/lit/ - Literature

"Life is robbery, but the robber needs justification."
If you actually want to learn about ecology, you would all do well to read Whitehesd and Deleuze instead of poisioning your mind with memes.

What the fuck is Whitehead's God? Is it even a God? Plz explain.

>The greatest philosopher of all time is an Anglo
It's pretty ironic

Is he right?
>"There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore-the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. Its final integration yields mere transient non-entity. Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition. The character of existent reality is composed of organisms enduring through the flux of things.organisms have achieved a - self-identity dominating their whole physical life."

"Progress is founded upon the experience of discordant feelings. The social value of liberty lies in its production of discords. There are perfections beyond perfections. All realization is finite, and there is no perfection which is the infinitude of all perfections. Perfections of diverse types are among themselves discordant. Thus the contribution to Beauty which can be supplied by Discord -- in itself destructive and evil -- is the positive feeling a quick shift aim from the tameness of outworn perfection to some other ideal with its freshness still upon it. Thus the value of Discord is a tribute to the merits of imperfection."
What did he mean by this?

>Whitehead's God bestows the initial subjective aim for an actual entity as a lure for its concresence and the experiential intensity it evokes.
>It is God’s purpose to enjoy the experiential intensities Its provokes.
>God is not omnipotent as actual entities and their societies have their own teleology.
>God is not omniscient because the future does not yet exist because novelty emerges from actualities via their subjective aim and the infinity of eternal objects.
>God is not omnibenevolent because morality is subordinate to aesthetic appreciation which is God’sdesire.
>(Thus ‘God’ is perhaps a misnomer.)
>Above Actual Entities and God, the third main tenetof Whitehead’s cosmology isCreativity.
>God conditions creativity but it is beyond Its control.

So is God a Nietzschfag?

>No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Is he right?

Is he right?

"Also we must recollect the basis of our procedure. I hold that philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double one, first of harmonising them by assigning to
them their right relative status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe, and thereby promoting the formation of more complete schemes of thought. It is in respect to this comparison that the testimony of great poets is of such importance. Their survival is evidence that
they express deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact. Philosophy is not one among the sciences with its own little scheme of abstractions which it works away at perfecting and improving. It is the survey of sciences, with the special objects of their harmony,
and of their completion. It brings to this task, not only the evidence of the separate sciences, but also its own appeal to concrete experience. It confronts the sciences with concrete fact."

"Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things.It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and — so far as may be — efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests."

That is wrong. Also philosophy is needed more than ever today.

"Also we must recollect the basis of our procedure. I hold that philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double one, first of harmonising them by assigning to
them their right relative status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe, and thereby promoting the formation of more complete schemes of thought. It is in respect to this comparison that the testimony of great poets is of such importance. Their survival is evidence that
they express deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact. Philosophy is not one among the sciences with its own little scheme of abstractions which it works away at perfecting and improving. It is the survey of sciences, with the special objects of their harmony,
and of their completion. It brings to this task, not only the evidence of the separate sciences, but also its own appeal to concrete experience. It confronts the sciences with concrete fact."

"Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things.It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and — so far as may be — efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests."

Philosophy is the critique of abstractions

him

Whitehead was based
> Logical Positivism is a topic rarely distant from my thought. Every mathematician and symbolic logician is, in his habit of thought, a logical positivist. Yet to some of the expositions I find myself in violent opposition — especially to the very habit of dismissing questions as unmeaning i.e. unable to be expressed in existing symbolism. Wittgenstein annoys me intensely. He is the complete example of the sayings: I am Master of the College What I know not, is not knowledge.
> Logical Positivism in this mood — its only mood — will produce a timid, shut in, unenterprising state of mind, engaged in the elaboration of details. I always test these general rules by trying to imagine the sterilizing effect of such a state of mind, if prevalent at any time in the last ten thousand years.
> The fact is that thought in the previous two centuries has been engaged in disengaging itself from the shackles of dogmatic divinity. Thus it unconsciously seeks new fetters, viz anything offensive to the Pope of Rome. But I see no reason to believe that the stretch of Bertrand Russell’s mind or of Wittgenstein’s mind, or of Carnap’s mind, has attained the limits of insight or expression possible in the evolution of intelligent beings. They are bright boys, good representatives of a stage of rationalization, but nothing more.

