/lit/ - Literature

Ok how hard is this and what should I read before it?

Someone give me a quick rundown on this. I heard it was coocoo panpsychism stuff and I'm interested.

This book has literally made me a schizo

What should I read before this?

pic related. I feel that if you cut away the panentheism and other weird doctrines process metaphysics is actually pretty compatible with more classical Neoplatonism.

What are some not well known and underrated philosophical texts?

Anyone have any reccomendations for secondary sources on whiteheads process philosophy? Are there any well regarded introductions/guides? I feel I've done enough preparation to read it but I also feel the complexity of the text warrants additional support.

>>18378508
Should have talked about real metaphysics

Whitehead on superjective FREEDOM:
"In the case of those actualities whose immediate experience is most completely open to us, namely, human beings, the final decision of the immediate subject-superject, constituting the ultimate modification of subjective aim, is the foundation of our experience of responsibility, of approbation or of disapprobation, of self-approval or of self-reproach, of freedom, of emphasis. This element in experience is too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction. It governs the whole tone of human life. It can be illustrated by striking instances from fact or from fiction. But these instances are only conspicuous illustrations of human experience during each hour and each minute. The ultimate freedom of things, lying beyond all determinations, was whispered by Galileo -- E pur si muove -- freedom for the inquisitors to think wrongly, for Galileo to think rightly, and for the world to move in despite of Galileo and inquisitors. The doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that, however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence -- its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its purposes, its phases of subjective aim -- beyond the determination of these components there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe. This final reaction completes the self-creative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations of efficient cause. Each occasion exhibits its measure of creative emphasis in proportion to its measure of subjective intensity. The absolute standard of such intensity is that of the primordial nature of God, which is neither great nor small because it arises out of no actual world. It has within it no components which are standards of comparison. But in the temporal world for occasions of relatively slight experient intensity, their decisions of creative emphasis are individually negligible compared to the determined components which they receive and transmit. But the final accumulation of all such decisions -- the decision of God's nature and the decisions of all occasions -- constitutes that special element in the flux of forms in history, which is 'given' and incapable of rationalization beyond the fact that within it every component which is determinable is internally determined.” (*Process and Reality*, p. 46-47)

>>17584929
There is no problem of consciousness.

>>17545308
Yo

What is the best metaphysics?

I’ve started reading the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead, like his almost exact contemporaries Henri Bergson, and John Dewey, was famous and highly esteemed during his lifetime, in the first half of the twentieth century, but was almost entirely forgotten during the second half.

Of late, there has been something of a Bergson revival, thanks to Gilles Deleuze‘s interest in him; as well as a Dewey revival, thanks to the efforts of Richard Rorty. But Whitehead still remains obscure; as far as I can tell, in the English-speaking world he is mostly read by liberal theologians. Perhaps Whitehead is also due for a revival; Deleuze was interested in him, but wrote very little about him (just one chapter, as a sort of sidenote, in his book on Leibniz). A book taking Whitehead seriously, and looking at him in depth released: Penser avec Whitehead by Isabelle Stengers, a Belgian philosopher of science who was close to Deleuze. I’ve just started reading it, together with several of Whitehead’s own books: I just finished Adventures of Ideas, and plan to go one two one or two other shorter works of Whitehead’s, and then tackle his magnum opus, Process and Reality.
From what I’ve read thus far, I can say that Whitehead is indeed an interesting thinker. Like Dewey and especially Bergson, he is interested in process and temporality, in change and in events and processes, rather than in substances, essences, and absolutes. He’s as anti-essentialist as Wittgenstein or Heidegger or any other major philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, but with his own particular twists.

Whitehead criticizes classical empiricism, and modern positivism, for being reductionist in their isolation of immediate sensory data from all other forms of mental and physical experience; he insists on a wider definition of “experience” that includes past and future, memory and anticipation, as well as a full range of bodily reactions in addition to those of the immediate sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc). But he remains an empiricist under this wider definition of empirical actuality, rather than going the routes either of Anglo-American linguistic analysis or of Continental dialectics.

cont

Just bought this. What a I in for?

What is the best metaphysics of all time?

