Observations placeholder
North Whitehead, Alfred – Philosophy is conscious self-correction of excesses of subjectivity
Identifier
025742
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Process and Reality - Part I The Speculative Scheme
Chapter I - Speculative Philosophy
Section VI
…..men do what they can in the way of systematization, and in the event achieve something. The proper test is not that of finality, but of progress. ….
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. …
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.
Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, … has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes.
The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.
Morality of outlook is inseparably conjoined with generality of outlook.
The antithesis between the general good and the individual interest can be abolished only when the individual is such that its interest is the general good. …
Philosophy frees itself from the taint of ineffectiveness by its close relations with religion and with science, natural and sociological. It attains its chief importance by fusing the two, namely, religion and science, into one rational scheme of thought.
Religion should connect the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents.
Religion ….. is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity.