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The Pluralism Wars Return: Towards a Diplomatic Ontology of Organism
I was wondering how long the cease fire would last… The pluralism wars flared up again this afternoon over on FaceBook (this link may not work for everyone). Misunderstandings abound, or so it seems to me. My position–which is greatly indebted to thinkers like James and Whitehead, and more recently, Bruno Latour–is that of ontological pluralism. What is finally real in such an ontology has nothing to do with a mind-independent objective nature; rather, what is real are the value-experiences of a multiscaled and creatively evolving ecology of organisms.
Ontological pluralism is not equivalent to the rather banal thesis that human individuals and collectives have different world views. Of course they do. Call this "world view pluralism" or "multiculturalism." Many of us don't like it, but it doesn't matter: it's still a plain fact about the sociopolitical environs modern people inhabit. The idea here is that human subjectivity provides for a whole multitude of cultural, psychological, and/or symbolic ways of relating to the world. The Modern constitution has it that each way of relating to reality should be tolerated, even respected, but on the other hand we are also all obliged to agree that there is finally just one pre-existent true reality out there somewhere. This is the incoherence of Modernity's bifurcation of nature. Depending on whether we're dealing with a theistic or scientistic fundamentalist, this "one true reality" could be a natural world made of matter that Science/Reason is the only objective, culture-free way of accessing, or a supernatural world made of spirit that Religion/Revelation is the only objective, culture-free way of accessing. This all too Modern settlement is rooted in the bifurcation of nature that Whitehead spent the last 25 years of his life protesting against:
What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream. -The Concept of Nature, p. 31
Scientific materialism, in other words, has come to oppose our subjective experience of nature (the dream) to an abstract model of nature theorized to be the objective cause of that experience (the conjecture). Latour recently delivered a lecture to an audience of anthropologists that continued Whitehead's protestation against bifurcation: "What Is the Recommended Dose of Ontological Pluralism for a Safe Anthropological Diplomacy?" It is worth a listen…
Latour and Whitehead both protest against scientific materialism, but they don't do so as beautiful souls trying to defend the subjective meanings of consciousness from reduction to the materiality of the nature known to science. As Latour makes clear in the lecture above, his project is an attempt to account for the variety of materials known to the sciences more adequately. Similarly, Whitehead was driven into metaphysics precisely because of his deep appreciation for and desire to defend the scientific process. He was as shocked as everyone else who lived through the demolition of classical physics in the early part of the 20th century. He realized that a quantum, relativistic physics, to continue being rational and offering elucidating descriptions of reality, was going to need new metaphysical justification. His process-relational ontology (aka, ontology of organism) takes materiality very seriously, but it no longer considers "matter" to be the objective half of a bifurcated universe. Rather, enduring materials are understood to be always already hybrid subject-objects. Everything physical is understood to be mixed up with everything conceptual and affective. The universe is awash in flows of feeling, flows composed not just of actualized histories and present appreciations, but of anticipated future trajectories. Energy carries physical as well as emotional force.
All that said, what, then, is ontological pluralism? Unlike the banal form of pluralist multiculturalism that everyone already accepts, ontological pluralism is the more radical thesis that no unified underlying material reality exists that might referee the plurality of organismic (human and nonhuman) value-experiences that contest, cooperate, or metamorphose with one another in order to secure their continued existence. The universe is an evolving ecosystem of organisms. It is eros and eris all the way down, equal parts symbiogenic orgy and struggle for existence from top to bottom. Whitehead (Science and the Modern World) offers a concrete example of how this plays out in the physical world:
"Thus just as the members of the same species mutually favor each other, so do members of associated species. We find the rudimentary fact of association in the existence of the two species, electrons and hydrogen nuclei. The simplicity of the dual association, and the apparent absence of competition from other antagonistic species accounts for the massive endurance which we find among them."
In the image of the cosmos constructed by the philosophy of organism, evolution comes to refer not only to the process of biological speciation in the earthly mesocosm, but also to wider micro- and macrocosmic ecologies of individualizing energetic activity. Evolution, in its most general outlines, is a theory relevant to the entire scope of cosmic history.
The sciences are generally quite good at producing objectivity, but they do so by forging robust alliances with a multitude of still evolving agencies, not by laying bare the supposed material substratum of all things. As a result, their knowledges and their truths, are always in-the-making (just as the cosmic ecology itself is always in-the-making). Science is a process of inquiry, not a storehouse of produced knowledge.
Latour's ontological diplomacy is an effort to avoid marshaling "Scientific Facts" as though they might bring a final end to all contestation. Such facts will remain as important as ever even in a non-modern ecological epoch. They deserve to be defended. But the question is, just how is the scientific process best defended from its relativist critics? By claiming that it somehow transcends culture, politics, society, practice, embodiment, subjectivity, etc., and speaks unambiguously on behalf of an objective and pre-existent "Nature"? No, I don't think this does the reality of the often anarchic and surprising scientific process justice. Latour shows how if such a defense of science via purification were successful, it would only succeed in rendering science entirely unequipped to produce any of the knowledge we've come to expect of it.
I'm no relativist, though I am a relationalist. We have plenty of tools to determine which facts are more secure and which more fragile. The clearest evidence we can produce of a well-constructed fact is to trace the network of relationships it has been able to forge between the agencies constituting it. The more tightly and widely networked, the more serious we ought to take it as a fact. So for example, when it comes to the issue of climate change, I'm way more inclined to trust the worldwide scientific community of climatologists–with their well-funded labs, peer-reviewed journals, satellites, thermometers, weather balloons, etc.–than I am a PR rep from the oil industry or the Heritage Foundation. Unfortunately, the PR industry has its own way of forging networks that work tirelessly to undermine the public's trust in the scientific process. Here, we can and should distinguish between the political and the scientific mode of existence: the Heritage Foundation thinks it is doing climatology, but really it is doing politics. Its networks are not productive of experts, but rather of ideologues. Not that there is anything wrong with politics! The point is just that a more diplomatic effort to sort out these ontological confusions might help us do politics and science more effectively amid the plurality of fragile things composing this open-ended universe.
Ontological pluralism, then, is the thesis that reality is multiple and open-ended (not just that humans have a multitude of world views). It's not just that our scientific knowledge of the universe is incomplete, its that the universe itself is incomplete. Ontological pluralism does not entail that we ought not to disagree with human collectives whose values differ from our own. We can and must enter into such disagreements! We cannot rely on some transcendent Scientific God's eye view to settle our scruples for us. Instead, we should weigh the merits of different human values and world views on less otherworldly (ethical and aesthetic) grounds.
For the pluralism of an ontology of organism like that I've tried to articulate, the question about whose subjective symbolic or cultural or psychological world view is true and whose is mistaken just doesn't arise. It is a dumb question once you've accepted the conceptual consequences of this path for thinking. If what is finally real are the value-experiences of a multiscaled and creatively evolving ecology of organisms, then the question isn't "whose view is correct?" ("correct" in the scientific sense of objectively true regarding an external material world), but whose view is more powerful? Being is power, as Whitehead said, following Plato in The Sophist.
Ontological pluralism is not a thesis about the relativity or objectivity of truth. It concerns the truth of relativity–the truth suggested by post-classical physics, systems biology, and post-colonial anthropology–that the universe is full of agencies at all levels (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, …) and is ontologically incomplete/open-ended/processual.
The "…" is important for process-oriented pluralists. It signifies that which cannot finally be signified. Call it "Creativity" if you think that's less cagey.
"Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic" by Whitney Bauman
"From a planetary perspective, truth is seen as the coconstruction of truth regimes. Our understandings of the world and the technologies of those understandings begin to create those worlds that we are persuaded most toward. In other words, one of the reasons modern science became so pervasive is that its truth regime–including the medical, communication, and transportation technologies derived from its way of understanding–is quite persuasive. It gives us results; it gives us things. However, at no small cost: atomic bombs, environmental ills, species extinction, global climate change, and gross economic inequities are just a few…Every truth regime, and its corresponding habits for becoming in the world, has benefits and costs, and this is what it means to understand truth from a pragmatic perspective. From a planetary perspective, the question is not which truth regime is really real, but rather toward which truth regimes do we want to live? Given the costs of the contemporary truth regime of the globalization of free-market capitalism and its modern scientific technologies, I would argue we need ways of becoming into the future that respect the multiperspectival reality of the becoming planetary community" -Whitney Bauman (p. 61)
I've been enjoying Whitney Bauman's new book (Colombia University Press, 2014). By developing the ideas of thinkers like Michelle Foucault, Tim Morton, Judith Butler, Catherine Keller, Deleuze and Guattari, Bruno Latour, Carolyn Merchant, Donna Haraway, Zygmunt Bauman, Karen Barad, Terry Deacon, Jane Bennett, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Gayatri Spivak, he has succeeded in furthering the case for a robust ontological pluralism.
Bauman spends much of the book overcoming the various materialist and idealist reifications of human and nonhuman identity that prevent the world's sciences and religions from having meaningful dialogue with one another.
In an effort to overcome the colonialist pretenses of Scientific Materialism, Bauman re-interprets Western science as itself a form of "traditional ecological knowledge." He remains a "naturalist," however, where nature, as his "all-inclusive term," includes
"humans, cultures, religions, ideas, imagination, atoms, ecosystems, the earth, the universe, and all other levels of reality. Nature is multiscalar [it consists of multiple levels, none of which can be reduced to the other] and emergent [nature is a process by which 'new' levels emerge in the course of planetary and cosmic evolution]. Thus nature is a multiperspectival emergent process…" (25).
Bauman's goal is to re-politicize both science and religion with the help of a new posthuman planetary ethic. Rather than a search for scientific or religious forms of transcendence, a planetary ethic is satisfied with "an open and becoming immanence" (33):
"This understanding of an immanent and ongoing nature provides a viable option for redefining nature as a transformative political space-time of planetary possibilities rather than a transcendent source for foundational claims" (38).
Rather than going along with the standard Weberian reading of modernity ushering in an age of disenchantment (recounted most recently by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age), Bauman follows Latour by arguing that, in effect, we have never been modern. Similar to my reading of modernity (also building on Latour) as a form of "misenchantment," Bauman writes:
"the enchantment of making the world dead matter is found in the marvels of modern technologies that such a mechanistic truth regime ushers in: the wonder and marvels of skyscrapers, space travel, air travel, the Internet, and the very sciences that emerge out of the mechanistic model of science (even if those sciences contain the ultimate demise of mechanism) are all quite enchanting" (41).
Rather than lionizing the standard heroes of modernization, like Galileo and Descartes, Bauman offers the panpsychic philosophers of immanence Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, and Baruch Spinoza as visionaries of an alternative form of modernity. (Along these lines, I also recommend Arran Gare's essay "Reviving the Radical Enlightenment: Process Philosophy and the Struggle for Democracy").
The one bone I'd pick with Bauman concerns his desire to entertain the idea that nature is all naturans and no naturata (44-47). Obviously, I'm on board with the idea that nature is creative process, but natural process gives rise to natural products whose relative individuality should be respected. This individuality is always in-the-making and becoming-with others, and so never an "identifiable essence" or reified substantiality. I think some sense of nature natured must be preserved in order not to overlook the particularities brought forth in the course of the creative advance of nature naturing.
Another exciting aspect of Bauman's thought is the way he explodes substantialist notions of a linear pre-existent/objective space-time by drawing on Barad's work (Meeting the Universe Halfway). Barad's "agential realism" construes spaces and times as "intra-actively produced" by a network of human and nonhuman agents, rather than determinately given once and for all (55). Similarly, the so-called "laws" of nature are re-read as tendencies or "pathways, scripts, or habits that get performed" (58).
Bauman preserves a role for polydox theologies after the death of God by reconstructing theology along poetico-imaginative lines. Theopoetic projections are part of what it means to be human, the meaning-making species par excellence. Further, our theopoems are as much introjected as they are projected: we may be the inventors of our gods, but what creator has ever been left untransformed by his or her creation?
Bauman comes down hard on liberal notions of identity and monogamous family structure. To overcome capitalism, we will need to realize that "identities are all messy assemblages"; we will need to become multiple, hybrid, queer:
"Our subjectivities are multiple in that we are made up of many human and earth others: histories, societies, actions, earth, air, water, fire, other molecules, other plants and animals. We are quite literally not the creators ex nihilo of our own identities, but we are created by multiple earth others. In a very real sense, we cannot cut off our understandings of the self from the whole 13.8-billion-year process of cosmic expansion and 4.5-billion-year process of geoevolution…From this perspective, perhaps planetary technologies of becoming will encourage us to think with earth others–and think with the in-between rather than as isolated thinking things" (120)
"It is not just that we are made of histories and biologies of evolving plants, animals, and minerals, nor that we will become part of future plants, animals, and minerals. Rather, it is that these companions literally make up our multiple, evolving, and open subjectivities. Just as queer theory recognizes our subjectivities as always already multiple, so from a radical materialist perspective we can say that our embodiments are always already multiple. As such, our agency is not just the agency of the Cartesian skin-encapsulated ego, nor are our thoughts and emotions our own. Our actions, thoughts, and emotions are always multiple. They involve multiple histories of planetary becomings or communities of plants, animals, and minerals, all of which are evolving beyond their own boundaries and diffracting into proliferations of subject-objects" (155).
Bauman's prescriptions are not easy pills to swallow for middle class white people who belong to the elite 1/5th of the world (or really for any of the "global mobiles," those of us in "the West" who live in a bubble floating atop the rest of the human population, the "immobile locals"). But perhaps our times call for strong medicine.
Notes for a Sunday Evening Cosmology Salon
If you're a San Francisco local, I'll be speaking with a few friends at Cyprian's Episcopal Church on Turk and Lyon this Sunday (4/27) at 7pm about community-building and the cosmopolitical importance of play in the aftermath of capitalism. Our salon-style panel discussion is part of a larger community festival in the Panhandle neighborhood.
Here is the blurb:
Cosmologies of Work and Play: Community in the Making
Slavoj Zizek has recently suggested that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. For those aware of the seriousness of the ecological and social crises of our time, imagining the end of the world may not seem all that difficult anymore. But perhaps it is not the world, but a world that is ending. For perhaps the first time in the modern age, the anti-cosmology of global capitalism is losing its ideological grip on the collective imagination. Exploitation of the human and nonhuman earth community for the private profit of a few has now become so intense, that apologists for capitalism can no longer divert our attention from the injustices it requires. Though the crises of our time are indeed serious, re-creating a more viable world will require at least as much play as it will work. Join us for a conversation building on anarchist anthropologist David Graeber's recently proposed "principle of ludic freedom," which not only, as he suggests, "gives us ground to unthink the world around us," but also provides a means of composing a more cosmologically grounded community from out of the compost of capitalism.
And some of my notes:
Why is cosmology relevant to community-building? Because cosmologizing is the most fundamental form of political action.
Nowadays, in our scientific age, when we think of cosmology what comes to mind are things like energy, matter, space-time, and so on. But for former pre-modern and contemporary non-modern thinkers, cosmology had/has also to do with more concrete realities, like the place of human values in the scope of the wider community of living beings on earth and in the sky. In the modern age, scientific cosmology became separated from its own ecological and political ground here on earth beneath the sky. The enchanted geocentric cosmology of the ancients was replaced by the abstract heliocentrism of mathematical physicists. This sort of modern conception of a static sun-centered universe obeying eternal laws is of course more than a century behind the discoveries of today's scientific cosmology, with its evolutionary, relativity, quantum, and complexity theories. The problem nowadays is that physics has become so overwhelmingly mathematical that the average person has no hope of actually understanding what it is supposed to have revealed about the cosmos. Like with the medieval Church that only gave mass in Latin, contemporary science has grown too esoteric for the common person to consciously participate in. Science has come to treat the universe as though it had no fundamental connection with the presupposed values of civilized life. Science treats the universe as if the shape of the Milky Way galaxy and the rhythmic orbits of the planets overhead were entirely irrelevant to our individual and collective human experience. Though physicists have devised several stunning mathematical models that bear some resemblance to our measurements of the physical world, they have provided no functional cosmology to the human species. If we have a popular cosmology today, it is "market cosmology." And if, as Thomas Berry suggested, a functional cosmology is synonymous with an adequate ecology (i.e., a theoretical and practical sense for how we are best to inhabit our habitat), then clearly market cosmology is dysfunctional.
Cosmopolitics! — Let us be done with the Modern constitution that bifurcates Nature from Society, Science from Politics, Facts from Values.
Cosmologizing is an integral activity, as much artistic, as religious, as scientific (I, We, It).
Cosmology is always in the making, a fragile process of collective world-creation; always an ongoing activity, an ever-contested endeavor whose completion is only ever intimated and never finally assured. Cosmology is fiction crafted in public, political poetry (as Shelley said, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world").
"The creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done." -Whitehead (Aims of Education).
To cosmologize is to re-imagine how space and time are experientially distributed. To cosmologize is to hack the social imaginary, to reshape the imaginative background or unconscious speculative ground upon which the conscious values of a civilization are based. In the capitalist world, under "market cosmology," space is property and time is on loan. That is to say, for most of us, time and space are made to seem scarce commodities. Our society's cosmology divides up space into real estate and measures time as though human beings were perpetually "on the clock." "Time is money," as Ben Franklin put it.
Are there any non-modern cosmological alternatives to market cosmology? Yes. Whitehead for one.
"We have no right to deface the value experience which is the very essence of the universe. Existence, in its own nature, is the upholding of value intensity." -Whitehead (Modes of Thought)
For Whitehead, philosophy begins in wonder. Wonder is the vague feeling we all have all the time that hovers just beyond the horizon of workaday consciousness—the intuition of being embedded within the grand adventure of a larger universe. Wonder is the all-pervasive (and so largely taken for granted) sense we have of the wholeness and the totality of things which embraces us. Wonder is the sublime feeling of being awash in the value-experience of other living creatures, astonished by the insistence of their existence, the way they press in upon us and demand our care and attention. Philosophy is the attempt to respond to this equal parts erotic and eristic experience of the values of the universe streaming in to us from every direction. Philosophy is the attempt to become faithful to the earth and to the sky, to become responsible for the way our humanity joins in their ancient cosmic procession.
How are we going to re-imagine lived space and lived time after the spatiotemporal matrix of global capitalism dissolves? We must run experiments >>
Latour's Space-Time Experiment: Thinking with Whitehead
Watch Olafur Eliasson and Bruno Latour re-enact the debate between Einstein and Bergson about space-time and the polarity between art and science.
Though I first heard about Latour's re-enactment of the Einstein-Bergson debate several years ago, I only uncovered the videos of this conversation while engaging in a FaceBook thread yesterday about Einstein's bloc universe. Einstein famously claimed that time as we experience it is a mere psychological illusion. If we want the fact of the matter regarding real time, we must accept the verdict of the positive sciences. Einstein didn't fess up to the covert metaphysic of bifurcation he was employing, and although Bergson wasn't able to get through to him on this point during their debate in 1922, other philosophers were listening.
