Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead

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8 responses to “Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead”

1. 

   Eilif Verney-Elliott

   December 18, 2013

   Beautiful painting and a great dissertation – printing it for preservation and research. Thank you!

   Reply
2. 

   SFFS

   December 23, 2013

   Matt– wow!

   so many great things here. wonderful subject..can’t wait to hear about esoteric sources of Schelling/Whitehead since Plato. Dietrich von Engelhardt’s chapter “Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism” in Faivre and Needleman’s Modern Esoteric Spirituality introduced me to Naturphilosophie…great read.

   Something about nature as telos…

   “The history of human beings, races, and peoples is generally associated with nature by way of the metaphysical identity of nature and spirit and also indirectly at the level of phenomena. All the epochs of history are given a relative value; the idea of the whole development is decisive. With the end there is a return to the beginning and the totality is realized; the original is found in the copy . The “kingdom of God” is to prevail in a “natural world” which is in the process of establishing itself; art, science, and faith are to become one with life. Like the natural development, the historical development substantially has its foundation at the ideal level; concrete factors are recognized, and finality is set above causality; history is the history of ideas.” 116

   One thing I immediately think of reading Schelling’s “’world-soul/universal organizing principle,’ Steiner’s ‘etheric formative forces,’ and Whitehead’s ‘evental ether/Creativity’ as typical of the process-relational imagination,” is Sheldrake as a modern complement to Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead, with Formative Causation/Morphic Resonance offering a similar alternative (ecologized, pan-psychic) modernity to mechanistic science. Science (Naturphilosophie) Set (Process) Free (Etheric Imagination)?

   I’ve only skipped through the abstract/chapter breakdowns but I was curious why the esoteric Christian imagination wasn’t given a specific category in your history section. Early Church fathers or early gnostic/Hermetic texts might be a fun addition, or spreading interpretations of Christ over a longer period… Hildegard? Eckhart? Conway? Steiner’s image of Christ as etheric mediator between spirit and nature, the spiritual technology of an esoteric cosmology?

   Other thoughts you spark is Swimme’s seamlessness/cosmic powers as a lens for III.B (Ether in Modern Scientific Theory), and Jungian interpretation of integrated opposites in the emerald tablet. What are your sources for Steiner’s etheric imagination? Any parallels to Jung’s Active Imagination?

   Don’t think you need any suggestions–your work is brilliantly engaging and a philosophical wonderland. It is looking like it will be a beautiful piece of art.

   P.S> your appendices are gold 🙂

   Reply
3. 

   Tusar N. Mohapatra

   December 27, 2013

   Reblogged this on Skylight.

   Reply
4. 

   m.

   December 28, 2013

   “Ideas are not merely represented inside an individual conscious mind, they are detonated in the
   imaginal depths of the world itself. Exploding Ideas seed symbolic vibrations that reverberate
   along the cosmic membrane (or “plane of immanence”) and unfold at the level of
   representational consciousness as a profound complicity between mind and nature: Ideas
   generate synchronicities…”

   Reply
5. 

   Chen

   January 1, 2014

   I rather like your appendices, Matt. As a lay criticism, I’d say I’m more partial to Schickler’s method. Your approach is fascinating, pulsating with ideas, concepts, and new terminologies forcing the reader to dive in with you. Schickler, on the other hand, lays out each argument in much detail making it easier, I think, to follow him to rather bold conclusions. Interesting contrast.

   As to other sources, I wonder if you have read the authors of The Nature institute http://www.natureinstitute.org/index.htm. Craig Holdredge has a book called “Thinking Like a Plant: A Living Science for Life ” but the authors here draw from Goethe/Steiner/Barfield. There work is directly engaged with Science as such and a concrete example of a different approach to, for example, the life sciences.

   Reply
6. 

   reciprocitylaws

   March 3, 2014

   Reblogged this on L'horreur islamique.

   Reply
7. 

   Distilling my dissertation topic—>Etheric Imagination in an Ontology of Organism: Towards a Planetary Philosophy | Footnotes 2 Plato

   May 21, 2014

   […] First, a few orientating quotations from the thinkers I will be boiling together in the alchemical vessel of my dissertation. […]

   Reply
8. 

   Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead | Henosophia TOPOSOPHIA μαθεσις uni√ersalis τοποσοφια MATHESIS οντοποσοφια ενοσοφια

   August 10, 2016

   […] Source : Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead […]

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