Quote of the Day: Footnotes to Plato

(((More Whitehead; that quote you've all heard or misheard part of; how to be Platonic)))

Most of us have at one time or another, and perhaps many times, heard or read some allusion or reference to the famous statement of Whitehead about Western philosophy. But I suspect we often mistake or perhaps merely oversimplify his point. So, let's try a little context.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars [and earlier philosophers? like Aristotle? or like Proclus? Ficino?] have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. (Process and Reality, 39)

There's something sort of retro-Renaissance about this, on the one hand: let us go back to the horse's mouth and start over. But on the other hand, he's really right in several respects, perhaps most especially in the simple observation that Plato was freer than we are. He had a much smaller and less systematized tradition or set of traditions to deal with, and maybe most importantly, there was not the tradition of philosophical writing and scholarship that we have now, where philosophy can only properly be philosophy if it is, frankly, dull. And in any case, it cannot be ambiguous, especially not deliberately ambiguous. That is for poets, and don't we Know that Plato hated poets? And yet, Plato wrote what amount to plays, not treatises, even if there are treatises of sorts to be found in them.

So, if we want to be truly Platonic, and there are good reasons to want just such a thing, perhaps we need to throw off the shackles of disciplinary, and particularly scholarly, custom.

Oooh, scary.

tags technorati : Whitehead, Plato, Philosophy

Quote of the Day: Whitehead on Baconian Empiricism

(((Alfred North Whitehead on radical empiricism; the naivete of Francis Bacon; how induction isn't always everything it's cracked up to be.)))

Francis Bacon and the modern scientific method. New Atlantis, you know, and the Novum Organum of induction. Among philosophers and historians of science, Bacon's thinking on induction is considered impossibly naive, but that naivete lives among those who think science is simply some Other Thing, divorced entirely from our, I don't know, normal?, ways of doing things. Simply, purely rational, grounded entirely in unbiased observation. Empirical. As opposed to, say, metaphysics.

[Already in metaphysics], the method of pinning down thought to the strict systematization of detailed discrimination, already effected by antecedent observation, breaks down. This collapse of the method of rigid empiricism is not confined to metaphysics. It occurs whenever we seek the larger generalities [i.e., when we do science]. In natural science this rigid method is the Baconian method of induction, a method which, if consistently pursued, would have left science where it found it. What Bacon omitted was the play of a free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic. (Process and Reality, 4-5).

In fact, science has advanced considerably since Bacon, but it is awfully hard to argue, it seems to me, that this advance has not been as much in spite as because of Bacon. Perhaps more, depending on how much actual influence one grants the Novum Organum. The truth is that science simply has not progressed by means of Bacon's purist empiricism, because that's not how science advances. I think most scientists know this. I think many lay admirers of science find it much easier to presume that science is somehow the "opposite" of religion, and so must therefore be purely rational and purely empirical (as if these also were the same thing). The truth, alas, is more complicated.

tags technorati : Whitehead Science Empiricism Bacon

Quote of the Day: Whitehead on Dogmatic Irrationality

(((Alfred North Whitehead; science as a mixture of rational and irrational behaviors; no, seriously: irrational; what today we might call "scientism" as the "self-denial of thought.")))

In its use of this method [i.e., "the method of generalization"] natural science has shown a curious mixture of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become dogmatic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such a denial is the self-denial of thought. (Process and Reality, 5-6)

We might add that Whitehead also rightly thinks science properly understood is precisely a mixture of the rational and irrational, or maybe better put, of the empirical and the imaginative. But that's for tomorrow's quote. Maybe.

In the meantime, it is worth noting that materialism considered in this way is precisely such a self-denial of thought. And it is here that I am beginning to think that Searle gets one over on Dennett, but I admit I am reserving judgment on this, at the moment, philosophy of mind being not my field and me still wading through their fight.

tags technorati : Whitehead, Science, Philosophy