Adventurous Old Man

DIALOGUES OF ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD (373 pp.)--Lucien Price--Little, Brown ($5).

Harvard's late famed Philosopher-Mathematician Alfred North Whitehead was far from the conventional absent-minded professor, but he did have occasional verbal lapses. One day he was cautioning a student about a theory of logic. "You must take it with a grain of er . . . um ... ah ..." For almost a minute, Whitehead groped for the word, until the student suggested. "Salt. Professor?"

"Ah, yes," Whitehead beamed. "I knew it was some chemical."

One for the Road. It is the informal and gifted conversationalist--not the abstruse philosopher--that Boston's Lucien Price has caught in Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. When Author Price, an editorial writer for the Boston Globe, first met Whitehead. the philosopher was past 70. But as their friendship developed, Price would leave the old man's study dazzled and "exhilarated as with a raging flame of life." From 1934 to Whitehead's death in 1947 at the age of 86, Price went back again and again, afterward recording each conversation. Once, Whitehead saw him to the door and offered this nightcap: "I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine." But Price took away a record of one of the most probing minds of the century in spontaneous action, kicking ideas around for the joy of seeing them bounce.

Out of the Dialogues emerges the image of a man as well as the imprint of a mind. Little more than 5 ft. high, frail, bent, kindly Philosopher Whitehead had a bald, domed head framed by wispy white hair that made him look, in the words of one student, "like an angel whose halo had slipped." His bright blue eyes, set in a rosy-cheeked, unwrinkled face, had the candor of a child's. He spoke with a nicely articulated British accent, usually with deliberation, often with enthusiasm, and his mind had the freshness of youth. "Between the ages of 19 and 35, the imagination is most active." Whitehead told Price, "and we mostly keep going thereafter on whatever 'fizz' we have experienced then."

Repeatedly he returned in his talks with Price to a youthful experience that forever after shaped his thought. In the 1880s, "nearly everything was supposed to be known about physics that could be known ... By the middle of the 1890s, there were a few tremors, a slight shiver as of all not being quite secure, but no one sensed what was coming. By 1900 the Newtonian physics were demolished, done for! ... I have been fooled once, and I'll be damned if I'll be fooled again! . . . There is no more reason to suppose that Einstein's relativity is anything final than Newton's Principia. The danger is dogmatic thought; it plays the devil with it." religion, and science is not immune from "I Have Been Saying . . ." Whitehead avoided dogma better than most through out his teaching career at Cambridge, London and, finally, Harvard, where he began his spectacular rise as a creative philosopher at 63, when most academicians are thinking of retirement. "The vitality of thought is in adventure," Whitehead told Price. "That is what I have been saying all my life, and I have said little else . . . One of my anxieties . . . has been *lest a rigid system be imposed on mankind and that fragile quality, his capacity for novel ideas, for novel aspects of old ideas, be frozen and he go on century after century . . . until he and his society reach the static level of the insects . . . You may have wondered at my coolness, not to John Dewey personally . . . but to his thought. The reason is that the emphasis of his thought is on security. But the vitality of man's mind is in adventure."

Whitehead's talk was an adventure that could lead almost anywhere. Samples:

Chicago & Grand Opera: "As you will remember, the Egyptian priests in Plato's story told Solon: "You Greeks are only boys.'... And like America [the Greeks] were rather violent. I can imagine the Persians and Egyptians saying to one another, 'I say, isn't it shocking how many murders get committed in Greece?' . . . But the murders didn't stop things from getting done. I fancy the place I have been in that was most like Greece was a gathering of university scholars at Chicago! The city was disorderly but very much alive."

"The Germans are emotionally and musically susceptible. Wagner appeals to their pride of race. I venture to think that if you had in England a series of really stunning grand operas with gorgeous music and pageantry glorifying England from the Tudors up to 1914, that in a generation they could wreck the English genius for political self-government."

Immortality. "God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us ... Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the Divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to the estate of an irrelevancy. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur."

It was nine years before Author Price told Whitehead he was recording his conversation and showed him a transcript. Whitehead's reaction was characteristic. "It is very unusual to get authentic records of conversation from the past," he remarked. "I should think these pages of yours might be more valuable 100 years from now."

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