Alfred North Whitehead agreed with Bergson's critique of Einstein, though not with Bergson's philosophical reconstruction of relativity. Whitehead developed his own alternative (philosophical and geometrical) formulation of relativity in a 1922 book The Principle of Relativity:
It follows from my refusal to bifurcate nature into individual experience and external cause that we must reject the distinction between psychological time which is personal and impersonal time as it is in nature (66).
Whitehead's reformed principle of relativity is based on the metaphysical priority of actual facts, or occasions of experience, from which the geometrical order of spatiotemporal extension is derived (Epperson, Quantum Mechanics, 5). Through an abstractive process of logical construction rooted in the coordination of the somewhat fragmentary nature of individual occasions of experience, the general character of space-time holding true for our cosmic epoch can be produced (Whitehead, "Space, Time, and Relativity," in The Aims of Education, 162-163). While Einstein's proposal of a universal and a priori space-time implies a taut, already fully woven fabric whose spatial curvature is modified by the material bodies situated within it, Whitehead's alternative theory of a coordinated plurality of space-times implies a fraying fabric always in the process of being repaired by the dipolar physical-mental concrescences of organismic occasions of experience. In this sense, contrary to Levi Bryant's dismissal of Whitehead as an armchair philosopher who concocted "just so" stories with no empirical grounding (see the FaceBook thread), Whitehead's innovation was to translate many of the properties that Einstein's general relativity defines a priori into empirical, or a posteriori facts (Stengers, Thinking With Whitehead, 168). Instead of privileging the misplaced concreteness of an abstract space-time that would "[separate] an organism from its environment" such that "the endurance of the former and the patience of the latter [is defined] in terms of right [or "law"], not of fact," Whitehead emphasizes the contingency of the evolved habits currently holding sway over the ecology of organisms shaping our cosmic epoch, no matter how general or universal they may appear at this time (Stengers, Thinking With Whitehead, 169).
Whitehead terms the general character of space-time "the uniformity of the texture of experience" (Whitehead, "Space, Time, and Relativity," 163). "The physical world [i.e., the extensive continuum of space-time]," he goes on, is,
in some general sense of the term, a deduced concept. Our problem is, in fact, to fit the world to our perceptions, and not our perceptions to the world (Whitehead, "Space, Time, and Relativity," 165).
Here, Whitehead directly contradicts Einstein's famous statement that our immediate experience of temporality, while perhaps necessary for civilized life (or for biotic existence in general, for that matter), is in reality nothing but a persistent illusion no longer to be believed in by professional physicists. Whitehead's reconstruction of relativity theory so as to avoid the social and ecological perils of the bifurcation of nature is not based on a denial of Einstein's physical formulations, but a denial of the unconscious imaginative background shaping Einstein's metaphysical interpretation of these formulations. Following Stengers, it can be said that Whitehead's philosophy of organism aims not to belittle or deny the abstractions of the scientific intellect, as Bergson seems to, but rather to articulate an
ecology of abstraction…that creates the possibility of a mutual aesthetic appreciation between specialists of precision and adventurers of generalization (Stengers, Thinking With Whitehead, 141).
Transcendental Earth: Thinking Horizontally with Deleuze and Guattari
Some other bloggers (AGENT SWARM and Time's Flow Stemmed, for example) have been been ruminating over this beautiful string of sentences from Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy?:
Thinking provokes general indifference. It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless. Indeed, it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they often remain hidden and barely perceptible inherent in the enterprise. Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always to follow the witch's flight.
So the movement is one from the transcendent to the horizontal? No, it can't be that simple…
What moderns lost in verticality for their thought they gained in fact by the invention of the spaceship. The transcendental has not been replaced by the horizontal; rather, the horizontal has been brought to its completion in a noöspheric earth, a "transcendental star," as Sloterdijk calls it: "A star on which the theory of stars appeared, the earth shines with self-generated phosphorescence" (p. 25, In the World Interior of Capital).
Horizontality, so long as we conceive of it as a going and a return, shares an essentially circular structure with verticality. Its just transcendentalism with more speed, with escape velocity. Still, whether Platonist or Humean, we ascend and descend, we travel far away and we come back home again. Sure, sometimes we get bored and give up. Sometimes we are blinded by the light on approach. Other times we die on the way back (and what unimaginable lines of flight might draw us then?). But if there is a flat plane before philosophy, there must be a curved sphere after it.
Were we to take flight toward the fading sun at the precise rate of earth's counter-rotation, time would appear to cease and we would feel as though we needed no sleep. But when we finally came down from our magic flight, our friends back on solid ground would see the dreamlessness in our eyes. Though their subjectivity is nothing like the chains of common sense, even sorcerers are subject to the grip of gravity. Earth holds us all.
I am more inclined to bear the cross of horizontal heavens with transcendental planes than I am to let one tip the other over on its side…
The transcendental and the horizontal meet in the terrestrial.
Big History and Cosmopolitics
Some friends of mine presenting at the upcoming Big History conference at Dominican University.
Originally posted on Knowledge Ecology:
[Image: Vincent Fournier]
I'll be speaking with some of the usual suspects at the International Big History Association Conference this August at Dominican University in San Rafael, California. Our Panel description and abstracts can be found below. (Don't know what Big History is? Me neither until a few weeks ago. Here's a short primer.)
Panel Title: Cosmopolitics and the Big Journey: Resolving Nature-Culture Dualisms
Abstract: In its research and teaching programs, Big History facilitates the integration of human and natural history into a multidimensional collective history. There is still much work that remains to be done to articulate collective history without falling back into longstanding dualisms that separate humans from nature. Along those lines, Big History can benefit from a dialogical encounter with others who are oriented toward overcoming the human/nature dualism, including those involved in the Journey of the Universe project and, in a very different vein…
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Process, Relationality, and Individuality: Graham Harman and Alfred Norht Whitehead (response to Jonathan Cobb)
Relevant links to the argument between me, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman:
Levi Bryant Mis-reading Whitehead?
Whitehead's Process Atomism (Response to Graham Harman)
Object as subject-superject, or why Harman is wrong about Whitehead
Occasionalism in Whitehead and Harman
Harman's Crucified Objects and Whitehead's God: More on Withdrawal
Soul-Making with Iain McGilchrist
Iain McGilchrist is the author of several books, most recently The Master and His Emissary.
What if we are not born with fully formed eternal souls, but must each grow our own in time? What if psyche, like physis, is a relational process, and not an independent substance?
McGilchrist quotes James Hillman: "The soul is not an object, but a way of knowing objects."
McGilchrist wants to resurrect Plato's theory of vision, where physical light comes into the eyes while spiritual light goes out of it.
Letters on Cosmology and Theodicy
Below, I've copied an email thread with Dan Dettloff, who blogs at Re(-)petitions. I thought some of our other readers might want to chime in. Actually, I'd really like to hear other people's responses to Dan's question. I've not arrived at a satisfying answer to it, but I do think getting past "the problem of evil" will require a far more radical re-conceptualization of God's nature than that offered by any ontotheology. On the other hand, there is more to religion than concepts. If, as the religious believe, God actually exists, then God is not simply an idea. God is real. After Kant–for whom God became merely a regulative idea necessary "for us" as rational thinkers but for all that not necessary for being "in itself"–the problem of evil became more acute, since it was re-located from the transcendent to the transcendental, from the universal to the individual: what had been an abstract problem for God to work out before the creation of the universe became a concrete problem for each human person to work out before theorizing about or acting within the world. Theology was no longer ontologically relevant, was not a science of divinity, but nonetheless remained crucially important for phenomenological knowledge and practical affairs, for free and responsible action among others. Without the regulative idea of God, or the Kingdom of Ends, human freedom would spin free of its gravitational center and unwind into blind willing. We would be incapable of good or evil action, incapable of loving. We would be as nothing.
Dean has been busy trying to think Christianity in the context of Speculative Realism and the "New Story" of evolutionary cosmology. Some of my own thoughts on these topoi were collected in this essay "Towards a Christological Realism."
I'll be brief, as I'm sure you're busy, and I to you with what may turn out to be a bit of a heady question. I have followed your blog from time to time, and I admire your ability to bring various strands of thinking together. In fact, your writing prompted me to take a course on eco-theology with Dennis O'Hara in Toronto. I come from continental philosophy and identify as a Christian with the usual string of philosophical qualifiers. Convicted by Speculative Realism and a general growing interest in science, I have been hard at work trying to bring together the theological visions, which have ontological ramifications, of religious traditions (most specifically Christianity). Perhaps a year or so ago, Levi Bryant made a post at larval subjects calling out folks like Caputo for reducing religion to a sort of poetic overlay on the world, suggesting this cuts its legitimate, if (on Bryant's view) misguided, ontological claims.
I share Bryant's criticism, but, naturally, not his atheism, and as such have been exploring just what those ontological claims of Christianity might be, especially given the new cosmology. I've read The Universe Story by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry and Berry's The Great Work, along with a myriad of articles (and I have some formal theological training, most specifically with Moltmann). While I'm not novice to theology, I recognize that this is a new arena for me, or at least I'm coming to it with new sets of questions.
