A New View of Idea, Thought,

and Education in Bergson and Whitehead?

KEVIN CORRIGAN
Emory University

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that a view which has come to be

accepted in modern times, that ideas or thoughts are discrete items
of information or concepts from which all feeling and movement
must be radically extirpated, if not exorcized, represents neither
some of the more subtle trajectories of earlier thought in the
Western world nor, in particular, the dynamic thinking of Bergson
and Whitehead. The thought of Bergson and Whitehead plunges
one radically into movement, connectedness, newness, and
unfinishedness in such a way that Whitehead, for example,
proposes an entirely new view of education, according to which the
holy engagement of the idea in the tender movement of
understanding contrasts sharply with the ritualized mutual
slaughter that lurks not so inconspicuously in the shadow-sides of
our educational systems.

KEYWORDS: Idea, thought, education, feeling, process,

movement, interconnectedness, Whitehead, Bergson, Plato.

We tend to think – uncritically perhaps S of ideas as items of

information and of education as user-friendly segments or courses, a
commodity composed (how obligingly) of modules or bodies of relatively
solid or fragile knowledge. Yet if so-called reality (however problematic
the term may be) is constantly in motion and organic development, then
the very notion of a distinct self and its ideas in supposed contra-
distinction to a reality conceived as objectively other, as well as the
common conception of education as systems of information which
somehow have to be introduced to or imposed upon a receptive self –
these notions may well appear to be always and fundamentally flawed.
What is an idea, then? Is it a concept or a potential intellectual
formulation in my head? Or are ideas the things I think or, again, the
means by which I can think things? Surely, my ideas are “mine” (i.e., I
think them in my own head with my own brain, don’t I?). But then how
are ideas communicable to others, or sometimes, I admit with the
ancient sophist, Gorgias, entirely incommunicable?1 If I can

Interchange, Vol. 36/1-2, 179-198, 2005.

DOI: 10.1007/s10780-005-2353-z

C Springer 2005
180 KEVIN CORRIGAN

communicate an idea, then perhaps my so-called idea does not belong

entirely to me. But then how can it be in my own head, if you have the
same idea and I know what you mean because I can test you? Or, are
ideas like viruses: one minute you’re sick or healthy with a thought and
the next minute, so to speak, I’ve come down with the same thought? On
every occasion, except when they just bore you silly, ideas and feelings
go together: brown study or fireworks, but mostly we just don’t notice.
I know that I’ve sometimes been so overwhelmed by an idea which I
couldn’t really grasp but which rocked me to my core that I had to go for
a ten-mile walk or run just to settle my mind so that I could start
thinking its apparent immensity for the next ten years (Corrigan, 1995).2
Was this an idea – or a mushroom?
By and large, the modern empiricist answer to these questions, or to
some of them, has been that ideas are really the things I think. I form
concepts and pictures of things: abstraction, association, transformation,
and so forth, which represent the things I see.3 An idea I have, therefore,
is not different from the thing I see and represent to myself. Or again,
mental images seem to have rather different properties from physical
images. That is, they don’t seem to need to have the same definite
physical characteristics or at least not with the symmetry, detail, and
order physical images need to have. My mental image of a horse, for
instance, doesn’t need to possess a complete set of horsey characteristics.
Since this appears to be so, then mental images are perhaps just a more
abstract kind of physical image. For the Medieval world (and Thomas
Aquinas, in particular), ideas are not the things themselves nor are they
simply images (phantasmata) without which I cannot think things, since
we invariably use images of things to think with. Ideas are rather the
means by which I think things.4 In this respect, the Medieval world is
closer to ancient usage than the modern or contemporary worlds which
seem to have many fewer words for thought, ideas, concepts than the
ancients and to regard them in a much more limited way, as irreducible
properties of mental things (i.e., brains or brain states).5 As far as I can
see, major exceptions to this modern tendency are the thought of
Bergson and Whitehead which look at ideas in a thoroughly novel way,
not as set over abstractly from things, nor as some spiritual, ideal force
distinguished from matter, but in some sense as the expression of the
universe’s creativity or the dynamic meaningfulness of events, closer to
nature or event than the substance-attribute relation or the form-matter
dichotomy can ever express (e.g., Bergson, 1911, p. 314-315; Whitehead,
1929/1957). This must mean, I suggest, that, in some sense, for
Whitehead and Bergson, living ideas are not mine or yours in the
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 181

