“thar’ she blows!”

All right, I couldn’t wait, and some of you might really enjoy remembering these selected Whitehead “Whales” or even hearing them for the first time. Looks like I marked 13 whales, not 7 or 8 as I remembered.

These all come from Part 1, Chapter 1 of Process and Reality, which is short enough that I won’t bother listing page numbers.

“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 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.”

“It has been remarked that a system of philosophy is never refuted, it is only abandoned. The reason is that logical contradictions, except as temporary slips of the mind –plentiful, though temporary– are the most gratuitous of errors; and usually they are trivial. Thus, after criticism, systems do not exhibit mere illogicalities. They suffer from inadequacy and incoherent.”

“In its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition. But the bundle of philosophic systems expresses a variety of general truths about the universe, awaiting coordination and assignment of their various spheres of validity. Such progress in coordination is provided by the advance of philosophy; and in this sense philosophy has advanced from Plato onwards. According to this account of the achievement of rationalism, the chief error in philosophy is overstatement. The aim at generalization is sound, but the estimate of success is exaggerated.”

“But the accurate expression of the final generalities is the goal of discussion and not its origin. Philosophy has been misled by the example of mathematics; and even in mathematics the statement of the ultimate logical principles is beset with difficulties, as yet insuperable. The verification of a rationalistic scheme is to be sought in its general success, and not in the peculiar certainty, or initial clarity, of its first principles.”

“Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities.”

“If we consider any scheme of philosophic categories as one complex assertion, and apply to it the logician’s alternative, true or false, the answer must be that the scheme is false. The same answer must be given to a like question respecting the existing formulated principles of any science.”

“The primary advantage thus gained [of arguing boldly and with rigid logic from a basic philosophic theory] is that experience is not interrogated with the benumbing repression of common sense.”

“In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.”

“Thus one aim of philosophy is to challenge the half-truths constituting the scientific first principles. The systematization of knowledge cannot be conducted in watertight compartments.”

“It is merely credulous to accept verbal phrases as adequate statements of propositions. The distinction between verbal phrases and and complete propositions is one of the reasons why the logicians’ rigid alternative, ‘true or false,’ is so largely irrelevant for the pursuit of knowledge.”

“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.”

“Each phase of generalization exhibits its own peculiar simplicities which stand out just at that stage, and at no other stage. There are simplicities connected with the motion of a bar of steel which are obscured if we refuse to abstract from the individual molecules; and there are certain simplicities concerning the behaviour of men which are obscured if we refuse to abstract from the individual peculiarities of particular specimens…. These general truths, involved in the meaning of every particular notion respecting the actions of things, are the subject-matter for speculative philosophy.”

“Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away.”