Let me cut to the chase. I'm having trouble finding a satisfactory answer to the problems of creative destruction in the universe story, especially as it pertains to the kind of vision of a God of love present in most religious traditions. The argument is likely not foreign to you, but so we're on the same page it goes something like: if God is so loving, as revealed in figures like, for example, Jesus Christ (though one could obviously choose others, but perhaps staying Christocentric will give us a little bit of a particular ground to work with), and God reveals that humans are called to enact radical love, forgiveness, and peace in the world, why would God create a universe which can only seem to create itself via loads of natural evil? In other words, when God incarnates into the person of Christ, God essentially becomes not just a human but inherits the sacrifice of millions of suffering creatures who, as part of the universe story, have given rise to this particular conscious being we call Jesus. Jesus then explores an ethic of love which runs precisely counter to the pre-human logic of cosmogenesis (or at least biogenesis).
Solutions to this issue usually take the form of some kind of libertarian notion of freedom for creation. God steps back and allows creation to realize itself. But this, too, is at odds with plenty of religious definitions of freedom, and, of course, autonomy is hardly synonymous with freedom. So what gives? Are we forced to affirm some kind of strange, perverse religious ontology which suggests God creates a universe which creates itself, only to tell the universe it was messing up the whole time? Do you know of any ways out of this predicament?Thanks in advance, Matthew. I hope all is well, and thank you, again, for your work. I've personally benefited quite a bit from it and look forward to reading more.
Hi Dean,
Thanks for your email. You've raised a question that has been on my mind lately, actually. I just finished a book by Matthew Stewart called The Courtier and the Heretic: Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. It goes into the different theological positions of Spinoza and Leibniz.
For Spinoza (a pantheist), there is no such thing as good and evil from God's all-inclusive perspective. Further, God has no freedom, since God is identical to the natural world, which was conceived by Spinoza along Newtonian lines as deterministic and law-abiding.
For Spinoza, the problem of evil is really just an illusion resulting from our limited perspective on things. Things are the way they are because they couldn't have been any other way. God had no choice in the matter.
Leibniz was deeply influenced by Spinoza, but fought against his conclusions. Leibniz wanted to defend a conception of God as both apart from and internal to the universe, as both free and as necessary. In his Theodicy, he asked "why is there something, rather than nothing?" He imagined God deliberating with Himself prior to creating the universe: "Is such an endeavor worth it?," Leibniz imagines God asking Himself. Leibniz then distinguishes between the divine understanding (God's mind, if you will) and the divine will (God's heart). The divine understanding, in creating a universe, must obey the logical principles of identity and non-contradiction. The divine will, given these restrictions, desires to create the best of all possible worlds. So the finite created world we know, according to Leibniz, contains the least amount of evil that it possibly could contain. God did His best, in other words. He decided it was worth creating the world for the good that would result, even if this good was won at the cost of some degree of evil and suffering.
My own response to the problem of evil comes largely out of Whitehead's process theology. Whitehead (dis)solves the problem in a way that may be unacceptable to some orthodox Christians, in that he denies God's omnipotence. Leibniz also limited God's power in some sense (in that he required God to obey logic–Descartes is an example of someone who conceived of God as so powerful that He could even make 2+2=5 if He wanted). But Whitehead's denial is more radical. God is no longer an all-powerful dictator who created out of nothing a finite and contingent universe. Rather, God is a creature of Creativity, part of cosmogenesis like you and I, not a distant unmoved mover but"a fellow sufferer who understands." His only power derives from "the worship He inspires." He is not capable of coercing creation to obey his commands, but works gently by way of erotic, moral, and aesthetic persuasion.
I presented a paper recently that further fleshes out Whitehead's psychocosmotheology called "Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: Steps Toward an Incarnational Philosophy" that further develops his process theology.
In short, for Whitehead, evil is not God's fault, but is a side effect of creative process/evolutionary becoming. Evil is "creativity in the wrong season," as he puts it.I'm also influenced by Schelling's treatment of these issues… He would probably invert the Whiteheadianism that "evil is not God's fault." For Schelling, evil is precisely the fault or fissure in God between hiddenness and revelation, between wrathful withdrawal and radiant love.
Hope that clarifies some things for you somewhat… I welcome further dialogue about all this. Would you mind if I post your question and my response on my blog? I think others would enjoy thinking alongside us.
Thanks so much for your timely and thorough response. You're welcome to post it on your blog, and feel free to edit whatever you'd like. I'm not much a stickler on those sorts of things.
Your presentation of Whitehead is a useful way of cutting through Spinoza and Leibniz. I wonder, though, if this response moves the problem around rather than solving it (I recognize that "theodicy" may very well be an impossible thing to "solve," but it remains the nagging problem of the universe story and, I fear, threatens it as a viable interpretive option). While I would happily deny God's classical omnipotence, the question remains as to how God could not have created a universe which creates itself without all the violence. The Judeo-Christian writings get out of the problem by basically affirming that God creates a universe which is open to further development under a primordial goodness, and evil/suffering end up having a radically anthropocentric cause. This older cosmological mythos doesn't explain suffering, of course, but it gets God off the hook. With the new cosmology, I, like you, find it necessary to deny a strong Providence, but we end up running into the usual problems of process theism, namely that it seems to encourage us to modify the concept of God so significantly that the God who comes out on the other side seems totally alien to the impulses of most world religions. God ends up sort of being shoe-horned into a certain cosmological model rather than setting the terms of the discourse, and thus process theology runs the risk of re-establishing another God of the philosophers and committing the sin of ontotheology.
Bringing this back to the problem of evil, the process paradigm, while still (I think) a God of the philosophers, is an improvement on the classical paradigm, but it fails to name the origin of evil other than to say it is structurally present in the very processes of the universe. It would be hard, I think, to hold that God creates the universe out of love as a result. We would need to posit the usual Boehme-Hegel-Moltmann-zimzum models, which come loaded with their own structural instabilities just as the classical models do.
But perhaps I've missed something somewhere along the way. I've sort of assumed a lot of things about these models in a slow disclosure of how I feel about them, and I certainly don't want to pin anything on you that you don't wish to be saying. My apologies for any presumptions or errors.
Thanks again for your time, Matt.
I suppose it comes down to whether or not we are persons of faith, for whom God's nature and existence are attested by way of spiritual revelation. If we cannot simply affirm this or that sort of God by way of an inner faith or an acceptance of outer religious authority, then we are forced to consider the physico-cosmological revelation instead by asking: What can God be like, given what we know of the physical universe? This question seems absurd, even abhorrent, for evangelical Christians, since what we've learned about biological evolution (which marches forward mostly by way of the satanic Great Selectors: sex and death) suggests we'd do better not ask the question at all, since if such a universe of continual carnage does have a Creator, its not the sort of God that would be worth loving. Better to be an atheist than to admit the existence of a deity who thought billions of years of rape and slaughter were worth the effort of creation…
I think process theism, whether we're talking about Whitehead's version, or Schelling's Böhmean version, forces us to consider the darkness, the wrath, and the unconsciousness of God, as much as we may prefer only to look at His conscious light and love. If the life of God is an eternal process of incarnation, then the classical sort of religion that would have provided its adherents with hope for some sort of escape hatch to a better world beyond this one must be regarded as nothing more than the illusion of a death fearing primate struggling desperately to cope. God is here with us, part of us, living and dying with us. God isn't trying to escape this world, but to become more and more mixed up with it. Creation wasn't something God undertook by choice, as far as I can tell.
"God," said Whitehead to Lucien Price, "is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts…In so far as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death…to…irrelevancy. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur."
I came across this article in The Atlantic penned by Whitehead in 1925 called "Science and Religion." Much of it seems to be excerpted from his lecture published as Religion in the Making. Thought it might be relevant to quote at length:
"Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something which gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. The immediate reaction of human nature to the religious vision is worship. Religion has emerged into human experience mixed with the crudest fancies of barbaric imagination. Gradually, slowly, steadily, the vision recurs in history under nobler form and with clearer expression. It is the one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend. It fades and then recurs. But when it renews its force it recurs with an added richness and purity of content. The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
The vision claims nothing but worship; and worship is a surrender to the claim for assimilation, urged with the motive force of mutual love. The vision never overrules. It is always there, and it has the power of love presenting the one purpose whose fulfillment is eternal harmony. Such order as we find in nature is never force — it presents itself as the one harmonious adjustment of complex detail. Evil is the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision. Evil is overruling, retarding, hurting. The power of God is the worship He inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure."
Brian Swimme on "The New Story" in cosmology:
Update: By chance, I noticed this opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times: "A Rationalist's Mystical Moment" by Barbara Ehrenreich. Her discussion of Rudolf Otto's psychology of religion is certainly relevant.
10th International Whitehead Conference – "Seizing an Alternative: Towards an Ecological Civilization"
After speaking at the 9th International Whitehead Conference last fall in Krakow, Poland, I was invited to help organize a track for the 2015 IWC in Claremont, CA next summer (June 4-7). The 2015 conference is called "Seizing an Alternative: Towards an Ecological Civilization" and is largely the brain child of process theologian and environmental philosopher John Cobb, Jr. Plenary speakers include Cobb, Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, Brian Swimme, Catherine Keller, Herman Daly, and David Ray Griffin. The conference will be divided into 12 topical sections, with each section including 4 or 5 tracks. My track is in section 3, "Alienation from Nature: How It Arose," and is called "Late Modernity and Its Reductive Monism." For a brief description of the proposed focus of this section and its sub-tracks written by Cobb, click HERE.
In his proposal for my track, Cobb writes:
Rene Descartes, who developed the Enlightenment vision most profoundly and influentially, is known especially for his radical dualism of the human soul, on one side, and mere matter in motion on the other. Although this carried the alienation from nature to its extreme, it gave dignity to human beings. It supported the ideas of human rights and even of a fundamental equality of all. However, in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin showed that human beings are a product of evolution, so that they are fully part of nature. This opened the door to re-thinking nature as having some of the properties Descartes attributed to the human soul. But the commitment of the sciences to methods associated with nature's purely objective existence was very strong. Instead of changing the approach to the rest of the natural world, scientists chose to study humans in the way they had previously studied the objects of human experience. Enlightenment dualism was replaced in late modernity by reductionist monism. The Enlightenment led people to understand themselves as responsible citizens. The new reductionistic monism represents us as laborers in the service of the economic system.
To re-phrase, my track will focus on the way that the classical Enlightenment dualism between morally responsible human souls and a morally neutral mechanical nature has, in the late modern period, been replaced by a pseudo-materialistic monism. Descartes was the first to articulate this dualism in its modern form. His attempt at a clean break from traditional dogmas by re-grounding human rationality on our own self-evident powers of reflective self-consciousness was an essential factor in the Western world's later revolutionary struggles for individual political freedom. Without Descartes and those who followed in his wake (especially Locke and Kant) there would be no Modern philosophy, obviously, but nor would there have been a French or American Revolution. The dualistic ontology of spiritual human vs. mechanical matter, though unsuited for (and in some sense the cause of) our present ecological nightmare, was for an earlier epoch a catalyst for democratic liberation from the oppressive theocratic monarchies of the medieval world. Nowadays, since the dominant ontology has devolved into a confused monist materialism (which Latour deconstructs and re-assembles in AIME), the democratic political ideals of the Enlightenment are increasingly being called into question by neoliberal economists and reductive neurobiologists, among others. If there is no such thing as a soul, there is no such thing as freedom, no such thing as moral responsibility to other human souls, and so no real justification for democratic self-governance. If we are really just selfish desire-machines blindly designed by the Darwinian struggle for consumption and reproduction called Natural Selection (nature's "invisible hand"), then, following the neoliberal capitalist approach, the best form of governance is that orchestrated by well-trained technocrats and social engineers, those who know how best to keep the civilizational machine running smoothly.
The discoveries of deep time and biological evolution that emerged during the course of the 18th and 19th centuries dealt the death blow to substance dualism, forcing humanity to make a fateful ontological decision: either, as Cobb puts it, (1) re-imagine nature as in some way ensouled, or (2) re-think the human soul as somehow mechanical. In the 20th century, Western techno-science committed itself to the second project: human society and the earth itself were to be re-made in the image of the machine (if ancient cosmologies suffered from anthropomorphism, modern cosmologies suffer from mechanomorphism). Our early 21st century world, with its exploding economic inequality and ecological unraveling, is the near ruin lying in the wake of that decision.
Whitehead stands out among 20th century philosophers, not for his revolt against techno-scientific reductionism (certainly, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were just as dedicated to resisting it), but for his decision to have a go at project #1. As I describe in my essay on Whitehead's relevance to contemporary cosmology Physics of the World-Soul (2013), Whitehead's response, not only to 19th century evolutionary theory, but to 20th century quantum and relativity theories, was to re-imagine, in process-relational terms, the relationship between the interior psychical and exterior physical worlds. That conscious human experience is continuous with the rest of an evolved nature is clear enough; but Whitehead argues that we cannot think coherently of this continuum in an eliminatively materialist way, as though consciousness could be explained by reduction to something entirely dumb and numb, unintelligent and unfeeling. If we are to remain civilized, we must take knowledge and love seriously as having a real effects on the course of human history. To take human knowledge and love seriously requires that we root these powers ontologically, that we ground them in the energies of cosmogenesis itself. Otherwise they are mere passing fantasies, cultural figments to be reduced to the neurotic mechanics of our brains and controlled by techno-scientific specialists.
The results of the modern world deciding in favor of project #2 are detailed by Whitehead toward the end of Science and the Modern World (1925):
[All] thought concerned with social organization expressed itself in terms of material things and of capital. Ultimate values were excluded. They were politely bowed to, and then handed over to the clergy to be kept for Sundays. A creed of competitive business morality was evolved…entirely devoid of consideration for the value of…life. The workmen were conceived as mere hands, drawn from the pool of labor. To God's question, men gave the answer of Cain– "Am I my brother's keeper?"; and they incurred Cain's guilt (181).
Participants in my track will have an opportunity to draw on Whitehead, as well as other congenial thinkers, in an effort to both critique late modernity's reductive monism and to re-construct a more viable ontology for a future ecological civilization. I'll continue to post updates about the shape of the track as the conference date approaches.
Online course this Fall: "Mind and Nature in German Idealism"
Below is the introductory lecture of a 10-week undergraduate course called "Mind and Nature in German Idealism" that I'm hoping will run this coming Fall (2014) for the University of Philosophical Research. If you're an undergrad looking for an independent study, let me know.
Schelling & Whitehead inheriting Spinoza & Leibniz: God and the Modern World
I've just finished Matthew Stewart's popular book The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006). I was hoping to fill out my own understanding of the historical context surrounding these two thinkers. I was not disappointed on this front. Stewart combed the archives and stitched together an entertaining story about the important influence (even if negative) that Spinoza had on Leibniz. After Leibniz had caught wind of Spinoza's heretical writings through a mutual friend, he initiated a short correspondence before eventually meeting with Spinoza at the latter's apartment in The Hague in November of 1676.
Stewart's presentation of the ideas, as well as the personal character, of these two world-historical thinkers is tilted rather sharply in Spinoza's favor. Stewart is certainly entitled to his perspective, but I was put off by his hatchet job on Leibniz. Spinoza, clearly his hero, is made to seem like an anti-mystical modern liberal materialist, while Leibniz is painted as a greedy, socially needy medieval throwback and a pathological liar whose best ideas were cribbed from Spinoza. Leibniz's character flaws, as well as his philosophy, are psychoanalytically reduced by Stewart to the loss of his doting father at the tender age of 6.
Leibniz was well-traveled and well-connected man whose collected works and correspondence with other learned members of the European upper classes totals more than 150,000 pages. As a result, historians know far more about his biography than Spinoza's, who was forced into seclusion after being excommunicated from the Sephardic Jewish community in Amsterdam when he was 24. Leibniz's flaws, as well as his brilliance, are far more on display than Spinoza's, whose life remains shrouded in mystery. This makes it easy for Stewart to elevate Spinoza to the stuff of legend, the exemplar of all virtue and modesty. Stewart claims him as the heroic forerunner of everything he finds great about modernity: the religiously tolerant and democratic state, the ethos of self-interest, the mechanistic understanding of nature, etc.
Stewart laments the "anti-modern" influence of Leibniz in the centuries following his death, suggesting that "the reactive form of modernity that began with [him] has in fact become the dominant form of modern philosophy" (310). He goes on:
"Anxious over the apparent purposelessness of the world revealed by modern science; bitter about the threatened demotion of humankind from its special place in nature; alienated from a society that seems to recognize no transcendent goals; and unwilling to assume personal responsibility for happiness–a needy humankind has reinvented the Leibnizian philosophy with abandon over the past three centuries" (311).
Stewart lists Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger as each expressing what amounts to the same sort of reactionary philosophy that Leibniz first articulated in response to his encounter with Spinoza's system. All these anti-modern thinkers, according to Stewart, failed to face the darker mundane truths about human and cosmic nature revealed by the scientific method and by the bloody course of political history. Contra Leibniz, it would seem that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.
There is certainly something profound in both Spinoza's pantheism and Leibniz's monadology. My own philosophical heroes, Schelling and Whitehead, learned a great deal from each of them. Schelling, who argued his entire life on behalf of freedom (for humanity, for God, and for nature), nonethteless lavishes great praise upon Spinoza (this despite the latter's thoroughgoing deterministic world-picture). In his 1833 lectures published as On the History of Modern Philosophy, Schelling writes:
"It is unquestionably the peacefulness and calm of the Spinozist system which particularly produces the idea of its depth, and which, with hidden but irresistible charm, has attracted so many minds. The Spinozist system will also always remain in a certain sense a model. A system of freedom–but with just as great contours, with the same simplicity, as a perfect counter-image of the Spinozist system–this would really be the highest system. This is why Spinozism, despite the many attacks on it, and the many supposed refutations, has never really become something truly past, never been really overcome up to now, and no one can hope to progress to the true and the complete in philosophy who has not at least once in his life lost himself in the abyss of Spinozism" (66).
Schelling was stimulated to move beyond his early allegiance to Fichte's subjective idealism by Spinoza. But the latter's system was no resting place for Schelling, it was rather a springboard towards deeper speculations on the relationship between the creative life of God and on God's participation in the becoming of nature. For Spinoza, God was inseparable from and so identical with nature. Though infinite, Spinoza's God was also an immovable and so dead substance, incapable, says Schelling, of going out of itself in order to create. And as far as Schelling was concerned, despite the genius of his system, Spinoza left us with no explanation for how the transition to even just the appearance of finite things could ever have taken place. "We are compelled," writes Schelling, "to go back into infinity with the explanation of everything."
