Category: Religion
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Latour annunciating his religion…
“Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame, or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate” (2004) by Bruno Latour There is nothing extravagant, spiritual, or mysterious in beginning to describe religious talk in this way.We are used to other, perfectly mundane forms of speech that are evaluated not by their correspondence with any state of affairs either, but by the quality…
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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…
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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…
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Reflections on nihilism as a belief system
Levi Bryant initiated a string of blog posts on nihilism with his “axioms for a dark ontology.” Attempts at Living followed HERE, and Bill Rose Thorn HERE. Both of them accept Bryant’s ontological purposelessness, but raise the important issue of developing a “post-nihilistic praxis” (see this great post by Michael/Archive Fire from last year on what…
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Robert Romanyshyn’s “alchemical hermeneutics” as the foundation of a method in the participatory study of esotericism
Romanyshyn’s alchemical hermeneutics as the foundation of a method in the participatory study of esotericism Robert Romanyshyn has developed a depth psychological method informed by hermeneutic phenomenology but ultimately rooted in alchemy. In approaching my research on the etheric imagination, I’ve turned to Romanyshyn’s method of alchemical hermeneutics because it allows for the retrieval of…
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Lecture by Prof. Jacob Sherman @ CIIS this Friday on Contemplative Philosophy
The PCC Forum will be welcoming CIIS’ own Prof. Jacob Sherman this Friday, May 3rd at 6:30pm in room 560. The lecture is free and open to the public.
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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…
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Reflections on “The Function of Reason” (1929) by Alfred North Whitehead
“The function of Reason,” says Whitehead, “is to promote the art of life” (4). Reason thereby becomes primarily an aesthetic concern, a matter of appetition, and of the appetition of appetition with “emphasis upon novelty” (20). Reason is not simply the art of surviving, but of living well, and living better. If some degree of…
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Teleology in Science? Purpose in Nature?
I’ve just read Grant Maxwell’s critique of a HuffPo piece by Matthew Hutson. I enjoyed his rebuttal of Hutson’s blanket rejection realism regarding teleology. I am also enjoying the discussion Grant is having with Hutson down in the comments. I do not think Hutson has read the work of organic/creative finalists like Bergson or Whitehead.…
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More on Latour and Tarnas – Networks, Technology, and the Transformation of Western Culture
Grant Maxwell has responded to my reflections on Richard Tarnas, Bruno Latour, and the Re-Enchantment Project. Grant wonders what I meant by referring to Tarnas’ archetypal cosmology as a “middle up” approach to transforming culture, and to Latour’s anthropology of the moderns as a “top down” approach to the same. I appreciate Grant’s use of Latour’s own network…
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Discussing Bruno Latour’s Gaian Political Theology
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Latour’s final Gifford Lecture – “Inside the Planetary Boundaries of Gaia’s Estate”
Whereas the Atlas of the scientific revolution could hold the globe in his hand, scientists of the Gaian counter-revolution, I am sorry to say, look more like ticks on the mane of a roaring beast. -Latour Who are the people of Gaia?: …if the agent of geostory had to be the revolutionary humanity of the Marxist utopia…[that…
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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…
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Latour’s 4th Gifford – “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe”
My summary: By 2016, the world’s geologists will officially decide whether or not Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. From Latour’s non-modern perspective, neither “nature” nor “society” can enter this new epoch unscathed. The theater of Modern history has been destroyed and must be re-constructed from scratch. Gone is the passive stage,…
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Reflections on Bruno Latour’s 3rd Gifford Lecture – “The Puzzling Face of a Secular Gaia”
Latour marvels at the reverse symmetry of the discoveries of Galileo and Lovelock. Both transformed humanity’s perspective of the Earth (and itself) by pointing cheap instruments to the sky. In the 17th century, Galileo dissolved the lunar membrane that had separated heaven and earth. He expanded the laws of nature into the distant reaches of space, dislodging Earth…
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“Spark” – A Documentary about Burning Man
Spark, a new documentary on Burning Man, premires in Austin, Texas on March 10. Some psychonautical friends and I from CIIS will be traveling to Black Rock City this August to (re)create our archetypal-astrological theme camp called Cosmicopia (maybe you visited us in 2011?). Related articles Spark: A Burning Man Story, Documentary Feature Film…
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Schellingian Reflections on Latour’s 2nd Gifford Lecture – “A Shift in Agency, With Apologies to Hume”
Latour is introduced by professor of physics Wilson Poon, who publicly confesses to being a great admirer of Latour’s work. Latour, thinly veiling how tired he is of the “Science Wars,” thanks him for the “rare confession”: “I don’t have many friends among physicists.” Poon contributes to a course at the University of Edinburgh on…
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Pope Benedict XVI Resigns – Creation Theologian Matthew Fox Responds
Matthew Fox has some important things to say here…
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Bruno Latour’s 1st Gifford Lecture – “Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm”
Bruno Latour (the infamous sociologist of science, …or famed political ecologist and anthropologist of the moderns) is delivering the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Above is his first lecture, “Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm.” In these lectures, Latour is attempting to prepare us (we moderns? we humans?) to meet…
Footnotes2Plato 