Whitehead’s Universe · Chapter 2: Ancient Intuitions of Flux and Permanence
Is reality a river or a mountain? Change or permanence?
In this second conversation, Andrew Davis and I trace an intuition far older than Whitehead: that all things flow. We travel from Lao Tzu and Confucius to the Buddha, from Heraclitus to Plato and Aristotle, and find that every age has wrestled with the same tension between what changes and what abides.
Whitehead found the whole problem of metaphysics in two lines of a hymn: “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide.” The first line holds on to what is permanent. The second sets it amid the flux. The two, he says, cannot be torn apart.
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If you’d rather watch, this conversation is also on YouTube. A new chapter arrives every Tuesday.
