I had been avoiding the Whitehead Research Project‘s monthly reading groups because of conflicts with other scheduled activities, but today I joined. The reading was a short, unpublished manuscript somewhat misleadingly titled “Freedom and Order,” as it’s mostly about humor, wit, and imagination.
Now I understand why I’ve always been put off by, and a little suspicious of, people who are too witty. Whitehead counterposes wit against humor:
“Humour is the first product of consciousness. It is the emotion produced by observation of the way that happenings are conditioned. […] It results from the given ‘go’ of the universe, as observed. It is awakened interest. For this reason the intrusion of morals is fatal to humour. Morality arises from the fussiness of wit. The humour of the cat makes it play with the mouse. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals represents the interference of wit.” (p. 4)
“Wit,” on the other hand, “is the later product of consciousness.” It is “critical, satirical. It debunks.” “Without humour,” he continues, “there is nothing tremendous. Wit never understands the common goings-on of things… witty people herd together.” The kicker, for academics: “Universities are a standing danger to the survival of active humour. They are too witty.” (pp. 5-8)
But, as always, there is a resolution or synthesis to this dyad:
“The fusion of wit and humour produces the great imaginative feeling. It elicits pathos, tragedy, and the glory hidden in daily matter of fact. […] The humour preserves the realization of the tremendousness of history, its fatefulness. The wit preserves the sense of its failure, its success, its ideal.” (pp. 6-7)
Whitehead is a wonderful thinker of synthesis, which is part of the reason why I find it fruitful to map his categories onto Peirce’s (which I will do in a moment). If only he pushed this idea of imagination further — say, into the kind of treatment he gave perception in his brilliant 1927 book Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect. Alas, no such luck. (I’m hoping Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei might help with that, in her new book The Life of Imagination, which I’m preparing to read. More on that soon.)
Whitehead goes on to write sociologically (overgeneralizing, as he tended to do) about the relationship between freedom and order, about the dependence of democracy on the “large harmony of such humours” (democratic instincts, we might call them) throughout the societies in which democracy succeeds, and about the multiple factors shaping the fate of revolutions. One of the latter factors, in his estimation, is religion, which Whitehead redefines as “the sense of perfection,” the “glimpse of the ideal and the aim at it,” which provides a “sense of the unattainable” and “shapes our routes of approximation” toward it.
By this standard, of course, even the Soviet revolution had religion, but one must distinguish the religious ideals of the revolutionaries from the religion of the masses. There’s a difference — all the difference, Whitehead suggests — between the religion of Plato, with its “fusion of the Good and the Beautiful,” or the “positivist good sense” of Confucianism, or the “maligned Jesuits of the seventeenth century” (say more!) and, on the other hand, the religion of Calvin, which substitutes the “purposes” of God with the “imperatives” of God. In his dyad of humor versus wit, the habits of religion are aligned with the first, the dogmas of religion with the second. In our Soviet example, it would be the “humors” of the people (in the full bodily, Bakhtinian/Rabelaisian sense) that would count as the first, and the dogmas of both the priests (less witty) and the Bolsheviks (far more witty, at first) that count as the seconds. The revolution failed, perhaps, because of a radical disconnect between both those layers and the regulative ideals that might support them.
One of the easier overlays one could make onto the humor-wit dyad comes from Whitehead’s account of perception in Symbolism, which distinguishes between three kinds of perception: perception in the mode of causal efficacy (a kind of “general sense of things”), perception in the mode of presentational immediacy (sensory perception in the clarity of its detail), and perception in the mode of symbolic reference (the practical synthesis of the other two). The consensus of Whiteheadian Peircians, or Peircian Whiteheadians (the handful of us who exist), is that causal efficacy correlates with Peirce’s firstness, presentational immediacy with secondness, and symbolic reference with thirdness (see here, though that piece needs a ten-year updating).
Humor is, according to this mapping, also a first; wit, a second; and imagination, a third. In “Freedom and Order,” Whitehead loosely relates aesthetics (or the Beautiful) to humor, and thus to firstness; and ethics, or at least morality (the Good), to wit, and thus to secondness. By this logic, logic itself (in its most expansive form, pace Peirce), or the True, acts as the third element. And if we align the different forms of religion over this, we get something like this:
- 1. religion as habit
- 2. religion as dogma
- 3. religion as ideal (for efforts of “approximation”)
The correlation with Peirce may appear inexact here, since both “habit” and “dogma” suggest the kinds of things Peirce equates with thirdness (sign, law, representation, et al.). But the general sense — in which habit is taken as a “general sense,” dogma as a kind of final gesture, and ideal as a mediating and “regulative” orientation — fits quite well.
Here’s the full array of overlays:
| Category | First | Second | Third |
| [?] | Humor | Wit | Imagination |
| Perception | Causal efficacy | Presentational immediacy | Symbolic reference |
| Transcendentals | the Beautiful (aesthetics) | the Good (ethics, morality) | the True (logic) |
| Religion | as habit | as dogma | as ideal |
In our time, social justice and ecological “harmony,” conceived in one way or another (as sustainability, eco-egalitarianism, et al.), are playing the role of a novel religion, or at least a vaguely defined religiosity and spirituality, for an increasing number of people. (For the record, I generally identify with this movement in the world, so they are part of my spirituality as well.) These concepts provide ideals to guide the “routes of approximation” for our efforts. For some, they even suggest Calvinist “imperatives.”
I prefer the way of humor as Whitehead has articulated it: the slow, Platonic and Confucian (in Whitehead’s account) movement of humors rooted in “an ancestry of habits going back through tens of thousands, or even through millions of years.” In this sense, social justice and ecological harmony are regulative ideals that need to be embodied — and in some sense already are — rather than imposed. The process of embodying them is always a process that looks backward as well as forward, that listens to echoes and recognizes kinship in diverse places even as it reimagines the present as a confluence of multiple histories. Whitehead’s temporal and spatial frames could, in this sense, use some Afrofuturist infusions to spike them up. But his essential message about “instinctive judgment” holds:
“With that presupposition respecting the basic elements of instinctive judgment, democracy will be a success.”
I think the same will apply to an eco-egalitarian democracy. Somehow, despite the urgency of the situation — an urgency that calls for the quickest wits imaginable — we need to preserve (and sometimes restore) the “positivist good judgment” of the cat playing with the mouse, and the perception of the “tremendousness” of a situation that couldn’t possibly be contained within a set of dictates or imperatives.
That said, Whitehead’s general thrust in the article is a little difficult to pin down, as several speakers pointed out at today’s session (which was brilliantly run by Brianne Donaldson, Brian Henning, and Joseph Petek). The central equation of “freedom” with “wit” and “order” with “humor” could easily be turned around; at least it wasn’t clear to everyone why that equation was so obvious to Whitehead.
That left me wondering, too, if in his later writings (as this appears to be, though there’s no date attached to it) Whitehead had shifted from being the pre-eminent philosopher of novelty and creativity to being a radically open-minded but essentially conservative thinker, one whose center of gravity, for all his openness, was in the political center (effectively, between the Tories and Labour, more or less where the British Liberals of the time stood).
I mean the word “conservative” in the best sense of that word here — more this than Roger Scruton, but also a little of what Canadians might call a “progressive conservative” based on the 60-year history of one of the country’s main political parties being called that. That party ended up imploding when the tension between its poles (one of them being known for a time as “red tories”) became unbearable. Perhaps there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
In our time, there is a vast opening up of how we can attend to the “democratic instincts” and sensibilities of people — mainly because there is a vast opening up of what, and who, counts as the people. More on that soon.
