Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Evil is not eliminated by a destructive retributive judgment, but by an aesthetic synthesis of intensity, order, and harmony. Whitehead’s God is not a cosmic judge; rather, God is a cosmic artist. The many poor paintings of individual lives and events are transformed in a continuous aesthetic process of harmonizing the parts with an ideal…
Regular Tendencies Settled Into I tell myself to think of something else and find that I’m back there with you, alone, by the window talking to the wind. A lonely and anxious fear. Tightness that I would like to untie, but the fretful anguish arrives; natal homing, not unlike a salmon riding on the back…
“In light of this, we think that the picture emerging from evolutionary and developmental biology is – contrary to the widespread opinion among contemporary philosophers – one that very much supports the notion of human nature, just not an essentialist one. Human nature is best conceived of as a cluster of homeostatic properties, ie of…
“I would say that selfhood as we humans normally conceive of it emerges as we master language. As Whitehead says in “Adventures of Ideas” (I summarize), the account of the 6th day should be written, “He gave them language, and they became souls.” I think we can make distinctions between degrees of nonconscious experience (particles,…
“In Adventures of Ideas, which I found to be the most accessible read of Whitehead’s works, he discusses in more detail his thoughts of eros and its relationship to God. Eros is the power in the universe urging toward the realization of ideals, and as such it plays a major role in his later work….
“To put this into the context of a life narrative, my dreams do not belong only to myself but to all of the people and non-human things and processes with which I share this earth. The earth flows through me, and my vision of the world, in turn, reverberates back out into my surroundings. Strictly…
I may certainly be misunderstanding the concept (or understanding it incompletely) but for me, as a process-relational thinker, the pejorative ontotheological criticism/dismissal has never bothered me much in the first place, and as a panpsychically-oriented, panentheistic religious naturalist I again don’t care. A) in the process-relational conception of things the “ontic” category isn’t really meaningful,…
“Prehensions are the way that what is there becomes something here. A prehension is the bond between two actual occasions. The past occasion shares in the constitution of the new occasion…” “Suppose you are listening to music. You hear the final chord of a musical phrase. But why do you hear it as the final…
“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…
“But there is no society in isolation…The environment, together with the society in question, must form a larger society in respect to more general characters than those defining the society from which we started. Thus we arrive at the principle that every society requires a social background, of which it is itself a part.” —…