Process and Reality Quotes

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality]

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“Change’ is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away. It is then trespassing with the wrong equipment upon the field of particular sciences. Its ultimate appeal is to the general consciousness of what in practice we experience. Whatever thread of presupposition characterizes social expression throughout the various epochs of rational societyt must find its place in philosophic theory. Speculative boldness must be balanced by complete humility before logic, and before fact. It is a disease of philosophy when it is neither bold nor humble, but
merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“This doctrine of necessity in universality means that there is an essence to the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality. Speculative philosophy seeks that essence.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“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. But such universals, by their very character of universality, embody the potentiality of other facts with variant types of definiteness. Thus [22] the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. When thought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. 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. Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. The methodology of rational interpretation is the product of the fitful vagueness of consciousness. Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. And yet all occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation. Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“It is the ideal of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from each other. In other words, it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“The primary method of mathematics is deduction; the primary method of philosophy is descrip- [16] tive generalization. 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. 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. 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. A new idea introduces a new alternative; and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“Love neither rules, nor is unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“The many become one, and are increased by one.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“The success of the imaginative experiment is always to be tested by the applicability of its results beyond the restricted locus from which it originated. In default of such extended application, a generalization started from physics, for example, remains merely an alternative expression of notions applicable to physics. The partially successful philosophic generalization will, if derived from physics, find applications in fields of experience beyond physics. It will enlighten observation in those remote fields, so that general principles can be discerned as in process of illustration, which in the absence of the imaginative generalization are obscured by their persistent exemplification.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“Explicitly in the verbal sentence, or implicitly in the understanding of the subject entertaining it, every expression of a proposition includes demonstrative elements. In fact each word, and each symbolic phrase, is such an element, exciting the conscious prehension of some entity belonging to one of the categories of existence.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“In its use of this method 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 a dog-
matic 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.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“The merit of Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' is its adequacy, and not its consistency. . . He should have widened the title of his book into 'An Essay Concerning Experience.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology