Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“The answer to bad speech, we are told, is more speech. The only way that tired bromide could be true, though, would be if it were possible for the bad speech to be definitively rejected through reasoned argument. That is to say, free speech can only be the solution if the result of the ongoing…
“The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home…
“Communotheism is a divine communalism. “Divine communalism is the position that the Divine is a community of gods who are fundamentally related to one another and ontologically equal while at the same time distinct from one another by their personhood and functions”. In communotheism, there is immanence in that there is radical relationality among the…
“It’s what I like to call ‘retrospective induction.’ Working backward from your experience all the way down in nature. So [the question is] can you find dimensions of your experience spread out through the natural world all the way down to the lowest level of things, whatever they are? […] And the answer is, yes,…
“The basic outline of Hartshorne’s aesthetic theory is the first task…The basic insight is that beauty is a mean among four intersecting poles of relation. On the x axis is the relation of depth, sublimity at one extreme and superficiality at the other, while on the y axis the relations of total unity and utter…
“As the philosopher Rae Langton argues, we can also ‘undo’ hateful speech from the inside, by dismantling the conditions needed for the speech act to have its force in the first place. As we saw, some speech acts require the speaker to have authority. And some presuppose content that gets smuggled into the ‘conversational score’….
“The problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. When I sprain my ankle, a stout stick may help me walk, and I…
“Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal,” meaning they die from disease, injury, or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old…
“Brightness and illumination are forces which can be equally as hostile to humankind as blinding darkness, under the correct circumstances. The fear and power of God’s Kingdom is revealed in hideous, brutal light, a ray of harshness which reveals ugliness, impurity, and dirt without concern for the results of such unkind exposure. Light, in Western…
“Our species’ ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology, that is, by the idea that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s panexperientialist cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on…