/lit/ - Literature

huh so memeing writers on here really does get some people to read them. good on you anon.

>>12423224
>forms can't be real since they must refer to their referents
>why? the alternative is idiotic that's why
I hate Plato's forms as much as the next guy, but this is a total non-argument.

>>12423224
using the word "idiotic" indicates 1 of 2 things: 1) he doesnt know what he's talking about and set up a strawman, 2) he wants to pick a fight. Either is good enough to dismiss the writing, but it's dreadful in its own right

>>12423384
this, his writing is quite poor. and he shouldn't be insulting like that

>>12423224
If Whitehead really wrote this, all it shows is that he never read Plato's Parmenides.

>>12423224
Plato literally considers and discusses this in the Parmenides

>>12423224
Embarrassing on Whitehead's part. There's a reason why we say to start with the Greeks

what's wrong with this?

>>12423224
>>12423384
>>12423424
That is not Whiteheads writing. He is far more articulate and precise than that, and he never denigrates by referring to ideas as idiotic. Whitehead's prose is occasionally sublimely coherent and smooth and occasionally poetic. I highly doubt the above is written by Whitehead rather than a commentator. Source?

As for Whitehead and the eternal objects, he is essentially irrefutable. Say we have an essay which contains some logical flaws that the writer was unaware of. The flaws are not in the mind, since the writer is unaware of them, the flaws are not in the ink, since the ink contains no argument in and of itself, but the flaws remain to be realized in the mind of a reader should they discover them. The flaws have the potentiality of being realized in the understanding at some later stage in the un-actualized future. This shows that there is an atemporal existence beyond experience. It is possible for you to turn off your computer and walk out the door, but this possibility has no actual existence until one actually acts out the phenomena in temporal reality. So the eternal objects are the totality of unrealized atemporal possibility/potentiality. It is from the realm of eternal objects the the concrete actual forms which compose the whole of concrete existent actuality partake. Blessed Whitehead never fails.

So stoked he is becoming a meme. The world will be better when Whitehead becomes the governing meme of /lit/

>>12423544
whitehead is the sargon of akkad of 20th century philosophy

>>12423544
/lit/ only needs one meme

>>12423544
from here

>>12423544
yikes, take your anglo autism elsewhere please
>>12423570
this

Man this excerpt is maddening doozy all by itself. Good God i cant make head or tail of it. Im scratching my scalp till it bleeds. Alone, it begs for all the precision analytical philosophy aspires to deliver.

>>12423570
"The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a 'perpetual perishing.' Objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling. There is a unison of becoming among things in the present. Why should there not be novelty without loss of this direct unison of immediacy among things? In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction. But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story. The nature of evil is that the character of things are mutually obstructive. Thus the depths of life require a process of selection. But the selection is elimination as the first step towards another temporal order seeking to minimize obstructive modes. Selection is at once the measure of evil and the process of its evasion. It means the discarding the element of obstructiveness in fact. No element in fact is ineffectual: Thus the struggle with evil is a process of building up a mode of utilization by the provision of intermediate elements introducing a complex structure of harmony. The triviality in some initial reconstruction of order expresses the fact that actualities are being produced, which, trivial in their own proper character of immediate 'ends,' are proper 'means' for the emergence of a world at once lucid, and intrinsically of immediate worth."

>>12423620
"The evil of the world is that those elements which are translucent so far as transmission is concerned, in themselves are of slight weight; and that those elements with individual weight, by their discord, impose upon vivid immediacy the obligation that it fades into night. 'He giveth his beloved - sleep.'"

Whitehead had beautiful thoughts and a sensitivity to the world worth remembering. He is not to be read only for lucidity, but for profundity. Whitehead might make you cry, should one try and see what he saw...

>>12423620
this is pretty poetic which book is this from?

whitehead is a crypto-platonist

>>12423576
Damn you are right. Unusual for him.

>>12423592
"He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness."

