The Relevance of Whitehead by Leclerc Ivor;

Author:Leclerc, Ivor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1702255
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

III

Let us turn to alleged necessities of language and of thought, in their relation to the metaphysical effort.

Do necessities of speech have metaphysical significance? Plainly, the universe is under no obligation to be such that homo sapiens can talk about it. He can talk about it—for the same reason that he can talk about Poltergeists: he possesses a conceiving brain, vocal chords, and culture. Any universe in which these can arise is one that can be babbled about. The real problem is how it is possible for some of these babblings to approximate truth.

We should look with the utmost suspicion on every dilemma of the form, “ Either you accept this metaphysical position, or you deny the possibility of meaningful speech”—or as people used to say, “of significant discourse”. The necessities posed may reflect nothing more than the limitations of the author’s vocabulary or the properties of the language in which he writes. Hence the potential value of new ways of talking metaphysics. Not that we can ever hope to possess a perfect metaphysical language; but we may hope to continue the progress which has occurred. It is an achievement to show that some things cannot be said in English without paradox, but it is mere intellectual conservatism to anathematize all efforts to talk in new ways. As Whitehead somewhere says, our language was formed for the market-place, not for metaphysical purposes. His reminders of the inadequacies of language have been misunderstood as complaints and condemnations, and said to be “completely nongenuine”35 because he saw the redesigning of language as an endless task. What other view of the relation of language to metaphysics would be sensible?

In Whitehead’s view, this endless task serves another process of endless approximation, that of constructing an adequate network of metaphysical concepts. The nature of things outruns human thought, and thought may outrun speech. When some metaphysical thesis is presented to us as a logical necessity and we find no logical mistake, we should remember that the author is not the universe but a human thinker. The necessity flows from his initial concepts, his meanings. So we search our stock of concepts for better beginnings. And we may never assume that this stock is perfect.

In contrast to particular alleged necessities of thought, which are always in reality hypothetical, stands the broad requirement of consistency. But it is a genuine necessity for metaphysics only because of our daily evidence that the world is not literally “a fiction … made up of contradiction”. I have never heard anyone report that for a moment he saw something as both red and blue all over. If the universe were in large part made up of contradiction, consistency would be a demerit in a metaphysical system, though it might still be a convenience to an occasional reader.

A second broad necessity for metaphysics is coherence, in Whitehead’s sense: the general features of existence are to be so formulated that the full understanding of any one, as formulated, will take you to the others.

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