>If we adopt panpsychism isnt it the case that there's life in stones, and trees and dirt
"Life is robbery, but the robber needs justification."

>destroys the subject/object dichotomy
what a madlad

Childhood: Idealism
Adulthood: Materialism
Sagehood: Processism

The wordperceiveis, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the wordapprehension, even with the adjectivecognitionomitted. I will use the wordprehensionforuncognitive apprehension:by this I meanapprehensionwhich may or may not be cognitive.

. . . For Berkeley'smind, I substitute a process of prehensive unification. . . . In the first place, note that the idea of simple location has gone. The things which are grasped into a realised unity, here and now, are not the castle, the cloud, and the planet simply in themselves; but are the castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint , in space and time, of the prehensive unification. In other words, it is the castle over there from the standpoint of the unification here. It is, therefore, the castle, the cloud, and the planet which are grasped in unity here. You will remember that the idea of perspectives is quite familiar in philosophy. It was introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads mirroring perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am toning down his monads into the unified events [in later Whitehead writings,actual entitiesoroccasions of experience]in space and time. . . . In the analogy with Spinoza, his one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realisation . . . Thus, concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into underlying activity of prehension, and into realised prehensive events.

. . . The difficulties of philosophy in respect to space and time are founded on the error of considering them as primarily the loci of simple locations. Perception is simply the cognition of prehensive unification, or more shortly, perception is cognition of prehension. The actual world is a manifold of prehension; and a ‘prehension' is a ‘prehensive occasion'; and a prehensive occasion is the most concrete finite entity, conceived as what it is in itself and for itself, and not as from its aspect in the essence of another such occasion. . . . For space and time are simply abstractions from the totality of prehensive unifications as mutually patterned in each other.

[In answer to Berkeley's claim that the reality of nature is] the reality of ideas in mind [Whitehead maintains that nature is] a complex of prehensive unifications. Space and time exhibit the general scheme of interlocked relations of these prehensions. You cannot tear any one of them out of its context. Yet each of them within its context has all the reality that attaches to the whole complex. Conversely, the totality has the same reality as each prehension; for each prehension unifies unifies the modalities to be ascribed, from its standpoint, to every part of the whole. A prehension is a process of unifying.

. . . The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature.

Stop bifurcating nature

Stop bifurcating nature

Whitehead should be required reading in all schools and universities. He is the greatest teacher in guiding his pupils in embarking on their adventures of ideas. There is no greater thinker than Whitehead that will induce such wonder as he does in his readers and have them become more open to new ideas.

"The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a 'perpetual perishing.' Objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling. There is a unison of becoming among things in the present. Why should there not be novelty without loss of this direct unison of immediacy among things? In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction. But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story. The nature of evil is that the character of things are mutually obstructive. Thus the depths of life require a process of selection. But the selection is elimination as the first step towards another temporal order seeking to minimize obstructive modes. Selection is at once the measure of evil and the process of its evasion. It means the discarding the element of obstructiveness in fact. No element in fact is ineffectual: Thus the struggle with evil is a process of building up a mode of utilization by the provision of intermediate elements introducing a complex structure of harmony. The triviality in some initial reconstruction of order expresses the fact that actualities are being produced, which, trivial in their own proper character of immediate 'ends,' are proper 'means' for the emergence of a world at once lucid, and intrinsically of immediate worth.
"The evil of the world is that those elements which are translucent so far as transmission is concerned, in themselves are of slight weight; and that those elements with individual weight, by their discord, impose upon vivid immediacy the obligation that it fades into night. 'He giveth his beloved - sleep.'"

The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of Beauty.

Stop bifurcating nature

Stop bifurcating nature

You are bifurcating nature bud. It is because of thought like this that we are heading towards ecological collapse and that people feel more alienated and miserable today.
https://youtu.be/BHztIS9kdVY