Category: poetry
-
Thinking with Emerson, Or how German Idealism Came to America
The Beacon of Mind: Reason and Intuition in the Ancient and Modern World (forthcoming).
-
Tolkien on mythopoetics
I just came across an apt addition to the discussion last week on myth and religion. In a letter to C. S. Lewis, Tolkien writes: “If God is mythopoeic, man must become mythopathic.” Given that all forms of literalism as regards the scientific or spiritual nature of reality are to be rejected, the only remaining…
-
Responding to Levi Bryant on the Question of Religion
I’ve copied my response to Levi below: I’m glad you are not reducing all religion to the sort of literalism we’re both trying to critique (you from a scientific standpoint aimed at religion, me from a spiritual standpoint aimed at scientism). Regardless of what the majority of “believers” may think about the ontological status of…
-
John Sallis’ Logic of Imagination as an Example of Etheric Imagination
Below is another section of my dissertation proposal. More to come… ……………………………………. John Sallis begins his Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (2000) by regretting the Husserlian phenomenological tradition’s tendency to subordinate imagination to pure perception in an effort to “[protect] the bodily presence of the perceived from imaginal contamination.”208 Sallis argues that…
-
Images of Earth and Eros in Walt Whitman’s Poetry
Images of Earth and Eros in Walt Whitman’s Poetry A Presentation by Matthew D. Segall at the 2013 Cosmology of Love Conference Come, said the Muse, Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted, Sing me the universal. In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and…
-
Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J. R. R. Tolkien
Yesterday I found myself reading The Silmarillion, an unfinished collection of Tolkien’s mythopoeic writings depicting the creation of Ëa and its passage through the first of the three ages of the world (The Lord of the Rings trilogy depicts events at the end of the third age). The stories, posthumously published by his son Christopher in 1977, are prefaced…
-
Continuum
Some good friends of mine will be featured in this film: Planetary Collective Presents: Continuum
-
Root Images in Philosophies of Difference
-
Fragment of a Dialogue: A Walk to Imagination’s Limits
This is an incomplete project that I may not be able to pick up for a while. Thought I’d post the fragment. It was inspired by Schelling’s dialogue Bruno. —————————————————– A Walk to Imagination’s Limits Chroma: We have chosen a wonderful evening to set out on a walk along the riverside. Don’t you think so, my friends?…
-
[Final Draft] Worldly Religion in Deleuze and Whitehead: On the Possibility of a Secular Divinity
Below I’ve written a paper using the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead to construct a secular divinity. For Deleuze, this is an especially serious act of buggery on my part. Deleuze of course approved of that method in his own projects, but I wonder if he would approve of the baby jesus…
-
Imagination in Philosophy (from NYT’s “The Stone”)
From a recent essay over at The Stone on NYT.COM by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone about philosophy and the poetic imagination: “…what makes these interpretive efforts poetic: They do not concern the ordinary significance of form in language. When we approach language prosaically, our focus is on arbitrary conventions that link words to things…
-
The New School Panel asks if Philosophy still matters, and if so, what its good for.
-
Petals Rising
I forgot about this short poem I penned back in August on the inside of the back cover of Ramey’s book after sitting on a bench intending to read in a rose garden in Golden Gate Park. It seems relevant to some of what I’ve covered above: I stand here watching rose petals fall. I pick up…
-
Cosmopolitical Theology: Violence, Value, and the Push for a Planetary People
This is a talk I gave back in September for my colleagues at CIIS during our annual retreat to Esalen in Big Sur, CA.
-
Thinking With Whitehead: Science, Sunsets, and the Bifurcation of Nature
Thinking with Whitehead: The Scientific Revolution and the Bifurcation of Nature The scientific revolution, beginning perhaps with Copernicus’ rediscovery of the heliocentric model of the solar system early in the 16th century, and culminating perhaps with Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion and universal gravitation towards the end of the 17th century, fundamentally…
-
Cosmic Self: a Uni-Verse
It is with my own self-consciousness that I must begin… but I will confess, I am not yet certain of my own beginning, or even of my own uncertainty. Already I seem to have said too much: “I am”–how do I know that? Do I really exist? Can I claim self-consciousness as “my own” if…
-
Margulis and the Psychedelic Eucharist
Here is Prof. Corey Anton lecturing on the recently deceased Lynn Margulis’ bio-philosophy. Towards the end of her book (co-authored with Dorian Sagan) What Is Life?, Margulis offers an analysis of the role of psilocybin in the evolution of mammalian consciousness. She brings up the usage of psychedelic fungi in ancient mystery cults just after sharing Socrates’…
-
Anthrodecentrism – the genesis and meaning of a word
I’m not one to claim ownership over my language. I have not yet succeeded in working off my debt to the language with which I speak. I still owe it everything. I suspect I will always owe it everything. Words exist in an ecology of knowledge, a gossipy network of promiscuous and often comedic-tragic ties. Words…
-
The Poetics of Cosmogenesis, or Cosmopoiesis
Jason/Immanent Transcendence has asked me to offer a Whiteheadian take on his recent posts (two examples are HERE, and, especially relevant, HERE) concerned with such ideas as purpose, process, form, time, and chance in John Dewey. Jason has also recently written about a Deweyan approach to the place of values in nature while in conversation…
-
Reflections on the Astrality of Materiality
Levi Bryant/Larval Subjects has a few new post up (HERE and HERE) about the contingently constructed concept of “nature” and about his own flavor of monistic materialism. Bryant and I have argued in the past about his materialism and its lack of formal and final causality. I’ve been claiming that ideas and purposes are real,…
Footnotes2Plato 