Footnotes To Plato? What Whitehead Really Thought
There's way more to the tradition of Western philosophy than just that
Perhaps the most famous quotation by the great early 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is this one:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
As is often the case, on its own, this sentence ends up being rather misleading. It easily lends the impression that Whitehead accords Plato an absolute priority within the long history of philosophy. You’ll see people occasionally quoting it as if it conveys a judgement similar to “there is nothing new under the sun.”
It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Footnotes are after all far from the main show, the body of a work. So if Whitehead asserts that the European philosophical tradition (which presumably would extend to the American as well) is mere “footnotes to Plato”, that must mean that Plato did all the real philosophizing needed early on. Everyone coming after him merely added their supplemental bits to what Plato accomplished.
But is that really what Whitehead thinks? For anyone who has done much reading within the long “tradition” (really a whole set of interwoven and rival traditions!) of Western philosophy, that mere “footnotes to Plato” verdict can’t be taken seriously. And if that really was Whitehead’s genuine view, it would be natural to dismiss him as way, way off-base. One might even wonder why someone seemingly so smart might assert something so foolish.
This is why it is so important to actually read philosophical texts, not just rely on quotes lifted out of any context. Just prior to the paragraph in which the “footnotes to Plato” gets mentioned, Whitehead writes:
the scheme of thought which is the basis of the philosophy of organism is confronted with various interpretations of the facts widely accepted in thet European tradition, literary, philosophic, and scientific.
“Philosophy of organism” is Whitehead’s own contribution to philosophy, developed and articulated in Process and Reality (his Gifford Lectures), among other works. He spends a good bit of time engaging with a number of key thinkers from the previous history of philosophy. He continues:
There is no point in endeavouring to force the interpretations of divergent philosophers into a vague agreement. What is important is that the scheme of interpretation here adopted can claim for each of its main positions the express authority of one, or the other, of some supreme master of thought - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant.
Notice two key things here relevant to the “footnotes to Plato idea.
First, Whitehead explicitly refers to interpretations of divergent philosophers. They’re not just anemic imitators of Plato. They have their own points of view, which can’t be brought entirely into agreement.
Second, notice who he mentions by name. Plato, but also from the ancient period, Aristotle. And then a succession of four key modern thinkers. These aren’t all of the major philosophical figures with their insights, positions, arguments, and systems that Whitehead engages with and draws upon in his work.
So, why is Whitehead then immediately after this proffering this “footnotes to Plato” idea? Well, look at what he says immediately following by way of explanation. First he tells us what he is referring to by the name “Plato”
I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.
Given then, if any of the subsequent thinkers, or philosophical movements and schools, can be said to be “footnotes to Plato”, it would be by developing what Plato might have suggested or sketched, but didn’t develop in its entirety or even perhaps beyond a mere hint within the dialogues and letters we possess from him.
He continues his explanation:
Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition.
This sense of “Platonic” takes us beyond just a interpretive or commentary tradition that remains essentially within the orbit of Plato, his texts, and his ideas. Notice the clarification Whitehead then provides;
But I do mean more: I mean that if we had to render Plato's general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy of organism.
We see Whitehead claiming that a philosophical approach and even a tradition at least in some respects quite new - certainly in its articulation - is in a certain sense also true to Plato. But it is what a Plato in the present-day would or could have produced. And that would necessarily be quite a different Plato than the one we know from the 4th Century BCE.
So there it is: the fuller context of a remark made early on in Whitehead’s arguably most important work, Process and Reality. A remark that so caught the eye of readers that it took on a life, and an erroneous meaning of its own.