In dealing with “antitheses,” or “apparent self-contradictions,” Whitehead’s God neither selects among the alternative possibilities in the manner of Leibniz’s divinity, nor “sublates” the oppositions into a higher, self-reflexive and self-differentiating unity in the manner of Hegel’s Absolute. Rather, Whitehead’s God operates “a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast” Where Leibniz’s God selects “the best of all possible worlds” by excluding incompossibilities, Whitehead’s God affirms, without preference or restriction, the “discordant multiplicity of actual things”. Or, as Deleuze puts it: for Whitehead, in contrast to Leibniz, “bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discord belong to the same motley world. . . Even God desists from being a Being who compare worlds and chooses the richest compossible. He becomes Process, a process that at once affirms incompossibles and passes through them” . What difference does this approach make to Whitehead’s understanding of the world? How does his “philosophy of organism” compare to more conventional varieties of empiricism and naturalism? The most important difference, I think, is this. In rejecting the bifurcation of nature, and in requiring a sufficient reason for all phenomena, Whitehead necessarily challenges the founding assumption of modern scientific reason: that of a “split subject” (Lacan), or a figure of Man as “empirico-transcendental doublet” (Foucault). For Whitehead, the experimenter cannot be separated from the experiment, because they are both present in the world in the same manner. I cannot observe other entities any differently from how I observe myself. There can be no formal, permanent distinction between the observing self (the self as transcendental subject, or subject of enunciation) and the self being observed (the self as object in the world, or subject of the statement). Therefore there can be neither phenomenology nor positivism, and neither cognitivism nor behaviorism. Whitehead underscores this point by using the same vocabulary to describe the biological world, and even the inorganic world, as he does the human world. He suggests that categories like will, desire, and creation are valid, not just for us, but for non-human (and even non-organic) entities as well. He writes without embarrassment of the “feelings” and “satisfactions” of a plant, an inorganic object like Cleopatra’s Needle, or even
an electron. Every event or entity has what he calls both “mental” and “physical” poles, and both a “private” and a “public” dimension. In the vast interconnections of the universe, everything both perceives and is perceived.

What do I need to read before this?

Many of the great thinkers of Western modernity define their goal as a therapeutic one. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein all present themselves as diagnosticians and clinicians. They examine symptoms, discern the conditions of our metaphysical malaise, and propose remedies to free us from our enslavement to “passive emotions” (Spinoza), to ressentiment (Nietzsche), to traumatic recollections (Freud), or to the “bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein). Therapy in this sense is the modern, secularized and demystified, form of ethics. One of the striking things about Whitehead is that he does not make any such therapeutic or ethical claims. He does not say that his metaphysics will cure me, or that it will make me a better person. At best, philosophy and art may awaken me from my torpor, and allow me to subsume the painful experience of a “clash in affective tones” within a wider sense of purpose. Such broadening “increases the dimensions of the experient subject, adds to its ambit.”. But this is still a rather modest and limited result. At best, philosophy and poetry “seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization". Granted, Whitehead displays none of Nietzsche’s or Freud’s justified suspicion regarding the value of “good sense,” or of what we call “civilization.” But even from the perspective of Whitehead’s entirely laudatory use of these terms, he is still only making a deliberately muted and minor claim. We are far from any “exaggerated” promises of a Great Health, of self-transcendence, or of cathartic transformation.

Even in his hyperbolic evocation of “God and the World,” in the fifth and final Part of Process and Reality, Whitehead does not offer us any prospect to match the “intellectual love of God” exalted by Spinoza in the fifth and final part of the Ethics. Whitehead’s God, in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s, does not know the world sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, Whitehead’s God is “the poet of the world.” This means that he knows the world, not in terms of its first causes, but only through its effects, and only in retrospect. God “saves” the world precisely to the extent, but only to the extent, that he aestheticizes and memorializes it. He remembers the world in each and every detail, incorporating all these memories into an overarching “conceptual harmonization”. But if God remembers every experience of every last entity, he does not produce and provide these experiences and memories themselves. That is something that is left for us to do, contingently and unpredictably. Where Spinoza’s book ends with the “spiritual contentment” that arises from the comprehension of “eternal necessity,” Whitehead’s book rather ends by justifying, and throwing us back upon, our “insistent craving” for novelty and adventure. That is what it means to write an aesthetics, rather than an ethics.

Are metaphysics just a different kind of religion?

How is process philosophy not fundamentally opposed to platonism?

Many of the great thinkers of Western modernity define their goal as a therapeutic one. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein all present themselves as diagnosticians and clinicians. They examine symptoms, discern the conditions of our metaphysical malaise, and propose remedies to free us from our enslavement to “passive emotions” (Spinoza), to ressentiment (Nietzsche), to traumatic recollections (Freud), or to the “bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein). Therapy in this sense is the modern, secularized and demystified, form of ethics. One of the striking things about Whitehead is that he does not make any such therapeutic or ethical claims. He does not say that his metaphysics will cure me, or that it will make me a better person. At best, philosophy and art may awaken me from my torpor, and allow me to subsume the painful experience of a “clash in affective tones” within a wider sense of purpose. Such broadening “increases the dimensions of the experient subject, adds to its ambit.”. But this is still a rather modest and limited result. At best, philosophy and poetry “seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization". Granted, Whitehead displays none of Nietzsche’s or Freud’s justified suspicion regarding the value of “good sense,” or of what we call “civilization.” But even from the perspective of Whitehead’s entirely laudatory use of these terms, he is still only making a deliberately muted and minor claim. We are far from any “exaggerated” promises of a Great Health, of self-transcendence, or of cathartic transformation.

