Forever Becoming

Closed / Open

Closed              -              Open
Left hemisphere       -              Right hemisphere
Solid           -              Liquid
Mono              -              Poly
Certain           -              Uncertain
Committed           -              Uncommitted
Known              -              Unknown
Answer -              Question
Fact -              Fiction
Old       -     New
Is -              Could be
Actual -              Potential
Repetition -     Innovation
Conservation    -     Liberation
Limited              -     Unlimited
Serious              -              Playful
Adult             - Child
Senex -    Puer
Rigid    -     Flexible
Converge        -              Diverge
Order -              Chaos

Go too far in one direction and you freeze into a statue; too far in the other and you thaw into a puddle.

The teacher-student encounter runs parallel to an inner tension between the states of being a knowledgeable adult and an unknowing child.

In every adult there is a child who constantly leads us on to new things.

The adult's knowledge makes him rigid and inaccessible to innovation.

The unknowing child's irrational experimentation, his naive openness, must be retained as a living potential in every adult if he is to remain emotionally alive.

Thus the adult is never completely grown up; if he is to be somewhat healthy psychically, he must always keep a certain childlike unknowingness.

One often meets teachers who seem to have lost every trace of childishness, who have even fewer childish traits then the average healthy adult. Such teachers have become "only-teachers," who confront unknowing children almost as their enemy. They complain that children know nothing and do not wish to learn; their nerves are torn by their students' childishness and lack of self-control.

For this kind of teacher children are the Other, that which he himself wishes never to be.

A dynamic teacher must have a certain childishness in himself, just as a doctor must have a vital

relationship to the pole of illness.

He must not only transmit knowledge but also awaken a thirst for knowledge in the children, but this he can only do so if the knowledge-hungry, spontaneous child is still alive within him.

When [the teacher's childishness is repressed and projected onto the pupils] learning progress is blocked. The children remain children and the knowing adult is no longer constellated in them ... Children are his enemies, representing the internally split pole of the archetype, whose reunification is attempted through power.

[Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig]
Power In The Helping Professions, p.104-6

Premature Cognitive Commitments

[One way] that we become mindless is by forming a mindset when we first encounter something and then clinging to it when we reencounter that same thing. Because such mindsets form before we do much reflection, we call them premature cognitive commitments.

When we accept an impression or a piece of information at face value, with no reason to think critically about it, perhaps because it seems irrelevant, that impression settles unobtrusively into our minds until a similar signal from the outside world calls it up again. At that next time it may no longer be irrelevant, but most of us don't reconsider what we mindlessly accepted earlier.

The mindless individual is committed to one predetermined use of the information, and other possible uses or applications are not explored.

When our minds are set on one thing or on one way of doing things, mindlessly determined in the past, we blot out intuition and miss much of the present world around us.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.22, 118

Learning what to ignore is critical for effective psychological functioning—it would be simply overwhelming to process the full stream of information available to our senses as we make our way through the world.

So we cull through this information for relevant details, screening out everything else. The problem is, the screened-out information might be useful later, but by then we are slow to realize its significance, to unlearn its irrelevance.

This process can be modeled in the laboratory by preexposing participants to seemingly unimportant stimuli that later form the basis of a learning task. For the average person, this preexposure stifles subsequent learning—the critical stimulus has been rendered “irrelevant” and fails to penetrate awareness. Not so, however, for those high in openness, who are less susceptible to latent inhibition.

This again demonstrates a more inclusive mode of thinking—a “leaky” cognitive system, if you will—that lets in information that others filter out [...] Open people see more possibilities in even the most mundane of objects.

According to personality theorists, openness reflects a greater “breadth, depth, and permeability of consciousness” and propensity to “cognitively explore” both abstract information (ideas and arguments) and sensory information (sights and sounds).

[Luke Smillie]
'Openness to Experience: The Gates of the Mind'

That’s what people can do that a computer can’t - see similarities, similes, metaphors […] What we can do is parallel processing [and] patterns.

[Creativity is] networks that have wider expanses that connect to a broader number of neurons […] [A creative individual has] networks that are spreading far wider than in some other individual […] literally making connections that another individual does not.

Picasso had a broader network as to what could constitute a face. A broader network […] is more divergent.

[Robert Sapolsky]
'22. Emergence and Complexity'

Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones.

