/lit/ - Literature

>>14713622
I want to punch you in the face.

>>14713631
punch your face*
I wanted to quickly fix my error because it helps make my sentiment clearer. Do you understand now?

i want this to be a better thread
for what it's worth, process and reality is available for free online in the archives: https://archive.org/details/AlfredNorthWhiteheadProcessAndReality/mode/2up

>>14713622
it really is an ideal book cover. i like the choice in color too: pale yellow. there's something about yellow that screams madness

>>14713622
I feel the same way about Hegels PoS

>>14713622
>>14713657
How can you talk about the cover without mentioning how absolutely comfy Whitehead looks in that photo?

>>14713696
he reminds me of pic related. smug as all fuck and cosy as all hell. i guess that's what happens when you pivot from writing one of the most important mathematical texts, to writing one of the most important philosophical texts

Bump

what are you having trouble with op?

it reminds you of the matrix code screens, thats why

>>14713715
what's important about it, dude things change, wow such insight

>>14714127
?

>>14714127
>t. hasn’t read P&R

>>14713622
How is 'reality' abstract? If you're using abstract that broadly--and some might say wrongly, since you can't conceptually abstract reality into a realm in which to consider it by itself since it's context par excellence--you might as well not even use it.

>>14713622
Whitehead was the most wholesome philosopher
>...He and his ideas seemed to permeate everything. By an odd quirk of imagination he became identified with one of the noble passages in music, those pages in the finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, that great passacaglia, where the them is sounded by horns in goldenly glowing sustained notes above sonorous argeppii in the darker registers of the string choir, violencelli and violas (the measures from 113 to 129). Apprently there was no other connection except that of grandeur.
>Then *he* disappeared. Oh yes, there remained his voice, clear, resonant, kindly, deliberate and perfectly articulated, British in tone and accent; there was his face, serene, luminous, often smiling, the complexion pink and white, the eyes brilliant blue, clear and candid as a child's yet with the depth of the sage, often laughing or twinkling with humour. And there was his figure, slender, frail, and bent with its lifetime of a scholar's toil. Always benign, there was not a grain of ill will anywhere in him; for all his formidable armament, never a wounding word.

>>14713622
You can save your time, he was retroactively refuted by Rene Guenon (pbuh)

The same trend is noticeable in the scientific realm: research here is for its own sake far more than for the partial and fragmentary results it achieves; here we see an ever more rapid succession of unfounded theories and hypotheses, no sooner set up than crumbling to give way to others that will have an even shorter life— a veritable chaos amid which one would search in vain for anything definitive, unless it be a monstrous accumulation of facts and details incapable of proving or signifying anything. We refer here of course to speculative science, insofar as this still exists; in applied science there are on the contrary undeniable results, and this is easily understandable since these results bear directly on the domain of matter, the only domain in which modern man can boast any real superiority. It is therefore to be expected that discoveries, or rather mechanical and industrial inventions, will go on developing and multiplying more and more rapidly until the end of the present age; and who knows if, given the dangers of destruction they bear in themselves, they will not be one of the chief agents in the ultimate catastrophe, if things reach a point at which this cannot be averted?

Be that as it may, one has the general impression that, in the present state of things, there is no longer any stability; but while there are some who sense the danger and try to react to it, most of our contemporaries are quite at ease amid this confusion, in which they see a kind of exteriorized image of their own mentality. Indeed there is an exact correspondence between a world where everything seems to be in a state of mere ‘becoming’, leaving no place for the changeless and the permanent, and the state of mind of men who find all reality in this ‘becoming’, thus implicitly denying true knowledge as well as the object of that knowledge, namely transcendent and universal principles. One can go even further and say that it amounts to the negation of all real knowledge whatsoever, even of a relative order, since, as we have shown above, the relative is unintelligible and impossible without the absolute, the contingent without the necessary, change without the unchanging, and multiplicity without unity; ‘relativism’ is self-contradictory, for, in seeking to reduce everything to change, one logically arrives at a denial of the very existence of change; this was fundamentally the meaning of the famous arguments of Zeno of Elea.

>>14714436
However, we have no wish to exaggerate and must add that theories such as these are not exclusively encountered in modern times; examples are to be found in Greek philosophy also, the ‘universal flux’ of Heraclitus being the best known; indeed, it was this that led the school of Elea to combat his conceptions, as well as those of the atomists, by a sort of reductio ad absurdum. Even in India, something comparable can be found, though, of course, considered from a different point of view from that of philosophy, for Buddhism also developed a similar character, one of its essential theses being the ‘dissolubility of all things ’. These theories, however, were then no more than exceptions, and such revolts against the traditional outlook, which may well have occurred from time to time throughout the whole of the Kali-Yuga, were, when all is said and done, without wider influence; what is new is the general acceptance of such conceptions that we see in the West today.

It should be noted too that under the influence of the very recent idea of ‘progress’, ‘philosophies of becoming’ have, in modern times, taken on a special form that theories of the same type never had among the ancients: this form, although it may have multiple varieties, can be covered in general by the name ‘evolutionism’. We need not repeat here what we have already said elsewhere on this subject; we will merely recall the point that any conception allowing for nothing other than ‘becoming’ is thereby necessarily a ‘naturalistic’ conception, and, as such, implies a formal denial of whatever lies beyond nature, in other words the realm of metaphysics— which is the realm of immutable and eternal principles. We may point out also, in speaking of these anti-metaphysical theories, that the Bergonian idea of pure duration’ corresponds exactly with that dispersion in instantaneity to which we alluded above; a pretended intuition modeled on the ceaseless flux of the things of the senses, far from being able to serve as an instrument for obtaining true knowledge, represents in reality the dissolution of all possible knowledge.

