Whitehead Walks into a Comedy Club
Reading Whitehead with a Playful Spirit
No one has ever confused Whitehead with a stand-up comic. True, he can be witty and ironic, but for the most part he comes across as sincere and serious—a well-meaning philosopher with a mathematical bent and a soft heart, but hardly a comedian.
Nevertheless, he does something central to the art of stand-up: he unsettles common sense, only to return us to ordinary life with a transformed sense of what the ordinary contains. He tells us, for example, that the "actual entities" of the universe are not objects that move through space, but rather moments of experience, of which our own experience is an instance. And then he adds that, as our experience unfolds through time, there is no separate experiencer: that the experiencer 'is' the experiencing. We look at our own lives in new ways, as moment by moment occasions of experience. "No experiencer experiences twice," he says.
And, like an improvisational comic, he enjoy the art of “yes-and.” When confronted with contrasts that others regard as conflicts—science and religion, permanence and change, the one and the many—he responds with “yes, and” rather than “no, but.” Yes, there is wisdom in science and yes, there is wisdom in religion, and the two can inform one another. He loves to build contrasts and even proposes that contrasts are among the fundamental categories of existence. He says contrasts add a needed novelty to experience and takes heed in Process and Reality of the proposition value of jokes. "It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true," he says.
Moreover, reading him can sometimes be funny in its own way, because it is a bit odd. Imagine walking into a comedy club and reading aloud various passages from Process and Reality. Do it with a straight face and good timing. Try it!
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For my part, as I read Process and Reality, I find myself quietly laughing at how difficult, strange, and audacious it is. I laugh at the peculiarities of his syntax and terminology, at his occasional ironic turns of phrase, at the fact that—unlike many philosophers—he rarely offers a straightforward, linear argument, and at the way he leaps from topic to topic, revisiting each from novel points of view. Above all, I laugh at the sheer boldness of his attempt to offer an interpretive lens for understanding virtually everything: mathematics and science, aesthetics and ethics, religion and the universe itself. Really now: Who could be so bold? I find myself glad that he also says that the "merest hint of finality of statement is an exhibition of folly."
Whitehead the Comic? Well, maybe. He does what all stand-up and improvisational comics do. He makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Ordinary things—feeling, perception, causation, memory, possibility, even the persistence of a chair—become peculiar when redescribed in terms of momentary acts of experience with prehensions and subjective aims of their own. At the same time, notions that initially seem utterly strange—feelings without consciousness, actual entities that become but don't move—gradually become recognizable. This double movement is part of Whitehead’s power.
I realize that many readers of Whitehead of his writings do not find Whitehead “funny” in these positive ways. Some find him funny only because they think many of his ideas ridiculous. He is funny in a quirky sense.
And others who appreciate him believe that his ideas are too "serious" to be fun or funny. I sometimes think the latter read him with too much earnestness. They approach his categories as if they formed a finished and perfectly consistent system whose every term must be defended, rather than an adventurous experiment in thought.
Whitehead was himself experimental. As he composed Process and Reality he sometimes seems to be making up his mind as he writes—trying out formulations, revising earlier emphases, pursuing unexpected connections, and discovering where his own ideas might lead. He may have an outline, but he doesn't seem to have an overly determined script.
There is playfulness in this. His technical vocabulary can be understood not only as a body of doctrine to be mastered but also as a collection of imaginative inventions: conceptual props for exploring reality, provisional gestures toward aspects of experience that ordinary language overlooks. Even the metaphysical propositions are, in his words, "lures for feeling."
To recognize this playfulness is not to dismiss Whitehead or deny the importance of his philosophy. He does want to offer a vision of reality—not a final vision, but a “likely story” about the nature of things. He does want to provide a scheme of ideas that can interpret the multiplicity of reality and show how everything is connected. He wants make a difference, and in a serious way.
But those who knew him say that he was always thinking afresh, never resting on his own preexisting ideas. See the accounts of his student Paul Weiss in "He was always Thinking Afresh: Whitehead's Personality and Style." Here is what Weiss says to his interrviewer, Lewis Ford.
He was always thinking afresh.
'I would say he was always groping through ideas and always changing his mind. I don’t think that there was a definite doctrine that he was maintaining. Everytime he thought, he thought afresh."
He did not urge his views.
"He did not urge his views; but they were more openings up, adventures in imagination, insights into the nature of things."
His remarks functioned as stimulants for reflection.
"His remarks were for me essentially stimulants, provoking me to thought; I didn’t pay particular attention exactly to what the words were or how he put it. I was merely just prompted by what he said to excite thoughts in areas I had not expected to go."
He had a sophisticated innocence.
"He didn’t approach philosophical questions or illustrations within the same rubrics that his colleagues did. He would come at them indirectly. You might even say, if I can use that kind of language, with a sophisticated innocence. There was a freshness to his illustrations that threw the issues in a new light."
He did not present arguments; he presented points of view.
Lewis Ford: I take it this would be a reason why the book tends to have so little argument in it.
Paul Weiss: Right, right! He was not a dialectical person. He was trying to present a point of view.
To recognize the playful side of Whitehead is to take seriously his conviction that philosophy, including his own, is always unfinished: a speculative adventure whose proposals must be tested against experience and revised when they fail to illuminate it. Terms such as “prehension,” “concrescence,” and “eternal object” can become frozen objects of reverence, but they can also function as invitations to thought: prompts for noticing, imagining, and feeling the world differently.
Here's the point. Whitehead can be read with a serious mind, but also with a playful mind. Not as an authority delivering the final script of the universe, but as an intellectual performer offering possibilities to an audience. We need not applaud every proposal. We can laugh, fall silent, recognize something, resist, reinterpret, and offer possibilities of our own. The performance continues through us. We can perform at the comedy club, too.
Bonus: More on Stand-Up Comedy
In A Vulgar Art, Ian Brodie uses a folkloristic approach to stand-up comedy, engaging the discipline's central method of studying interpersonal, artistic communication and performance. Because stand-up comedy is a rather broad category, people who study it often begin by relating it to something they recognize―“literature” or “theatre”; “editorial” or “morality”―and analyze it accordingly. A Vulgar Art begins with a more fundamental observation: someone is standing in front of a group of people, talking to them directly, and trying to make them laugh. So, this book takes the moment of performance as its focus, that stand-up comedy is a collaborative act between the comedian and the audience.
Although the form of talk on the stage resembles talk among friends and intimates in social settings, stand-up comedy remains a profession. As such, it requires performance outside of the comedian's own community to gain larger and larger audiences. How do comedians recreate that atmosphere of intimacy in a roomful of strangers? This book regards everything from microphones to clothing and LPs to Twitter as strategies for bridging the spatial, temporal, and sociocultural distances between the performer and the audience.
Although the form of talk on the stage resembles talk among friends and intimates in social settings, stand-up comedy remains a profession. As such, it requires performance outside of the comedian's own community to gain larger and larger audiences. How do comedians recreate that atmosphere of intimacy in a roomful of strangers? This book regards everything from microphones to clothing and LPs to Twitter as strategies for bridging the spatial, temporal, and sociocultural distances between the performer and the audience.