Creatively Advancing into Novelty
If I were to quickly describe to someone what I thought good, healthy religion was I would say this: religion is one part art, one part play, and one part contemplation. So, religion is art in the sense that it taps into that same, beautiful, liminal space that good art taps into; I like the…
“In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes argues that writing destroys every voice and point of origin. This is because it occurs within a functional process which is the practice of signification itself…A writer, therefore, does not have a special genius expressed in the text, but rather, is a kind of craftsman who is skilled…
“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others” –Nelson Mandela With all that’s been going on lately regarding the evocation of “free speech” from hate groups on the right, I wanted to jot down some more reflections…
“When we contrast the process self of Whitehead and Confucius to the substantial self, either Greco-Roman or Indian, we immediately see the psychological and philosophical advantages of the former. When Epictetus, for example, reflects about the nature of the self he discovers the true self, one that never sleeps and is never compromised by the…
“If the nature of reality is processual and relational, then a diplomatic approach to truth is the only adequate way to respond to it. With every encounter with other psyches, we make the truth anew. Reality doesn’t just sit there waiting for the most clear-headed intellect to uncover. Reality is participatory and co-created, not just…
“Everything we know about the adolescent brain, in particular, would suggest that the school day ought to start much later in the morning, if not after lunch. That’s a simple example of the way that schools can actually work against the optimal development of the brain. There’s also the fact that for a very long…
“The field of psychology, let alone psychoanalysis, is largely unaware of the magnitude of Whitehead’s contributions to philosophical psychology. But surprisingly, so is the field of philosophy. Unless you are a fervent Whiteheadian immersed in the minutia of process studies, Whitehead’s contributions to human psychology largely remain eclipsed by his other bodies of work that…
“Embodied mind theory and process theology lend themselves to an appreciation of metaphorical thinking, which takes concepts from one domain and links them with another, forming what Whitehead calls blended contrasts. The metaphors then become means by which subjects can be understood that could not be understood in more literal thinking. […] But process theology…
“But Nietzsche’s influence saturated Rand’s writing in a deeper way, one emblematic of the overall trajectory of the right since its birth in the crucible of the French Revolution. Rand was a lifelong atheist with a special animus for Christianity, which she called the “best kindergarten of communism possible.” Far from representing a heretical tendency…
“To see why the quantum state might represent what someone knows, consider another case where we use probabilities. Before your friend rolls a die, you guess what side will face up. If your friend rolls a standard six-sided die, you’d usually say there is about a 17 percent (or one in six) chance that you’ll…