>>12423640
Later section of Process and Reality, "The Ideal Opposites"

>>12423620
this is literally the definition of hegelian "pretend make up words"

>>12423685
this, lol. what nonsense did i just read

>>12423685
>>12423690

it's beautiful and makes perfect sense, but whitehead writes at a very high level. he's saying something very profound

>>12423685
Take some time to understand him and you will see he is driving at something very near to all of us. The tragedy of each beings fullness not being able to be achieved. The wolf goes hungry should the rabbit escape, and should the wolf be full the rabbit sacrifices his lifeblood for this. It is a tragic truth that not all of the goods in the world may be realized, but the order of the world strives to realize as much goodness as it can and so this very process of loss and disintegration into the past which we all face together in this universe is necessary for the beauty and goodness to continue. We are like sculptors of the world who each contributes to its ongoing beauty and sets the stage for new life to continue on, and yet all of the goodness that is present now will fade for the new to emerge. So Whitehead is highlighting the bittersweet nature of Gods creation. It's like an old person on a bench in the autumn, remembering all of those sweet moments like their first love and the day they had their child, and noting how it all slips away. But then they hear kids playing in the park and are reminded that all of these moments will be reborn anew without them, and so on it goes, striving towards beauty and perpetuation. The process of life.

>>12423685
>>12423690
>anything I dont understand is obscurantist word salad!

>>12423707
lmao this is literally what analytics say and it's funny because ur making a post defending whitehead

>>12423713
late whitehead isnt an analytic

>>12423544
Parmenides (as usual) destroys this argument. Potentiality is not metaphysically real as it necessitates the existence of change. Change is not real, and neither is potential by extension. There is only one "potential"; Being itself. Parmenides is irrefutable. God bless him.

>>12423720
>Parmenides
Whitehead could be made commensurate with the emptiness of Parmenides. In fact I'd argue the eternal objects are the pure self or the dao or Parmenides's atemporal unchanging absolute. Think of it this way. The self is a mountain which is passed over by mist. The mist passes and changes ceaselessly, and the mountain remains no matter what passes. This is the nature of knowing or witnessing. Knowledge is atemporal and unmoved, but the content of appearance passes by over knowledge. Knowledge is atemporal actuality which is nothing other than pure potentiality (whiteheads eternal objects) The world is process as whitehead describes it, the realization of the possibilities latent in this ultimately free emptiness (free because it is without definition or limitation to restrict it, therefore it is able to create finite passage by virtue of its own lack of restriction to not do so). This is the illusory or impermanent passage of phenomena.

>>12423705
beautiful post

I don't underatamd what i am readimg how do I get out of brainletism?

>>12423749
It means a lot to me that you felt that way

>>12423254
>pure potentiality can subsist independent of a possible actuality
how, exactly?

>>12423766
possible actuality and pure potentiality have identical meanings and are synonymous. Pure potentialities however can exist independently of concrete actualized phenomena. Think of all the different actions you could perform right now in your room. You can generate endless possibilities, but you can only realize a finite sequence to the exclusion of all of those other possibilities. All of those unrealized possibilities are pure potentialities and they exist in that atemporal way whether anything brings them into concrete existence or not.

>>12423766
Not that anon but this was covered already. Read the thread.

>>12423766
The Forms do not exist independently of themselves. That's how.

>>12423759
by reading the greeks

>>12423759
Honestly just sinking your teeth into Modes of Thought is about as good as you will get for beginning to understand Whitehead. Go as slowly as you feel necessary and try to understand as much as you can. Check out youtube videos to brush up or help clarify. Other than that it is pretty much just a matter of putting in the time and effort. Whitehead is not deliberately obscure. He is precise and incredibly careful and often writes exquisitely. Sometimes the density of ideas and terminology does become over the top. All I have to say is he is coherent and understandable. It just takes effort.

>>12423224
>How about the form of mud, and the forms of evil, and other forms of imperfection?

What does this question mean? Incidentally, Plato's Parmenides directly addresses this, but I doubt Whitehead wrote this is good faith. It's the eternal Anglo murk, lukewarm irony, insolent bluff, appeal to "common sense", a jester quivering with terror, begging for a laugh track.

