Whitehead's Way Beyond Postmodernism

20 thoughts on “Whitehead's Way Beyond Postmodernism”

1. I've been wanting to create a learning center for some time now. In this era of social distancing, I am taking the first steps by beginning it online. The 'Synechism Center for Learning and Dialogue' is now conducting its work from my YouTube channel. It's time. …. Those who understand the differences between synechism and nominalism, triadic versus dyadic thinking, and the terrible fallout to humanity that the misdirected, missing limb of perception has caused (dualism, reductionism, materialism, ontological individualism), need to combine their teaching skills to combat humanity's current direction. Time is of the essence. We need to teach the importance of understanding and respecting 'biological dialogue' (semiosis, dialogism, unity of opposites, 'Being' categories, universes of experience, etc.), and this teaching needs to touch all levels of education and intellect, not just academia. .. Many people have recognized this natural understanding when learning about any one of a handful of historic thinkers (referenced on 'My Freedom from Nominalism' playlist), and my goal is to gather those who recognize this understanding, no matter their source. … We are too spread out in trying to combat nominalism. We would have much better success if we unify our efforts and practice what we preach instead of individualizing and 'naming' this understanding in so many ways that it is confusing for others. … Otherness is key. … The common man and woman are very vulnerable and subject to the forces of a nominalistic culture. If we don't reach them in ways that they can understand, humanity's tragic direction will not change. … You will find the historical background of our dilemma on my 'Discussion' tab. … Thank you.

2. I'm only guessing here but I bet you're a communist. The lecture was very good, well done.

3. What do you think of islam? I mean while the bible and teachings of jesus have indeed high value( not christianity as a religion though), the quran and Mohammad do not. With islam it is hard to argue against the claim that religion is indeed a delusion and harm.

4. I think you over widen the meaning of religion, myth, spiritual and divine to hide it’s meaning. The fact that humans are narrative-building machines does not justify gods (which are by definition supernatural). It’s the supernatural that Dennett rejects, not the existence and importance of narratives. There is absolutely no evidence that the supernatural is even logically consistent, let alone real. Your critique of Dennett here is a strawman.

5. Couldn't help but be reminded of this verse during your video: Romans 8:19 NASBS
   For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.

6. Don't know why I skipped this video… You're not just "thinking out loud" in this one…

   Is Postmodernism the main culprit in the current state of affairs ? Or is it "the end of history" (Huntington), that is to say of Hegelian dialectics ? Pragmatically and strategically, doesn't ecology stand to gain from being viewed as a new antithesis rather than as some revealed truth ?

   In your blog, you already stated your conviction "we don't belong to ourselves". But I'm sure you realize that three of your fundamental claims here are obviously exposing your proposition to being hijacked :

   1/ Human beings need myths.
   2/ To some extent, the divine has its place in politics.
   3/ The concept of individual should be questioned.

   I recuse the first assertion, whose validity, by the way, you're not demonstrating : how do myths bring us closer to the truth ? How are they not too merely the expression of our neuroses ? As for the remaining two, I think I understand your perspective, but I need you to tell me how it differs from, for instance, what would motivate a new SCOTUS to annul Roe v. Wade. And, once again, I ask you : should the fundamental human rights safeguarded by well-known international treaties and national constitutions be subjected to permanent re-negotiation ?

   Diplomacy is key, you say. But, at the end of the day, just like the eagle has two sets of claws, one holding arrows, the other an olive branch, what could diplomacy accomplish without the threat to use force ? And is the diplomacy of the carrot and the stick the one you're advocating ? Diplomacy isn't neutral : there is no such thing as a levelled playing field in representative politics. And that's something Latour should know by now.

   Your conclusion, to me, sounds like pure poetry : planetary cosmological love, without either extinction or destruction in sight. Forget about Andromeda. Or rather think of it as a giant sexual explosion to come… I'll further refrain from being sarcastic.

   I know what Richard Alpert was referring to when he described his first OOBE. But an OOBE and our perceptions during one are not permanent; they're a window : distinction (aka division) is a reality of the tangible world. One should be aware of the former; one can't overlook the latter. "Make the best of all the worlds we live in"… Huxley's exhortation in his interview with Herman Harvey was marked by genuine wisdom. Listening to his interview with Mike Wallace is one of the many ways to understand why there needs to be a frontier between public and private life. And, since you'll never be able to persuade me and millions of others of the contrary, does that mean your endeavor is doomed to fail ? History keeps showing us what the result of an abolition of the distinction between public and private looks like : the triumph of domination. If we except the Orwellian surveillance state, the US has been spared by totalitarianism so far, from a non-slave-descendant's and a non-'Indian' perspective. Perhaps that's why you have some trouble integrating this crucial dimension into your way of thinking. And perhaps that's also why your ideal better remain a myth…

7. Great Video man, if you haven't already gone into it I would watch Tim Ingold's "one world anthropology" talk, and read "The Ontological Turn" by Holbraad and Pedersen, as well as anything by Viveiros de Castro. Its super relevant to multinaturalism.

8. Do you study Gregory Bateson and the Ecology of Mind (it looks like on your website in 2010 you briefly quoted him)? I noticed that in your Incarnational Philosophy lecture which used Deleuze and Whitehead, you used a William Blake painting (right?). Blake is very important to Bateson, as is Whitehead (Bateson’s etiology of schizophrenia used Russel and Whitehead’s theory of Logical Types), and also Deleuze’s use of the “intensive plateau”—as in thousand plateaus—comes from Bateson’s ethnography Naven. Do you already know these things (I ask because use of Deleuze and Whitehead and William Blake suggest that Bateson would interest you)? If you indeed are familiar with Bateson’s thought, then why your preference for Latour as an inspiration or guide toward “ecologizing”? I’m curious because I find Bateson a much more interesting and rich “ecologizer” than Latour (a personal opinion—I just find reading him more provocative and exciting). I’m excited to share him. No one seems to talk about him explicitly outside of the field of Family Therapy.

9. Gotta say, the lecture helped me get some good sleep in the first listen 🙂 [second time though was very interesting 😉 ]

10. I find Generative Anthropology provides a good framework for response to postmodernism

11. Brilliant, thank you

12. If you are more knowledgeable about philosophy of myth, then maybe you could consider making some videos on the topic? It would be a valuable contribution.
    Also, it would be nice to see those unknown [to me, of course] takes on myth (Fichte, Schelling) compared with more recent or more known (Jung, Joseph Campbell).
    What say you?

13. Very interesting lecture. The political left would do well to abandon radical egalitarianism, as it's antithetical to the ontological pluralism described here. The destruction of the right to freely associate was a massive mistake. The great compromise that must occur today is the right giving up their fanatical devotion to capitalist economics, and the left recognizing the natural inequality of reality.

14. The big problem of modernism and postmodernism is that, they assume that the form of belief stays constant in the course of history, only the content changes, but this is really not the case at all. How one believes is equally important with what one believes .

15. Whitehead points to where to begin; on page 166 of Process and Reality: " In the place of the Hegelian hierarchy of categories of thought, the philosophy of organism finds a hierarchy of categories of feeling." And what I never thought or heard before, on page 94 : " Every actual entity, in virtue of it's novelty, transcends it's universe, God included." //You based much of our society on Decartes, but also peer into Hegel….right?☺️ To think of what it means "to transcend"….is like having a shared reality but also each his very own…on page 178, he speaks of the perceptual mode…it starts getting really fantastic!

16. this was one of your greatest lectures, particularly in light of its currency in the political, economic, social, financial, ecological moment we exist in today. Your delivery style and thoughtful presentation are wonderfully listenable.

17. there was no 20th century "failure" of communism. communism was a massive success for the working and poor classes of not only the soviet union but the world. it was overthrown after 40-50 years of a brutal capitalist encirclement – propaganda, economic sabotage, proxy wars, etc. your world view, nature as a community, can only become prevalent in a communist economic system where production is carried out for utility by the community of producers based on rational planning. "capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking the life of living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." this system, capitalism, is never going to allow ideas which do not reinforce its logic to become dominant, and the class which this system empowers is never going to voluntarily end it and give up their position as ruling class. "the ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class". so long as classes exist class struggle will be the driver of history and the only way capitalism will be ended is through actual material class struggle, not merely ideological struggle.

18. This is the most practical and best explanation as to a way out of postmodernity, while retaining some of its more valuable critiques. I'm more on the reactionary (perhaps not neo) perennial side of things, but I find many Pomo writing to be salvageable and useful. My thing is sort of anti-modernism and postmodernism meeting in the middle! 😉

    Side note: the one problem is that "multiculturalism" now a days in liberal modernity only serves to destroy and homogenize world cultures, culture is rendered into trinkets and consumable items like ethnic restaurants. The modern lib simply views everyone as a westerner willing to come out of their skin.

19. You need to have Richard Wagner's music playing in the background while you speak

20. "Globalization, which carries the screened outside everywhere, tears the freely trading cities–and ultimately even the introverted villages–out into the homogenizing public space. It breaks open the independently growing endospheres and brings them into the net. Once caught in it, the settlements of the grounded mortals lose their immemorial privilege of being the respective center of their world.
    In this sense, the history of the Modern Age, as stated above, is initially nothing other than the history of a spatial revolution into the outside. This history brings about the catastrophe of local ontologies. In its course, all Old European countries become locations on the surface of an orb; numerous cities, villages and landscapes are transformed into stations of a limitless traffic of capital, which march through in their five-fold metamorphosis as commodity, money, text, image and celebrity." Peter Sloterdijk, p.791-2, Spheres II: Globes
    —–
    Paul Virilio calls chronopolitics a problem as great as geopolitics. Snychronized world time is not harmless.
    —–
    “We always have the beliefs, feelings, and thoughts we deserve given our way of being or our style of life.” – Gilles Deleuze
    ——
    The global system of controlling space and time must be destroyed. Knowimg earth is not actually a globe in extracosmic space, synchronized in time, will help free people from modern slavery. A conspiracy to suppress flat earth cultures implicates Rome as a imperial power controlling the world.

    Pedophile networks and ritual child slaughter are used to maintain access to power. Destroying these networks will free peoole to a greater extent than simply learning of cosmological deceptions.

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