Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“[W]hen we survey the living world, animal and vegetable, there are bodies of all types. Each living body is a society, which is not personal. But most of the animals, including all the vertebrates, seem to have their social system dominated by a subordinate society which is ‘personal’… Thus in one sense a dog is…
What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in your hand Ah, what then? ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge Long ago, there lived far to…
“If Whitehead’s universe is really god-infused, the materialists say, then his speculative adventure in cosmology is for that reason also made irretrievably irrelevant for any modern, scientific, rational investigations of nature…The problem with this assessment of Whitehead’s scheme, as I understand it, is that the story of modern scientific rationality and its technological mastery over…
“Whether at a young age marveling alongside my sister at the swath of a clear cut forest for a power line in the forest, or remembering walking deep, deep into the state forest simply to make a decision regarding where I ultimately should go to college…the woods, the mountains, the trees, the animals, the plants,…
You’ve got to admit, reason itself is quite mysterious. Might it not even be referred to as supernatural? The knowledge gained by the scientist, if true, cannot without contradiction be collapsed into nature. How is it that the rational scientist claims the universe entirely lacks purpose and intelligence? What of the scientist’s own intelligence? Is…
For Whitehead there’s something important at stake in the framing of human experience in terms of the bifurcation of nature that Stengers wants us to pay attention to; namely, the bifurcation of nature requires a certain kind of sacrifice on behalf of human experience that we may not wish to accept. Stengers describes this sacrifice,…
…We exist simultaneously in cultural and natural ways that are inextricably tangled. We are always already situated in an intersubjective (and thereby already cultural), spatiotemporal, fleshy (and thereby already natural) world before we creatively adopt a personal position in it. Moreover, nothing determines us from the outside or inside, precisely because we are from the…
In current Western and Westernized societies, in addition to the scarcity of true maturity, many people of adult age suffer from a variety of adolescent psychopathoogies–incapacitating social insecurity, identity confusion, extremely low self-esteem, few or no social skills, narcissism, relentless greed, arrested moral development, recurrent physical violence, materialistic obsessions, little or no capacity for intimacy…
What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in you hand Ah, what then? Poem by Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Painting, Chalk…
In “The Canticle of the Sun,” Francis consistently uses the Italian preposition per, by which he is saying that God is praised through (not for) the very existence of the sun, moon, stars, wind, air, weather, water, fire and earth. This is significant and telling. Their very existence gives glory whether any human ever sees…