commodity-ways we typically understand them as belonging to

individual substances. What if an idea is not really (or only) an item of
information (except perhaps in a trivial sense) or something only
residing in your or my head, but more like a virus (or, better, a
transnational / transboundary activity) which might be said to
characterize one item or to belong to one self only by virtue of a highly
dubious commodity analogy that dangerously – indeed violently –
misrepresents the ambiguous, multi-dimensional, and fluid character of
self, meaning, and idea? Even worse, our individualistic ideologies of
idea, self, and education tend to suck all the feeling out of our
experience. Thus, we can live in a thoroughly arid, denominationalized
universe, ripe for the most insidious forms of demarcation, or even
discrimination, and their natural complement, of course, is education
thinly disguised as warfare (civil or international).
Bergson and Whitehead, it seems to me, offer us a different view.
And so I shall here briefly examine, first, what appears to be Bergson’s
(1923) view of ideas, primarily from L ‘evolution créatrice; and then go
on to explore the revolutionary implications of Whitehead’s view of
thought for education in a small part of his little work, The Aims of
Education(1929/1957). The purposes are: (a) to come closer to what they
mean by idea, (b) to see if this is really something new with them, and
(c) to pinpoint some of the implications of this for any view of education
in general.
My overall view, then, is this: Our typically individualistic notion of
ideas, however necessary a fact of our everyday situation copyright may
be, may inadvertently hide a dangerously one-sided, monochromatic
view of the much bigger universe we inhabit. This view conceals from us
the potentially fatal problems (i.e., for our survival as a species with a
living responsibility for so many other species) related to our equally
individualistic, competitive educational systems. Such educational
systems may unfortunately be, at their worst, a thinly disguised impetus
to warfare and, even at their best, a tacit reinforcement of individualistic
and nationalistic sets of achievements (i.e., unconsciously divisive and
militant). We can be grateful that this is not the whole picture, but we
nonetheless need a broader view of education, and of the nature of ideas,
if we are to have any long-term prospects of surviving and flourishing in
a new inclusive way during the very dangerous years of the century
ahead of us. Such a view, I shall suggest, was already part of the
thought of Bergson, Whitehead, and others, despite the obvious fact that
it does not seem to have received any proper recognition, or at least the
recognition that it deserves.
182 KEVIN CORRIGAN

In the later portions of Creative Evolution, Bergson (1911) sets out

his own view of intuition by a radical critique of the ideas at work in the
earlier history of thought, not unlike Heidegger’s (1977) similar critique
in The Question Concerning Technology. Bergson’s work took place
against the backdrop of the rising surge of consciousness itself, to which
categories like unity and multiplicity, devised to speak about inert
matter, do not apply. This consciousness “includes potentialities without
number which interpenetrate” (Bergson, 1911, p. 269) and is free no
matter how determined its particularity may be, that is:
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed,
although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct
from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its
vicissitudes. (p. 270)
Bergson (1923) also states:
As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar
system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent
which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the
humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in
which we are ... do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of
the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. (pp. 270-271)
Matter and spirit are but two sides of a single flow of energy, one a
downward movement into necessity; the other an upward flow into
freedom and new potentiality (see Bergson, 1911). Both sides have to be
held together in a single undividedness if we are to avoid the tendency
of history to freeze-frame time and space either into abstract ideas or
material quanta. Like Nietzsche (1994), Foucault (1971), and Derrida
(1978), Bergson effectively offers a critique of the ancient notion of form,
idea, or adios as an abstract snapshot or cinematographic mechanism of
what is always in motion. After the manner of Heraclitus (i.e., “you
cannot step twice in to the same river”),6 but not Cratylus (i.e., “you
cannot step once into the same river”)7 Bergson insists that it is not a
question of finding our way into the movement of time and space.
It is no use trying to approach duration: we must install ourselves
within it straight away (p. 299) .... [But] instead of attaching
ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves
outside of them in order to recompose their becoming artificially.
We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these
are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a
becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of
the apparatus of knowledge. (p. 306)
According to Bergson (1911), this makes thought and our ideas
dependent upon action (i.e., thought becomes essentially discontinuous).
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 183

I am left with a string of snapshots of a transition, “of the transition

itself it teaches me nothing” (p. 307). Although Bergson does not
acknowledge it sufficiently perhaps,8 this is essentially Aristotle’s
answer in the Physics to Zeno’s paradoxes: A line is potentially composed
of points, but not actually; a line is a line. Time is not a string of
moments or nows, but duration or periodic actuality.9 The universe is a
reservoir of potentialities so that we could make a further cut or
subdivision (i.e., it’s not just a function of our thought), but in actuality
there is pure continuity.10 But for Bergson, much more like Plotinus
perhaps than Aristotle,11 it is only from within the actuality of duration
that potentialities or the new can be glimpsed.
Install yourself within change, and you will grasp at once both
change itself and the successive states in which it might at any
instant be immobilized. But with these successive states, perceived
from without as real and no longer as potential immobilities, you
will never reconstitute movement. (p. 308)
In other words, potentialities neither emerge out of some abstract
matter set over and against a world of change nor out of the thought
which abstracts and reifies them, but only from within the threshold of
actuality itself!
We do not see that the trajectory is created in one stroke, although
a certain time is required for it; and that, though we can divide at
will the trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which
is an act in progress and not a thing. (Bergson, 1911, p. 309; French
ed., 1923, p. 335)
How, then, does this relate to the traditional notion of idea and what
does it tell us about the nature of thought itself from within movement?
For Bergson, the word eidos12 denotes not only three aspects of thing-
hood but determines the essential schemata of our language. Eidos or
idea denotes (a) quality, (b) the form or essence, (c) the end, design, or
intention of the act being performed; and these three aspects correspond
to the basic building blocks of language: (a) adjective, (b) substantive,
and (c) verb. Intellect, therefore, reduces its ideas to the principal
components of movement or becoming without realizing that it can only
do this because thought or idea is more than these components. Bergson
explains as follows:
After the explanations we have given above, we might and perhaps
we ought to, translate eidos by “view” or rather by “moment.” For
eidos is the stable view taken of the instability of things: the
quality, which is a moment of becoming; the form, which is a
moment of evolution; the essence, which is the mean form above
and below which the other forms are arranged as alterations of the
184 KEVIN CORRIGAN

mean; finally, the intention or mental design ... which is nothing

else ... than the material design, traced out and contemplated
beforehand, of the action accomplished. To reduce things to Ideas
is therefore to resolve becoming into its principal moments, each of
these being, moreover, by the hypothesis, screened from the laws
of time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity. (1911, p. 315;
French ed. 1923, pp. 340-341)13
If this is true of the prevailing legacy of ancient thought, how far is it
true of modern thought? According to Bergson, whereas ancient thought
tries to measure movement by abstracting from it its privileged
moments, modern science with its system of cinematographic signs tries
to measure movement by considering the object at any moment
whatever. The same abstractive mechanism is work, but whereas the
ancients “reduced the physical order to the vital order, that is to say,
laws to genera . . . the moderns try to resolve genera to laws” (Bergson,
1911, p. 330).14 But from immobility we cannot get back to change. How
then can we begin to recover a new view of what an idea may also be?
For Bergson, it seems, we start from movement, for here there is
already “more” than our abstract ideas have represented to us:
We said there is more in a movement than in the successive
positions attributed to the moving object, more in a becoming than
in the forms passed through in turn, more in the evolution of form
than the forms assumed one after another. Philosophy can,
therefore, derive terms of the second kind from those of the first,
but not the first from the second: from the first terms speculation
must take its start. (1911, p. 316)
Here then is a first contrast. Bergson sets up an implicit tension
between the characteristic mechanism of intelligence and the departure
point of speculation. Second, speculation itself is not a more abstract
form of intelligence but a concrete engagement with duration, which
speaks of my actual experience, “for it coincides with a certain degree of
impatience which is rigorously determined” (Bergson, 1911, p. 339). The
feelings of ordinary existence (e.g., Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and also
Hegel, if desire is a form of burgeoning consciousness)15 are part of my
speculation.
What is it that obliges me to wait, and to wait for a certain length
of psychical duration ... over which I have no power? If succession,
in so far as distinct from mere juxtaposition, has no real efficacy, if
time is not a kind of force, why does the universe unfold its
successive states ... with this particular velocity rather than any
other? Why not with an infinite velocity? Why, in other words, is
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 185

not everything given at once, as on the film of the cinematograph?

(1911, p. 339)
Bergson’s conclusion is that even if the future is bound to succeed the
present, the reason why it unfolds like as it does is because the future
is not altogether determined at the present moment and because “there
is unceasingly being created, in the concrete whole of which every ...
system forms part, something unforeseeable and new. This duration may
not be the fact of matter itself, but that of the life which reascends the
course of matter” (1911, pp. 339-40). This emphasis upon the
unforeseeable is not new with Bergson. It is present in Schiller’s notion
of play, Schelling’s idea of the unvordenklich character of art, and it
looks forward to Lyotard’s notion of the incommensurable (le différend),
itself developed from Burke and Kant’s notion of the sublime. What,
then, is further distinctive about Bergson’s notion of la speculation?
First, Bergson develops a theory of two different kinds of ideas out
of what he calls the unforeseeable nothing, “which is everything in a
work of art” (i.e., not just something everyone else overlooks, but what
is genuinely not even perceived by anyone). For the artist who creates a
picture by drawing it from the depths of his soul, time is no longer an
accessory ... the duration of his work is part and parcel of his work .... It
is a vital process, something like the ripening of an idea (un processus
vital, quelque chose comme la maturation d’ une idée) (1911, p. 340;
French ed. 1923, p. 368).
An idea, therefore, in this sense of creative invention, is a ripening
process: une germination or floraison d’ une forme (Bergson, 1923, p.
368), a kind of continuity of interpenetration in time by which the
“unforeseeable nothing … creates itself as form” (Bergson, 1911, p. 341).
This is a remarkable conception, which Bergson describes as follows:
We know the painter’s style: Do we foresee what will appear on the
canvas? We possess the elements of the problem; we know in an
abstract way, how it will be solved ... but the concrete solution
brings with it that unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a
work of art. And it is this nothing that takes time. Nothing of
matter, it creates itself as form. The sprouting and flowering of this
form are stretched out on an unshrinkable duration, which is one
with their essence (or qui fait corps avec elles!) It is the same for the
works of nature. Their novelty arises from an interior impetus
which is progress or succession, which confers on succession a
peculiar virtue or which owes to succession the whole of its virtue
– which, at any rate, makes succession or continuity of
interpenetration in time, irreducible to a more instantaneous
186 KEVIN CORRIGAN

juxtaposition in space .... Time is invention or it is nothing at all.

