This project was not pursued for its own sake, however. Adventures of Ideas represents an integral part of Whitehead’s lifelong quest to reestablish metaphysics in a way that takes seriously challenges to previous metaphysics raised by sensationalist views of the human mind (Locke through Hume) and positivist views of society and history. Then one comes to the final chapters and gains a full grasp of what the terms “adventure” and “ideas” signified for the author. Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.This book is more ambitious than its title, which suggests a primer for youths interested in philosophy, might indicate. And yet all occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation. Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. The methodology of rational interpretation is the product of the fitful vagueness of consciousness. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. Its search for a rationalistic scheme is the search for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate justification, of the interpretations which we perforce employ. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. When thought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Thus the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. But such universals, by their very character of universality, embody the potentiality of other facts with variant types of definiteness. “Whenever we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understanding leads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to its past, to its future, and to the universals in terms of which its definiteness is exhibited. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.” A new idea introduces a new alternative and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. The depositions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,† Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptations, and inversions, either unknown to them, or even explicitly repudiated by them. This misapprehension of philosophic method has veiled the very considerable success of philosophy in providing generic notions which add lucidity to our apprehension of the facts of experience. Under the influence of mathematics, deduction has been foisted onto philosophy as its standard method, instead of taking its true place as an essential auxiliary mode of verification whereby to test the scope of generalities. “The primary method of mathematics is deduction the primary method of philosophy is descrip- tive generalization.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |