/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13770545]

What did Whitehead mean by this? (whites only edition)

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.
"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.'"

[Anonymous No.13770546]

>>13770545
he is painting a complex picture that has many implications

he wants you to visualize a world where everything is evil to everything else to some degree and that mediates itself, sorts itself, so that what is evil to one thing would be further away from that thing or else would consume it and take its place

this should be a hint anyway

[Anonymous No.13770556]

>>13770546
in masonic imagery they utilize a scene like whitehead describes

this checkerboard represents the slave class
left and right perfectly divided,
each individual set with evil on all sides with the minimal tangent to good (the corners)
put on the floor and walked on, the foundation for luxury and whatever 'purpose' of the owners

[Anonymous No.13770579]

>>13770556
see this is meant to be living hell.
in the elite's world, there are more colors and more dimensions and more corners, but the colors sort themselves into gradients

in this would-be/example model, the checker board is maintained in the grey area in the middle