>The truth itself is nothing else than how the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain adequate representation in the divine nature. Such representations compose the ‘consequent nature’ of God, which evolves in its relationship to the evolving world without derogation to the eternal completion of its primordial conceptual nature. In this way the ‘Ontological principle’ is maintained—since there can be no determinate truth, correlating impartially the partial experiences of many actual entities, apart from one actual entity to which it can be referred.
Does anyone actually take away anything from this book, or do they just pretend to understand it so they seem smart?
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Science and the Modern World clarifies the implications of these ideas a bit more, and Bergson is important reading for Whitehead.
So in order to understand this book, I have to read someone who pretends to understand it?
What? Bergson was before Whitehead and the book I mentioned is by Whitehead.
>or do they just pretend to understand it so they seem smart?
It's probably not this. I don't doubt that the words of most metaphysicians can be interpreted into some sort of logically consistent system. Of course, that all of these systems will be "floating" in the sky with no way to evaluate its connection to reality is invariably the immediately following stipulation.
The more important question is what all the mental masturbation represents. In one word the answer is "cope". The enlightenment has always masked the theological presuppositions that went into it, and so its failure presents at its core a theological issue while simultaneously denying us the tools to seek or even begin to formulate a solution in earnest. Whitehead's attempt no matter how well intentioned is just a means by which to mask a theological answer as a philosophical one.
Whitehead explicitly states in the book that philosophy is essentially the attempt to reconcile science and theology.
That's great and interesting (at least he recognizes the problem), but what is his solution? The only possible solutions that I'm aware are possible are reducible to aestheticism or defense of revelation. Is his any different?
How do you see live? Apart from criticizing others, do you just accept practical dogma as a tool to get what you want? Why do you continue living? What ideologies do you follow that are not coping mechanisms? Coping against a meaningless world that somehow hosts your own moments of temporal happiness?
The only way to transcend cope is suicide, but that would be a cope.
I think he is trying to describe what it is like to exist in a state of mortal sin.
My answer probably won't satisfy you. A religious foundation isn't something that you adopt as an instrumental practical dogma that you weigh against others and trade out for the most efficient. To approach it with this mindset is self-defeating from the outset. It is an unsettling development that individuals today are often born in the West into a situation where there is no such solid foundation readily at hand, especially when there exists one with such an incredibly rich and complex history that until recently was unquestionably the birthright of all those born in the West. To go a little further, there is an important distinction between "cope" and earnest interpretation, and because life is dynamic and you must always struggle with the fact that you may be coping (to continue the verbiage) or self-serving rather than honestly interpreting, that work can never be complete.
This is all lost if you accept a-priori the notion of the utility-maximizing individual because that you are capable of earnestly doing anything other than coping becomes incomprehensible. The fact is that religion at its best is not the blind acceptance of dogma. The realization that even our despair and rage are "not particularly important to the dark diceman" as Faulkner puts it is not a recipe for nihilism as much as it is a primer for the realization that the grace of God does not afford mankind, much less we as individuals, a central or privileged place. That's the real starting point. For more on that read Jonathan Edwards.
As an aside, this always reminds me of those lectures by Rick Roderick on The Self Under Siege. There's a part where he laments the spiritual state of the university students. They "believe nothing, want nothing, hope nothing, expect nothing," etc, and he makes the point that these are the privileged youth, going to top schools in the most prosperous nation on the planet, the implication that it can only be worse for others. What he doesn't realize is that it can't possibly be worse than it is there; the poor and less materially fortunate widely maintain the traditional foundations that provide them with the toolset necessary to make sense of life in the way at question. The real horror comes from the realization that it is the alienated life led by those in the professional-managerial class that then becomes the ideal.
In short, you take a leap of faith. If one does not readily present itself to you you are either profoundly unlucky or still fooling yourself into thinking that reason alone can accurately and completely describe our experience.
Delusive. Perhaps it's adequate for you, but simply saying 'it cannot be a position attained through rational analyse' delegates it into an impossible situation contrasted to the more scientific-nihilist view which gains ground continually with each passing day.
The fundamental failing of the wishy-washy universalism (the only passably acceptable religious view today), is that it can't justify itself through something akin to the Christian God's fear and terror. If there is a universalist god, how could anyone truly believe that it will matter as to our views of it? how can we expect it to grant salvation to some and hell to others? how can it even have a view as to privilege human qualia?
There's a reason intelligent theists always struggle with their faith each day, discovering new torments which must have been devised by their god to inflict upon man; whilst the average intelligent atheist is quite content with their position and, barring spontaneous suicide, which doesn't invalidate the position in as such as the suicide was to escape from a world supposedly built by god, simply tries not to think about eschatological concerns.
>but simply saying 'it cannot be a position attained through rational analyse' delegates it into an impossible situation contrasted to the more scientific-nihilist view which gains ground continually with each passing day.
This is the mindset that I noted in my post. It doesn't allow you to go any further than this. It's self-defeating. Anyways, if we're going to be scientific about it, it's worth noting that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so it's not exactly correct to say the "scientific" view is necessarily nihilistic. As evidenced by the fact that few "scientists," nor many others at all, are really nihilists.
>There's a reason intelligent theists always struggle with their faith each day, discovering new torments which must have been devised by their god to inflict upon man;
There is a reason, but that's not it. At least not that characterization of it.
They are not mutually exclusive, that's the point. But it is also very disingenuous to arrive at that important decision as a result of what is basically a cost-benefit analysis; more than anything that reveals one's conception of the problem as misguided. The true leap of faith is arrived at prior to reason and is not in the last analysis answerable to reason. That's what makes it a leap.
Why must the two be mutually exclusive? You can "take a leap of faith" and attempt to rationalize theology at the same time. That's actually the only way we ever use reason. We accept things on faith, then try to justify them rationally after the fact. No one has ever come to any conclusion using reason alone. Even mathematicians will have a vague intuitive belief that some conjecture must be true or false before they attempt to prove it.
So few words but so exhausting to read. I understand the first sentence as saying the truth is that the material world is reflected in the divine (whatever that means), but I can't even look at the rest of it, it's like eye poison or something.
its an autism test
It took me all day yesterday just to read the first chapter.
>read a sentence
>pic related
>reread
>contemplate
>pic related
>reread again
>give up
>next sentence
>repeat
Reading Process and Reality was not easy, the language was quite confusing at first. Once I started to understand the system it became obvious to me that many paradoxes in science and philosophy arise from an incoherent metaphysical foundation. I no longer have difficulty understanding "paradoxes" like how consciousness comes from matter or how quantum-scale objects can exhibit properties of both particles and waves. But if I started writing about the self-referential phases of concrescence (comparative prehensions) or about coordinate division of a concrete actual entity versus genetic division of an actual entity in the process of concrescence (re wave-particle duality) readers might doubt my sanity. The language of Whitehead's work is barely English.
If you actually understand consciousness and QM as a result of reading P&R, I want desperately to understand this book. Those are two problems which torture me eternally.
Have you read Penrose's Road to Reality or any Sheldrake?
Never read them but I'm familiar with their ideas. I don't think Penrose gets us any closer to understanding consciousness. Whether Leibniz's mill is classical or quantum mechanical, it still doesn't explain how the mill is conscious.
>no longer have difficulty understanding "paradoxes"
Can you simplify it? This also has been haunting me
Try reading Auxier's Quantum of Experience first, and maybe Charles Hartshorne's process theology.
Whitehead's greatest failure is that he was too polite, refusing to insult any living value. He failed to properly illustrate a processual "way of life" based on his metaphysics. Instead the purpose of his system seems to bring "closure," i.e. to cope, rather than transform, which seems at odds with the ever-changing nature of things.
What would a processual way of life look like?
>What would a processual way of life look like?
I asked for a processual way of life, not a cope.
I think we've already established in this thread that any way of life is essentially a cope.
Trying to answer questions you know nothing about on goat-mongling forums is a cope.
>What would a processual way of life look like?
Like this one. It’s explaining what is the makeup of your actions.
Anti-dogmatic - myth is trivial in its history. Myth is only valued by its consequences (~”if god doesn’t exist, he needs to be invented”, Ronald Reagan saying he wished an alien army attacked humanity because it would be the only way to create union.)
The value of myth is not that it’s true. It’s that it motivates us.
A processual way of looking at life is that you criticize it and evaluate it conscious of the fact that your criticism is an element of the process. It’s an existential claim in that regard.
It pro-formalization but more importantly pro-reformalization, pro-experiment. Data is how we gain depth into the process but this is distinct from dogma. Dogma is distinct because of the lack of critical self evolution, how it sees itself in the process.
Ant-
Last thread someone suggested a companion book, but can't recall the title.
This was the thread https://warosu.org/lit/thread/S20438695