As for Leibniz, Schelling agrees with Stewart that his monadology was largely a reaction to Spinoza's system, "a hypothesis which [Leibniz] thought up, perhaps only to oppose something different for a time to Spinozism, in order, so to speak, to divert the world with it" (78). Schelling goes on to say (in further agreement with Stewart) that "we can primarily regard Leibnizianism only as a stunted Spinozism." Schelling sees Leibniz not so much as an opponent, but as an interpreter or mediator of Spinoza's ideas. As Stewart points out, Spinoza's doctrine of mind-matter parallelism became Leibniz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony of monads.
Schelling does praise Leibniz for his insight into the stages of nature's coming to consciousness of itself as spirit. The material world Leibniz called a "sleeping monad-world"; the vitality of plants and animals he referred to as the "dreaming monad"; and the rational soul of intelligent creatures like human beings he referred to as the "waking monad." Schelling was also inspired to build on Leibniz's early attempt to delve into the mind of God prior to the creation of the world. In Schelling's hands, this exercise became the attempt to articulate a sort of "temporal eternity," a past that was never present, a divine time prior to cosmic time in which God deliberated with Itself. Schelling's Ages of the World project remained unfinished at his death. It proved too difficult in the end for Schelling to overcome the subject-predict mode of expression while at the same time remaining logically comprehensible at the same time. Though perhaps he came close in his drafts:
"The doctrine that God created the world in time is a pillar of genuine faith. The labor of this present work [Ages of the World] would be adequately rewarded had it only made this thought comprehensible and intelligible. For since there is no time in God itself, how should God create the world in time if there is not a time outside of God? Or how would a determination of this time be possible if there is not already, before creation, a movement outside of God, according to whose repetition time is measured? God, in accordance with His highest Self, is not manifest. God manifests Himself. He is not actual. He becomes actual. It is precisely by this that God may appear as the most supremely free being. Hence, something else emerges between the free eternity and the deed, something that has a root that is independent from eternity, and is something commencing (finite), albeit eternally so. Thereby, there may eternally be something through which God could draw nigh to creatures and communicate Himself to them. Thereby, pure eternity may always remain free with respect to Being. And Being may never appear as an emanation from the eternal capacity-to-be and hence, there may be a distinction between God and his Being. In science, as in life, people everywhere are governed more by words than by clear concepts. Hence, on the one hand, they explain God in an indeterminate fashion as a necessary being and, on the other hand, they get worked up over a nature being ascribed to God. They would thereby like to give the appearance that they are saving God's freedom. How little they understand, or, moreover, how they understand nothing of this whatsoever, is illuminated by the preceding. For without a nature, the freedom in God could not be separated from the deed, and hence would not be actual freedom. Hence, they quash, as is proper, the system of universal necessity and yet they appear just as eager to quash any succession in God, although, if there is no succession, only a single system remains, namely that everything is simultaneous with and necessary to the divine being. In this way, as one notices that they also do in life, they reject, like the blind, precisely that which they most eagerly seek (without understanding it) and are drawn exactly to that which they really wanted to flee" (80-81).
In the end, Schelling faults Leibniz as much as Spinoza for denying freedom and life to God. Spinoza's denial was more forthright: God's only "freedom" is to be what God is. God is substance–simple, unified, unchanging being. End of story. Leibniz attempted to retain God's freedom, but only through a logical device. He distinguished between the divine will and the divine understanding, whereby the metaphysical necessity of God's understanding was said not to hamper the moral freedom of God's will. But Leibniz goes on to claim that God's goodness could only have led him to chose the best world (even while His understanding forced him to accept only the best of all possible worlds, given the necessities that come along with bringing a finite world into existence). This logical maneuver is but a diplomatic pretense, just "the last resort of rationalism," according to Schelling (83). Leibniz says God is free, but by arguing that God's nature is to be good, Leibniz has actually limited God to an essence, that is, God has been equated with necessary existence, which in fact is no existence at all (where to ex-ist means to stand out from oneself, to be free of oneself, but also free to become oneself). Here it is clear how Leibniz, though he consciously strove to escape Spinoza, could in the end only collide with him. As Stewart writes in his endnotes:
"The truth is that, before he knew anything about Spinoza, Leibniz was against Spinoza; and yet, at the same time, he also had a Spinozistic side. The encounter with Spinoza was crucial to his philosophical development because it forced him to confront this division within his own thought. Spinoza presented him with a problem he devoted his philosophical labors to solving, namely, how to suppress the dangerous Spinozist within himself. Absent the dalliance with Spinoza, Leibniz would have remained a conservative thinker; but he would not have been an essentially modern one, and his philosophy would not have originated the reactive form of modernity" (331).
Neither Leibniz nor Spinoza had a way to account for the transition from the infinity of their ideas to the finitude of actual experience. Pure reason alone offers no such path. Leibniz's many monads and their a priori harmonies; Spinoza's one Substance with Its attributes and modes: both speculative systems fail the test of experience.
Experimenting on experience is described by Whitehead in the opening pages of Process and Reality as "the true method of discovery." Like an airplane, the testing of experience:
"starts on the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation" (5).
Whitehead certainly owed a lot to both Spinoza and Leibniz. His speculative system is a re-assemblage of many of their most insightful concepts. But in re-assembling them, Whitehead also drastically alters their meaning. Leibniz's monads are turned into process-relational actual occasions; they are, unlike Leibniz's ultimate entities, almost all window. Spinoza's simple substance is turned into creative process, neither finally describable as one or as many, but only as a transitional inter-relationship whereby "the many become one and are increased by one"–an eternal repetition of creative differentiation forever and again until the crack of doom. As for God, It becomes a creature of Creativity (but an important one, in that God is Whitehead's principle of limitation, that Eros for which and by which there is anything definite at all in the first place… Without Desire, nothing could become. Creativity/the Absolute would remain unmanifest, unrevealed, mere potential, unable to ex-ist, to free itself from itself.
So Spinoza and Leibniz (since Kant, usually classified as rationalists) couldn't account for the transition between the infinite and the finite, and so couldn't coherently bring God and the World into positive relation… Are Schelling and Whitehead's answers any better? Is Desire or Divine Eros a convincing reason for this transition? Could there be any other reason? Whatever you may think, Whitehead wagered on this particular solution because he felt it was the most empirically adequate account of the ontological question ("why something rather than nothing?"). Existence has value, else it would not and could not exist. Schelling similarly advocated for a metaphysically empirical account of the ultimate act/fact of creation in his late philosophy of revelation.
Are Schelling and Whitehead "anti-modern" thinkers because of the religious dimension of their thought? I suspect Stewart would think so. They seem to fit right into his schema of "anxious," "bitter," "alienated," and "needy" inheritors of Leibniz who felt the need to protect their human dignity by inventing a divine Father-figure capable of redeeming the chaos and suffering that has thus far dominated human history. I think Stewart rightly warns us to avoid the sort of ontology of consolation he describes. Perhaps Leibniz did fall victim to such a quasi-philosophical strategy in some of his lazier moments. I think Schelling and Whitehead must be understood, not as anti-modern, but as alter-modern. Their philosophies are incarnational, focused more on the Son and the Spirit than the Father, to continue to develop the theological analogy. In this sense they are fully secular, concerned with this world, and not the next.
Thinking Through Atheism in a Religious Cosmos (response to professoranton)
"In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty."
"Picking Holes in the Concept of Natural Selection" by Evan Thompson
The philosopher Evan Thompson (author of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind) recently reviewed two books on the philosophy of biology: Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong and Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. Check it out HERE.
Thompson expresses doubts about these authors' argumentative strategies and laments their neglect of the latest literature in theoretical biology (much of which points to natural selection being just one in a number of other causal factors in evolution). But he seems to agree with them that an adequate evolutionary theory must include some account of natural or immanent teleology if it hopes to explain the emergence of life and consciousness from physical processes. In other words, Thompson agrees with these thinkers that reductive materialistic accounts of life and consciousness fall short of explanatory adequacy.
Thompson writes:
A number of theorists have argued that certain types of self-organizing systems exhibit a kind of natural teleology in the sense of a directedness arising from being self-producing and self-maintaining (Juarrero 1999, Thompson E 2007, Deacon 2012). This kind of directedness does not involve teleological laws beyond or outside of the laws of physics, unlike the natural teleology that Nagel proposes but does not develop fully. Moreover, such self-producing and self-maintaining systems arguably exhibit protomental characteristics and thereby provide a bridge from the physical order to the orders of life and the mind.
Here is my earlier review of Nagel's book, in particular his mentions of Schelling and Whitehead.


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Watching Hard Knocks has definitely turned a lot of us into fans of Joe Philbin and the Dolphins -- Chris-Hogan-always-open! -- but it's hard to argue with the omen here.
From the Miami Herald's beat writer, Armando Salguero: "Multiple Dolphins players say team charter "backed into" another plane on the Dallas runway last night. ... The runway accident caused the
#Dolphins to be delayed such that they landed back in Florida only an hour ago. What a preseason!"
As defensive end Jared Odrick tweeted:
This is not real life…team plane backed into another plane right before take off. Party at— Jared Odrick (@JaredOdrick98) August 30, 2012
@anthony_fasano 's old crib
They were in Dallas, see--where Anthony Fasano used to play--but alas, there were no parties at Fasano's old crib. After a 30-13 loss to the Cowboys capped off a winless preseason, the Dolphins just had to hang out at the airport for most of the night, which is sad and funny and totally perfect all at once. Here's to hoping they had Hard Knocks cameras in the vicinity.
How does a plane possibly crash into another plane, you ask? Good question!
The only way this could be better would be if it happened to the Browns.
(HT: Shutdown Corner)

subset: commoncrawl


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Pre-Selling for Portrait Profits - by Laurence Kim
June 28, 2011 - Laurence Kim is a Seattle-based portrait photographer. When not shooting portraits, he blogs about the business of photo...Read the Full Post »
Mpix Promotion: 25% off All Metallic Prints
June 23, 2011 - Have you always wanted to try printing on Mpix's Metallic paper? Now is the time to try! Starting today and going until...Read the Full Post »
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Tools of the Trade: Integrating Tethered Photography
June 09, 2011 - Our friends at Tether Tools are committed to providing the highest quality tethering and workstation solutions for photo...Read the Full Post »
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Tuesday, August 28 2007
At 67, Herbie Hancock hasn't lost a bit of his go-for-broke attitude
"Miles wanted to hear me. That set me free."
Thursday, August 23 2007
Digitalism: Idealism
Digitalism truly clicks when its signature sound is all that is required to make a certain track function.
Akiko Tsuruga: Sweet and Funky
A young organist for Japan who swings for herself.
Wednesday, August 22 2007
Chris Byars: Photos in Black, White and Gray
Though the CD bears his name, saxophonist Byars allows his quartet to solo, at length, on each of the album's eight tracks. This could be an asset, but the musicians sound like they're wandering through each instrument, trying to grab inspiration from the air.
Friday, August 17 2007
Jazz drummer Max Roach dies
Monday, August 13 2007
A Desire to Make Sound: The Arrival of Creative Guitar God Nels Cline
The jazz guitarist -- with Wilco, his trios, or anyone else -- opens up a conversation about how to keep this music living.
Thursday, August 9 2007
Strategy: Future Rock
Strategy's vision of "future rock", it seems, derives its vocals from the vocoders of Kraftwerk, its ambience from the kraut of Can, and its groove from the spaceship Funkadelic.
Tuesday, August 7 2007
Svoy: Eclectric
Svoy has a wonderful idea of who he wants to be, but he spends so much of the album trying to live up to that standard that he seems to forget what makes his best songs so great in the first place.
Jean Luc Ponty: The Acatama Experience
It is uplifting to hear modern jazz that is at once both easily accessible and startling creative.
Wednesday, August 1 2007
Apparat: Walls
Apparat masters the art of balance, and does a bit too good a job of it.


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Meriden: one year on
Residents in Meriden say the land occupied by travellers until April last year has now improved.
Residents in Meriden say the land occupied by travellers until April last year has now improved.
Meriden green belt protesters have maintained their vigil to protest against an illegal gypsy site for 1000 days.
Villagers protesting against an illegal gypsy site near Solihull say they won't take down their protest camp.
It is 1,000 days since protesters against a gypsy site in Warwickshire took up their fight.
Gypsies moved onto the green belt in Meriden in April 2010, prompting people living nearby to set up their own camp in protest. They have until the end of March to leave the site.
Plans by gypsies in Meriden to move their illegal site to agricultural land next door will be discussed by Solihull Council today.
Residents have protested against the site in Eaves Green Lane for almost three years. The gypsies agreed to leave in March following planning refusals by a Birmingham High Court Judge
Forty residents from Meriden in Warwickshire have arrived in Westmister for a meeting with Planning Minister Brandon Lewis.
They want authorities to have greater powers when it comes to the occupation of greenbelt sites by travellers and developers.
Forty residents from Meriden in Warwickshire have arrived in Westmister for a meeting with Planning Minister Brandon Lewis. They are calling for councils to be granted greater powers to prevent occupation of greenbelt sites by travellers and developers.
They say the wheels of justice move too slowly in assessing the rights and wrongs of disputes adding to the distress of homeowners. They say the sanctity of precious areas of natural beauty is at risk unless action is taken.
Protesters against an illegal gypsy site in Meriden near Solihull are travelling to Parliament today to lobby ministers to give councils more powers to prevent travellers from developing sites on greenbelt land.
Residents want councils to have powers to remove caravans and restore the land until a planning application is finalised.
A group of gypsies have submitted an application to Solihull Borough Council for a temporary site at a nearby builders' yard on Eaves Green Lane.
The group illegally built a caravan site on greenbelt land in Warwickshire, back in 2010.
After losing a High Court appeal to stay in April, they have been given 12 months to quit the site.
– Solihull Borough Council
"We can confirm that we have received a planning application in relation to the yard.
The injunction that is in place for this site does not prevent a planning application from being made and we will need to process it in the normal way.
However, the application does not affect the injunction which still requires the existing site to be vacated by March next year and prohibits the occupation of the yard.
We will continue to monitor the site to ensure that the injunction is being complied with."
A group of Gypsies living on an illegal site have lodged an appeal against a High Court Judgment, which ordered them to leave the land in Meriden.
The group lost their High Court battle last month but Solihull Council agreed the Gypsies could stay for another year.
Now the Gypsies are appealing the decision, mainly on Human Rights grounds.
The land has been used as a temporary gypsy site for the past two years.
Since then a group of residents have kept a 24 hour vigil outside, to prevent any unlawful building on the greenbelt land.
But the villagers have been told that their protest camp is also illegal and must come down.


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- Home
- Accommodation
- See & Do
- Events
- Dining Out
- Canterbury District
- eShop
- Plan My Visit
Yorkletts, Whitstable, Kent, CT2 9JX, Email, www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/wood-information/victory-wood/
This is a place for a great walk set on the edge of the Blean Woodland area. See a wood with a difference! This is the Flagship Site, one of 33 woods plant around the UK, for the Trafalgar Woods Project to commemorate the 200th anniversary.
St Margaret's Street, Canterbury, CT1 2TG, Tel: 01227 479227, Email, www.canterburytales.org.uk
Step into medieval Canterbury and accompany Geoffrey Chaucer and his colourful characters on their magical pilgrimage from London to Canterbury.
Kings Bridge, St Peter's Street, Canterbury, CT1 2AT, Email, www.canterburyrivertours.co.uk
Flowing through the heart of historic Canterbury, the river is the perfect way to escape the hustle and bustle of one of the country's busiest city centres.
Marine Parade, Whitstable, Kent, CT5 2BE, Tel: 01227 862162, Email
The cliff-top lawns of Tankerton Slopes roll gently towards the sea and provide an excellent view of 'The Street' and a vantage point to watch the nautical world go by. Tankerton is east of Whitstable town centre.
11 Horsebridge Road, Whitstable, CT5 1AF, Tel: 01227 281174, Email, www.horsebridge-centre.org.uk
The Horsebridge Arts and Community Centre is located just yards from the beach in the centre of Whitstable town, on a site which has a long tradition of community and cultural activity and offers stunning sea views.
Riverscroft, Grove Ferry, Upstreet, Canterbury, CT3 4BP, Tel: 0300 333 5146, Email, www.kent.gov.uk/leisure-and-community/parks-and-outdoor-activities/find-a-park/grove-ferry-picnic-site
Grove Ferry Picnic Site is next to the River Stour and a good base for following the Stour Valley Walk, the Saxon Shore Way or the Wantsum Walks, and is adjacent to Stodmarsh National Reserve.
Whitehall Road, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 8BQ
Set in the floodplan of the Great Stour just outside Canterbury, Hambrook Marshes is in an area of natural marshland located adjacent to the Riverside Retail Park in Wincheap.
Mill Lane, Herne Bay, CT6 7DR, Tel: 01227 687487, www.herne-mill.btik.com
Herne Mill is the latest in a long line of mills, which have occupied the site for centuries. It is a local landmark on the skyline above the ancient village of Herne and is a 'sea mark' from the Thames Estuary.
Central Parade, Herne Bay, CT6 5LU, Tel: 01227 862162, Email
In the spring and summer months the seafront's beauty is enhanced by gardens, which bring floral colour for visitors who pass the Clock Tower and Bandstand.
King Street, Fordwich, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 0DB, Tel: 01227 711950, www.fordwichtown.org/
Although it is believed that there was an earlier building on the site, the present Guildhall, or Town Hall as it is known today, was built in 1544 during the reign of King Henry VIII.
Longmarket, Butchery Lane, Canterbury, CT1 2JR, Tel: 01227 785575, Email, www.canterbury-museums.co.uk
Explore the Roman town beneath your feet. Canterbury's underground Roman Museum is built around the remains of a Roman town house with mosaics preserved where excavated.
3 Palace Street, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2DY, Tel: 01227 639086, www.lilfordgallery.com
Established in 2000 Lilford Gallery is now one of the leading galleries in Kent. We exhibit contemporary fine art from established national and international artists as well as new and exciting talent.
Staple Street, Hernhill, Faversham, ME13 9TX, Tel: 01227 751496, Email, www.mountephraimgardens.co.uk
Mount Ephraim Gardens have plenty to offer and delight visitors. Unwind in these ten acres of gardens, set in the heart of an 800 acre estate with magnificent views over the Swale Estuary.
18 High Street, Canterbury, CT1 2RA, Tel: 01227 862162, Email, www.thebeaney.co.uk
This fabulous new visitor attraction provides state of the art special and permanent exhibition galleries, a brand new library, excellent learning facilities and a varied programme of events for all ages.
Canterbury Road, Herne Bay, CT6 7TZ, Tel: 01227 862000, Email
Curtis Wood Park is an informal area of protected open space situated on the outskirts of Herne. The site provides local residents and visitors the opportunity to enjoy a variety of semi-natural habitats in a relaxed and pleasant setting.
