Whitehead on flow and fluency

I mentioned Whitehead's apparent sympathy with Heraclitus in my last post about him. My reading had not yet at that point discovered Process and Reality. Part II, Chapter Ten, which takes the form of an extended meditation on the sentiment "all things flow." In Heraclitus' Greek, panta rhei.

The sympathy is here made explicit. Indeed, a full understanding of that sentiment is said to be one of the main goals of philosophizing at all.

Some of the thinkers of the early modern world tried to ban flow, or fluency, from their picture of the world.

But Whitehead adds, "Newton, that Napoleon of of the world of thought, brusquely ordered fluency back into the world, regimented into his 'absolute, mathematical time, flowing equably without regard to anything external.' He also gave it a mathematical uniform in the shape of his Theory of Fluxions."

What a marvelous packing of two concise sentences! Almost as magnificent as Heraclitus' two words.

"Newton, a Napoleon of the world of thought," from a Brit writing less than six score years after Napoleons final defeat by the Brits, this phrase is itself rich. It involves an acknowledgement of genius, but one that is at least a touch grudging. The subsequent language, of a brusque order, regimentation, the dispensing of uniforms, enhances the idea of Newton as a conqueror, in a world in which not few who are conquered are grateful.

Let us fill out the metaphor a bit. Think of the medieval scholastic ideas of time as the Bourbon regime. Think, then, of Descartes -- and even more so of Spinoza -- as Danton, Robespierre and the other revolutionaries, proud of their break with the past and willing to do without the monarch of flux altogether. Newton is then the Napoleon indeed. The monarchy of time returns, uniformed with the new mathematics of what we call calculus and what Newton called fluxions.

Yet Napoleon came to a bad end, confined to a remote volcanic island with no scope for his military genius or political ambition. Whitehead was well aware of early 20th century physics. He knew that Einstein had proved to be the Duke of Wellington of the world of thought.

Indeed, Whitehead may have fancied himself the Talleyrand, negotiating the post-Newtonian world with the other philosophers at the Congress of Vienna of the world of thought.

As to the fluidity of the cosmos, Whitehead's view is that it is of two sorts: the pursuit by many actual occasions/societies (mindfully or otherwise) of their own ideals on the one hand, and the perpetual perishing of all, regardless of ideas, on the other hand. He calls these the fluidity of creativity and of transition, respectively. He finds references to this distinction in the works of Locke, but regrets that Locke did not put "his scattered ideas" on the subject of time together in a systemic way.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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