/lit/ - Literature

The cliche objection to “relativism” has always been to point out that the statement “everything is relative” is itself an absolute one, so that any relativist necessarily contradicts him/herself. Of course this is a bogus objection: because the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement. Whitehead’s neutral style is precisely a way of pointing out how everything is relative, without turning this observation (or really, a potentially infinite series of observations) into a universal.
Whitehead’s philosophy is all about change, creativity, and the production of novelty. There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events. Or rather, events (which he usually calls “occasions”) are themselves the only entities. These “occasions” are each of them radically new — each of them is something that never existed before — and indeed, it is only because of this perpetual creativity and novelty that we are even able to think in terms of a “before” and an “after,” of time passing and irreversible — and yet each of them is radically intertwined with, affected by and affecting in its own turn, everything else. Everything is singular, but nothing is isolated.
Whitehead doesn’t ask (as Heidegger does) “why is there something rather than nothing?” (which in itself, is the ultimately nihilistic question: since it is demanding a reason for existence itself, when it is only within existence, and from an existing standpoint, that questions of value and purpose make any sense), but rather: “how is it that there is always something new, rather than just the same old same-old?”. He doesn’t “hearken” to (genuflect before) Language, as Heidegger and his deconstructionist heirs are always doing, but rather notes language’s inadequacies alongside its unavoidability. He doesn’t yearn for a return before, or a leap beyond, metaphysics, but (much more subversively) justdoesmetaphysics, inventing his own categories and working through his own problems, in order to make metaphysics speak what it has usually denied and rejected (the body, inconstancy and change, the relativeness of all perspectives and of all formulations). And he doesn’t “critique” the history of philosophy, but rather twists it in wonderfully ungainly ways, finding, for instance, arguments in Descartes that are themselves already the best response to Cartesian dualism, or anti-idealist moves in Plato.
Leibniz is the classical philosopher with whom Whitehead is most commonly compared. (Deleuze’s only extended discussion of Whitehead, for instance, takes place in a chapter ofThe Fold, his book on Leibniz); but there are ways in which Whitehead is actually more similar to Spinoza.

In short:
>gib me babytalk bilozoby
>need moar milgee

Thoughts on whitehead through the lense of Heraclitus?

>>12838031
No idea what you are talking about but this picture makes me sad. Imagine being the mother. Loosing your husband and your son. Forcing yourself to smile. Letting yourself accept that all of this is really happening and that the only thing you can really do is watch.

>>12838031

>>12838031
>and people decry the decay of western civilization
I think it's about time we get replaced.

>>12838564
I’m sure whoever follows us will be immune to decay as well lmao

>>12838564
>>12838578
More likely they were be heavily Westernised as everyone already is, Americanised rather.

>>12837957
Strange seeing a blog post I wrote 15 years ago here. I'm glad you appreciate it, though.

bump

>>12837957
>>12837965
So many words to say mom, dad, i'm gay.

>>12838920
Post blog link

Heidegger does get cumbersome after some time of reading the same shit in all his books.But there is something in Heidegger which a lot of people miss, not the deconstructionist part which is severely misunderstood. But the hermeneutic strand which Gadamer later picked up. Heideggerian hermeneutics in many of his lectures are a creative process of deriving alethia of the text through interpretation, that requires tremendous imagination and effort on the part of the reader not get lost. That and the phenomenological effort for reflection on what we are doing , while being in the moment. This is also a process.

In other words cease the polemics and take every writer honestly and in good faith.

>>12839330
>In other words cease the polemics and take every writer honestly and in good faith.
but then how will I stoke my superiority complex, you idiot, you absolute moron?

>>12838548

>>12837957
why write posts that only philosophy grad students can respond to

>>12839756
everyone on /lit/ has their phd in philosophy desu

>>12838920
wouldnt be surprised if shaviro shitposted on here desu

Are you the guy from the blog, or are you just pasting it here? Either way, whoever wrote this doesn't say anything philosophical. When he almost does, in praise of Whitehead's outlook as contradicting Heidegger's, he verges on agreement with Heidegger anyway.

I agree about Heidegger's grim, very typically Germanic, proto-Nazi "side" or style, but this is a cliche by now. The description of the second side of Heidegger almost says something interesting, about his fatalistic historicism, but again this has been done a lot (by Rosen's Nihilism for example), but it also lumps in a bunch of things that contravene its own point. If you're trying to show the fatalism and nihilism of Heidegger's radically immanent, merely self-relating, anti-Hegelian historicism, you shouldn't include all the positive-sounding and generally well-regarded elements of Heidegger's thought like "waiting and hearkening" or "walking on forest paths." Those sound positive or at least interesting, even to someone who doesn't know Heidegger, even just speaking rhetorically. Incidentally things like that are the reason that Heidegger awakened so much "wonder" in his students and disciples in the 1920s/1930s that he was arguably a modern prophet. Meanwhile everybody walked out of the first reading of Process and Reality because nobody knew what the fuck Whitehead was talking about in his didactic monotone.

I didn't like the "in a ____ sense" thing. I do that too because it's tempting to show off your exciting discovery that 10 different crit-theory and philosophy ideas "talk to each other." But there are subtler ways to do it, and sometimes restraint is just better. It reads like a 1990s American media studies professor who wears sneakers and a t-shirt with his suit-jacket.

All in all I just don't think it says much.

Bump