Offhand Comparisons

Republic of China (1912–1949) / Huang Yongyu/ Cranes

I have been made aware of the difference between A.N. Whitehead and Lao Tse of late.  As I am still in the process in reading Whitehead (and jesus, it is a chore), I cannot make any judgements on this comparison.  What I can do is look at the antecedent conditions and the world that each/either inhabited and try to figure out the society that each grew out of.

Whitehead is the easiest to nail down this way.  Wikipedia is good enough for this kind of thing and regularly spews out hagiographies of famous folk. Whitehead is obviously the better documented of the two.  An overeducated academic/upper crust English toff who did a lot of math and then moved the US to train our version of upper class toffs at Harvard.  One guy, fairly recent, spawn of two societies whose points of view about the world are being challenged on a daily basis.  Member of the ruling class of those societies and anointed at the highest level.

Lao Tse on the other hand might well be a mythical figure from two and a half millennia past.  What biography/historiography of a man who became a semi-religious figure is accordingly distorted by the years.  His biography is a series of semi-mythical (maybe just mythical) anecdotes.