(pp. 368-369)
Thought, like natural growth, is not reducible as creativity to mere
segments or to ideas in the sense that we normally give them (i.e.,
spatial units in juxtaposition). A living idea is more like, not one
sprouting flower or tree, but more like an interpenetrating network of
sprouting flowers and trees,16 and here time is of the very body of the
flowering of the unforeseeable nothing. I cannot help thinking of
Tolkien’s “Ents,” those ancient tree creatures, woken up by elves, whose
language is older and longer than other forms of language. Treebeard
tells Merry and Pippin that his name is too long to communicate to
them:
My name grows all the time and I’ve lived a very long life; so my
name is like a story. In my tongue, real names tell the story of the
things to which they belong .... It’s a very beautiful tongue but it
takes a long time to say anything in my tongue because we often
say nothing unless it’s worth the effort of taking a lot of time to say
it and to hear what is said. (1992, p. 486)
Time is of the essence of invention in both epic and lyric, but in different
ways in each, and length is not discontinuity or a collection of sound
bytes, but a continuity of interpenetration, not time-length, but time-
invention (Bergson, 1911, p. 341). What seems like time-length for Merry
and Pippin (like a first encounter with Hector and Odysseus with the
wrong teacher at school) is time-invention for the bard who sings a story
she has received from countless others! In short, for Bergson, ideas are
not merely a question of foreseeing and manipulating events and thus
transposing the real into symbols of mastery (i.e., Foucault’s notion of
power), but, much more concretely, a means of expressing the real. To
intellect, there must be added intuition or knowledge, which is
practically useless,17 especially with regard to extending our power over
nature. This means “developing ... another faculty, complementary to the
intellect” (p. 343).
For, as soon as we are confronted with true duration, we see that it
means creation, and that if that which is being unmade endures, it can
only be because it is inseparably bound to what is making itself
(Bergson, 1911; p. 343).
What, then, does creative intuition finally mean for Bergson? Let me
sum up several of its most important characteristics. First, intuition
involves movement, a plunging into perception to enlarge the scope of
perception and consciousness so that we can see more than we can see.
Intuitions can only be translated into what we normally call discrete
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 187

ideas, concepts, or images, but the idea in the field of intuition is always
more than itself (Bergson, 1911, pp. 339-344). Second, intuition involves
negation and displacement, a disruption of our normal attention. Art has
traditionally performed this function for perception, and philosophical
art has to transform the way static intelligences abstract themselves
from the flow of lived experience. Ideas in this larger sense are clearly
charged with feeling. As the poet speaks, Bergson (1934/1946) says in
The Creative Mind:
Shades of emotion and thought appear to us which might long since
have been brought out in us but which remained invisible ... great
painters are people who possess a certain vision of things which has
or will become the vision of all. (p. 159)
Negation? In “La pensee et le mouvant,” Bergson argues that intuition
acts frequently like Socrates’ familiar spirit.18 It whispers in one’s ear
“impossible;” impossible “because a certain confused, but decisive
experience speaks you from my voice that it is incompatible with the
facts one alleges and the reasons one gives” (1934/1946, p. 120). Ideas in
this sense are both destructive and creative simultaneously.
Displacement? Because they rupture the fabric of normal life and let us
glimpse the nothing, which is more than something (pp. 292-298). Our
knowledge, far from being made up of a gradual association of simple
elements, is the effect of a sudden dissociation” (pp. 161-162). Third,
intuition involves a displacement or rupture of attention from the parts
of the universe which interest us from a practical viewpoint and “a
turning it back towards what serves no useful purpose” (p. 163). This
“conversion of attention” is what an idea or philosophy really is (p.
163).19 Finally, therefore, while ideas are concepts, images, and so forth;
the idea destroyed, negated, plunged into, and ruptured in intuition is
part of a whirlwind, at once simple and yet pure movement:
La verité est qu’ au-dessus du mot et au-dessus de la phrase il y a
quelque chose de beaucoup plus simple qu’ une phrase et même qu’
un mot: le sens, qui est moins une chose pensée qu’ un mouvement
de pensée, moins un mouvement qu’ une direction. Et de même que
l’impulsion donnée à la vie embryonnaire détermine la division d’
une cellule primitive en cellules qui se divisent à leur tour jusqu’ à
ce que l’organisme complet soit formé, ainsi le mouvement
charactéristique de tout acte de pensée, amene cette pensée par une
subdivision croissante d’elle-même, à s’ étaler de plus en plus sur
les plans successifs de l’esprit jusqu à ce qu’elle atteigne celui de la
parole. Là, elle s’ exprime par une phrase, c’est-à-dire par un
groupe d’éléments préexistants. (p. 133)20
188 KEVIN CORRIGAN

These pre-existing ideas or elements don’t get left behind. Instead, the
philosopher actually reaches them:
Et quand il y vient, l’idée ainsi entrainée dans le mouvement de son
esprit, s’animant d’une vie nouvelle comme le mot qui reçoit son
sens de la phrase, n’est plus ce qu’ elle était en dehors du tourbillon
(Bergson, 1934/1946, p. 134).21
An idea, therefore, whether pre-existing or new, can be item, concept,
image, or word; but it is also part of a direction, caught up and
transformed by a whirlwind and fundamentally, future-oriented. And if
so, this is surely what education should really be about.
But before I take up this last point, let me very briefly speak about
the idea in Whitehead’s thought. If anything, Whitehead is perhaps a
more brilliant thinker than Bergson, but there is no time here to do
more than to pick out a few significant details for my topic, well aware,
as I certainly am, that I can hardly claim to understand more than a few
bits of Process and Reality (Whitehead, 1929a, not to mention his other
works)!22
First, Whitehead has, in practice, a generous and deeply correct view
about ideas from the past. His much maligned, celebrated assessment
of the European philosophical tradition as a series of footnotes to Plato
reveals an incisive mind, for he rightly excludes “the systematic scheme
of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from Plato’s
writings” in favour of a genuinely enlightened view of Plato’s heritage:
I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered throughout 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 writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. (Whitehead,
1929a, p. 63)
We might almost say that instead of assessing Plato as a definite
substance to which predicates could be attached, he sees him rather as
an event, a living, organic idea full of the always as yet unsaid. The
same is true of his treatment of Aristotle. While he rejects the subject-
predicate form of proposition, as concerned with abstractions, in favour
of the philosophy of organism, he indicates nonetheless that the
dominance of Artistotle’s logic from the late classical period on “does not
seem to have been characteristic of Aristotle’s own metaphysical
speculations” (Whitehead, 1929a, p. 45). This is surely so correct that
Whitehead’s own philosophy of organism, event, and actuality bears
comparison with Aristotle’s aporetic theory of organism and actuality in
the Metaphysics.23 Whitehead foregrounds the open-endedness of
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 189

