Offhand Comparisons

[degringolade]

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.  

 

Comments

HARVARD VS. AN OLDER SCHOOL

[mschmidt]

Whitehead gets very complicated and goes way beyond what I am taking from him regarding self-evident understanding; but, the “self-evident” idea is fundamental to all the logic, relativity, etc. that he gets into.

This is not to suggest I am an expert on Whitehead; in fact, with most of his work I have no idea what he is talking about. I do not feel too bad about this because nobody else including scholars seems to know either. I mostly read his early lectures from England which focused on Nature and were fairly straight-forward. The emphasis in his lectures was on how things need to be abstracted from their natural place in the universe, when they are analyzed and explained scientifically. What he said about mathematics, is that using mathematics to explain physics shows how little we know about the world, not how much we know. B. Russell said the same thing.

*****

If there is any point in exchanging ideas, then there must be the possibility of something being self-evident. If understanding is defined as the recognition of pattern, then self-evident means the recognition of pattern. If the level of skepticism gets to the point that the physical phenomena a body perceives cannot be trusted, then there is no reason for anybody to try to exchange ideas.

The only reason to investigate who said something – whether it is a philosopher or a god - is that the statement is not self-evident to you. In that case, some sort of proof is needed, so the author should be able to supply some sort of proof that will get you to agree that the claim is self-evident, if the proof is valid and considered along with the claim. Or, in the case of a God, the self-evidence is found in the messenger.

Something A. N. Whitehead said related to abstraction is: “A fact in isolation is the primary myth required for finite thought – thought unable to embrace totality”.

The question is whether (and how) this idea can be accepted as self-evident. I chose this statement because I suspect it might align with the statement from Lao Tse below that you referenced.

Here is my view having read the material that presented the statement:

A fact is a myth. “Thought unable to embrace totality” means that a person or science can consider only a limited amount of all the factors in the universe that effect what happens; so, all human thinking and experimenting and theorizing involves an abstraction, and this fact means that human understanding is never complete and never can be.

A straightforward example with physics is the abstractions (any experiment) that prove Newtonian physics is correct. What the proof or theory abstracts/removes from consideration, in addition to who knows what else, is all the internal activity and energy that resides inside what is called “mass” - which is what everything in the world is made of, according to the science. And the same issue applies to what is regarded as empty space.

Whitehead: “As the subject matter of a science expands, its relevance to the universe contracts”.

When physics advances to the point that the calculated answers are wrong, then the presuppositions of old science no longer apply because they are too far from the way that the universe actually operates to be considered valid/correct.


Tao Tse: “To know and yet think we do not know is the highest attainment; not to know and yet think we do know is a disease”.

Is this statement self-evident?

Not to me, but the question is how might it be? In other words, what perspective of the world is needed?

If the message is that nothing can be self-evident, then the words must be from a God who will decide what is.

But hopefully this is not the case; so, my guess is Tao Tse and Whitehead are getting at the same point. At least this is a possibility.