Deleuze and Analytic philosophy: exploring the broken link Abstract Alfred North Whitehead was acknowledged by Deleuze to be ‘the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein’s disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror.’ He pointed out that for Whitehead: ‘Everything is Event, for the third time [after the Stoics and Leibniz], the cry reverberates with Whitehead: Everything is Event.’ Deleuze built on the event based ontology and Heraclitean process philosophy developed by Whitehead. However, it is only recently through the work of Isabelle Stengers that Deleuzians have become more fully aware of the importance of Whitehead in shaping Deleuze’s thought and the link that has now been established between their work. What happened to this ‘last great Anglo-American philosopher’ in analytic philosophy circles? He was the single person, I believe, whose work could and should have prevented that split which bedevils Western philosophy to this day: the great divide between analytic and continental philosophy. This is a catastrophic division that Michael Dummett famously stated has created such an impasse that ‘we have reached a point at which it’s as if we’re working in different subjects’. This paper is a draft of the one I will be presenting to The 12th annual Deleuze & Guattari Studies conference to be held at Royal Holloway, University of London Monday to Wednesday, 8-10 July 2019. Any comments are welcome. .. Alfred North Whitehead was acknowledged by Deleuze to be ‘the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein’s disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror.’ He pointed out that for Whitehead: ‘Everything is Event, for the third time [after the Stoics and Leibniz], the cry reverberates with Whitehead: Everything is Event.’ Deleuze (1987) Deleuze built on the event based ontology and Heraclitean process philosophy developed by Whitehead. However, it is only recently through the work of Isabelle Stengers that Deleuzians have become more fully aware of the importance of Whitehead in shaping Deleuze’s thought and the link that has now been established between their work. Stengers (2002), (2005), (2009) What happened to this ‘last great Anglo-American philosopher’ in analytic philosophy circles? He was the single person, I believe, whose work could and should have prevented that split which bedevils Western philosophy to this day: the great divide between analytic and continental philosophy. This is a catastrophic division that Michael Dummett famously stated has created such an impasse that ‘we have reached a point at which it’s as if we’re working in different subjects’. Dummett (1993), p.193. Willard Van Orman Quine, a foundational figure in the analytic tradition, Schorske (1997), pp. 289-310. is regarded by analytic philosophers ‘as one of the most important philosophers of the past two centuries.’ According to a poll conducted amongst analytic philosophers in 2009. His work has been extremely influential and has done much to shape the course of philosophy in the second-half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Quine stated categorically, not once but repeatedly, Quine (1995), pp.3-36. that not only did Whitehead make crucial contributions to analytic philosophy’s mathematical and logical foundations but he provided the vital missing metaphysics for the analytic philosophy movement. He said that: ‘Whitehead's metaphysics always remains present and is still waiting to be fully articulated within analytical philosophy’. Hahn and Schilpp, eds. (1997), p.45. (My italics for emphasis) The historian of mathematics, Ivor Grattan-Guinness underlines this assessment, he records in Historia Mathematica, that: A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947) contributed notably to the foundations of pure and applied mathematics, especially from the late 1890s to the mid 1920s. ... In the 1900s he was joined by Bertrand Russell, a former student, in an attempt to ground many parts of mathematics in the newly developing mathematical logic. ...The main outcome of the collaboration with Russell was a three-volume work, Principia Mathematica (1910–1913). By this time Whitehead had extended and revised his conceptions of logic and the philosophy of mathematics as part of an ontology of events through his developing ‘process’ philosophy. Grattan-Guinness (2002), vol. 29, pp. 427–462. We need to note that Whitehead never viewed his process philosophy as separate and distinct from his foundational mathematical work in the formation of analytic philosophy. He simply saw it as a necessary extension of his former work with Russell in Principia Mathematica. Willard Quine’s insistence on the vital importance of Whitehead’s work for analytic philosophy and in particular his metaphysics went completely unheeded, as has the assessment of Grattan-Guinness. Deleuze dramatically stated that Whitehead had been ‘assassinated’ by analytic philosophers and that he was one of the ‘very great philosophers’ to whom this had happened. Deleuze (1987), passim. He was simply airbrushed out of analytic philosophy history and practice, never to be mentioned again. How and why did this come about? Quine alone in analytic philosophy circles was acutely aware that Whitehead was the only major twentieth century philosopher who worked to achieve – with Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity coupled with early quantum theory – what his great seventeenth century predecessors (Descartes, Spinoza, Locke and Leibnitz) had tried to do for Galilean and Newtonian physics. This was to create a metaphysics adequate to their scientific and mathematical work whilst also encompassing an understanding of life, mind and meaning in a complete cosmology of naturalistic metaphysics. Deleuze, like Whitehead before him, saw himself as a ‘pure metaphysician.’ Nevertheless, unlike Descartes, Spinoza or Hegel, Whitehead was far more modest about his accomplishment. Where they had claimed certainty, finality and necessity about their metaphysics, he regarded his own work as hypothetical and fallible. His former student, Bertrand Russell, on the other hand was constantly striving to establish certainty, clarity and truth in analytic philosophy. Whitehead’s enormous mathematical and logistical contributions to analytic philosophy in the bible of analytic philosophy Principia Mathematica which he co-authored with Bertrand Russell, over a 13 year period, have been astonishingly assigned by analytic philosophy historians to either Gottlob Frege or Bertrand Russell. Ayer (1971), (1987). Whitehead has been completely wiped out of analytic philosophy history. This has resulted in an impoverishment of analytic philosophy from which it has never recovered. Even today, in the prominent analytic philosopher Adrian Moore’s widely acclaimed and massive work, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, published in 2012, which has defied analytic philosophy convention and firmly established metaphysics in analytic philosophy, there is only one jokey reference to Whitehead. This appears in a single brief footnote. Moore reviewed the work of 21 metaphysicians and even included a final groundbreaking chapter on the vital importance of Gilles Deleuze’s metaphysics for analytic philosophers. Yet, Alfred North Whitehead’s great work on metaphysics, Process and Reality is never even mentioned. Deleuzians may see little point, other than a passing interest, in the above and have no particular interest in the skirmishes leading up to the formation of analytic philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century. They may well think that this has nothing to do with us as many have simply given up on analytic philosophy. If ‘we’re working in different subjects’, as Michael Dummett pointed out, then this lack of interest and even contempt cuts both ways. Unfortunately, for our own sake and that of Deleuze, we cannot afford to ignore this tragic moment. The great divide poses a major problem crying out for a Deleuzian transcendental empiricist intervention. For, as John Searle notes: Without exception, the best philosophy departments in the United States are dominated by analytic philosophy, and among the leading philosophers in the United States, all but a tiny handful would be classified as analytic philosophers. Practitioners of types of philosophizing that are not in the analytic tradition – such as phenomenology, classical pragmatism, existentialism, or Marxism – feel it necessary to define their position in relation to analytic philosophy. Searle (2003), p.1. Not just in the USA, one should add, but in the UK and Australia too, analytic philosophy is dominant and retains a tight grip on what philosophy is and can be. Analytic philosophy has monopolised philosophy in academia for decades. As such, continental philosophy of any stripe is regarded as simply not worthy of attention. Consequently, neither Deleuze nor Whitehead feature in analytic philosophy papers, conferences or books and their ideas are not deemed worthy of exposition or even a mention in the vast majority of philosophy departments throughout the Western world. We need to find out what lies behind this attitude and what maintains it to this day. What are the origins and conditions of maintenance of a problem which lies at the very heart of Western philosophy? Its restrictive molar striations need to be carefully unpicked and elucidated so that the underlying problem itself can be fully revealed and then creatively transformed into new concepts, for as Deleuze puts it ‘[o]ne’s always writing to bring something to life; to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace [new] lines of flight’. Deleuze, 1990c, p. 141. We desperately need a positive disjunctive synthesis, a paradoxical Deleuzian ‘both/and’ to replace the divisive common sense ‘either/or’ of analytic philosophy’s negativity. In his book on metaphysics, A.W. Moore after proclaiming his analytic philosophy credentials states that ‘continental philosophers are thinkers of great depth and power [and he] despairs of the arrogance that casts them in the role of charlatans.’ Moore (2012), p.xx. Refreshingly he then points to Deleuze as ‘one of the most exciting and extraordinary of these continental philosophers.’ Regrettably no headway has been made as his plea for and advocacy of Deleuze has simply fallen on deaf analytic philosophy ears. Reviewers who praised his book generally were either silent on his advocacy of Deleuze or found it odd and unacceptable. Nowadays Deleuzian thinking is widespread but it is almost always aired in wider schools of humanities, literature or art and continues to be regarded disparagingly by many analytics as ‘literary philosophising’ or simply ‘non-philosophy’. Whitehead is in an even worse position philosophically. Whilst his explicit philosophical treatments of God seldom went beyond that of an ideal principle of maximal coherence, theological writers such as Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb have battened onto his work and virtually monopolised it, taking it far beyond anything that Whitehead wrote or possibly intended. Consequently, his ideas are largely confined to exposition in departments of theology or religious studies. Today, philosophers claiming to be followers of Whitehead are few and far between. There are some notable exceptions such as Steven Shaviro. Whitehead has been virtually lost as a mainstream philosophical thinker. So, once again I ask how could this have happened to Whitehead? As Michael Beaney points out in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, ‘analytic philosophy today is the consequence of several micro-revolutions and at least five different phases’, Beaney (2013), passim. nevertheless the original framework of understanding, or the paradigm, set by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore – but not Whitehead it should be noted – continues to hold sway and sets the parameters for much of contemporary analytic philosophy. Whitehead is deemed to have played no part in this foundational work. Thus, Stephen Schwartz, even setting aside G.E. Moore’s contribution, begins A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy as follows: Bertrand Russell, a brilliant philosopher and mathematician, is the father of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Russell did the hard work of expounding and promulgating the new symbolic logic that was to revolutionize the method of philosophy. Equally important for analytic philosophy, he introduced others to the works of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who might otherwise have languished unappreciated. Without Bertrand Russell’s work, especially the work he produced early in his career