Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“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…
“Art makes sense of the world through a material process – some thing is the end result of the artistic act. Whether a story, a painting, a song, a rock sculpted to create a new form – there are not neat, easily delineated distinctions argued within discreet sections and paragraphs – a process of dissection…
“My view is that the whole of Western Philosophy has assumed that the basic way in which we know the World, and anything outside of ourselves, is through vision. I know there were blind poets but I don’t think there were ever any blind philosophers, and I think that’s a great loss…the Bible is not…
I listened to a great podcast with Peter Cave recently that dealt with philosophical paradoxes. A paradox, for those who don’t know, is a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd, but in reality expresses a possible truth. One example that they used in the cast caught my attention. It is called the Paradox…
“When the “One” becomes invisible again, this is really not about the loss of monism, but of dualism. The disappearance of dualism is really a condition for the liberation of multitude. Gilles Deleuze has the formula that as soon as dualism vanishes “monism is pluralism.” The same strategy, I think, appears in Loomer’s theopoetic language…
A wolf came upon a lamb who had wondered too far away from the security of the fold. Instead of simply attacking, the wolf resolved to justify to the lamb why it was that it should be eaten. ‘Last year, you grossly insulted me’, said the wolf. ‘Impossible’ cried the lamb, ‘I was only born…
“The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the employers “exclusively” receive, the economy has a capitalist structure. So long as it is exclusively…
“Tertullian, an early Christian theologian, summed up what he regarded as the putrid nature of women’s bodies when he described women as a “temple built over a sewer.” Tertullian was thoroughly familiar with Greek philosophy, though he mostly rejected their views on metaphysics. But in regard to women, the Aristotelian strain of misogyny seeps through….
“We don’t really fit the categories of the West, and I’m ok with that. The Torah calls us an ‘Am,’ which loosely translates ‘a people,’ but it’s a Hebrew term, it has its own valence. So, Judaism is a nexus of history, religion, peoplehood, culture, shared destiny…I think in some ways, ethnicity rose again in…
“Consciousness is not in the head. Consciousness is an emergent, symbiotic process that is planetary in extent.” I’m really curious to read Kester Brewin’s new book about technology and transcendence titled Getting High (due to be published soon I suppose), but I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed to pick up a technophobe/Luddite…