/lit/ - Literature

Many of the great thinkers of Western modernity define their goal as a therapeutic one. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein all present themselves as diagnosticians and clinicians. They examine symptoms, discern the conditions of our metaphysical malaise, and propose remedies to free us from our enslavement to “passive emotions” (Spinoza), to ressentiment (Nietzsche), to traumatic recollections (Freud), or to the “bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein). Therapy in this sense is the modern, secularized and demystified, form of ethics. One of the striking things about Whitehead is that he does not make any such therapeutic or ethical claims. He does not say that his metaphysics will cure me, or that it will make me a better person. At best, philosophy and art may awaken me from my torpor, and allow me to subsume the painful experience of a “clash in affective tones” within a wider sense of purpose. Such broadening “increases the dimensions of the experient subject, adds to its ambit.”. But this is still a rather modest and limited result. At best, philosophy and poetry “seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization". Granted, Whitehead displays none of Nietzsche’s or Freud’s justified suspicion regarding the value of “good sense,” or of what we call “civilization.” But even from the perspective of Whitehead’s entirely laudatory use of these terms, he is still only making a deliberately muted and minor claim. We are far from any “exaggerated” promises of a Great Health, of self-transcendence, or of cathartic transformation.

Even in his hyperbolic evocation of “God and the World,” in the fifth and final Part of Process and Reality, Whitehead does not offer us any prospect to match the “intellectual love of God” exalted by Spinoza in the fifth and final part of the Ethics. Whitehead’s God, in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s, does not know the world sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, Whitehead’s God is “the poet of the world.” This means that he knows the world, not in terms of its first causes, but only through its effects, and only in retrospect. God “saves” the world precisely to the extent, but only to the extent, that he aestheticizes and memorializes it. He remembers the world in each and every detail, incorporating all these memories into an overarching “conceptual harmonization”. But if God remembers every experience of every last entity, he does not produce and provide these experiences and memories themselves. That is something that is left for us to do, contingently and unpredictably. Where Spinoza’s book ends with the “spiritual contentment” that arises from the comprehension of “eternal necessity,” Whitehead’s book rather ends by justifying, and throwing us back upon, our “insistent craving” for novelty and adventure. That is what it means to write an aesthetics, rather than an ethics.

When philosophers like Peirce, Whitehead, Bergson, etc., speak of continuity, discontinuities, etc., in relation to creativity, what exactly do they mean? Are they trying to imply that an act of creation is an occurrence of emergence, meaning a discrete and complete break from the past? Is there any fruit with trying to compare the "analysis" of creativity with the more Romantic notions of creativity, like Coleridge's distinction between fancy and imagination?

Many of the great thinkers of Western modernity define their goal as a therapeutic one. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein all present themselves as diagnosticians and clinicians. They examine symptoms, discern the conditions of our metaphysical malaise, and propose remedies to free us from our enslavement to “passive emotions” (Spinoza), to ressentiment (Nietzsche), to traumatic recollections (Freud), or to the “bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein). Therapy in this sense is the modern, secularized and demystified, form of ethics. One of the striking things about Whitehead is that he does not make any such therapeutic or ethical claims. He does not say that his metaphysics will cure me, or that it will make me a better person. At best, philosophy and art may awaken me from my torpor, and allow me to subsume the painful experience of a “clash in affective tones” within a wider sense of purpose. Such broadening “increases the dimensions of the experient subject, adds to its ambit.”. But this is still a rather modest and limited result. At best, philosophy and poetry “seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization". Granted, Whitehead displays none of Nietzsche’s or Freud’s justified suspicion regarding the value of “good sense,” or of what we call “civilization.” But even from the perspective of Whitehead’s entirely laudatory use of these terms, he is still only making a deliberately muted and minor claim. We are far from any “exaggerated” promises of a Great Health, of self-transcendence, or of cathartic transformation.

Even in his hyperbolic evocation of “God and the World,” in the fifth and final Part of Process and Reality, Whitehead does not offer us any prospect to match the “intellectual love of God” exalted by Spinoza in the fifth and final part of the Ethics. Whitehead’s God, in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s, does not know the world sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, Whitehead’s God is “the poet of the world.” This means that he knows the world, not in terms of its first causes, but only through its effects, and only in retrospect. God “saves” the world precisely to the extent, but only to the extent, that he aestheticizes and memorializes it. He remembers the world in each and every detail, incorporating all these memories into an overarching “conceptual harmonization”. But if God remembers every experience of every last entity, he does not produce and provide these experiences and memories themselves. That is something that is left for us to do, contingently and unpredictably. Where Spinoza’s book ends with the “spiritual contentment” that arises from the comprehension of “eternal necessity,” Whitehead’s book rather ends by justifying, and throwing us back upon, our “insistent craving” for novelty and adventure. That is what it means to write an aesthetics, rather than an ethics.

Did this nigga not just repeat what Heraclitus already said or what

Oddly enough, because I feel like you actually have to have autism in order to follow what he's saying.

should I or shant I?

>>12224767
fucking this

chad reads the corrected edition

Was Whiteahead right?

what do we think of whitehead /lit/?

thoughts on whitehead?

thoughts?

what should i read before process and reality to understand it better?

wtf this shit is like if wittgenstein wrote as deleuze