Platonic Pickwick

"I saw history," said Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once, "before I read it." He played games amid relics of the Roman, Saxon and Norman conquests; his father was vicar of a church built by the medieval Minster monks. As a boy he watched British seapower--in full sail--pass through the Channel. He prepped at 1,200-year-old Sherborne School, which claims Alfred the Great as a pupil.

Today, at 86, a retired Harvard professor, Philosopher Whitehead lives quietly in Cambridge, Mass., seeing only friends (and never the press),*reading history and philosophy, and recalling the past. On long London bus rides he used to amuse himself by imagining the great figures of history as his companions. He liked to wonder what they would think of what he saw about him. This week, in Whitehead's newly published Essays in Science and Philosophy (Philosophical Library; $4.75), readers will find this same sense of continuity and perspective.

Foolish Questions. "Every single generalization respecting mathematical physics which I was taught [at Trinity College, Cambridge]," he notes, "has now been abandoned. . . ." But Whitehead, who has seen science and philosophy adopt and then discard one "certainty" after another, remains undismayed: "The history of thought is largely concerned with the records of clear-headed men insisting that they at last have discovered some clear, adequately expressed, indubitable truths." Whitehead considers "inconsistent truths [as] seedbeds of suggestiveness," thinks (with his philosophical parent Plato) that "knowledge is a process," and that "ancient science stopped with Archimedes [because] people stopped asking foolish questions.

"For each succeeding generation, the problem of education is new. What at the beginning was enterprise, after the lapse of five and twenty years has become repetition. ... In the lecture halls, [as in] life, the best homage which we can pay to our predecessors ... is to emulate their courage." Instead he finds universities devoted to the study of "existing knowledge," a structure "supported by the orthodox literature, by orthodox expositions of theory, by orthodox speculation, and by orthodox experiments disclosing orthodox novelty." He deplores the educational anxiety to "secure youth and its teachers from revelation [because it] is dangerous for youth and confusing to teachers." As a Harvard professor, the story goes, he horrified his assistant by marking the exam papers himself, dispensing A's for courageous originality, E's for orthodox parroting.

Bell-Ringer. Whitehead began his teaching career 62 years ago as a mathematician at Cambridge. He and his famous pupil, Bertrand Russell, worked together for nine years on their Principia Mathematica, now on the St. John's list of the 100 Great Books, but strictly for specialists. Whitehead later became professor of mathematics at the University of London, quit (at 63) when faced with automatic retirement and came to the U.S. to start a new career on Harvard's philosophy faculty. He has written some 20 books on mathematics, science and philosophy (best-known: Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality), sometimes with humor and felicitous phrase, often in impenetrably thorny prose.

A plump little man who favors stiff collars and ascot ties, he used to say of his pink, shiny face: "I look like Mr. Pickwick." He still meets Monday nights for a learned chat with Harvard's Society of Fellows, invites friends to his apartment for coffee and conversation. Most of them agree at least one-third with Gertrude Stein, who once wrote: "Only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell rang within me. . . . The three geniuses [are] Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead."

* The New York Times erroneously reported him dead two years ago.

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