Categorizing and recategorizing, labeling and relabeling as one masters the world are processes natural to children. They are adaptive and inevitable part of surviving in this world. Freud recognized the importance of creation and mastery in childhood:

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early in childhood? The child's best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of the world in a new way which pleases him?

The child's serious re-creation can become the adult's playful recreation.

As adults, however, we become reluctant to create new categories [...] our outcome orientation tends to deaden a playful approach.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.63, 64

Any archetype includes opposite elements, e.g. therapist/patient, healer/healed.

If [...] a therapist defines herself or himself as a "healthy person without ailment," this archetype gets split away and the therapist becomes just a therapist and the patient just a patient.

Sadly, the patient then loses the opportunity of healing the self through the functioning of the healer archetype.

In order to prevent such a splitting off of the archetype, the therapist first has to recognize the patient that exists within herself or himself.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.98

In most educational settings, the "facts" of the world are presented as unconditional truths, when they might better be seen as probability statements that are true in some contexts but not in others.

Children are usually taught "this is a pen," "this is a rose," "this is a car." It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category "pen."

But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that "this could be a pen"? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child "this is a pen."

What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: "This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass"? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child taught initially taught "a family is a mother, a father, and a child" versus "a family could be ...."

Some may argue that to teach children about the world unconditionally is to make them insecure. Will children taught "it depends" grow up to be insecure adults? Or will they be more confident in a world of change than those of us brought up with absolutes?

Even in the most minor and ordinary details of our lives, we are locked in by the unconditional way we learn in childhood. We pick up rules before we have a chance to question them.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.120, 124, 125

OPEN: potential for more complex level functioning

- healthiest form with most possibilities for adjustment
- history and capacities conductive to movement
- Open state thinking changes as conditions/realities change
- deals effectively with barriers
- doesn't present as sharp a picture of the level as Closed does

ARRESTED: caught by barriers in self/situation

- possibility for change only if barriers are overcome
- may lack insights that explain what is happening
- will require more dissonance be created to spark change
- makes excuses and rationalizes the status quo

CLOSED: blocked by biopsychosocial capacities

- may lack neurological equipment or necessary intelligences
- historic traumas may have triggered closure
- unable to recognize barriers, much less overcome them
- threatened by change and fights to stay put or else

[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p.77

By 'insight' we mean there is an understanding of (1) what went wrong with the previous system and why, as well as (2) what resources are now available for handling the problems better. Until people have a rationale for understanding why the prior system was embraced initially and why it was eventually undermined, lasting change into the next order is fitful. Insight keeps the old problems in focus and clarifies the new ones.

Different patterns and models, as well as step-by-step processes for implementing them, are essential to moving into a new system. These alternative scenarios must be active in the collective consciousness before they can be considered. Too often they are guarded in the minds of an elite few 'planners' or 'decision makers.'

People need mental pictures of what things might be like for them in their own real Life Conditions, not for some distant Hollywood stars or textbook case studies.

[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p. 84

When the idea of altering our opinions, expanding them, or god forbid, abandoning them feels like suicide, we’re in real trouble.

We’re in an emergency where we lost sight of the plot. We forgot how big the world is and how big we are. We don’t have to be our opinions – we only have to be human.

[Andrew W.K.]
Andrew WK: why I'm making a radio show on Glenn Beck's network

Hegel deals with a sequence of logical categories: being, becoming, one, many, essence, existence, cause, effect, universal, mechanism, and "life". Each is examined in turn and made to reveal its own inadequacies and internal tensions. Each category is made to generate another more promising one which in its turn will be subject to the same kind of scrutiny.

Hegel calls this dynamic aspect of his thinking the power of "negation".

It is by means of this "negativity" of thought that the static (or habitual) becomes discarded or dissolved, made fluid and adaptable, and recovers its eagerness to push on towards "the whole."

Dialectical thinking derives its dynamic of negation from its ability to reveal "contradictions" within almost any category or identity.

[Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze]
'Hegel for Beginners'

In Rogers’ view, a therapy based on the notion of preserving the client’s personal self is misguided. So is a therapy based on the notion of preserving the counselor’s personal self.

It would be better to focus on the moment of experience which we share with our client, finding in it the invitation to be new rather than to go on repeating our past moments of experience the way a rock does.

[…] it is the openness of awareness to what exists in the present moment that is a key condition for the emergence of creativity.

