This post continues from the previous in this series, which looked at integral ecophilosopher Sean Esbjorn-Hargens’s writing on the ontology of climate change. Here I examine the relationship between leading integral theorist Ken Wilber, integralist Esbjorn-Hargens, and process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. It’s a little difficult to separate Wilber’s and Esbjorn-Hargens’s views on Whitehead. I […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
Eco-onto-politics 3: Wilber, Integralism, & Whitehead
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged integral theory, integralism, nonduality, object-oriented philosophy, spirituality, transpersonal psychology, Whitehead, Wilber on April 16, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Slice of time
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Bateson, Ontology, epistemology, Peirce, rigpa, time, Whitehead on April 10, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Chris Vitale has a nice post up on Deleuze’s Bergsonian notion of the image as a “slice of time,” or a “slice of the world” — which for Deleuze amounts to more or less the same thing. In a similar spirit, I thought I’d post briefly about a Whiteheadian notion of time. Normally when we […]
iLAND’s perceptual alchemy
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged dance, eco-art, iLAND, Monson, New York City, performance on March 30, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Some of today’s most important eco-artists — people like Patricia Johanson, Betsy Damon, and others — work on a landscape scale with interdisciplinary groups of participants to render socio-ecological change into aesthetically tangible and artistically significant forms. Experimental dancer and choreographer Jennifer Monson’s work falls into this category as well, though, as dance, it tends […]
Enchantments to come
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged biosemiosis, disenchantment, enchantment, Kauffman, Kerouac, religion, semiosis on March 21, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Thoughts for a spring equinox… Complexity theorist (and colleague of mine here at the University of Vermont) Stuart Kauffman takes stock here of the Enlightenment and sings of a re-enchantment to come. Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I’ve frequently explored in my writing (see here for a […]
Artmonks: children of Thoreau & Whitehead
Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged art, artmonks, monasticism, Peirce, Thoreau, Whitehead on March 21, 2011 | 5 Comments »
If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately […] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard […]
Religion & the Japanese tragedy
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged animism, eventology, imagination, Japan tsunami, nature, paganism, pantheism, religion, ritual, Shinto, spirituality on March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities. You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized […]
On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged animism, anthropomorphism, biosemiotics, cosmopolitics, Descola, Latour, panpsychism, Peirce, Stengers, Whitehead on January 10, 2011 | 15 Comments »
Since there isn’t much available in English about Philippe Descola’s writings on animism, I thought I would share a piece of the cosmopolitics argument I mentioned in my last post. It will appear, in modified form, in the concluding chapter of the SAR Press volume mentioned there. Most of the volume will consist of ethnographic […]
Religious (re)turns in the wake of global nature
Posted in Cultural politics, Spirit matter, tagged cosmopolitics, cultural ecology, ecology, environmental philosophy, religion, religion and ecology on January 8, 2011 | 4 Comments »
I’m reorganizing the piece I wrote for the School of Advanced Research workshop on science, nature, and religion so that part of it will fit into the introduction of the book we are producing (which I’m co-writing with the workshop organizer and chair, Catherine Tucker) and the rest will make up the book’s concluding chapter. […]
Mondrian in Avalon
Posted in Spirit matter on January 6, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Tim Morton has kindly posted about the cover art Indiana University Press gave my nearly decade-old (but none the worse for wear) book, Claiming Sacred Ground, which he likes for its “polyvalent symbolism” incorporated into a Mondrianesque design. The photo in the midst of that design is one I took looking up to the top […]
…& beginnings (a toast to this moment)
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter on December 31, 2010 | 5 Comments »
A process-relational buddhontology sees every moment as a moment of grasping, or prehension, that begins with an open, spacious cognizance, gathers/feels/responds to what has arisen before it, and ends in the satisfaction of its own concrescence. When the object of that satisfaction is unrecognized as what it is — as the immanent flow of desiring-production, […]
Happy solstice
Posted in Spirit matter on December 21, 2010 | 3 Comments »
What was the Earth protecting the moon from last night anyway? Ah, the solstice sun… First time in 456 years, apparently. Happy Solstice. More here.
happy hallowe’en
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged Bateson, ecological pilgrimage, green pilgrimage, Heidegger, paganism on October 31, 2010 | 1 Comment »
As occasionally happens, I was invited to speak last week at a local Unitarian Universalist service (in Stowe, Vermont). Since today/night is Hallowe’en/Samhain and that’s part of what I spoke about, I thought I would share a brief summary of the talk, which was called “Hallowed Ground, Sacred Space, and the Space Between the Worlds.”