How is it that people, even very smart people, even people of genius, can come to hold radically contrasting worldviews? Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, two pivotal intellectual figures of the 20th century whose fundamental views were as different as night and day, present an illustrative case.
In their younger days, Whitehead and Russell collaborated for ten years on the monumental work, Principia Mathematica. But when Russell began the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1940, Whitehead, who did the formal introduction, made this revealing remark: “Bertie thinks I am muddleheaded; but then I think he is simpleminded.”
Concerning this matter, philosopher Charles Hartshorne writes:
“There are two basic attitudes in philosophy, and always have been. These are: the minimalistic, skeptical, or positivistic attitude, on the one side; and the maximalistic, speculative, or metaphysical attitude, on the other.
“According to the first, the aim of philosophy is to rid us of illusions, confusions, and unverifiable statements, leaving us with only those forms of knowledge which are clear and testable by interpersonally convincing evidence.
“According to the contrary attitude, the aim of philosophy is to do full justice to all aspects of experience, even those which, perhaps, can never be made entirely clear and obvious. In people with this attitude the greatest fear is not that they may be unclear, or adopt beliefs with insufficient justification, but that they may miss the full meaning or nature of life by confining attention to the superficial aspects.”1
Another anecdote sheds further light on this:
“Whitehead once heard Russell discourse on ‘value.’ Russell, it appears, had suggested that Pavlov’s conditioned reflex experiments furnished our best clue to a theory of value. Whitehead rose and remarked: ‘There is a lost dialogue of Plato’s on The Good, and I have often wondered what could have been in that dialogue. Now I know: when one of Pavlov’s dog’s mouth waters, that is the good!’ Russell was thinking: how can ‘the good’ be made a clear and controllable idea? Whitehead was thinking: controllable or not, let’s talk about the good, in all its subtlety and depth, and not something else.”2
If a joke were made about this, one possibility might go something like this:
How can someone like you, who is so smart, be so dumb, as to disagree with someone like me?
Or, as I’ve written elsewhere:
Those who have an eagle’s eye for others’ faults are usually as blind as a mole to their own.
Notes
1. Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead’s Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970, p. 111.
2. Ibid., p. 112.