Honey Hill, Blean, Canterbury, CT2 9JR, Tel: 01227 765168, www.druidstone.net
Set in attractive gardens and woodland, Druidstone caters for the imagination of all ages. Go on a walk through the enchanted woodland, enjoy hands on experience with the farmyard animals.
Bekesbourne Road, Bekesbourne, Canterbury, CT4 5EL, Tel: +44 (0)844 842 4647, Email, www.aspinallfoundation.org/howletts
The Aspinall Foundation's Howletts Wild Animal Park in Kent is a great day out for groups of all sizes where education, conservation and fun combine. Set in over 100 acres of beautiful ancient parkland.
Christ Church Gate, The Precincts, Canterbury, CT1 2EE, Tel: 01227 459779, Email, www.canterburyguidedtours.com
Enjoy a fascinating 90 minute tour of historic streets AND Cathedral Precincts with knowledgeable, entertaining guides to address your questions and special interests. All for £7 or less! Tours daily from the Buttermarket.


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I grew up in Westmont, NJ and frequented the Cherry Hill Mall after it was first built in the 60s. I live in RI now, but every summer, we take a trip to the Jersey Shore. The Mt. Laurel Super 8 is our first stop for one night. The beds are super comfy, the room is spotless, the desk clerks... More
- Reservation Options:
- TripAdvisor is proud to partner with Travelocity, Orbitz, Priceline, Booking.com, Expedia, Tingo, Hotels.com, BookingOdigeoWL, TripOnline SA, Venere and Otel so you can book your Super 8 Mount Laurel reservations with confidence. We help millions of travelers each month to find the perfect hotel for both vacation and business trips, always with the best discounts and special offers.
- Also Known As:
- Super 8 Mount Laurel Hotel Mount Laurel
- Super Eight Mount Laurel
- Mount Laurel Super Eight
- Mount Laurel Super 8


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Taoiseach rejects criticism of Irish tax system
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has rejected criticism of the Irish tax system after a US Senate committee claimed Apple used the country in a bid to avoid paying billions of dollars in earnings.
On arrival at the European Union summit, he said: "I'd like to repeat that Ireland's corporation tax rate is statute-based, is very clear, very transparent - we do not do special deals with individual companies in relation to that rate."
The Taoiseach said Ireland was one of the first countries to agree a scheme on sharing of tax information with the US.
"Multinationals, in their aggressive tax planning, operate in many jurisdictions. For that reason, Ireland has been very much to the forefront in having and building more international consensus as far as transparency in tax regimes is concerned," he added.


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Shift Supervisor (US) Job Listing at Starbucks in Brookline, MA (Job ID 6674412033058439607)
As a Starbucks Shift Supervisor, you will assist the store manager in executing store operations during scheduled shifts. As a team lead, you will deploy partners and delegate tasks to create the Starbucks Experience for our customers by providing legendary customer service with prompt service, quality beverages and products, and maintaining a clean and comfortable store environment. You will be responsible for modeling and acting in accordance with Starbucks guiding principles and best of all, you'll be part of a company that is consistently rated as a great place to work and the people here love what they do.
Summary of Key Responsibilities
Responsibilities and essential job functions include but are not limited to the following:
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If you log on to the Google home page today, you'll see a curious link that reads, "Driving change: get up to speed on our winning new partnership."
When you click the link, you'll be taken to a page "announcing" a new deal between Google and NASCAR in which the Sprint Cup Series will now use Google's self-driving car technology for races.
The drivers, it seems, have been rendered obsolete.
Undoubtedly, some knuckleheads out there will actually be fooled by this joke. We hope you weren't.
But even if you recognize it's a fake, you have to like the way Google and NASCAR went all-out to sell the partnership.
It's certainly worth spending a few minutes flipping through the slides explaining how the technology works and the explanations for why Google created it.
"Humans cause the vast majority of traffic accidents and experience 100 percent of all traffic annoyance," one slide reads.
The best part is the video NASCAR created and posted on NASCAR.com. It features drivers Clint Bowyer, Brad Keselowski and Jeff Gordon giving interviews about the self-driving car.
"You know, the driving part was just too much," Keselowski said in the video. "I needed a break every once in awhile."
Check out Google's 2012 April Fools' joke here.


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Panadería Palenquito
Ojochal Area
With its fresh, bright, Moroccan-inspired flavors Citrus is a standout, even among the excellent choices within strolling distance.
Ojochal Area
While rural Ojochal isn't exactly a hot spot of cosmopolitan urbanity, this phenomenal gourmet restaurant certainly sets a high benchmark. The nouveau French dishes each emphasize a breadth of ingredients brought together in masterful combinations.
Around the glow of a bonfire and breeze from the west, diners enjoy the newest fine-dining option on this stretch of coast. The menu is international fusion with a strong local bent – chili chicken, artful stir-fries, snapper in garlic sauce – and the vibe is relaxed and romantic.


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March 8 to 9, 2014
Everyday • all day
Location :
Plaines d'Abraham
Borough of La Cité-Limoilou / Downtown
Québec , QC
Information about the event
Phone: 418-907-5734
In 2013, the ITU (International Triathlon Union) confirmed that Quebec City will host the world premiere of this new Winter Triathlon format.
Disciplines must be completed one after the other, in this order (snowshoe, skate and ski). The distances are decided by the organization.
Major Event
February 21 to March 8, 2015
Winter multisports event accessible to everyone. Skate, St. Lawrence River at your feet, on the new and spectacular skating rink on the Plains of Abraham. Multiple races, animations and exhibitions. ...
Major Event
September 1 to 7, 2014
An official PGA TOUR's Champions Tour event will be conducted September 1 to 7, 2014 at La Tempête Golf Club in Lévis, Quebec. The tournament, which has been played in Montreal the past four years...
Major Event
December 8, 2013 to December 28, 2014
The Notre-Dame de Québec Basilica-Cathedral was the first cathedral built in North America, making Notre-Dame de Québec the first Catholic parish founded north of the Spanish colonies. The 350th anniversary celebrations will...


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Community Classes
Contact Us
The Yogi Room
Website Designed
Design a Website
List Your Business
The Yogi Room specializes in providing private one-on-one yoga lessons in our White Plains studio. Whether you are looking to deepen your practice or are brand new to yoga, the private lessons are tailored to meet your specific needs. Benefits of private lessons:
-Comfortable non-intimidating environment
-Classes tailored to meet your specific goals (improve flexibility, increase strength, stress relief, improve breathing...)
-Get detailed instruction and adjustments
-Work with specific health concerns or injuries
The Yogi Room * 99 Mamaroneck Ave, Suite 6, White Plains, NY 10601 * firstname.lastname@example.com * (914) 290-6552
The Yogi Room ®
99 Mamaroneck Ave, Suite 6
White Plains, NY 10601
(914) 290-6552


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Vogograd motorcycle repair
Whilst in Volgograd in needed a new chain (and sprockets). We used a place called Custombike. Victor was extemely helpful, came out to our hotel that Sunday evening; within the hour the bike was in his workshop and we picked it up the next day even though it was a bank holiday. Very willing. www.custombike.ru. firstname.lastname@example.com
I should have put Victor's mobile number. He speaks good english
mobile +79033150709. He does texts!!
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Recent Features
The first Diablo 3 Season begins this evening and many fans are all fired up. Hear two eager Ladder climbers discuss their D2 Ladders experience, class and build plans, Patch 2.1 adaptations, weekend goals, how long they think the 1000 level 70s of each class will take, and more. Featuring Flux, Nerdwords, and Empty1. We'll […]
The first weekend of Diablo 3 Seasons has ended. How did the ladder rushers enjoy the experience? Which fast leveling strategies worked best (and worst), and does the Torment 6 "kill nothing but level fast" cheese need to be fixed? Featuring Wolfpaq, Rankil, N3rdwords, Katniss, and Flux. Following up Friday's Season-prep show, this is a […]
Community Talk
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- The Single Player Trophy Thread
Jay Wilson Rules out Diablo 3 PvP for This YearPosted 13 Dec 2012 by
It's not exactly a shock at this point, but Jay Wilson used his Twitter to announce that we're not going to get PvP in Diablo 3 this year, and that we might not even get that blog update about it.
We are not likely to post a PVP update until the end of the month. Note: that is not a promise. That's all I'll say about that. –JayWilson
GG Jay. "Almost a Disaster" –Will_Crets
This is why we don't like to give dates. When you put quality before deadlines sometimes you're estimates are wrong. –JayWilson
Let's review the recent timeline. On November 27th Jay said we'd see the PvP blog "very soon." A week later on December 4th he said complications had arisen and it wouldn't be so soon. Now it's a week later and we get this final word.
People like to bash Jay since he's the public face of the game, but from his comments it seems clear that the delay is out of his hands. Read between the lines of his Tweets back in early December. "Some complications have risen and forced a delay …I think some players don't understand the challenges of our job and what we face day to day…" If you read that and think, "Jay sucks and this is his fault!" I suggest that you've never worked with or in any kind of large corporation and have no idea of how complicated things can be.
Staracraft 2 was delayed shortly before the planned launch, rumors blamed that entirely on issues with B.net 2.0 not being ready yet, and reportedly the SC2 devs were furious but could do nothing about it. Jay might be living that now — he's being a team player and not pointing fingers — but from his words it's pretty clear the delays are coming from outside. Battle.net? Activision? Issues with e-sports stuff? Legal issue? International market issues?
There are a lot of possibilities, but ultimately it doesn't matter to most players, who just want PvP and care only that we're not getting it. Yet.