Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Yeah, so you know two or three people in a particular group who don’t fit a generalization? Who cares? The point of a generalization is to say what is true most of the time — the usefulness of a generalization lies precisely in the fact that it allows us to ignore the exceptions for the…
It is a basic tenet of systems theory that for a system to be optimized, its subsystems must be sub-optimized (their agency must be brought within the communal embrace of the higher holonic level of the system as a whole). When we look at the evolutionary system that is the spiral of development in consciousness…
“This is what Deleuze saw in Whitehead: that, in a creative world, “unification” is always “multiplication”—the creation of folds of difference. Any attempt to freeze this movement produces imperialism, that is, the “will to power” to conquer manifoldness. But the imperial desire for a “perfect” world “under control” only earns a dead world. It was…
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth. –Carl Gustav Jung I like listening to podcasts. One show in particular that I like is called “Get Up On This,” hosted by Jensen Karp and Matthew Robinson. In the show, Jensen…
“In order to show solidarity with the weak, God voluntarily empties Godself of power, freely chooses not to exercise this power, and this divine kenosis does not contradict omnipotence but manifests it. I do not travel down that path because it smacks of a ruse, a kind of docetism, in which weakness is an even…
Theopoetics guides a literary artist toward contextualizing experience and shepherds the intangibility of experience into art, turning confused isolation into a reach for the communal, all with an eye toward faith, hope, and love — charity in its true sense. It’s this act of making incarnate coupled with the intention of pursuing the divine that…
“As even Clayton himself has argued, there are “questions that science raises but cannot answer using its own resources.” In particular, he views quantum physics “as notorious for confronting us with philosophical questions that physics itself may never be able to answer…” This is where what Clayton calls a “hypothetical, pluralistic” metaphysics (like Barad and…
While our gridlocked government may be partially “representative” of our polarized culture, there are few who are happy about the situation. And it seems like the default assumption, and the position often repeated in the mainstream media, is that both sides are responsible, which leads to the conclusion that the appropriate remedy is for politicians…
The self or ego has always been a stumbling-block for Western philosophy because of its resistance to accommodation within its favored framework of substance-ontology. The idea that ‘the self’ is a thing (substance), and that whatever takes place in ‘my mind’ and ‘my thoughts’ is a matter of the activity of a thing of a…
“Marx’s innovation was to combine Smith and Feuerbach to derive an account of alienated labour. That is, the plight of the worker under capitalism is an instance of the way in which a person’s essence becomes detached from his or her existence; i.e. that workers live in a way that does not express their essence….