This is heavy material. I am definitely curious about process philosophy, so I will follow your advice to read. Thank you for challenging taken-for-granted understandings and insights.
Great to have these posts together like this. I have some questions about the ethical (existential) “I” in relation to process philosophy. Is it possible to conceptualise my own freedom to choose how to act in a process-based paradigm?
Hi Jon. Honestly, I don't think 'pure' process philosophy spends much time on this. Deleuze and Guattari committed a lot of their later work to the Freudian oedipal subject, and a lot of feminist new materialists draw on Jane Bennett's belief that 'my conatus will not let me "horizontalize" the world completely' (Vibrant Matter, p.104) to centre the human subject in their research when they probably shouldn't. But I think process philosophers think the existential/poststructural project of the last 75 years is decidedly dodgy. Way too anthropocentric and privileging of Kantian idea that we can only know the world through our (human) subjective lens. Whitehead's idea that all entities had a mental and physical pole comes close, but not really.
This is heavy material. I am definitely curious about process philosophy, so I will follow your advice to read. Thank you for challenging taken-for-granted understandings and insights.
Great to have these posts together like this. I have some questions about the ethical (existential) “I” in relation to process philosophy. Is it possible to conceptualise my own freedom to choose how to act in a process-based paradigm?
Hi Jon. Honestly, I don't think 'pure' process philosophy spends much time on this. Deleuze and Guattari committed a lot of their later work to the Freudian oedipal subject, and a lot of feminist new materialists draw on Jane Bennett's belief that 'my conatus will not let me "horizontalize" the world completely' (Vibrant Matter, p.104) to centre the human subject in their research when they probably shouldn't. But I think process philosophers think the existential/poststructural project of the last 75 years is decidedly dodgy. Way too anthropocentric and privileging of Kantian idea that we can only know the world through our (human) subjective lens. Whitehead's idea that all entities had a mental and physical pole comes close, but not really.
Are process philosophers at all concerned with ethics and individual responsibility?