dissertation progress…

Below is the table of contents of my substantially revised and extended draft. Also some excerpts that have been important for me.

“The Cosmotheandric [sic] vision is the most obvious human experience, so obvious that it becomes an obstacle to see it once we begin to specialize in our knowledge and forget the whole…The vision of primordial Man [sic], and I suspect our first vision as children as well, is an undiscriminated view of the whole. To see parts as parts presupposes already the view of a certain totality of which the parts are parts. One of the most common data of which humanity is aware is not the notion of Being but the experience of Life. We experience ourselves as living, and we see life everywhere. Reality is not a dead thing.” -Raimon Panikkar

“Whenever the light of that revelation faded and humans knew things not from the All, but from other things, not from their unity but from their separation, and in the same fashion wanted to conceive themselves in isolation and segregation from the All, you see science desolated amid broad spaces. With great effort, a small amount of progress is made, grain of sand by grain of sand, in constructing the universe. You see at the same time the beauty of life disappear, and the diffusion of a wild war of opinions about the primary and most important things, as everything falls apart into isolated details.” -Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

“There is a unity in the universe, enjoying value and (by its immanence) sharing value. For example, take the subtle beauty of a flower in some isolated glade of a primeval forest. No animal has ever had the subtlety of experience to enjoy its fully beauty. And yet this beauty is a grand fact in the universe. When we survey nature and think however flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders, and when we realize how incapable the separate cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect—then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our consciousness. That is the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred, which is at the foundation of al religion.” -Alfred North Whitehead

Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead

Abstract  3

Acknowledgements  4

Introduction: Imagining Cosmos, Theos, and Anthropos in Post-Kantian Process Philosophy  5

Chapter 1: Kant as Guardian of the Threshold of Imagination  10

1.1 Whitehead, Schelling, and the Aftermath of Kant  16

1.2 The Kantian Mode of Thought  23

1.2.1 Thinking  26

1.2.2 Desiring  35

1.2.3 Feeling  38

Chapter 2: Descendental Philosophy and Aesthetic Ontology: Beyond the Kantian Mode of Thought  49

2.1 Aesthetic Ontology and “the innocence of becoming” in Nietzsche’s Pluralist Perspectivism  62

2.2 Aesthetic Ontology as Elemental Phenomenology  73

2.3 Aesthetic Ontology as Transcendental Empiricism  77

2.4 Towards a Descendental Aesthetic  89

Chapter 3: The Inversion of Kant: Towards an Organic Cosmology  109

3.1 The Refutation of Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism”: From Subject-Substance Correlation to Process-Relational Creativity  126

3.2 From Geometric Conditions of Possibility to Genetic Conditions of Actuality  143

Chapter 4: Etheric Imagination in Naturphilosophie: Towards a Physics of the World-Soul 152

4.1 Traces of the Ether in Kant’s Opus Posthumum  156

4.2 Etheric Imagination in Schelling and Whitehead  167

4.3 Nature Philosophy as “Spiritual Sensation”  175

4.4 Etheric Imagination and Vegetal Metaphysics  182

Chapter 5: Worldly Religion in Whitehead, Schelling, and Deleuze: Towards an Incarnational Process Philosophy  199

Bibliography  221