in logic and the philosophy of language, there would have been no Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Schwartz (2012), p.8-45. The work that he produced early in his career in logic and the philosophy of language was done whilst writing Principia Mathematica with Whitehead. Schwartz makes no mention of Whitehead. Yet, Russell said, before the parting of the ways, with respect to the foundational work of analytic philosophy Principia Mathematica, that Whitehead had provided the insights and the techniques without which he could not have formulated his ‘theory of descriptions’, Russell (1903), p. xi. the theory which underpinned his famous paper ‘On Denoting’. Russell (1905), pp. 479-493. This is often held to be Russell’s major logistic innovation in Principia and his acknowledgement of Whitehead’s crucial part in this achievement is particularly important as it directly attests to the latter’s formative influence in early analytic philosophy. Deleuze (2004), p.341, n.2. ; Deleuze (2004), pp.181-183; (1994), p.153. Finally, Russell was at pains to point out that Principia was a truly collaborative effort: ‘Every part was done three times over ... There is hardly a line in all the three volumes which is not a joint product.’ Russell (1994), p.xxxix. (My italics for emphasis) For 13 years Whitehead and Russell had worked hand in glove on Principia Mathematica and were generally regarded as two peas in a pod by all who knew them: the Cambridge mathematics tutor and his most gifted former student working happily together, week in week out, year in and year out, on this massive, transformative project with never a cross word or major disagreement between them. What could possibly have gone wrong thereafter? Let us be plain, it is entirely due to Russell’s volte face following his repudiation of the British Hegelians whom he had previously long followed. Whitehead was not one of the British Hegelians, it must be stressed. Nevertheless when Russell turned against him it was Whitehead’s metaphysics that allowed him to equate Whitehead with Hegel in order to expunge his influence from the exclusivity of the new analytic philosophy he had agreed with G.E. Moore. John McTaggart was both Russell’s and G.E. Moore’s philosophy tutor at Trinity College Cambridge and a major early influence on both of them. McTaggart was a leading British Hegelian. He was the author of Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic and The Unreality of Time. After the completion of Principia Mathematica, Russell became increasingly involved philosophically with Moore who had been recently appointed to a lectureship at Cambridge, and he gives the credit for the origins of the analytic movement to him. Moore (1899), (1903) and Russell (1956), p.68. Moore had finally rebelled against McTaggart and repudiated British Hegelianism generally. He also attacked Kant’s idealism and argued for the restoration of ‘common sense’ philosophy – reliant on Locke and the British empiricists. Together with his ethical stance in Principia Ethica, he started the analytic philosophy movement. Nevertheless, it was Russell who really set his stamp on the new movement, as G.E. Moore himself readily acknowledged, Moore (1999), pp. 15-16. just as Stephen Schwartz echoed above. Schwartz (2012), p.8-45. Thus, Whitehead’s metaphysics and process philosophy form the nub of the problem leading to his summary dismissal from analytic philosophy discourse. Analytic philosophy began as a rejection of all things metaphysical as simply nonsense. Not just Russell and G.E. Moore completely rejected metaphysics as complete nonsense, but Wittgenstein, the members of the Vienna Circle who had joined Russell and A.J. Ayer concurred. Hegelian metaphysics and Kantian idealism took the brunt of Moore’s and Russell’s critiques. Russell had often struggled with the counter-intuitionist explanations of his philosophy tutor John McTaggart and finally turned to Hegel himself in order to seek clarity. He states that he was shocked to find in his erstwhile master only, ‘a farrago of confusions and what seemed to be little better than puns.’ Russell (1956), p.22. Following G.E. Moore, Russell now completely rejected Hegelian idealism and metaphysics. His rebellion was extreme as he gleefully turned away from anything and everything he had previously believed: Hegel had maintained that that all separateness is illusory and that the universe is more like a pot of treacle than a heap of shot. I therefore said, ‘the universe is exactly like a heap of shot’. Each separate shot ... had hard and precise boundaries and was as absolute as Hegel’s absolute’, and wherever, ‘Hegel [held] that he had proven by logic that number, space, time and matter are illusions ... I developed a new logic to show that these were as real as any mathematician could wish’, etc., etc. ‘Broadly speaking where Hegel’s proof showed that something does not exist ... I assumed [the opposite], I thought that whatever Hegel had denied must be true’. Russell (1956a) and (1959), pp. 40-41. As Paul Redding notes: Russell, in particular, promulgated a 'shadow Hegel,' a distorted, even mythical image that justified his philosophical patricide, and he sold it effectively for the rest of his life.  After the Cambridge Two slew the Hegelian father and liberated philosophy from his oppressive regime, Hegel and Absolute Idealism became taboo, mentionable only with disgust, scorn, and ritualistic excoriation. Redding (2007), passim.   