Even in his hyperbolic evocation of “God and the World,” in the fifth and final Part of Process and Reality, Whitehead does not offer us any prospect to match the “intellectual love of God” exalted by Spinoza in the fifth and final part of the Ethics. Whitehead’s God, in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s, does not know the world sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, Whitehead’s God is “the poet of the world.” This means that he knows the world, not in terms of its first causes, but only through its effects, and only in retrospect. God “saves” the world precisely to the extent, but only to the extent, that he aestheticizes and memorializes it. He remembers the world in each and every detail, incorporating all these memories into an overarching “conceptual harmonization”. But if God remembers every experience of every last entity, he does not produce and provide these experiences and memories themselves. That is something that is left for us to do, contingently and unpredictably. Where Spinoza’s book ends with the “spiritual contentment” that arises from the comprehension of “eternal necessity,” Whitehead’s book rather ends by justifying, and throwing us back upon, our “insistent craving” for novelty and adventure. That is what it means to write an aesthetics, rather than an ethics.

ok this fucking slaps

Many of the great thinkers of Western modernity define their goal as a therapeutic one. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein all present themselves as diagnosticians and clinicians. They examine symptoms, discern the conditions of our metaphysical malaise, and propose remedies to free us from our enslavement to “passive emotions” (Spinoza), to ressentiment (Nietzsche), to traumatic recollections (Freud), or to the “bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein). Therapy in this sense is the modern, secularized and demystified, form of ethics. One of the striking things about Whitehead is that he does not make any such therapeutic or ethical claims. He does not say that his metaphysics will cure me, or that it will make me a better person. At best, philosophy and art may awaken me from my torpor, and allow me to subsume the painful experience of a “clash in affective tones” within a wider sense of purpose. Such broadening “increases the dimensions of the experient subject, adds to its ambit.”. But this is still a rather modest and limited result. At best, philosophy and poetry “seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization". Granted, Whitehead displays none of Nietzsche’s or Freud’s justified suspicion regarding the value of “good sense,” or of what we call “civilization.” But even from the perspective of Whitehead’s entirely laudatory use of these terms, he is still only making a deliberately muted and minor claim. We are far from any “exaggerated” promises of a Great Health, of self-transcendence, or of cathartic transformation.

Even in his hyperbolic evocation of “God and the World,” in the fifth and final Part of Process and Reality, Whitehead does not offer us any prospect to match the “intellectual love of God” exalted by Spinoza in the fifth and final part of the Ethics. Whitehead’s God, in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s, does not know the world sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, Whitehead’s God is “the poet of the world.” This means that he knows the world, not in terms of its first causes, but only through its effects, and only in retrospect. God “saves” the world precisely to the extent, but only to the extent, that he aestheticizes and memorializes it. He remembers the world in each and every detail, incorporating all these memories into an overarching “conceptual harmonization”. But if God remembers every experience of every last entity, he does not produce and provide these experiences and memories themselves. That is something that is left for us to do, contingently and unpredictably. Where Spinoza’s book ends with the “spiritual contentment” that arises from the comprehension of “eternal necessity,” Whitehead’s book rather ends by justifying, and throwing us back upon, our “insistent craving” for novelty and adventure. That is what it means to write an aesthetics, rather than an ethics.

Many of the great thinkers of Western modernity define their goal as a therapeutic one. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein all present themselves as diagnosticians and clinicians. They examine symptoms, discern the conditions of our metaphysical malaise, and propose remedies to free us from our enslavement to “passive emotions” (Spinoza), to ressentiment (Nietzsche), to traumatic recollections (Freud), or to the “bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein). Therapy in this sense is the modern, secularized and demystified, form of ethics. One of the striking things about Whitehead is that he does not make any such therapeutic or ethical claims. He does not say that his metaphysics will cure me, or that it will make me a better person. At best, philosophy and art may awaken me from my torpor, and allow me to subsume the painful experience of a “clash in affective tones” within a wider sense of purpose. Such broadening “increases the dimensions of the experient subject, adds to its ambit.”. But this is still a rather modest and limited result. At best, philosophy and poetry “seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization". Granted, Whitehead displays none of Nietzsche’s or Freud’s justified suspicion regarding the value of “good sense,” or of what we call “civilization.” But even from the perspective of Whitehead’s entirely laudatory use of these terms, he is still only making a deliberately muted and minor claim. We are far from any “exaggerated” promises of a Great Health, of self-transcendence, or of cathartic transformation.

Even in his hyperbolic evocation of “God and the World,” in the fifth and final Part of Process and Reality, Whitehead does not offer us any prospect to match the “intellectual love of God” exalted by Spinoza in the fifth and final part of the Ethics. Whitehead’s God, in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s, does not know the world sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, Whitehead’s God is “the poet of the world.” This means that he knows the world, not in terms of its first causes, but only through its effects, and only in retrospect. God “saves” the world precisely to the extent, but only to the extent, that he aestheticizes and memorializes it. He remembers the world in each and every detail, incorporating all these memories into an overarching “conceptual harmonization”. But if God remembers every experience of every last entity, he does not produce and provide these experiences and memories themselves. That is something that is left for us to do, contingently and unpredictably. Where Spinoza’s book ends with the “spiritual contentment” that arises from the comprehension of “eternal necessity,” Whitehead’s book rather ends by justifying, and throwing us back upon, our “insistent craving” for novelty and adventure. That is what it means to write an aesthetics, rather than an ethics.