OOO, CCC, & Eros or relatedness

Mythology, Madness and Laughter – The Mythological Being of Reflection 1.0 from An und für sich by Anthony Paul Smith

So while Hegel thinks of being as something accessible, or thinkable, through reflection; Schelling thinks that reflection itself ‘indicates the brute fact of existence, which is per se inexplicable in logical terms (20). This is where mythology becomes crucial for Schelling, as it allows him to denominate this brute fact of existence, which is incapable of being accounted for in logical terms (as Hegel believes it can be). Contra Hegel, Schelling maintains that there is always an unprethinkable remainder to every logical system, and that the mythological allows us to speak of what Hegel falsely identifies as the immediacy of being. From here Gabriel furthers this distinction between Hegel and Schelling by outlining the implications for thinking subjectivity.

Ritual Matters: Dynamic Dimensions in Practice, Sudhir Kakar

A ritual is an illusion, yes, but a necessary and even desirable illusion that lights up the narrow, mundane world of daily existence, a world which has always been inadequate to our experience and unequal to bear the burden of our hopes.

The Need for Barbaric Rituals : India : Santosh Desai : TOI Blogs 25 Apr 2010

The elaborate marriage ritual full of sacred incantations and cosmic invocations, serves to create a threshold area laden with compressed meaning that allows one to make a transformation from one kind of life to another. Nobody really understands what the ceremony itself connotes; in most cultures it is mediated by a religious intermediary who plucks out divine references from the religious ether and sprinkles them with authoritative finality on the couple. They feel married; they may not grasp the full implications of the act, but they are certainly made to understand its momentousness. … in spite of its obvious disadvantages, a ritual like marriage continues to thrive in its overblown, ruinously expensive avatar. [City Stories : Tales from Here and There]

to rush things is the reputed prerogative of the devil & inattention to data is a quite typical method for the development and expression of reactionary opinion. methodology and logic is faulty, which leads not to insight, a desired goal, but to oversight.

Von Franz was convinced that through the feminine principle of Eros or relatedness, along with feeling and intuition, the wounds created by the Western patriarchal worldview will be healed. 

comment on the Rorty quip from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

The unity of objects, for Husserl, is in those objects themselves, not in a human subject that bundles or counts them. 

Exo-Qualities (I Really Need a Better Term!) from Larval Subjects

Although I am sympathetic with some aspects of Bergson’s Matter and Memory, I here diverge strongly from attempts to ontologize his account of memory and the pure past, or to treat all objects as containing a memory. I see no good reasons for supposing this is the case with rocks or my coffee mug, for example. Rather, this sort of relation to the past seems to belong exclusively to reflexive objects. 

Ivakhiv on Relations and Some Remarks on Epistemology from Larval Subjects

For OOO it is ontology that is first philosophy. Moreover, there can be no hope of a coherent epistemology without ontology as first philosophy.

between Whitehead & Peirce from immanence by ai

The case has often been made -- by John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and others -- that Alfred North Whitehead's process metaphysics provides an account of the universe that is, or could be, foundational to an ecological worldview. This is because it is an account that is naturalist (or realist), relational, evolutionary, and non-dualistic in its overcoming of the subject-object and mind-matter dichotomies. For what it's worth (this part probably isn't necessary to an ecological worldview, though it may be attractive to some of its proponents), Whitehead's philosophy is also more or less panexperientialist or panpsychist, which means that it acknowledges mind or mental activity, defined at least in a very minimal sense, throughout the universe; and, if one cares about its theological stance (which many classical Whiteheadians do), it is more or less panentheistic, recognizing divinity as both immanent in the world (i.e., pantheistic) and transcendent of it (in...

Change is underway in the UK from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

As an outside observer, I can only applaud Great Britain for finally taking the lead in undoing the worst degradations of modernity — ranging from neoliberalism, colonialism, and exploitative industrialism all the way to nominalism and voluntarism. The island that gave us Duns Scotus is now taking responsibility for reversing the trends he set in motion. Given the UK’s continuing role as the absolute nerve center of world politics, we all wait in joyful hope for the spread of the ontology of peace to all corners of the globe. [Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation, Zizek and Theology (Philosophy and Theology)]

Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

So my overall sense is that the Contemplative Cinema Canon doesn’t even give us a very good sense of what’s most interesting and most powerful in contemporary international art cinema today. But I think there’s more. Great works of art can be created in profoundly retrograde styles, and almost completely detached from contemporary concerns. And I think the best works of the Contemplative Cinema Canon may in fact be described in such a way. But I still think that, even at its best, Slow-Cinema-As-Default-International-Style is profoundly nostalgic and regressive — and I think that this is a bad thing. It’s a way of simulating older cinematic styles, and giving them a new appearance of  life (or more precisely, a new zombified life-in-death), as a way of flattering classicist cinephiles, and of simply ignoring everything that has happened, socially, politically, and technologically, in the last 30 years. It’s a way of saying No to mainstream Hollywood’s current fast-edit, post-continuity, highly digital style, simply by pretending that it doesn’t even exist. And I agree with Nick James that this simply isn’t enough.

When I say that CCC is regressive, I don’t mean that all change automatically constitutes “progress,” or that such “progress” is somehow automatically good.

Brentano and the analytic/continental distinction from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Analytic philosophy is deeply committed to the idea that philosophy is a cumulative enterprise, and that the adding up of small discoveries will lead to a general professional advance. Everything else follows from this presupposition: the analytic admiration for the natural sciences as a model… the great respect for philosophical specialization…

By contrast, it seems pretty clear that continental philosophy follows the “fine arts” model of the history of philosophy… The progress of philosophy is made not of cumulative argumentation but by the vision of towering geniuses, which has the upside of promoting patient labor to understand those towering figures subtly, and the downside of creating a tribe of insecure people who don’t feel they can add to Heidegger or Hegel’s insights and so will merely clarify and comment upon them…