Lamedh

 

Your word, O LORD, is everlasting;
it is firmly fixed in the heavens.
Your faithfulness continues through all generations;
You established the earth, and it endures.
Your ordinances stand to this day,
for all things are servants to You.
If Your law had not been my delight,
then I would have perished in my affliction.
I will never forget Your precepts,
for by them You have revived me.
I am Yours; save me,
for I have sought Your precepts.
The wicked wait to destroy me,
but I will ponder Your testimonies.
I have seen a limit to all perfection,
but Your commandment is without limit.  Ps 119

 

 

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. 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, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it 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. It replaces in rational experience what has been submerged in the higher sensitive experience and has been sunk yet deeper by the initial operations of consciousness itself. The selectiveness of individual experience is moral so far as it conforms to the balance of importance disclosed in the rational vision; and conversely the conversion of the intellectual insight into an emotional force corrects the sensitive experience in the direction of morality. The correction is in proportion to the rationality of the insight . AN Whitehead, Process and Reality

Color coded

By now, the observant reader has noticed that we use colors to code the different phases of the 3e-cycle. Economy is BLUE. Ecology is GREEN. Education is RED. By doing so, we hope to highlight the distinct but successive and complementary functions of each phase in what we have elsewhere called the metabolism of the universe through which all ideas and actions must pass ... changing "color" as they go [Whitehead's concrescence].

In the drawings above, we see two versions of the ancient Hebrew letter LAMEDH from which we get our modern letter L.

• The first drawing is the original pictograph of a shepherd's staff which filled the symbol with meaning "teach, yoke, bind, toward". 
• If this is the ancient image of Education, what is being yoked or bound together in the act of teaching? Is the answer Economy and Ecology? "Toward" what is Education pushing/leading us?
  

• The second image is the modern rendering of LAMEDH which has sound but no significance and which moderns accordingly use
• mechanistically [ala the Cartesian and Newtonian determined individual particle extracted from its field] to compose their own words [nominalism] rather than
• organically [as part of the new Quantum Field Theory] to engage the broader reality of which we have lost sight because we have sadly [but not irredeemably] lost our memory of what the ancients seem to have understood before science was [according to Whitehead improperly and illogically] separated from religion [with which Whitehead claims science is irrevocably united in philosophy].
  

Can you begin to grasp the difference in the two ways to understand LAMEDH ... Education?

The limits of perfection

The psalmist introduces us to the "limits of perfection". By "perfection" he means our ideas and actions [ie. Economy] WHEN we engage in them AS IF they were perfect. If you object that none of us is silly enough to think our ideas and actions are really "perfect", you miss the point. When we engage in "science" [as distinct from "religion"], we unconsciously limit the scope of our considerations in order to clearly articulate working solutions. An example of this is the Enlightenment's greatest invention [I did not say discovery] ... Newtonian physics:

In the infancy of science, when the main stress lay in the discovery of the most general ideas usefully applicable to the subject matter in question, philosophy was not sharply distinguished from science. To this day, a new science with any substantial novelty in its notions is considered to be in some way peculiarly philosophical. In their later stages, apart from occasional disturbances, most sciences accept without question the general notions in terms of which they develop. The main stress is laid on the adjustment and the direct verification of more special statements. In such periods scientists repudiate philosophy; Newton, justly satisfied with his physical principles, disclaimed metaphysics.

The fate of Newtonian physics warns us that there is a development in scientific first principles, and that their original forms can only be saved by interpretations of meaning and limitations of their field of application --- interpretations and limitations unsuspected during the first period of successful employment. Whitehead, ibid

Education pushes back the limits

But, of course, knowledge of reality has no "limits" ... it is, as the psalmist says, "without limit" [omni-science] ... organic. ... and the role of Education, as both the ancient and the modern must conclude, is to broaden our limits [our Economy] and recover [ie. re-member] the totality [Ecology] lost by individual/particle selection. This is not only wise, it is [as the psalmist and Whitehead seem to agree] the basis of all reality and morality.

I hope you enjoy these thoughts as we see old and new come together before our eyes in a 3e-system cycle.