“general ideas” from the past and situates his own thought within them,
perhaps with greater insight than Bergson:24
Whenever we attempt to express the matter of immediate
experience, we find that its understanding leads us beyond itself,
to its contemporaries, to its past, to its future, and to the universals
in terms of which its definiteness is exhibited. But such universals,
by their very character of universality, embody the potentiality of
other facts with variant types of definiteness. (Whitehead, 1929a,
p. 21)
Second, not only does the unpacking of experience take one everywhere;
not only does the holographic25 universal help philosophy “to recover the
totality obscured by the selection” (Whitehead, 1929a, p. 22) so as also
to uncover the totality as a reservoir of possibilities and potentialities;
but feelings or prehensions foreground and afterground perception and
thought. Whitehead has been criticized for putting such an emphasis
upon feeling or subjectivity, but arguably because of a misinterpretation
of his meaning. Feeling, for Whitehead, overcomes the subject-object
split already present in the relatively abstract act of perception. Feeling,
emotion, pain, and pleasure are not only expressive of immediate
experience in all organisms. They are also a guide to precision for
rational interpretation in “the fitful vagueness of consciousness … [if]
philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess
of subjectivity” (p. 22). Which is, of course, why Aristotle undertakes an
analysis of pleasure, not at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics
(EN), but at the end, after a discussion of moral and intellectual
excellences (EN, pp. 2-6), weakness of will (p. 7), and the major natural
antidote to such weakness, that is, friendship (pp. 8-9), and in the
context of the two most comprehensive lives, for him, the contemplative
and the political (p. 10).26 Feelings are prehensive guides starting from
all grades of organisms and leading to the supreme divine feeling. Is it
accidental, then, that Whitehead chooses a term prehension which is a
literal English translation of the Greek Epicurean and Stoic term
prolépsis? Prolepsis means “a taking beforehand.” For Epicurus,
prolepsis is a preconception, mental picture, or scheme into which
experience is fitted. The Stoics talk of “inborn preconceptions” or
“common human preconceptions.”27 Neither means preconception in our
sense, but rather, in the case of Epicurus, prolepsis signifies our
everyday experiences, feelings, or concepts whose authority is that they
came from experience unless corrupted by bad theory (cf, Annas, 1991).
In the case of the Stoics, preconceptions are our common vague feelings
about the profitability of what is good, the desirability of one’s own
190 KEVIN CORRIGAN

happiness, and the identification of happiness with the possession and

what is good into which we often fail to fit our representations of
particular circumstances (cf. Long, 1991). Feelings foreground and
pervade thought. Whitehead takes us back, in an novel way, to the use
of a term in Hellenistic philosophy intimately related to the Aristotelian
notion of mind, which not only includes feeling but is completely
expressive of it (as also proleptically in Plato).28 For Aristotle, god’s life,
a life of reflexive thinking, is sweetest!”29 I think this entirely changes
what we normally mean by idea, but I don’t have time to dwell on this
here, since I want to link this to the question of education.
If prehension, then, is the reception of expressions (Whitehead, 1938,
p. 22) so that thought is not just a function of human beings but is
expressive in all grades of animality;30 and if, though I am “individual
enjoyment ... as I shape the activities of the environment into a new
creation … each occasion presupposes the antecedent world as active in
its own nature” (p. 165) so that “everything [italics added] that in any
sense exists has two sides, namely, its individual self and its
signification in the universe;” and further, if “each task of creation is a
social effort, employing the whole universe” (Whitehead, 1929, pp. 340-
341) and if, finally tenderness, God, “is the poet of the world with tender
patience leading (or persuading) it by his vision of truth, beauty and
goodness … love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little
oblivious as to morals” (p. 526; p. 520) – if all of these are true, then the
consequences for education and for our view of what ideas are seem
quite astounding, especially for someone brought up in the system of
military hurdles called 11 plus exams, “O” level GCSEs, “A” and “S” level
or in the system I currently inhabit of SATs, GREs, and IQs! We can
never do away with competitiveness, but competitiveness and the
implicit military might of demarcational achievement should not be the
only real game in town or else we will fail to notice the gaps, the gaps
where the unvordenklich31 might be just as much the gaps between the
haves and the have-nots.
For Whitehead, like Bergson, ideas and the thought which is their
movement, work in at least two ways: “to submit to the authority of
facts,” on the one hand, “without loss of its mission to transcend the
existing analysis of facts,” on the other (1938, p. 68), that is, “to accept
the limitations of the topic but simultaneously to enlarge and recast
categorical ideas” within those limitations. Both decay and intensity of
value are a function of these two movements:
The crowding of houses is no explanation why houses should be
beautiful. But there is in nature, some tendency in a contrary
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 191

direction to the aspect of physical decay. In our experience we find

appetition, effecting a final causation towards ideal ends which lie
outside the mere physical tendency. (p. 72)
Here again, idea is tendency, direction towards the beautiful. How then,
we might well ask, should this work concretely in education? Whitehead
has a remarkable answer, which would be easy just to read through
without really grasping its revolutionary nature, especially in early 20th
century England. In addition, it’s only a question of some 23 short pages!
First, education must be useful,32 to equip us for the present. What
does this mean in practice? For Whitehead, by contrast with our
information-explosion education, the main ideas must be few and
important and the student should make them her own in the sense (a)
that they give a joy of discovery, and (b) “that general ideas give an
understanding of the stream of events which pours through <her> life,
which is <her> life,” and an understanding that is more like the
tenderness of God (e.g., “to understand all, is to forgive all”) than mere
logical analysis (1929/1957, p. 3).
Second, education is a question, not of the postponement of life or of
the training of the mind as instrument, but of the dynamic
connectedness of everything in the present.
The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the
past, and it is the future .... The communion of saints in a great and
inspiring assemblage, but it has only one possible hall of meeting,
and that is, the present; and the mere lapse of time through which
any particular group of saints [Whitehead mentions Shakespeare,
Moliere, Sophocles, and Virgil] must travel to reach that meeting-
place, makes very little difference. (1929/1957, p. 4).
Whitehead, of course, is citing Sophocles’ famous line from Oedipus at
Colonus: “all the place is holy”!33
Third, ideas cannot be inert or disconnected. They must form a living
stream. This is what Whitehead means by usefulness: “By utilizing an
idea, I mean relating it to that stream, compounded of sense perceptions,
feelings, hopes, desires, and of mental activities adjusting thought to
thought, which forms our life” (p. 1929/1957, p. 4). An idea is in my head
in a variety of ways, but only because it is everywhere else too! What a
thought!
Fourth, education should also be intensely personal:
In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a
nasty place. This evil path is represented by a book or set of
lectures which will practically enable the student to learn by heart
192 KEVIN CORRIGAN

all the questions likely to be asked at the next external

examination. (1929/1957, p. 7)
This is why Whitehead deplores the standardized exam while at the
same time welcoming specialism. “Mankind is naturally specialist. One
sees a whole subject, where another can find only a few detached
examples” (p. 15). And on standardized exams: “I suggest that no system
of external tests which aim primarily at examining individual scholars
can result in anything but educational waste. Primarily, it is the schools
and not the scholars which should be inspected” (1929/1957, p. 21). In
the English system, we now include psychological testing at ages 7 and
9 and up, over and beyond all the other tests. If we accept Whitehead’s
terms, the situation is worse now than it was even in his own day.
Finally, for want of space, “the essence of education is that it be
religious.” What does this mean?
A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and
reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of
events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue,
ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is
this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete
sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude
of time, which is eternity. (Whitehead, 1929/1957, p. 23)
I submit that there could not be a conception of education more different
from our present systems and habits of thought: (a) to relate facts and
ideas in the tender movement of understanding, (b) to meet the holy
connectedness of everything in the present, (c) to engage in the living
stream of the idea, (d) to experience in a personal, intimate way without
standardized tests but allowing for natural individual specializations,
and (e) to be religious-dutiful and reverent! How completely outside our
quasi-military, no-nonsense, competitive systems! Yet surely the
originality of Whitehead and Bergson’s views are partly a function of the
fact that they are not entirely new with them, but that they reveal in
new ways the always provisional, suggestive character of the living
insights of that “communion of saints” which is responsible for
civilization in the life of the organism – from Heraclitus to Parmenides
(“the more is thought”)34 to Anaxagoras (“mind is all alike”)35 to Plato
(Protagoras: education is not a commodity business but more dangerous
because one risks being transformed by ideas; or the 7th Letter)36 and so
on.37 Part, again, of the importance of these views is that they also cast
into relief the shadow-side of our educational systems as potential
bastions of the glorification of privilege and instrumental power or as
networks of vast implicit contradiction in which the urge to include, to
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 193

understand, and to forgive is fatally undercut by the urge to succeed, to

keep what one has achieved, and to make sure by any means, especially
war, that one stays on top (in whatever of the myriad ways we figure
staying on top means – but especially those of which we are largely
unconscious). Our capacity for the new is what distinguishes us as
human beings, for Whitehead, but this – for better or worse – gets
reduced to an individual property or commodity: “The conceptual
entertainment of unrealized possibility becomes a major factor in human
mentality. In this way outrageous novelty is introduced, sometimes
beautified, sometimes damned, and sometimes literally patented or
protected by copyright” (Whitehead, 1938, p. 25). It seems to me that
Whitehead and Bergson point in the opposite direction: real ideas are
the property of no one; they belong to everything and everyone because
they are actually free. And yet they are, one might say, irreducibly
personal at the same time, but yet by not entirely belonging in your or
my suitcase! I suggest we need this spirit of generosity more than ever
in the 21st century, after the bloodiest of all previous centuries combined,
the 20th! As Bergson puts it:
Is there anything more daring, anything newer than to announce
to physicists that the inert will be explained by the living, to
biologists that life will only be understood through thought, to
philosophers that generalities are not philosophical, to teachers
that the whole must be taught before its elements, to students that
one must begin by perfection, to <human beings> more than ever
given over to egoism and hatred, that the natural driving power of
human beings is generosity? (1934/1946, p. 300)

NOTES
1. Gorgias of Leontini (latter half of the fifth century, B.C.E.), the famous
sophist who is represented in Plato’s dialogue of that name, was reported
by Sextus Empiricus to have held the view (presumably against Parmenides
and his followers or at least against all who appeared to hold a confidence
in Being, thought, and the structures of language and reality, that nothing
exists and that even if it were comprehensible, it would be incommunicable!
For Greek text, see Diels/Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker II
(Weidmann, Zurich – Hildesheim, 1992 – original 1952), fragment 3 (pp.
279-283); English translation, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers,
Kathleen Freeman, Oxford, 1966, 128-129.
2. For an application of this in relation to the term ekstasis (with reference
to “growth,” “standing out of,” and “being drawn out of”) see Corrigan
(1995).
194 KEVIN CORRIGAN

3. Descartes’ use of the term idea (and of many other terms too) is decisive
here (see especially Meditation III) as is also its subsequent use in Locke,
Berkeley, and Hume.
4. For Aquinas’ distinction between illud quod and id quo in relation to
both sensible and intelligible species, see Summa Theologica I, Quaestio 85,
article 2.
5. This is an important topic which has eluded any treatment, as far as I
am aware, but there is no space to develop it here. It will have to be
sufficient, therefore, merely to list some of the major Greek terms related
to ideas in the sense of thought, thinking, idea, concept, word, image,
meaning, and so forth: e.g., ennoia, epinoia, logos, eidos, idea, morphe,
ennoema/noema, enthymesis, ennoesis, logismos, dianoia, synesis,
synaesthesis, noesis. For use of these terms see (citation and reference list
entry) Greek-English Lexicon, Liddell and Scott, Oxford, 1968.
6. For Heraclitus see fr. 91 and also fr. 49a (cp. fr. 12): “We enter and do
not enter the same rivers, we are and we are not.”
7. This is not entirely unrelated to the quasi-cinematic shadow state of the
prisoners in Socrates’ cave in Republic 7. For comment on the connection see
Baudry (1986), Musser (1990), Jameson (1988).
8. Bergson does, of course, take up the question of Zenos’ paradoxes
extensively (see Bergson, 1911, pp. 308-314).
9. See, for example, Aristotle’s Physics generally 1, 7-8; 3, 1-8; and more
specifically 4, 10-14. For an excellent account see Lear (1988, p. 55-95).
10. See Aristotle, De generatione et corruptione 1, 2, 317a 3 ff. For the two
senses in which a line may be said to be divisible: a line is divisible “through
and through” to the degree that it could be divided anywhere along its
length, but it is not divisible in the sense that it could be divided
everywhere (Cf. Lear, p. 71).
11. Plotinus criticizes Aristotle’s definition of time as the measure of motion
in Ennead 3, 7, On Eternity and Time, on the grounds, among other things,
that one also has to take the measurer into account, i.e., the life of soul
herself in her metabatic or transitional movement out of eternity into time
(see chs. 1-11). But this criticism of Aristotelian views actually catches
something of Aristotle’s own view, e.g., in Physics 4, 14: “It is also worth
investigating how time can be related to the soul … whether if soul did not
exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if
there cannot be someone to count, there cannot be anything that can be
counted either, so that evidently there cannot be number (Lear, 1988).”
12. Eidos can mean (among other things) form, shape, pattern, physique,
figure, species, class, kind, nature, situation, notion, meaning (see Liddell
and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, 1968).
13. See generally Bergson, 1911, pp. 314-29.
14. See for the larger section Bergson, 1911, p. 329 ff.
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 195

15. For the pivotal role of desire (Begierde) in Hegel’s Phenomenology (see
the section on self-consciousness); also Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire:
Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, New York, 1978.
16. This view is not dissimilar from Gille Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizome.”
See A Thousand Plateaus, G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, trans. Brian
Massumi, Minneapolis, 1987, introduction.
17. The precise meaning of “uselessness” is important to make precise in
this context. Intuition is useless in the sense that it is not manipulative or
instrumental. Whitehead’s insistence that education must be useful, at first
sight so different from the view of Bergson, emphasizes in fact a different
and compatible aspect of the dynamic function of thought.
18. For the daimonion or spiritual voice of Socrates see Plato, Apology, 31
c-e.
19. The term “conversion” (drawn from the Latin conversio), contains an
intertextual resonance with the Neoplatonic notion of epistrophê (or a
turning back to one’s source), the Thomistic notion of a reditio completa, a
complete return to the self in self-knowing, and also Socrates’ image in
Republic 7 of turning back the eye of the soul. For part of the history of
these terms from Plotinus to Aquinas’, see K. Corrigan and Carl Still, “The
Problem of Aquinas’ notion of reditio completa in relation to its Neoplatonic
Sources,” to appear in Being and Thought in Aquinas, Binghampton, 2004,
pp. 1-16.
20. “The truth is that above the word and above the phrase, there is
something much more simple than a phrase and even than a word: the
meaning which is less a thing thought than a movement of thought, less a
movement than a direction. And just as the impetus given to embryonic life
determines the division of an original cell into cells which make further
division in their turn up until the complete organism is formed, so the
characteristic movement of every act of thought leads that thought by
means of a growing subdivision of itself to spread out more and more on
successive planes of the spirit up until it attains the plane of the word.
There it gets expressed by a phrase, that is, by a group of pre-existing
elements” (author’s translation).
21. “And when he arrives there, the idea so drawn in the movement of his
spirit, animated with a new life like the word which receives its meaning
from the phrase – the idea is no longer what it was outside the whirlwind”
(author’s translation).
22. On Whitehead’s Process and Reality see E. Pols, Whitehead’s
Metaphysics – A Critical Examination of Process on Reality, Southern
Illinois University Press, 1967; D.W. Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s
Process and Reality, New York-London, 1966; idem, “Whitehead, Alfred
North,” in Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy,
Cambridge, 1995; Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension
and Solidarity, Albany, 1986.
196 KEVIN CORRIGAN

23. On this generally see J. Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand,

Cambridge, 1988, pp. 209-320; K. Corrigan, Plotinus’ Theory of Matter-Evil
and the Question of Substance: Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander of
Aphrodisias, Louven, 1996.
24. Bergson, of course, says many different things about Plato and
Platonism in his work, but occasionally his views tend toward
oversimplification as in Creative Evolution, 1911, p. 315 ff.; or again p. 347:
“As soon as we incline to make metaphysics a systematization of science, we
glide in the direction of Plato and Aristotle.”
25. By the term holographic I mean that in every single part of a whole the
whole is potentially or even actually inscribed or implicate, so that in each
part or detail the whole is in some way implicate.
26. See especially Aristotle, EN, 10, 7.
27. See under prolepsis in H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek English
Lexicon (with a supplement), Oxford, 1968.
28. See Symposium and Phaedrus generally, but especially Symposium
210a ff.
29. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12, 1072b, 13-26.
30. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12, 7-10; EN, 6, 7.
31. The term unvordenklich that I borrow here is used by Schelling
particularly to signify the precognitive, even pre-noetic power of the new
which emerges in the great artwork. See, for example, unvordenkliches Sein
in Philosophie der Offenbarung, ed. Manfred Frank, Frankfurt, 1977, p. 160
ff.
32. On the question of usefulness see below for Whitehead’s view.
33. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus line 54.
34. I mean particularly the notion that it is a function of thinking and being
always to go beyond boundaries, for example, as in Heraclitus, fr. 115: “the
psyche has its own logos, which increases itself ;” cf. Frs. 45, 18 etc.,
Parmenides, fr. 16: “for the more is thought (to gar pleon esti noêma).
35. Anaxagoras, fr. 12: “and mind is all alike … (nous de pas homoios esti).”
36. Protagoras 313 a-c; 7th Letter 342a – 344d.
37. Cf. Aristotle’s famous definition of the self-reflexive character of mind’s
thinking: an understanding of understanding (noêsis noêseôs) (Metaphysics
12, 9, 1074b 34), in the broader contest of Metaphysics, 12, chapters 7-10.

Author’s Address:
The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts
8415 Calaway Center
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
U.S.A,
EMAIL: kcorrig@emory.edu
A NEW VIEW OF IDEA, THOUGHT, AND EDUCATION 197

REFERENCES
Annas, J. (1991). Epicurus’ philosophy of mind. In S. Everson (Ed.),
Psychology – Companions to ancient thought II (p. 88). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Aristotle. (382-322 BCE). Eqikh Nikomaco (Nichomachean Ethics (EN).
Aristotle. (382-322 BCE). Metafusikh (Metaphysics).
Baudry, J-L. (1986). The apparatus: Metapsychological approaches to the
impression of reality in the cinema. In P. Rosen (Ed.), Narrative,
apparatus, ideology. New York, Columbia.
Bergson, H. (1911). Creative evolution (A. Mitchell, Trans.). New York:
Henry Holt & Company.
Bergson, H. (1923). L’évolution créatrice (26th ed.). Paris: Librairie Félix
Alcan.
Bergson, H. (1946). The creative mind (M.L. Andison, Trans.). New York:
Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1934)
Corrigan, K. (1995). Ecstasy and ecstasy in some early pagan and Christian
mystical writings. In W.J. Carroll & J.J. Furlong (Eds.), Greek and
medieval studies in honor of Leo Sweeney, S.J. (pp. 27-37). New York:
Berlin.
Derrida, J. (1971). Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human
sciences. In Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans., pp. 278-293).
Chicago: Publisher.
Foucault, M. (1971). Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In D. Bouchard (Ed.),
Language, Counter-Memory, Practise (pp. 139-164). Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. In D.F. Krell
(Ed.), Martin Heidegger, basic writings (pp. 287-317). New York: Harper
and Row.
Jameson, F. (1988). Postmodernism and consumer society. In E.A. Kaplan
(Ed.), Postmodernism and its discontents (p. 20). London and New York:
Verso.
Lear, J. (1988). Aristotle: The desire to understand. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Long, A.A. (1991). Representation and the self in stoicism. In S. Everson
(Ed.), Psychology – Companions to ancient thought II (pp. 102-120).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Musser, C. (1990). The emergence of cinema: The American screen to 1907.
New York: Charles Scribner.
Nietzsche, F. (1994). On the genealogy of morality (C. Diethe, Trans., K.
Ansell, Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tolkien, J.R. (1992). Two towers. London: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929a). Process and reality. New York: Macmillan.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929b). The function of reason. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
198 KEVIN CORRIGAN

Whitehead, A.N. (1938). Modes of thought. New York: Macmillan.

Whitehead, A.N. (1957). The aims of education. New York: The Free Press.
(Original work published 1929)