>>12423224

>How about the form of mud, and the forms of evil, and other forms of imperfection?

What does this question mean? Incidentally, Plato's Parmenides directly addresses this, but I doubt Whitehead wrote this in good faith. It's the eternal Anglo murk, lukewarm irony, insolent bluff, appeal to "common sense", a jester quivering with terror, begging for a laugh track.

>>12423620
>>12423633
I cannot help but read these passages in light of his son's early and violent death, and think that perhaps he began and ended this project only to bring some closure upon that terrible event. I know Tennyson's In Memorium was hugely important for the development of his thought. The whole subject seems very close to him here, and I am compelled to reflect upon those close to me that I, too, have lost to the slippage of time, and cannot rest in the solace that I will be rejoined with them. Only that the echoes of their being resonate within me, so long as I choose to remember their sound.

>>12423775
I understand this. Whitehead's objection to the theory of forms, as far as i can discern, is precisely that such a realm of pure being is completely remote and independent of the actuality. In that sense, it is the realm of the purely arbitrary and empty, rather than the purely potential.

>>12423738
>Whitehead could be made commensurate with the emptiness of Parmenides
>The self is a mountain which is passed over by mist. The mist passes and changes ceaselessly, and the mountain remains no matter what passes. This is the nature of knowing or witnessing. Knowledge is atemporal and unmoved, but the content of appearance passes by over knowledge.
I don't know if this is where you are drawing this from or just that you came to similar conclusions after considering the relation of Parmenides and Whitehead but this is exactly what Advaita Vedanta teaches

>>12423720
The Parmenides refutes this.

>eastern spiritual anon comes along just in time
Whitehead does it without the funny poses or alien syllables.

:Whitehead's God is Kant's boyish charm rendered to the absolute of time's regenerative Oneness: It is in Leibnizean process that the God of process parasitizes the axiom of Vedic rendicism cosmologised as a post-cosmology: Within cosmic cosmism we see Plato's own Theory of Non-contradicton: A centrifuge of Time's own Kalian ontological tautology:

>>12423831
I actually thought the same thing as I typed those quotes out. It strikes me as a kind of solace or bittersweet reflection. For all his precision and technical reserve, Whitehead's character as an incredibly sympathetic sensitive human seeps through across his writings. His values and cares as a person making sense of the world still shine past the volumes of intellectual reflection, but never in excess or without due cause. He is a philosopher with a poet tucked away in his heart, and it always warms me to see him let his little poet say a few words here and there.

>>12423843
If I understand you, this is to say that Whitehead's potentialities by their very nature are available for exhibition within concrete reality and this is distinct from forms which can have existence without being available for realization within actuality? I agree that the idea of a potentiality which is not possibly available to for being realized within some arrangement of actuality is completely alien to what could be considered all existence and possible existence. The eternal objects are real by virtue of their possibility for ingression into definite actuality. If they were not available for ingression they would be of an incoherent or radically alien character which would be completely outside of concept or possibility and are essentially not even comprehensible or worthy of considering. Just this pure outsideness which is incomprehensible. Probably why he used the word idiotic lol.

Bump

Bump

>>12423905
This is precisely what I meant, yes. Whitehead's terminology is still clumsy in my hands, so I find myself reaching for terms that are more manageable for me but maybe less apt.
The 'actual' ontological status of eternal objects is still quite obscure to me. I will need to find the passage, or passages, that support this reading, but I believe Whitehead holds a kind of occassionalist position, in that, insofar as the ingeresson of any eternal object into an actual event is the consequence of a real decision, that decision is 'grounded' in the primordial nature of God, which is something like the production of novelty. God here seems to take the place of the Realm of Forms. Being an actual entity, though the only atemporal entity, these eternal objects have their reality by virtue of their relation to actuality through God's nature.

