Lancelot Law Whyte: Process

Lancelot Law Whyte was Scottish industrial engineer. Explore interesting quotes on process.
Lancelot Law Whyte: 124   quotes 0   likes

“Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Archimedes or the Future of Physics (1927)
Context: The question of the reversibility of natural processes provides the key to a great intellectual struggle which is now behind the complexities of philosophic and scientific thought. The issue can be formulated thus: Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity. For just as Einstein made his advance by analysing conceptions such as simultaneity, which had been thought to be adequately understood for the purposes of experimental science, so the next development of physical theory will probably be made by carrying on the analysis of time from the point at which Einstein left it.

Question , Nature , Time

“The unitary system of thought has three main characteristics which distinguish it from many other systems: it deals with the form of systems rather than with their component parts; it recognizes a process of development as prior to the apparently static aspects of nature; and it is unitary, emphasizing one general form beneath all apparent dualism.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 21-22

Nature , Parting

“The internal tendencies of every organism, if isolated, lead to its disintegration. But the processes of the wider system sustain and modify those internal tendencies by "nourishing" them and gradually increasing the mutual conformity of organism and environment.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 36

“No scientist has yet provided an acceptable definition of "mind" or "mental" that reveals the character of "unconscious mental processes," and no physicist a lucid definition of "elementary particles" that shows how they can appear or disappear, and why there are so many.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

Appearance

“This essay touches bottom for twentieth century man. …it is one many signals marking the end of "Antiman," with his hopeless relativism, and announcing "Unitary Man," …able to be more harmonious because he has become aware of the ordering processes at all levels in nature, without and within. …here at last subject and object are potentially fused in a single insight.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

Nature

“By openly recognizing the inescapable rhythm of harmony and tension which is the form of all human processes unitary man achieves a far-reaching emancipation. Much that was concealed can now stand in the open. The neutrality and objectivity of the quantity symbolism seemed to dissociated man a guarantee of the liberation of the mind from anthropomorphic and subjective illusions. But at deeper level it expressed merely the desire to escape inner conflict in a harmony of static form. This escape was wholly illusory; the superficial neutrality of science left it open to abuse, and the spirit of man has been punished by its attempt to escape struggle in an intellectual harmony. Unitary man renounces such separation and partakes in the development of the whole. Man finds himself in the universal process, by finding the universal process within himself. Tension continues, but henceforward his struggle is with, not against, the process of nature.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 276

Nature , Universe , Science

“More comprehensive process than those of the conscious mind control human destiny.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 151

“The ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness represent attempts to interpret the process of development as a group of tendencies permanently directed towards certain permanent and universal ends. But human behaviour is not directed towards unchanging ends, not even towards those temporary ideals which each community sets up for itself. The formative tendency is displayed, not in any steady process of definite orientation, but in a rhythmic sequence of transformation which cannot be represented as tending towards any particular final condition.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 261-262

Truth , Beauty , Communication , Universe

“The idealist seeks the security of a static harmony, and therefore considers every tension evil. Unitary man recognizes tension as an essential feature of the formative process operating in man. Man creates in resolving tensions, but never brings them to an end. The contrasts of past, present and future forms provide an inexhaustible source of tension.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 274

Evil , Past , Future

“The term dissociation is here used for a condition in which the organizing process in an individual fail to develop one characteristic form, and two or more mutually incompatible systems of behavior compete for control.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 62

Behavior

“I consider that Curie's Principle has two major consequences:
First: It shows that the class of processes which can be isolated for causal representation, not requiring the inference of external causes, is wider than the class of energetically closed systems. One-way processes in which the system loses energy can be isolable, in the sense that they can be given complete representation without taking their environment into account.
Second: It suggests the possibility of a geometrical physics treating 3D spatial relations, i. e., angles or lengths, as primary. Just as statistical mechanics, the theory of crystal symmetry, and Group theory in quantum mechanics, are useful without assumptions about forces, so Curie's principle, with an appropriate model, can determine the path of a one-way process without such assumptions…”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Pierre Curie's Principle of One Way-Process (1970)

Way , Sense

“The failure of idealistic thought lay partly in the fact that it did not recognize that every ideal is linked to its shadow. […] Whatever is incomplete is thus always complemented by its contrary; the penalty for any principle which fails to express the whole is the necessity to co-exist with its opposite. Partial love implies partial hate; spirit, sensuality; self-sacrificing compassion, sadism. The denial of any aspect sharpens and preserves it, while its acceptance transforms it by bringing it within the process of the whole.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 254

Love , Hate , Penalty , Failure

“In Plato we find the essential form of the European attitude: the intellectual rejection of the phenomenal world of process on account of its sordid ruthlessness and the emancipation of the spirit within its own realm of permanent intellectual clarity and harmony. The ancient, aristocratic, tragic consciousness disappears; man sets out to console his spirit and protect his body by the exploitation of static ideas.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 201

World , Idea

“In separating consciousness from the material world Plato has to ascribe the formative faculty of the mind to consciousness, whereas the formative processes of the human system are largely unconscious, that is, they operate below the dominant processes of the human hierarchy and only come to attention at special moments.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 203

World

“It is impossible today to escape the need for a general awareness of the phasing of the historical process. In the past great cultures could be created unconsciously, the organic processes forming the new patterns without man's attention being drawn to their wider significance. But the unconscious phase of history is now past. The acceleration of social change which has resulted from the attention paid to specialized techniques can only be controlled by paying attention also to the general formative processes which in earlier times were unconscious. Consciousness of specialized technical methods must be balanced by consciousness of general developing forms.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 167

History , Change , Time , Past

“Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the process of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 1

Search , Failure , Thinking

“The idea of the unconscious mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective around 1900, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large number of individuals of varied interests in many lands.”

Lancelot Law Whyte book The Unconscious Before Freud

The Unconscious Before Freud (1967)

Imagination , Idea , Effort

“The dualistic-static form of thought which marks the European tradition attains its most radical expression in Descartes. Whatever lip service we pay to other ideas, and however certain we are of its falsity, after three centuries we still behave as if we lived in a Cartesian world. The static clarity of Cartesian thought inevitably fascinated and imposed on beings who were so badly in need of harmony and so ready to deny process in the search for it. The very clarity of the method exposes its own errors, but we are accustomed to them and like them, for they satisfy our vanity. It has been evident for a century that unity is necessary to thought, and that process is inherent in nature, but western man has preferred to perish in his dualism rather than give up the proud autonomy of reason and risk losing his identity in the universal process.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 214

World , Error , Search , Idea

“Unitary man escapes these confusions through his recognition that one factor is of supreme importance: the maturity proper to man can only come through the experience of adult unity. This experience may come in many ways, but it means that the individual has, for the moment, outgrown the sense of any division, either within himself of from others, through a mature relations to at least one other person. Tension is inherent in the process, but tension does not become frustrating conflict if the overriding unity is realized.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 255

Way , Sense , Personality

“Man set out on a two-thousand-year trial of a particular method of differentiation, adapting the structure of his mental processes, conscious and unconscious, to a certain general form. We need to consider only the most general characteristics of this form, and for the purpose of this analysis, there reduce to two. Thought may be either unitary or dualistic (since other pluralistic forms may be neglected), and it may be either process or static. These two pairs produce four combinations or types of thought: unitary-process, unitary-static, dualistic-process and dualistic-static. The first and the last are the most stable and common types; the unitary-static and dualistic-process forms are less frequent and may be regarded as anomalous forms appearing at times of transition.”

Lancelot Law Whyte

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 193-194

Appearance , Time