Tag: nihilism
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Descendental Philosophy and the Confrontation with Nihilism (dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman has been reading my book Crossing the Threshold. In this dialogue, we explore Whitehead’s mathematical imagination, theory of perception, and attempt to overcome the nihilism that Nietzsche marked out as a pathological transition stage. Watch on YouTube for timestamps. ChatGPT summary: 📘 Perception and Reality: Perception is not merely passive reception through the senses but…
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Cosmic Pessimism: Response to a post by S.C. Hickman
The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix’d into furrows of death. -William Blake Read the engaging and wide-ranging post here: The Cosmology of Nick Land: Bataille, Gnosticism, and Contemporary Physics I have noticed my own tendency to waver between a less extreme version of the cosmic pessimism Hickman describes…
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The “innocence of becoming”: Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Nihilism as a Pathological Transitional Stage between Monism and Pluralism
It is remarkable how similar Nietzsche’s musings on perspectivism are to Whitehead’s process-relational ontology. I was reminded of their congruence while re-reading excerpts from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power (published in Mark Taylor’s Deconstruction in Context). Of course, one might read Whitehead’s somewhat Platonic cosmological scheme (which includes reformed conceptions of teleology, god, eternal objects, and so on) as directly opposed…
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Nihilism and Groundlessness: Towards a Gaian Praxecology?
I’ve just gotten around to reading Michael/ArchiveFire‘s post last September regarding a “post-nihilistic praxis.” It’s got me reflecting on what the “creaturely” might mean/be after the death of God (the Creator), or what the “facticity of matter” might mean/be after its traditional opposite, the activity of spirit, has been reduced by natural science or deconstructed by…
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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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Vitalism in Philosophy: “The stars are the fountain veins of God.” -Böhme
Levi Bryant is pulling his hair out about vitalist philosophy (a title he gives to the work of Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze, among others). I read all three as materialists, though of course it is a rather strange sort of materialism replete with God-making machines, physical feelings, and alchemical metallurgy. Nonetheless, their philosophical work, especially Whitehead’s, couldn’t…
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God and the Chaosmos: Thinking with Catherine Keller
Several months ago, a discussion erupted across the SR/OOO blogosphere concerning the implications of various forms of nihilistic and theistic realism. Some of my critiques have since ended up in a Wikipedia article. In one of my responses to Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, I toyed with the idea of Whitehead’s panentheism as a kind…
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SR/OOO and Nihilism: a response to Harman and Bryant
I’ve already posted a short response to Harman, but I wanted to re-visit the issues explored in that post concerning the difference between Homo Sapiens, as an object among objects, and the Anthropos, as an ideal toward which every object tends. I will also try to disentangle my own “cosmotheandric” position from the generic anti-nihilism…
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The Ears, Eyes, and Mind of the Wor(l)d
What is language, and how did it evolve? The flurry of recent posts concerned with media ecology and the way the content of philosophical thinking depends upon the form in which it is expressed has redirected my attention to the significance of the Word. I think grammatically, which is to say that my alphabetic consciousness,…
Footnotes2Plato 