I think Whitehead mischaracterizes Plato, he accuses Plato of an otherworldliness that is less their transcendent reification than it is just a certain intensity of our knowledge of them that Plato encourages everyone to strive towards

What I'm trying to say is that these forms are inseparable from the processes that actualize them, but as the form/structure of these processes (forms of definiteness as Whitehead calls them and "tracks of determination" is how I think of it) they are irreducible, cannot be fully immanentized, by the content of these processes. So actuality, reality, coincides with a logic - a structure of a participation immanent to the very wellspring of potential presupposed by this participatory process - that both coincides with it AND is underived from it, from these processes taken strictly "as-is" - that is, from an empty or purely formal register of being, there's something very subtle going on here, there's something about just taking "existence" as the most abstract category that is that both DEMANDS the ingression of content/"forms of definiteness", while being itself, this demanding, underived from that content, though it is only within that content that it can be DISCLOSED.

Whitehead's God doesn't sit above or "behind" being, but aside it in this way, and if you read certain parts from Perlman's theophany he describes the Platonic God in almost identical terms - as the principle of non-contradiction, while Whitehead calls him the principle of (affirmative) limitation, of conjunctive order

>>12426554
>>12423905
you've both got a good grip on whitehead's language

bump

>>12423224
>forms of evil
Someone hasn't read Proclus, lazy boy.

>i-it's mere phantasy!
>an argument
Choose one

>>12423766
It exists as something more real because it's eternal, perfect, and unchanging and can be accessed noetically by anyone (or anything) from any temporal or spatial location. Any particular in the material realm is imperfect, and subject to the becoming and corruption necessary to being subject to temporal flow.

>>12423905
Think of something that is impossible to actualise in any possible world. It can exist as a comprehensible idea, but can never be actualised. An example: there are many mutually exclusive theologies of God's nature, at least some must be impossible, yet they can exist as ideas philosophers debate.

Bump hol up

>>12423544
>Say we have an essay which contains some logical flaws that the writer was unaware of. The flaws are not in the mind,
Why not? Because he is unaware of it so that makes it not his fault? You dont need to be aware of a mistake to make one.

>>12423821
Forms of evil or ugly things pose a problem for Platonic theology where forms emanate from the Form of the Good and the Beautiful. Whitehead is being glib in not acknowledging or addressing the Platonic arguments on this.

>It's the eternal Anglo murk, lukewarm irony, insolent bluff, appeal to "common sense", a jester quivering with terror, begging for a laugh track.
Very true. Wtf is wrong with us? Prots enabling Whigs to take over the English soul by destroying Catholicism?

>>12430885
No, it comes from the belief that philosophy should be nothing but ebdlessly quibbling about the Bible. The Anglo tradition rejects this, but has nothing else to turn to as axiomatic (Anglos can't, say, return to some pre-Christian religious tradition).

So the Anglo tries to start from scratch to create axioms which leads to various flavors of autism.

The Anglo's faith in science derives from this as science is the ultimate attempt at establishing axioms.

>>12431481
>>12430885
How superior you both are to the vagaries of the national soul.

>>12428341
Why make this conceptual leap to a 'realm of being' utterly distinct from our own, which ar can only access through a kind of magic ritual (thinking)?
If the Forms are eternal, perfect, self-sufficient and unchanging, why partake of an imperfect reality? Why condescend in this way?
Also, if the Forms really are accessible by minds and other things at any spatio-temporal location, does this very act of accessing compromise their perfection. Are they not changed by being accessed by this and then again this and then again this other mind/thing? Like a whiteboard in an empty classroom gradually scribbled over with the graffiti of passing students.

>>12423544
WOA THERE, I see some serious assumptions about the location of mind, stop it.
So are you telling me Whitehead never moved past..
never mind, bugger off and read dilletante.

>>12428386
The concept or idea is itself an actual occasion recurring over time. That a 'mental' entity like a unicorn will never be encountered as a 'physical' entity does not entail ontological priority to either. Both are 'poles' of the same reality.

>>12432780
Please, share. We are exchanging ideas here.

>>12432790
I bite my thumb at your ideas, they mean nothing to me.

>>12432804
Whatever, man.

>>12432834
shoo shoo peasant, it's back to the dregs for you. One must be learned in order to post on this forum.