Sometimes in the rush to implement social improvements, attendant complexities are ignored, and the attempt to remove an evil ends up releasing further evils (20). While Whitehead was himself a progressive (he was involved in the women’s rights and educational reform movements of his day), he cautions against the impetuous insistence upon imposing new ideas in the wrong season. Whitehead lists environmental conditions and the brute necessities of technological production (e.g., the socially transformative effects of coal, steam, electricity, and oil) among the senseless forces, and Axial religion and democratic humanitarianism as examples of intelligent aspiration (7). People “are driven by their thoughts as well as by the molecules in their bodies, by intelligence and by senseless forces” (46). Whitehead claims that the study of history reveals a general dichotomy, that between senseless, often violent, compulsion and consciously formulated aspiration. Our imaginations of history are inseparable from our metaphysical and cosmological presuppositions. History is a story told in the present, often to serve as material for the formation of our own self-understanding. Were we to be presented with the bare facts, devoid of any theoretical interpretation, we would have merely sound vibrations and the motion of colored shapes (3). He begins by reminding his readers that history is not just a collection of facts. ![]() While the issue of novel ideas into practical consequences may be slow, the upward adventure of life on Earth testifies to their power. His hypothesis is that the rise of human civilization exemplifies the effective lure of ideas in the adventure of cosmogenesis. The fact that civilized beings have emerged in the course of the evolution of the universe tells us something important about the nature and perhaps even the purpose of that universe. He operates under the assumption that human civilization has profound cosmological significance. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.Whitehead’s goal is these pages to elucidate the concept of civilization. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it." We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. ![]() It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. ![]() It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Ĭreativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux.
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