>>14714442
This leads us to repeat an essential point on which not the slightist ambiguity must be allowed to persist: intellectual intuition, by which alone metaphysical knowledge is to be obtained, has absolutely nothing in common with this other ‘intuition’ of which certain contemporary philosophers speak: the latter pertains to the sensible realm and in fact is sub-rational, whereas the former, which is pure intelligence, is on the contrary supra-rational. But the moderns, knowing nothing higher than reason in the order of intelligence, do not even conceive of the possibility of intellectual intuition, whereas the doctrines of the ancient world and of the Middle Ages, even when they were no more than philosophical in character, and therefore incapable of effectively calling this intuition into play, nevertheless explicitly recognized its existence and its supremacy over all the other faculties. This is why there was no rationalism before Descartes, for rationalism is a specifically modern phenomenon, one that is closely connected with individualism, being nothing other than the negation of any faculty of a supra- individual order. As long as Westerners persist in ignoring or denying intellectual intuition, they can have no tradition in the true sense of the word, nor can they reach any understanding with the authentic representatives of the Eastern civilizations, in which everything, so to speak, derives from this intuition, which is immutable and infallible in itself, and the only starting-point for any development in conformity with traditional norms

Whitehead's whole project retroactively refuted and ended in only 5 paragraphs

>>14714382
well, to get to what makes 'reality' an abstraction 'in itself' and not just by virtue of being a concept, we can start with the question: what does the term 'reality' refer to?

>>14714436
>>14714442
>>14714450
what do you make of whitehead's refutation of the eleatic doctrine in his chapter on the extensive continuum, and his invention of a primitive mereology i.e. a 'point-less geometry?

>>14713622
>don't even know
Nor does it matter as aesthetics interest (you) more; begin with Longinus.

>>14714854
>refutation of the eleatic doctrine in his chapter on the extensive continuum,
never happened, fake news

>>14715004
Who HASN'T Guenon retroactively refuted?

>>14713622
Retro refuted

>>14715106

>>14715147
yeah no wonder he never retroactively refuted her, look at the top of her head. she refuted herself

you had a real chance

>>14713622
The picture feels relaxed and not like hes trying to gayop my opinions on reality, put he also has a professional pose that bypasses my initial sense to reject elites.
The yellow is a semi passive and friendly colour that reminds me of a new born chick.
The lettering is bold in the middle and small outside the box making for a tight and tidy feel.

Today we use such strong colours to made books stand out, but this one attempts to stand out by being inviting to the eye rather than assaulting the senses.

I was attempting the same thing with my own book.

>>14714450
King

Bump

>>14715997
underrated

>>14713622
>For some reason this cover intrigues me. It's the aesthetics, the [abstract noun][conjunction][abstract noun] title, the color and the font, as if they were the official version of the book for all eternity.
That's the description of a meme my friend, you've fallen for it, just like Hegel's Phenomenology.

>>14717249
Hegel and Whitehead are based tho

>>14717317
Sure but I mean that image association is literally the definition of a meme, and knowing that image over any actual authentic content is also the literal definition for falling for a meme.

>>14717324
Ah ok

>>14713622

I like this cover too

>A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality
https://b-ok.cc/book/3583641/95db27

>>14717331
>>14713622
Here is a comfy one

>>14717330
So you understand?

>>14717334
That's very good

Here's another aesthetic Whiteheadian cover

>>14713715
>he reminds me of pic related. smug as all fuck and cosy as all hell. i guess that's what happens when you pivot from writing one of the most important mathematical texts, to writing one of the most important philosophical texts

>>14717389
If you take Ted seriously past the age of 13 you need to rethink your life.

>>14717460
>projecting
cool it with the inferiority complex, bro!

>>14717389
based

>>14714839
Ah the Heideggerean gambit. If he couldn't do it convincingly with being, I'd be impressed if you can do it with reality. But feel to try. Otherwise it's simply an intuitive, contingent context of everything that occurs--it can't be abstracted because it doesnt exist in itself.

>>14718015
the word itself is an abstraction op is not referring to the concept itself

>>14718024
I agree that every word is an abstraction, but if that's the point OP was consciously trying to make he would've included (abstract conjunction) in his description of the title. It's more likely OP doesnt know what abstract means and it just saying it because it 'sounds smart.'

>>14717389
hahahahaha fucking based

>>14718138
>>14718015
to start, i am not op.
to continue, it may be helpful if you clarified for yourself the difference between the abstract and the concrete.
i say this because being an 'intuitive, contingent context' is not concrete, but the opposite. it is indefinite, because contingent, and indeterminate, because the context is absent.
i also wonder what it even means for reality to be contingent. contingent on what?

>>14718190
>it is indefinite, because contingent, and indeterminate, because the context is absent
'indeterminate' and 'indefinite' need to be switched

good thread

>>14714436
>>14714442
>>14714450
Basé

i will bump for interest.

once more