Whilst still on good terms with Whitehead after the completion of Principia Mathematica, Russell initially turned a blind eye to the metaphysical philosophy of Whitehead which imbued all of his mathematical and logistic work. A fact that Russell must have been very well aware of as he was his former student. He said of Principia: The problems with which we had to contend were of two sorts: philosophical and mathematical. Broadly speaking Whitehead [did the maths and] left the philosophical problems to me. Russell (1994), p.xxxix. (My italics for emphasis) At that stage of their relationship, Russell was uncertain of how to deal with his old tutor, mentor, co-worker and friend, so he discounted the evident fact that Whitehead’s mathematical contribution to Principia were part and parcel of his ‘ontology of events’ forming his metaphysics as process philosophy. Whitehead was never really interested in the problem solving aspect of mathematics but in the ‘patterned relations’ he discerned that allowed him not only to connect all algebras together but showed how mathematics could be related to the world generally. This was shown in his earlier A Treatise on Universal Algebra, which Russell had certainly read as a student, followed by An Introduction to Mathematics. The former introduced Russell to symbolic logic. Russell now turned to positivistic scientific methodology, mathematics and logic together with the common sense and exactitude of argument that G.E. Moore had brought to the new movement. He added to this the ‘clarity’ that the logistical work of Gottlob Frege brought to analytic philosophy and initially applied this to language analysis. A.W Moore points out that, throughout its history and to this day, the main aim of analytic philosophy is to emphasise the ‘clarity of understanding,’ which Frege brought to the movement and its subsequent formative effect on Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn. He adds, Frege is consequently a ‘supremely important contributor, both to the inception and the propagation’ of analytic philosophy, ‘because contemporary formal logic devised by him provides the single most powerful set of tools that analytic philosophers use in undertaking such analysis.’ Moore (2012), p.196. Thus, clarity, certainty, truth, mathematics, symbolic logic, close argumentation, linguistic analysis and positivistic science form the bedrock of analytic philosophy cast in Russell’s image. The craving for truth and clarity unambiguously spelled out was the driving force behind Russell’s mathematical and philosophical interests, Russell (1967), (1956), (1992)) it formed the backbone of his analytic philosophy. Deleuze (and Guattari) disagree strongly with Russell. In What is Philosophy? they say: Philosophy does not consist in knowledge and it is not truth that inspires philosophy, but rather categories like the interesting, the remarkable, or the important that decide its success or failure. Deleuze and Guattari (2003), p.80. Eugen Fink writing in A Sixth Cartesian Meditation adds to this point, he asks: Has not the philosophy that aims primarily for certainty already passed over all fundamental truths, and opened out into the inconsequentiality of a “wholly secure” knowledge? To put the question still more radically: is not regress to secure and apodictically [demonstrably] certain truths an avoidance of the real problems, a flight from the insecurity and eeriness of unsettled human existence? Fink (1995), p.46. Whitehead could only agree. Nevertheless, Russell now discounted synthesis and concentrated on analysis alone. It lay behind his rejection of Whitehead as ‘lacking in ‘clarity’ and being ‘muddle-headed’. The difference in their philosophical outlook had now become too evident for Russell to ignore as he strove to establish himself and his views at the head of the analytic philosophy movement. Whilst he emphasized abstraction and clear cut relations among static things, Whitehead presented a dynamic theory of processes. Whilst Russell rejected all things metaphysical, Whitehead embraced metaphysics. Whereas Russell believed in ‘certainty’ and absolute clarity, Whitehead maintained that ‘In the focus of experience, there is some comparative clarity. But the discrimination of this clarity leads into the penumbral background.’ Whitehead (1937), pp. 122-131. Consequently, Whitehead stated that Russell was ‘simple minded’ and one-dimensional in his views. Steven Shaviro notes Whitehead’s ‘double view of the world’ Shaviro (2014), pp.3-4. which starkly contrasts with that of Russell: On the one hand ‘the ultimate metaphysical truth is ‘atomism’, each entity is different, and separate, from all others [as Russell’s analysis argued]. But on the other hand, these ultimate atoms are ‘drops of experience’, complex and interdependent. That is to say they are active and articulated processes – experiences, or moments of feeling – rather than simple, self-identical substances. In this way, being is subordinated to becoming; yet becoming is not an uninterrupted, universal flux, but a multiplicity of discrete ‘occasions’ [or events] each of which is limited, determinate and finite. Whitehead (1967), pp.18, 35 and 104. Whitehead, unlike Russell, is able to combine analysis and synthesis to give a better explanation of the world around us. A quotation from Whitehead’s lectures concerning what he calls ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ hints at the potential limitations of Russell’s approach in this respect, as it seems to rely on analysis alone: The advantage of confining attention to a definite group of abstractions is that you confine your thoughts to clear-cut definite things, with clear-cut definite relations. Accordingly, if you have a logical head, you can deduce a variety of conclusions respecting the relationships between these abstract entities. Furthermore if the abstractions are well founded, that is to say, if they do not abstract from anything that is important in experience, the scientific thought that confines itself to these abstractions will arrive at a variety of important truths relating to our experience of nature. We all know these clear-cut trenchant intellects, immovably encased in a hard shell of abstractions. They hold you to their abstractions by the sheer grip of personality. Whitehead (1953), pp. 415-416. The last two sentences here seem clearly to refer to Russell. Whitehead does not rule out abstract thinking or its usefulness but simply shows its limitations. He continues: The disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group of abstractions, however well founded, is that by the nature of the case you have abstracted from the remainder of things. In so far as that excluded things are important ... your modes of thought are not fitted to deal with them. You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly it is of the utmost importance in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critique of abstractions. Ibid. Whitehead puts this more forcibly in Modes of Thought, ‘an abstraction is nothing else than an omission of part of the truth.’ Whitehead (1938), p.138. He regards philosophy’s initial purpose as one of opposition to Russell’s attempt to confine it to scientific abstractions, mathematics and logic in his search for clarity and truth. We need to stress that Russell now decided to target and eliminate Whitehead just as he had with Hegel and Bergson. He set aside any pretence of fairness, argument or initial attempt to see the other’s point of view which he pretended was always his approach: In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble as far as possible the state of mind of a person abandoning any opinions which he has hitherto held. Russell (1945), p.47. This lifelong pacifist took on the role of a military general at war, aiming to attack the enemy at its weakest point and use any means, fair or foul, to enhance his chance of victory. First, in order to establish the ‘New Philosophy’, in his own image, two things had to be done he realised. He had to rid the new movement of viable external competitors (Hegel, Bergson) and also cleanse it from internal dissent (Whitehead). Let us be clear this was not the philosophical approach he had advocated above but a deliberate political programme of attack and destroy. We have seen that he had already destroyed Hegel and British Hegelianism through a tactic of slander and defamation. We recall that in turning to Hegel, he says that he was shocked to find in his erstwhile master only, ‘a farrago of confusions and what seemed to be little better than puns.’ Russell (1956), p.22. This allowed him to state unequivocally that: ‘Broadly speaking where Hegel’s proof showed that something does not exist ... I assumed [the opposite], I thought that whatever Hegel had denied must be true’. Russell (1956a) and (1959), pp. 40-41. No need to address Hegel’s philosophy per se, just dismiss it all, out of hand. Just as Redding had stressed, ‘Russell, in particular, promulgated a 'shadow Hegel,' a distorted, even mythical image [so that] Hegel and Absolute Idealism became taboo, mentionable only with disgust, scorn, and ritualistic excoriation. Redding (2007) passim.  This was exactly what Russell wanted, it cleared the deck for his own ‘analytic philosophy’ and he employed this tactic successfully again and again – until the philosophical ground had been emptied of all competitors (ie. anyone who thought differently from him). Next on the scene was Henri Bergson. If we look at the fate of Bergson at the hands of Russell we can see much more clearly how and why he planned and executed the demise of Whitehead, because his dealings with Bergson were far more blatant. Russell’s antipathy to Bergson did not stem from a misunderstanding of or real aversion to the latter’s philosophy. Like Hegel, Bergson was simply in Russell’s way. At the beginning of the twentieth century Bergson was highly regarded not just by Western philosophers in general but by educated Western society as a whole. He was looked upon as the outstanding philosopher of his day. Russell resented his popularity and wide acceptance, as Bergson stood in the way of Russell realising his own ambition of establishing his ‘New philosophy’ as the dominant, indeed the only, true philosophy with himself as formulator in chief at its head. As with Hegel he adopted an attitude of slander, denigration and dismissal rather than resorting to sympathetic understanding and argument. He deliberately targeted Bergson as ‘intuitionistic’, ‘irrational’, ‘mystical’, a ‘visualizer’, someone who can only ‘think in pictures’ (Bergson was a talented mathematician, a fact that Russell chose to overlook Bergson's original training was in mathematics. (Duffy (2013), passim.) ) and was consequently far ‘too imaginative’ – in the latter case, possibly because he had recently won the Nobel prize for literature with Creative Evolution. Russell clearly envied him this and finally, through much effort, achieved the same prize himself in 1950, for his ‘championing of humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought’! Russell’s ruthless and devastating public attacks on Bergson, delivered in his humourless and cutting ‘professorial manner’, coupled with his deliberate cultivation of maximum media coverage including frequent personal radio appearances, follow-up articles judiciously placed in the most prestigious and influential professional journals, as well as widespread coverage of his totally dismissive views through the popular press, all of which he planned and meticulously arranged, did immense and completely unwarranted damage to Bergson’s public standing and philosophical reputation. Russell’s scurrilous attacks on Bergson’s ‘lack of argument’ replaced, Russell insisted, by some ‘strange doctrines on number, time and intellect’ were all ‘infected’ by his ‘picture view’ of space. Bergson’s ‘personal idiosyncracy’ was taken, by Bergson alone, Russell said, to be ‘a necessity of thought’. Russell (1992), p.330. He concluded a typical article on Bergson in the Monist as follows: Bergson confuses subject and object in his theory of perception. As soon as this identification is rejected his whole system collapses: first his theories of space and time, then his belief in real contingency, then his condemnation of intellect, then his account of the relations of mind and matter, and last of all his whole view that the universe contains no things, but only actions, movements, changes, from nothing to nothing. Russell (1912), p. 347. Space prevents me from giving a detailed report of a typical speech which Russell gave to ‘The Heretics’ at Cambridge to a packed and highly appreciative audience in which Bergson was ridiculed and dismissed as an ‘anti-intellectual’, a ‘mystic who opposed science’ and had nothing in common with Russell’s own ‘clear and true’ analytic philosophy. Wood (1957), p.89. These vicious attacks were calculated to demonstrate to his academic audiences at Cambridge university and to the wider world, that as a renowned mathematical logician whose philosophy was based on incontestable scientific methodology, his considered verdict on Bergson was absolute and irrefutable. Russell simply dismissed Bergson’s ideas as risible and not worth a moment’s consideration. Instead, Russell insisted, it had been completely replaced by his own ‘analytic philosophy’. As a direct result of these calculated attacks, Bergson’s widespread popular support which he had received in this country beforehand was rapidly dissipated, thereby making room for analytic philosophy as the only bona fide philosophy available, Vrahimis, (2011), pp.123-134. just as Russell had planned. External threats having been vanquished Russell turned to Alfred North Whitehead as the great internal threat to analytic philosophy conceived in his own image. As with Bergson and Hegel before him, Russell now turned his destructive talent on Whitehead, his erstwhile mentor, colleague and friend. His attack on Whitehead was necessarily more nuanced than those launched successfully on Bergson and Hegel. Whitehead contributed notably to the foundations of pure and applied mathematics, commencing in the late 1890s and continuing until the mid 1920s. It was not until the 1900s that he was joined by Russell, his former student, in an attempt to ground many parts of mathematics in the newly developing mathematical logic or logistics established by Frege. Whitehead had been both Russell’s mathematics teacher and his examiner in his viva voce. He had recognised and cultivated Russell’s intellectual ability and befriended him. Principia Mathematica, according to Russell’s own account, as we have seen, was a truly collaborative effort. Russell (1994), p.xxxix. How then could Russell rid himself of Whitehead and what he now saw as his pernicious metaphysics? Certainly not by argument alone, Whitehead would have given him at least as good as he got. Fortunately for Russell times had changed, Principia Mathematica was now behind him and he realised that he simply did not need Whitehead anymore, as he had during those 13 long years. He now had a new and more accommodating partner in G.E. Moore. Russell now saw that Whitehead’s process philosophy and metaphysical commitment made him a real, internal danger to Russell’s hegemonic new philosophy. However, he realised that he could not use exactly the same tactics as he had with Hegel and Bergson in order to rid himself of Whitehead. The latter was, after all, the joint author of Principia Mathematica with him. Consequently, Whitehead had achieved a status in the analytic movement almost on a par with that of Russell himself. Russell realised that Whitehead had to be handled differently and more subtly. He had to move cautiously to achieve his objective. The trauma Whitehead suffered after the death of his 18 year old son in the First World War gave Russell a golden opportunity and he seized on this without hesitation. In Portraits from Memory, Russell (1951), §§  VIII, p.92. Russell characterises Whitehead’s philosophy in the following terms: In the last months of the war his younger son, who was only just eighteen, was killed. This was an appalling grief to him, and it was only by an immense effort of moral discipline that he was able to go on with his work. The pain of this loss had a great deal to do with turning his thoughts to philosophy and with causing him to seek ways of escaping from belief in a merely mechanistic universe. His philosophy was very obscure, and there was much in it that I never succeeded in understanding. He had always had a leaning toward Kant, of whom I thought ill, and when he began to develop his own philosophy he was considerably influenced by Bergson. He was impressed by the aspect of unity in the universe, and considered that it is only through this aspect that scientific inferences can be justified. Russell, insisted that it was only after the loss of his son that Whitehead turned to philosophy. We have already seen how false that claim was. First, however, Russell evinced sympathy and recognition of Whitehead’s courage in the face of adversity as he demonstrated ‘an immense effort of moral discipline’. Only then, having shown his humanity and fellow feeling, did he begin his destructive work. Russell linked Whitehead’s process philosophy to Bergson and Kant, both of whom he had previously condemned in the strongest possible terms, but he added to this the reviled Hegelian idealism together with its holistic metaphysics. All sympathy was set aside as he moved in for the kill. Whitehead, henceforth, was to be seen as the great betrayer of the analytic movement. Russell now condemned Whitehead, his long-time co-worker in the formation of analytic philosophy, and stated that he was no more than a ‘snake in the grass’: It was Whitehead who was the serpent in this paradise of Mediterranean clarity. He said to me once: ‘You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep’. I thought his remark horrid. Russell (1956), p.41. All that Whitehead was attempting to do with this remark was to broaden Russell’s Panglossian view of the world which was essentially ‘... an avoidance of the real problems, a flight from the insecurity and eeriness of unsettled human existence.’ Fink (1995), p.46. Yet, Russell had concluded that his fundamental beliefs in certainty, clarity and truth were all at issue from such remarks. Russell’s view of the world didn’t allow for anything that seemed to threaten his ‘paradise of Mediterranean clarity’. Russell had revealed Whitehead, his followers thought, as a betrayer whose earlier work had promised so much, but who was now shown in his true colours to be a Judas Iscariot, to continue with Russell’s biblical allusions. Even so, given his previous status as joint author of Principia, Whitehead ‘was still regarded as being made of the “Right Stuff”’ by most analytical philosophers, and Russell had yet to complete his skulduggery. He went to work on his followers and before long ‘baffled reverence mingled with deep suspicion was the reception accorded to Whitehead’s later publications.’ Lowe (1985), p.43 and pp. 44-45. These were found to be completely ‘incomprehensible’ by analytics now well schooled in the anti-metaphysical, Lockean empiricism and common sense of Russell and G.E. Moore. The ‘later’ Whitehead was now seen as having undertaken: A regrettable return to the worst excesses of 19th century speculative metaphysics of precisely the kind that Principia Mathematica and the emergence of analytic philosophy would, it was thought, save us from. Robinson (2009), p.4. Forget the death of his son and any sympathy this might have evinced. Whitehead’s erstwhile analytic colleagues now circled the wagons and rejected his pioneering work completely, convinced by Russell that he had reneged on all of the advances he had so strongly argued for in Principia Mathematica. Russell’s revered tutor, colleague, associate worker and long-time friend had become for Russell’s acolytes persona non grata, a controversial figure and a liability, whose later thinking, when it could be understood at all, seemed to be taking philosophy backwards. So, the analytic philosophy community took Russell’s verdict to heart, shook their collective heads, no doubt muttered ‘poor chap’ and then moved on. Whitehead had been successfully cut adrift and Russell had achieved his final aim. Whitehead was summarily expunged from analytic philosophy history and practice, to its very great loss. References Deleuze (1987), Lecture Five. ‘Lecture on Whitehead’, Cours Vincennes, St. Denis (< Whitehead, 10 March 1987@www.webdeleuze.com> accessed 10/11/2016) Stengers, Isabelle (2002) Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts (Paris: Seuil);‘Deleuze and Whitehead: A Double Test’, in Cloots, A. and Robinson, K. A. (eds.) (2005) Deleuze, Whitehead and the Transformation of Metaphysics (Brussel: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgiëvoor Wetenschappen en Kunsten), pp. 7-19; ‘Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead’, in Keith Robinson (ed.) (2009) Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections (Houndmills, Hants and New York: Palgrave Macmillan) Dummett (1993) Origins of Analytic Philosophy (London: Duckworth), p.193. Carl Schorske stressed the importance of Quine by noting that, ‘the foundational figures of the analytic tradition must always include the canonical figure of Willard Quine.’ (Schorske (1997) ‘The New Rigorism in the Human Sciences, 1940-1960’, Daedelus , vol. 126 (Winter), pp. 289-310.) Brian Leiter. March 11, 2009. ‘Who is the most important philosopher of the past 200 years’ (https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-most-important-philosopher-of-the-past-200-years.html ,accessed 24/03/2019>) Quine (1995) ‘Selected Logic Papers: Alfred North Whitehead’ in (Cambridge, Mass and London: Harvard University Press), pp.3-36. Hahn and Schilpp, eds. (1997) The Philosophy of W.V. Quine. 2nd ed. (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company), p.45. (My italics for emphasis) Grattan-Guinness (2002) ‘Algebras, Projective Geometry, Mathematical Logic, and Constructing the World: Intersections in the Philosophy of Mathematics of A. N. Whitehead’, Historia Mathematica, vol. 29, pp. 427–462. (My italics for emphasis. Later on Russell attributes the philosophical developments in Principia Mathematica solely to himself.) He also highlighted Henri Bergson as another important philosopher who had suffered a similar fate. (Deleuze (1987) ‘Lecture on Whitehead’, Cours Vincennes, St. Denis (< Whitehead, 10 March 1987@www.webdeleuze.com> accessed 10/11/2016) Deleuze aimed, as he tells us in his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science – a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze probably owes more to Whitehead in this venture than is generally realised. Jeffrey Bell points out that in 1967, during the question and answer session that followed a talk Deleuze gave to the Society of French Philosophy, Deleuze responded to a question, put by Alquié, by stating that his primary interest was in the metaphysics science needed rather than in the science philosophy needs. This metaphysics, Deleuze stressed, is to be done ‘in the style of Whitehead’ rather than that of Kant. In developing this metaphysics – a Deleuzian-Spinozist metaphysics done in the style of Whitehead – it resulted in the ‘metaphysics science needs’. (Bell (2006) ‘Between Realism and Anti-realism: Deleuze and the Spinozist Tradition in Philosophy’, in Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) In A.J. Ayer’s standard history of analytic philosophy the title speaks for itself, Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage ((1971) (London and New York: Macmillan). Whitehead’s name appears only once as joint author with Russell of Principia Mathematica. Elsewhere, Ayer comments that this work is out of place in Whitehead’s general work. It should be regarded as part of Russell’s early development. (Ayer (1987) ‘Frege, Russell and Modern Logic’, in Magee (1978) Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy (London: The British Broadcasting Corporation), pp. 298-319. Searle (2003) ‘Contemporary Philosophy in the United States’, in N. Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., (Oxford and New York: Blackwell Publishing), p.1. Deleuze, (1990) Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 141. Moore (2012) The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), p.xx Ibid, passim. There are some notable exceptions such as Steven Shaviro (2014)The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press); (undated) ‘Deleuze’s Encounter with Whitehead’ (shaviro@shaviro.com, accessed 01/10/2016) Beaney (2013) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), passim. Schwartz (2012) A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: from Russell to Rawls (Chichester : Wiley-Blackwell ), p.8-45. Russell (1903) Principles of Mathematics (London: Routledge), p. xi. Russell (1905) ‘On Denoting’, Mind, Volume XIV, Issue 4, 1 January), pp. 479-493. Deleuze acknowledged the genius of Russell in realising that the condition of truth (its denotation) lies firmly in the domain of sense. He compared Russell to Husserl here and decided that the two forms of sense that Russell offered was superior to that of Husserl (Deleuze (2004)The Logic of Sense, (London: Continuum), p.341, n.2.) Nevertheless, he points out that finally Russell, like Kant before him, was content to establish the conditions for truth rather than its genesis. (Deleuze (2004), pp.181-183; (1994) Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press), p.153). Russell (1994) Foundations of Logic, 1903-05 (London and New York: Routledge), p.xxxix. (My italics for emphasis) It was G.E. Moore in his paper ‘The Nature of Judgment’ ((1899) ‘The Nature of Judgement’, Mind, vol. 8 (30), pp.176-193) and not Bertrand Russell, who first took the bold public step of completely breaking with ‘absolute idealism’. This move signalled British philosophy’s return to empiricism and common sense thinking as foundational. His paper ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ ((1903), Mind, vol. 12 (1)) and his major ethical work Principia Ethica ( (1903) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), underlined this revolutionary move. Russell states that ‘it was largely his conversation that led me to abandon both Kant and Hegel’ (Russell (1956) Portraits from Memory, and other Essays (London: Readers Union), p.68.) Moore himself acknowledged, in his autobiographical essay, that Russell was the prime mover in both ‘creating and setting the rules, distinct ideas and understanding of analytic philosophy.’(G.E. Moore (1999), pp. 15-16.) Schwartz, Stephen (2012) A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: from Russell to Rawls (Chichester : Wiley-Blackwell ), p.8-45. Russell, G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein and members of the Vienna Circle who joined them, as well as A.J. Ayer, all dismissed much of metaphysics as ‘meaningless nonsense’. For instance, Russell himself said ‘analytic philosophy is a movement characterized by conceptual clarification and the expulsion of metaphysics.’ (Russell (1956), The Outline of Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin), p.95.) Wittgenstein added further that in analytic philosophy ‘nothing metaphysical would be tolerated at all … analytics merely need to show the metaphysicist, that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions’ (Wittgenstein (1922)Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, Ltd), p.189. Russell (1956) Portraits from Memory, and other Essays (London: Readers Union), p.22. Russell (1956a)The Outline of Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin) and (1959) My Philosophical Development (London: Unwin paperbacks), pp. 40-41. Paul Redding (2007) Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.) Russell (1994) Foundations of Logic, 1903-05 (London and New York: Routledge), p.xxxix. (My italics for emphasis) Moore (2012), The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things, p.196. As a child it was mathematics which increasingly intrigued him. It seemed to promise the truth and certainty which he craved. Russell records in his Autobiography ((1967) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (George Allen & Unwin), passim) that it was only the need to know more mathematics that kept him from committing suicide. In ‘The Study of Mathematics’ ((1903) Principles of Mathematics (London: Routledge), he records, ‘Mathematics takes us further [away] from what is human, into the region of absolute certainty, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.’ When he was eleven years old his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which Russell described in his autobiography as ‘one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love.’ However, this was immediately followed by shock and disappointment because of his craving for truth and certainty. His disappointment lay in the fact that the underlying Euclidian axioms had to be taken on trust as they could not be proven. Russell was stunned. He wanted conclusive proof because otherwise as he said to Frank, ‘these axioms may not be true’. Frank simply replied but if you accept them everything that follows is true. Bertrand was not convinced. Truth had to be pinned down and as he said elsewhere ‘the need for certainty had now become like a religion for me’. Throughout his entire adult life this pressing need and craving for the unvarnished truth, clearly expressed, was his main aim. (Russell (1967) The Autobiography of Bertand Russell (George Allen & Unwin); Russell(1956), Russell(1992)) Deleuze and Guattari (2003) What is Philosophy? trans. G. Burchill and H. Tomlinson (London: Verso), p.80. Eugen Fink (1995) Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p.46. Whitehead (1937) ‘Analysis of Meaning’, in Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library), pp. 122-131. Shaviro (2014), The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press), pp.3-4. Shaviro’s quotes are from Whitehead’s Process and Reality, pp.18, 35 and 104. Whitehead (1953) Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 415-416. Ibid, p.410. Whitehead (1938) Modes of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.138. Russell (1945) A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster), p.47. Russell (1956) Portraits from Memory, and other Essays (London: Readers Union), p.22. Russell (1956a) Outline of Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin), passim, and (1959) My Philosophical Development (London: Unwin paperbacks), pp. 40-41. Redding (2007) Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought Bergson's original training was in mathematics. He won the first prize in mathematics for the prestigious “Concours Général,” when he was only 18. This led to the publication of his solution to a problem by Pascal in Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques. Bergson’s teachers were aghast when he told them that he had chosen not to be a professional mathematician but a philosopher. He was regarded by them as a highly gifted mathematician. As Duffy notes, ‘Bernhard Riemann supports Bergson’s mathematical justification for his central notion of duration, and Deleuze carries this project farther, bringing more of Riemann's mathematics to bear in his interpretation of Bergson.’ (Simon B. Duffy (2013) Deleuze and the History of Mathematics: In Defense of the "New" (London and New York: Bloomsbury)  Russell (1992) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 1909-1913, vol.6. (London: Routledge), p.330. Russell (1912) ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, The Monist, vol.22, pp. 321-347. Wood (1957) Bertrand Russell: The Passionate Sceptic (London: Routledge), p.89. Vrahimis, (2011) ‘Russell’s critique of Bergson and the divide between ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy’, Balkan Journal of Philosophy, vol. 3 (1), pp.123-134. Russell (1994) Foundations of Logic, 1903-05 (London and New York: Routledge), p.xxxix. Russell (1951), Portraits from Memory (New York: Simon and Schuster), §  VIII, p.92. Russell (1956) The Outline of Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin), p.41. Fink (1995) Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p.46. Lowe (1985) Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work Volume I: 1861–1910 (Baltimore and London : Johns Hopkins University Press), p.43 and pp. 44-45. Robinson (2009) Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections (Houndmills, Hants and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p.4.