Alfred North Whitehead - Process and Reality

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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Alfred North Whitehead
Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgements; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

Alfred North Whitehead
So far as we can see, inorganic entities are vehicles for receiving and storing in a napkin, and for restoring without gain or loss.

Alfred North Whitehead
But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat.
Process and Reality

Alfred North Whitehead
The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal.

Alfred North Whitehead
A chain of facts is like a barrier reef. On one side there is wreckage, and beyond it harborage and safety.

Alfred North Whitehead
We habitually observe by the method of difference. Sometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not. The result is that an elephant, when present, is noticed.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is either an important statement of systematic theory correlating observations of a common world or is the daydream of a solitary intelligence with a taste for the daydream of publication.

Alfred North Whitehead
Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.

Alfred North Whitehead
The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

Alfred North Whitehead
We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

Alfred North Whitehead
A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

Alfred North Whitehead
The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

Alfred North Whitehead
Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.

Alfred North Whitehead
The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

Alfred North Whitehead
Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

Alfred North Whitehead
The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.

Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

Alfred North Whitehead
Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration.

Alfred North Whitehead
Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.

Alfred North Whitehead
Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

Alfred North Whitehead
The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.

Alfred North Whitehead
Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.

Alfred North Whitehead
The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.

Alfred North Whitehead
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead
We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified — the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

Alfred North Whitehead
Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

Alfred North Whitehead