Every convention was once an invention – though probably not by an inventor conscious of being one.
Expression and transformation
Expression relates to assertion as creation to description. Continue reading Expression and transformation
I and I, Creator and Creation
When the mystic ‘knows his Lord,’ he knows that he has a God in the same way that an organism has a world: he dwells within it, owns up to the condition of being owned by God. Nevertheless it is his God, his creation, since his Lord is his very singularity turned inside out. Continue reading I and I, Creator and Creation
Seeing things
We see what we focus on: what we see distinguishes itself from the visual field: the dynamic object determines the sign to determine its interpretant. Cognition begins by making distinctions; recognition continues with emergence of relations from the phaneron, now that things have emerged from the phaneron. Continue reading Seeing things
The medium is the context
To understand a sentence means to understand a language.
— Wittgenstein, (Philosophical Investigations I.199)
Attention
The greatest gift you can offer anyone is your undivided attention.
— gnox
Radical readings
If an innovative interpretation of scripture becomes a revelation to a community, it may then become a scripture in turn. New religious movements can arise from radically new readings of established scripture. Continue reading Radical readings
Imagination and experience
After the initial basis of a rational life, with a civilized language, has been laid, all productive thought has proceeded either by the poetic insight of artists, or by the imaginative elaboration of schemes of thought capable of utilization as logical premises. In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.
— Whitehead (1929, 9)
‘Productive thought’ then is bound to be imaginative. But it is an imaginative response to (or reading of) actual experience – not imaginary experience – that is most productive, in science, art and religion.
Continue reading Imagination and experience
Renovation
What i have called recreation could also be called renovation – as in the ancient Chinese classic The Great Learning. According to this text, ‘the way of learning to be great (or adult education) consists in manifesting the clear character, loving the people, and abiding in the highest good’ (Chan 1963, 86). And according to Ch’eng, a Chinese editor of the text, ‘loving the people’ should be read as ‘renovating the people.’ Continue reading Renovation
Nature’s imagination
Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.
— John M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (Saturday Review, 1967)
Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s imagination is richer than ours.
— Freeman Dyson, ‘The Scientist as Rebel’, in Cornwell (ed.), Nature’s Imagination
The process of natural design, it seems, will routinely outrun the imaginings of human theorists.
— Clark 1997, 97