I believe it was Bertrand Russell who asked: if there is a "problem of evil" why is there not a "problem of good"? His answer was that there is a problem of evil only for those whose premises make evil seem anomalous. Following up that thought: If I believed that the world is the creation of the evil Cthulhu, designed to make us miserable and mad, why are there good and joyful moments? Why does Cthulhu let Bach's music slip through into ontology? Why are we allowed to take and feel such pride in our child's growth and accomplishments, if we are supposed to be miserable? My guess is that different Cthulhu-ists have different opinions. Schopenhauer's Will might be thought to raise the same question. But he might say that the Will preserves its own existence by preserving our generational cycles, so allowing the pride of parenthood is a necessary price the Will must pay to continue to have humans whom it can torture. As to music? it may have played a ro...
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I today finish my laborious piece-by-piece road through PROCESS AND REALITY with you, dear reader, by my side. Near the end of PROCESS AND REALITY, our author gets systematic about presenting his conception of God. The underlying idea here is of the physical cosmos and God as partners, not Master and Slave, not Creator and Created, but partners on the dance floor of existence together. That is my way of putting it. Not his, This is his way of putting it. It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God is many. It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as it is to say that in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently. It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the world, ...
... what does Whitehead have to say about the emergence of consciousness and its place in a largely hostile cosmos? Still working my way through his masterpiece, Process and Reality. I'm looking especially at Part III (The Theory of Prehensions), Chapter III, "The Transmission of Feelings,' Section IV, where our man seems to be working this through in real time himself. "It is evident," he says, "that adversion and aversion ... only have importance in the case of high-grade organisms. They constitute the first step toward intellectual mentality, though in themselves they do not amount to consciousness." He uses the phrase "adversion and aversion" and sometimes "adversion or aversion" repeatedly, with "adversion" apparently meaning attraction and "aversion" meaning repulsion. The two words suggest reaction to lures, positive or negative. These "high-grade organisms" approach food and they avoid preda...
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. ...
This is my fifth recent post on the meaning of Whitehead's masterpiece, PROCESS AND REALITY. On the big issue of Time versus Timelessness, Whitehead generally seems more on the side of Heraclitus than on that of Zeno. He believes that time, change, motion are all real. Indeed, at points in this book he seems to be struggling to invent a new vocabulary to allow precise statements about the realities of THOSE realities. But every once in a while he can pull us up short with a mention of "eternal objects." What the heck are THEY? An eternal object is an abstraction. Whitehead uses "eternal" in this sense to mean precisely outside of time. And he uses "object" to denote something objective, neither a social construction nor a subjective whim. So Whitehead, it is fair to say, is not a nominalist about abstractions. Eternal objects are the sorts of things that can recur. That is, Christopher Faille as a living breathing person does not recur. The pers...
So, what's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the tee shirt we live? I have written of late in this blog about Alfred North Whitehead's book, Process and Reality. But I have written chiefly of what he says there about other philosophers. Plato, Locke, Hume....Now I hope to get to the core of Whitehead's original thought. What does he say about ... process and reality? What is his cosmology? I have to bring one more historic figure, Leibniz, into the mix even to say this next bit, though. Because you can think of Whitehead's core supposition as a monadology. Any one of us is a society of society of societies ... all the way down. The ultimate bottom level, the individual nuggets (or monads, if you will) at the bottom of this hierarchy of societies? Whitehead seems to think there is a bottom, and he does give it a name: occasions. A lot of unconscious and brief occasions, conceived of as independent of content, might constitute the bottom building block. Sort of...
It is probably the single best known sentence Alfred North Whitehead ever wrote. It appears in the third paragraph of chapter 1 of Part II of Process and Reality. "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." The next three sentences, though, give that one some important context. "I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systemization, have made his writings an inexhausible mine of suggestions." It becomes clear that Whitehead is not interested in the overly thoroughly mined Republic and, say, the myth of the cave. He is much more interested in the esoteric Timeaus as a source for...
Whitehead called his own view of the cosmos "the philosophy of organism." Over the nearly-a-century since he wrote the book on it, though, the name has become cemented as "process philosophy". That has also given rise to such related terms as "process theology." Nobody seems to say "philosophy of organism." In the early going of his book, PROCESS AND REALITY, Whitehead quotes a Latin phrase he attributes to Augustine. He does not assist with an English translation. Securus judicat orbis terrarium. I thought for a second it meant that Augustine had a turtle residing securely in his terrarium and that the turtle was getting judgmental. So I thought, "why would one name a pet turtle Orbis?" Hence the image for this blog post. But no, the Latin phrase means: " the whole world judges rightly." Don't put yourself in a position of saying "the whole rest of the world, but for me and my small cult, is wrong." Judgm...
I have recently purchased a copy of Alfred North Whitehead's notorious volume, PROCESS AND REALITY. I have long promised myself I would read this book some day. It has long played a part in my own view of the history of philosophy through the 20th century, and I have had sporadic pangs of guilt over not having tackled it myself. I gather from the secondary literature that Whitehead tried to bring a philosophy akin to Henri Bergson's into the world of Anglophonic analytical philosophy. Whitehead of course knew the latter tradition from the inside. The title page of a classic work therein, the PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, three volumes on the logical foundations of mathematics, bears his name, along with Bertrand Russell's. The third and final volume of PRINCIPIA appeared in 1913. PROCESS came out in 1929. So there were sixteen years between them -- a lot of history (and one world war) and a lot of time for reflection. So ... you might consider Whitehea...
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.' I like that. But simply allowing my train of association to chug along its own tracks, this thought about science brings me to the issue of cosmogony, and the issue of the apparent demise of the old steady state theory of the cosmos. The great motivating factor of the theory was the immensity of infinity, the infinite expanse that opened in the past and presumably too in the future. The contrary Big Bang theory, with its definite moment of beginning and its threat of a heat death of the whole-she-bang, cuts one off from that lovely prospect. Also, relatedly, the Big Bang is sometimes defended as a way in which something might have come out of nothing, and THAT is a strongly counte...