Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Difference is endless, and so we are endlessly—infinitely—tangled in it.” –Catherine Keller It struck me recently that All Lives Matter, the defiant, pious, racist push-back to the very important Black Lives Matter movement, should also be filed under the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is one of my favorite Whiteheadian theories;…
Meaning runs far deeper than designation. We will never be able to think our connection to reality if we think of reality as a collection of things, because meaningful experience is about more than things. Experience is constituted by events. The ontology of an event cannot be captured by the mental representation of material things…
“So long as I myself am identical with Nature, I understand what a living nature is as well as I understand my own life…As soon, however, as I separate myself, and with me everything ideal from nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object, and I cease to comprehend how a life outside me…
“The soul is nothing else than the succession of my occasions of experience, extending from birth to the present moment.” —Whitehead Talking about the soul is confusing. I believe my earliest understanding of the soul was instilled in me by my mother at a fairly young age. Hers was a very Jewish understanding of the…
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” — Isaiah 45:7 I’ve been listening and reading a lot about the Devil in relation to Christian theology lately. Yesterday I listened to the “Devilpalooza” episode of Homebrewed Christianity which featured Richard Beck talking about…
“Goethe described his color theory as a “sensory-moral” account of natural phenomena such that the “physical laws” those phenomena “obey” are seen to emerge from out of one’s conscious perceptions themselves, rather than being imposed upon them from outside as in Newton’s mechanistic theories. Goethe’s scientific method “makes phenomena transparent to their own lawfulness,” as…
“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…
“Henry Nelson Wieman’s greatest contribution, in my opinion, is his empirical demonstration that the process of creative transformation is one that can be empirically described and that this description shows that, although it can be facilitated and served, it cannot be managed or controlled by human beings. On the other hand, I concluded that Wieman’s…
“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…
“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…