"The Art of Persistence Is to Be DEAD."

Reasonin' With Alfred North
Usually once a year I pull down my battered paperback copy of good old Alfred North Whitehead's The Function of Reason--mine's a fifth printing 1967 Beacon Press publication. It's one of those books that tag along with me wherever I go and with whom I go with or even if I go alone throughout my constantly shifting life. Some books just seem to always be in the boxes when I unpack them and again pretend to settle down. This is one of those books. I started reading Whitehead back in the days of Bertie Russell's famous-at-the-time autobiography (late 60s). Bertie had been a student of Alfred North's and they had collaborated on the amazing Principia Mathematica, published in 1919--by the bye, I used to have amorous thoughts and efforts toward a Canadian actress whose teevee role on a Canadian TV kiddie show on mathematics was "Mathematica."

Whitehead was a weird dude--his father founded one of the most successful boys schools in Merry Olde England; yet, Alfred attending another competing public school--and though Alfred was considered pampered and protected he excelled in sports as well as academics throughout his schooling--ending as a professor at Trinity College, a position he walked away from in protest against the college firing one of its professors for having an adulterous affair. Ah, Merry Olde England was so full of adulterous affairs--among the Power Elite that is, though the subservient Brit stock was just as scandalous, but the Power Elite enjoyed their love frivolities in terms of their being pure leisurely pleasure--yes, even old Alfred North and Lord Bertie Russell were of the Brit Power Elite in more than just philosophizing--I mean check out Bertie's father, Lord Russell, a man crazed by his lust for women, to the point he contracted the syphilis that eventually muddled his brain and took away his tainted life.

Well, hell, here ya go, read about weird Alfred North Whitehead--his brother was the Anglican Bishop of Madras ("There once was a maid from Madras/Who had a magnificent ass/Not rounded and pink/Like you vulgar folks think/But with long ears, 4 legs, and ate grass")--and he started off an agnostic, then married an Irish-Catholic woman who forced him to dabble in Catholicism, and from there he went on to, he says, empirically digesting his thoughts into a God of his own creation, a God based on the Platonistic idea of their being no separation of body and soul--in other words, God is us--or God is within us--therefore God is our invention. This caused a separation between him and Bertrand Russell, a Power Elite Atheist, who thought Whitehead's idea was ridiculous and silly. These two like minds never again had anything to do with each other. Alfred North spent the last years of his life (he died in 1947 at 86) in Cambridge, Mass., first lecturing at Harvard (he also lectured at Princeton in 1929, the lecture from which The Function of Reason was taken), then retiring still living in Cambridge, holding forth a salon once a week that was open to and attended by Harvard students--sessions where Whitehead would spiel away his thoughts his reasonings. I'm just fascinated by his reasoning wherever it leads me. Sorry, here read all about the man:

From Wikipedia (who knows how correct it is; Wev)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead

Anyway, like I started off saying, I read this little book once a year--just suddenly seeing it there dusty on one of my shelves and then picking it up and blowing the dust off of it and opening it up and then catching myself reading it again. It opens with a short preface that tells you, "Reason is the self-discipline of the originative element in history. Apart from the operations of Reason, this element is anarchic." Uncontrolled reason. You dig what he's saying. That's what I find fascinating about mathematical minds--and damn, I wonder what happened to "Mathematica" in Canada--I'll have to Google her and see--she's much older and less cuter now I'm sure--back to my fascination with mathematical minds: I find them stimulating, like I said, wherever they lead me, like Whitehead's reasoning taking in all forms of reasoning from the theological to the evolutionary--I'm pretty secure in my disbeliefs--I am a solid Atheist--that's where my functioning reasoning has led me and kept me--ironically Whitehead's reasoning even on God keeps me faithfully disbelieving. In fact, if anyone read yesterday's post, you'll know I posted the Infidel argument that Jesus Christ ("Joe the Blessed" in Greek, the language of the Christian Holy Bible, which is actually just the so-called New Testament, the Old Testament being the Torah) and his invented life is totally fraudulent and nutjobby--and then thedailygrowlerhousepianist sent me the Jesuspuzzle.com pages--he's currently studying early Christianity and the origins of the Gospels, including the Gnostic Gospels--afterall, my man is a church music director--I'm impressed, aren't you? Like his fav American Idol, Charles Ives, my man is in the orgelloft wailing away with his anthems and doxologies--hell, he told me he's writing his own hymns now--Praise de Lawd and pass me a couple of those hot biscuits and that pork-drippings-gravy boat over here, if you would please!!!

Whitehead's premise in the first chapter of The Function of Reason declares that the function of reason is "the art of life." Whooo-boy, you see, I like that big broad statement--empirically that covers a lot of ground between when we human-monkeys evolved into being able to define ourselves and further define ourselves by turning our thinking into words and those words into language. I've been experimenting lately--and I'm even thinking of making a video of this--with using only my hands to talk. I know, sign language, blah, blah, blah, but, no, I don't mean sign language where the hands actually spell out words, I mean the hands actually talking and making sense--and no I don't mean the use of hands while actually speaking a language. NO, I mean just talking using only the hands and turning what they're saying into understandable phrase-like gestures. Like how would you teach a student physics using only your hands? I think it would be possible using only the hands and the physical objects used to do physical experiments--like teaching Einstein's E=MC-squared using only your hands--I suppose eventually I would have to incorporate a piece of chalk into my hands and then I could let my hands draw physical examples on a blackboard, though I couldn't use like the actual E=MC-squared on the board but a pictorial representation of it. But that's leaping over the paradigms of my original experiment--you see I'm beginning to reason about this--participating in the art of life--and I might amend Whitehead's "art of life" to "art of human life." Humans do reason using human calculations--like Americans reason in American English, even if you're foreign born and come here speaking only Sanskrit or Taureg, it don't matter, you soon have to reason in American English if you want to function at full reason over here--however, using the hands as your tongue overcomes that--hand phrases in hand language are compatible with whatever language your tongue speaks and your originality was formed in--or how elementary your American English is. Speak with your hands. Native Americans are experts at it. They had no written language for years--until white missionaries and Indian Bureau white guys started putting several of their tongues into a written language, but Native American languages evolved off their hand languages. I mean look how the Native American handsign for "I come in Peace" has been adopted--like raising your open-palmed hands in surrender when a hardboiled New York City cop is about to blow your brains out--"Whoaaa" you say with your hands, "Dude, look, I ain't got no weapon." Peace, brother. And check out how our young people use hand language, like their use of the old WWII V-for-Victory peace sign, which actually means Victory in War and not peace at all--or watch how they're using the old forefinger-and-little-finger up in the air alone--at the University of Texas that's the sign for "Hook 'em Horns"--the Texas mascot is the Longhorn steer whose big horns are symbolized by that hand phrase--but even NYC young people use the "hook 'em horns" symbol to mean "we got it under control"--or watch a hip-hop rapper use his hands--to push the words not at you for understanding but like hurling words as attention-getting rocks or self-advertisements at you.

You see how a dude like Whitehead starts the waters of your brain to boiling with reason?--and there was no confusion in his mind, even in dealing with something like Cardinal Newman's strange brand of Catholicism--Cardinal Newman an American by the way--or his dealing with Darwin's theory of evolution--the origin of the species and the evolutionist theory of "the survival of the fittest" that has evolved out of Darwinism. Whitehead counters with "The fallacy [of "the survival of the fittest" phrase] is the belief that fitness for survival is identical with the best exemplification of the Art of Life. In fact life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value. The art of persistence is to be dead."

Aha, so God becomes a qualifier in the art of life.

As Doodles Weaver once sang with Spike Jones's band, in their version of "The Man on the Flying Trapeze, "Holy Smoke, the Church Burned Down!" I like burning down churches with reason--or as Bob Marley sang, "I feel like bombin' a church."

Speaking of bombing churches, from thedailygrowlerhousepianist(&churchorganist) comes the JesusPuzzle: www.jesuspuzzle.com/ Praise ye the phony Lawd!!!

I could see that as jesuspizzle.com, too. But there I go reasoning again. I had an Economics professor in college who the first day of class wrote his name on the blackboard, turned around, faced us, and then shot us the finger--I mean a big solid up-yours finger, at which time he said, "This is the universal language--this right here, anywhere in the world you go, shoot this at them and they know exactly what you mean." He was a University of Chicago economist, too, and though I didn't go to Rockefeller's University in Chicago, I sure had a lot of University of Chicago professors in my college career--I was for a while an Urban Sociology student of Dr. Byron Munson (a protege of U of Chitown's famous Dr. Philip Hauser), and you can't study Urban Sociology without reading University of Chicago sociologists like E.W. Burgess whose 1925 "Concentric Circle" theory of Urban Planning was the cat's meow in that field for many years--a Chicago idea (I suppose you could argue with me on this): the Concentric Circle theory (Burgess was a Sociologist so his theory had to do with society and classes first of all)--as opposed to the Grid System of Urban environ--as per New York City. So check out Chicago next time you're looking at a map of that truly American city--you'll see starting at the Loop it spreading out in circles upward toward Milwaukee and south toward Indiana, east toward the Mississippi River and west, well, that's Lake Michigan, a true sociological boundary that looks like the ocean when you fly out of say Midway headed toward New York City and you fly out over its wavering width! Frank Lloyd Wright, a Chicagoan, used the Concentric Circle theory in planning his planned city he called Broadmoor.

Everything used to go in circles. Though nowadays, in this world of electronic linearism, most of our circular way of thinking has been reduced to parallel-line thinking.
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The Burgess concentric model was among the first attempts to investigate spatial patterns at the urban level (1925). Although the purpose of the model was to analyze social classes, it recognized that transportation and mobility were important factors behind the spatial organization of urban areas. The formal land use representation of this model is derived from commuting distance from the CBD, creating concentric circles. Each circle represents a specific socioeconomic urban landscape. This model is conceptually a direct adaptation of the Von Thunen's model to urban land use since it deals with a concentric representation.
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Shoot shoot the bird to the world, and remember, the Conservatives are like Christians, they are never wrong--no matter how backwards their laissez faire reasoning.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler