Diary

Faithful to Appearances and to Common Sense: Goethe, Whitehead, Bergson, Schelling and Teleology

“Goethe described his color theory as a “sensory-moral” account of natural phenomena such that the “physical laws” those phenomena “obey” are seen to emerge from out of one’s conscious perceptions themselves, rather than being imposed upon them from outside as in Newton’s mechanistic theories. Goethe’s scientific method “makes phenomena transparent to their own lawfulness,” as…

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Every Moment is a Loss and Every Moment is a Gain: More on Ontic-Shock, Psychoanalysis & Perpetual Perishing-Birthing

“One pulse of enjoyment follows another, and, as their number grows, all the pulses form the serial society we call the soul. It is like a growing pile of coins. Each pulse takes in all the frozen data from its predecessors and adds novel feelings of its own. The occasion does not passively copy the…

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I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her: LeRon Shults, Adaptive Atheism, Science, and Human Development

“I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.” –Arthur C. Clarke I recently listened to another great interview with theologian/philosopher, LeRon Shults. Every time I listen to LeRon he challenges me and gets me thinking. I really appreciate this about him. Reflecting back, though, every time I hear LeRon talk about his…

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One Possible Solution to the Trump Mess…?

“No matter how politically successful either the left or the right becomes, our democracy will always have some version of the other side.” –Steve McIntosh I’ve been reading a lot of lengthy, in-depth write-ups lately claiming to have diagnosed the Trump phenomenon. Two of the better ones I’ve read were written by Amanda Taub, at Vox,…

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“Lack” is The Wrong Word: Psychoanalysis, Sickness, Despair, and Demanding a Root Canal When a Filling Will Do

“One of Nietzsche’s objections to Christianity was, he said, that  Christianity depends on the notion that Nature has brought forth this sick creature of which it (Christianity) is the cure; and I think psychoanalysis sounds like that. It’s brought forth something sick, something “lacking” of which it (psychoanalysis) is the cure. “Lack” is the absence…

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What we take for granted frames the size of our concerns.

“These statistics definitely do not prove that animus or madness has ended. No decent person would deny that violence is still much too high everywhere…Still, the big picture of postwar history shows significant improvements in nearly all indicators of lived human experience. The average life span of humans is today longer than it has ever…

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Reflections on Nature, Super-Nature, Eternal Objects, Thumbnail Sketches, and the Cosmic Animal

“It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration.” –Whitehead … “It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is…

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The quest for certainty is futile, and yet fruitful life requires convictions.

“Henry Nelson Wieman’s greatest contribution, in my opinion, is his empirical demonstration that the process of creative transformation is one that can be empirically described and that this description shows that, although it can be facilitated and served, it cannot be managed or controlled by human beings. On the other hand, I concluded that Wieman’s…

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