For counselors following Rogers’ or Whitehead’s thinking each new moment is a moment of creation in which we and our client may either allow ourselves to be drawn towards the goal of beauty and complexity and become more than what we have been, or we allow ourselves to be trapped by past habits and reactions into repeating ourselves once more.

[Bernie Neville]
‘What Kind of Universe? Rogers, Whitehead and Transformative Process’, Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies, Volume 6, Number 4, p. 282-3

“What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to ‘know’ - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange and distant, as ‘outside us’.”

The difficulty is not so much in reconstructing the interpretation as in becoming explicitly aware of what we have taken for granted in the first place. Once we have done this, we have seen it as the product of an interpretation; and we can see it as such only on the basis of a further interpretation on our own part. Second, [Nietzsche's 'free spirits'] know that in producing new views they inevitably change their own situation and thus make further interpretations necessary; these interpretations will in turn create still other new situations.

They can thus accept the contingency of their views when that becomes necessary.

A “noble” will is one, as Sarah Kofman writes, “which, though capable of affirming one perspective over a long time is still distant enough from it to be able to change it and to see the world with 'other eyes'.”

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 72

It appears that pattern perception increases along with the concentration in the brain of the chemical dopamine […]

A higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection; an injection of L-dopa, a substance used to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease, seems to increase such activity and lower’s one’s suspension of belief.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 67

Disasters do not follow preordained scripts. Even in situations where there is extensive disaster experience, those seeking to respond invariably confront unforeseen situations.

One counterproductive way of dealing with the unexpected is to adhere to plans and procedures even when they are ineffective or offer no guidance in the face of unfamiliar challenges.

[Kathleen Tierney]
The Social Roots of Risk: Producing disasters, promoting resilience, p. 208

Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognise what it is.

For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point where both groups have been presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognise the hydrant much faster.

Moral? The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

[…] the more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see the noise (i.e., the anecdote) and mistake it for actual information. Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds - so those who delay developing their theories are better off.

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

Two mechanisms are at play here: […] confirmation bias […] and belief perseverance, the tendency not to reverse opinions you already have. Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to part with them.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 144

At the broadest level of trait description, therefore, variability in human personality appears to reflect restraint and engagement.

Stability appears to be associated with refraining from a variety of behaviors associated with disruptive impulses (such as drug use and reactive aggression), whereas Plasticity appears to be associated with engaging in a variety of behaviors associated with approach behavior and exploration (such as creative expression and attending social events) [...] behaviors consistent with an underlying exploratory drive.

These results are consistent with the theory that the metatraits reflect serotonergically mediated self-regulation and constraint on the one hand and dopaminergically mediated exploration and engagement on the other.

In particular, some of the processes underlying these traits may best be understood in terms of the different systems that are being restrained or regulated in each case. Process models that are consistent with this view include those linking Agreeableness to the inhibition of interpersonal aggression, Conscientiousness with the inhibition of distraction, and Emotional Stability with the inhibition of negative affect.

Stability appears to be reflected most strongly in restraint from drug use and hostility and in the absence of disrupted sleep. The association of Stability with stable sleep is consistent with the finding that Stability is associated with circadian timing, such that people higher in Stability tend to be ‘‘morning people’’ with circadian rhythms more strongly entrained to the daily light–dark cycle.

[Jacob B. Hirsh, Colin DeYoung, and Jordan B. Peterson]
'Metatraits of the big five differentially predict engagement and restraint of behavior', p. 11-13

Taken together, existing work suggests that political conservatism reflects a greater tendency to seek structure, to avoid ambiguity, changes to the status quo, and novelty. By this account, political liberalism represents greater comfort with lack of structure, new experiences, and novel information.

Given ideological differences in open versus closed styles of information processing, moral concern might follow a similar pattern.

In prioritizing closure, order, and stability, conservatives should express concern toward smaller, more well-defined, and less permeable social circles (relative to broader ones). In prioritizing openness, tolerance for ambiguity, and desire for change, liberals should express concern toward larger, less well-defined, and more permeable social circles (relative to smaller ones).

[Jonathan Haidt]
‘Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle’, p.2

Rather than a dichotomous chicken-or-egg question (does ideology cause differences in concern, or do differences in concern cause ideology?), the relations between ideology and ambit of concern are likely a complex interplay across development involving interactions between genetic and environmental factors.

Both one’s ambit of concern and political ideology are likely preceded by basic temperamental differences demonstrated by research in developmental psychology and political science.

Although again we cannot fully establish causality, we believe these perceptual preferences for tightness versus looseness reflect basic differences in information processing (desire for closure and structure versus desire for openness), which in turn drive preferences for tighter versus looser social circles.

In this way, our work is similar to work showing that left–right ideological differences manifest in basic information processing differences in orientation toward appetitive versus aversive stimuli and exploration versus non-exploration toward novel stimuli (even when these stimuli are devoid of social meaning).

Our work also demonstrates specific perceptual differences and connects these more fundamental information processing differences to social preferences, moral foundations, and moral expansiveness broadly.

[Jonathan Haidt]
‘Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle’, p.8

Jonathan Haidt […] found that of the five major moral foundations, conservatives are balanced in all five whereas liberals really only care about one or two.

The left can’t grasp why the right cares about loyalty any more than you can grasp why an autistic kid cares that his train is pointed the wrong way around—you and the liberal live in discrete moral worlds.

[Imperium Press]
‘The Epistemic Divorce’, Imperium Press, Substack

Masculine / Feminine
Extravert / Introvert

What's Your Position?

Perspectivism

Borders and Flow

Criticality

What's your label say?

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Even people who have developed a strong sense of competence can find it eroded by mindlessly accepted labels. Before getting married, Ann could balance her chequebook; once married, she let her husband take over the task; now divorced, Ann can't seem to balance her chequebook any longer. Jane is a confident lawyer; she has a baby and takes a leave of absence from her job. Now she wants to go back to work but has lost her confidence.

These rather familiar situations illustrate a phenomenon that we have called self-induced dependence. Former graduate student Ann Benevento and I designed a few experiments to see how it develops. We decided to conduct them at the airport, on the assumption that people who travel are likely to be somewhat independent and self-assured. If they could develop self-induced dependence, it was likely to occur in others as well.

In the first phase of one of these experiments, the subjects were given arithmetic problems which they could solve with ease. In phase two, we put the subjects in a position likely to lead them to question their competence. We gave some of them the title of "assistant" and others "boss," and had them perform tasks in a manner appropriate to their roles. In the third phase, all the subjects returned to the same kind of easy arithmetic problems they had successfully completed in phase one.

Those who had been made "assistants" now solved the problems only half as well as they had originally. Though they began participating with equal competence, the labels that they had assumed undermined their performance.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.47, 48

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Related posts:-
Dissemination of Information
Imminent (Double)-Agents
Guiding Fiction

Steps to greatness

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Our tendency to focus on outcome also narrows our self-image. When we envy other people's assets, accomplishments, or characteristics, it is often because we are making a faulty comparison. We may be looking at the results of their efforts rather than the process they went through on the way.

For example, imagine while talking to a professor in her office, you hear her use a word that you do not understand. You may feel intimidated and stupid. Now imagine that the same professor is sitting at her desk with an open dictionary. You would probably conclude that she knew that strange word because she spends time looking up words, finding them in books she reads, or learning them in some other straightforward way. You too could look up words, if you wanted to.

A true process orientation also means being aware that every outcome is preceded by a process. Keeping an eye on process, on the steps anyone must take to become expert, keeps us from disparaging ourselves.

Graduate students forget this all the time. They begin their dissertations with inordinate anxiety because they have seen other people's completed and polished work and mistakenly compare it to their own first tentative steps. With their noses deep in file cards and half-baked hypotheses, they look in awe at Dr. So-and-so's published book as if it had been born without effort or false starts, directly from brain to printed page.

By investigating how someone got somewhere, we are more likely to see the achievement as hard-won and our own chances as more plausible.

People can imagine themselves as taking steps, while great heights seem entirely forbidding.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.46, 75, 76

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Related posts:-
Process vs Outcome
Uses of Heroes | Possibilities

State / Process

State - Process
Goal - Journey

Objects - Connections

Static - Dynamic

Past - Future
Newtonian - Einsteinian
Transcendent - Immanent
Solid - Liquid

Presence - Absence
Particle - Wave
Being - Becoming

Sky-cult - Earth-cult

The Being view contends that we have a nature that is in some sense static and unchanging across time, be it the lifespan of the individual or of the species.

The Becoming view reveals Being as a fiction, as something to be chased but never attained. Human nature is essentially changeable, and adaptability is its keynote. Life is defined by this endless chase - by endless becoming.

The traditionalist view acknowledges Becoming but situates it within Being. We have a distinct and unchanging essence from which we can stray to a degree. All options are open, but our nature tethers us, and our fate is already written.

The traditionalist view asserts that we already possess Being (a centre, a predetermined form) and the challenge is to act in alignment with it, which involves renouncing multiple possibilities in favour of limited actualities. In this sense the traditionalist view is inherently anti-romantic, the latter insisting that the individual has no Being, or determined centre. The romantic edict is to renounce nothing and be everything, in a tragic-heroic effort to fill the hole at the centre.

Traditional man does not chase Being because he already has Being within him, as his root. It is where he starts from, and as such is not something to be pursued or captured. This gives him a security and self-possession that is missing in modern (romantic) man. Traditional man knows who he is and seeks to be true to himself at all times, which is another way of saying that he seeks to conserve and affirm his predetermined form.

With the death of God the transcendent realm became inaccessible and so all meaning was confined within the mundane realm, within the world of Becoming.

Flux is primary; which is another way of saying the the Feminine is primary.

Outcome Orientation

From kindergarten on, the focus of schooling is usually on goals rather than on the process by which they are achieved. This single-minded pursuit of one outcome or another, from tying shoelaces to getting into Harvard, makes it difficult to have a mindful attitude about life.

When children start a new activity with an outcome orientation, questions of "Can I?" or "What if I can't do it?" are likely to predominate, creating an anxious preoccupation with success or failure rather than drawing on the child's natural, exuberant desire to explore. Instead of enjoying the colour of the crayon, the designs on the paper, and a variety of possible shapes along the way, the child sets about writing a "correct" letter A.

Process Orientation

In contrast, a process orientation asks "How do I do it?" instead of "Can I do it?" and this directs attention toward defining the steps that are necessary on the way. This orientation can be characterized in terms of the guiding principle that there are no failures, only ineffective solutions.

The style of education that concentrates on outcomes generally also presents facts unconditionally. This approach encourages mindlessness. If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.

Such a single-minded way of viewing the world can generalize to virtually everything we do. By teaching absolutes we pass our culture from one generation to the next. It brings stability. But ... the cost may be high.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.33, 34, 35

[...] goals energize and direct people's activities in organized ways [and] serve to engage the activities of those who adopt them.

These views implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) convey the sense that goals give meaning to people's lives.

Each of these notions emphasizes the fact that understanding a person means understanding the person's goals. Indeed, it's often implicit in these theories that the self is made partly of the person's goals and the organization among them [...]

[C.S. Carver & M.F. Scheier]
On the Self-Regulation of Behavior, p. 65

Being and becoming, according to Nietzsche, are not at all related as we commonly suppose.

“Becoming,” he write, “must be explained without recourse to final intentions … Becoming does not aim at a final state, does not flow into ‘being’.”

One of his many criticisms of philosophers […] is that they have turned away from what changes and concentrated instead on what is: “But since nothing is, all that was left to the philosophers as their ‘world’ was the imaginary.”

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 170

Becoming

These becomings animate the possibilities of life, constantly moving through what we know to be real or true and running beyond the limits, boundaries and constraints that make those realities and truths what they seem to be.

Becoming explodes the ideas about what we are and what we can be beyond the categories that seem to contain us: beyond the boundaries separating human being from animal, man from woman, child from adult, micro from macro, and even perceptible and understandable from imperceptible and incomprehensible.

Becoming moves beyond our need to know (the truth, what is real, what makes us human); beyond our determination to control (life, nature, the universe); and beyond our desire to consume or possess (pleasure, beauty, goodness, innocence).

So becoming offers a radical conception of what a life does.

Positive ontology

Deleuze's work is often applauded for the "positive ontology" it pursues [...] Deleuze is concerned with unfettering possibility to experiment with what a life can do and where a life might go.

In other words, Delueze affirms the possibilities of becoming something else, beyond the avenues, relations, values and meanings that seem to be laid out for us by our biological make-up, our evolutionary heritages, our historical/political/familial allegiances, and the social and cultural structures of civilized living.

There is in this a radical affirmation of the sort of possibilities for becoming that we cannot think of in logical or moralistic terms: becomings that can only be felt or sensed or conjured, that require us to take risks and experiment in ways that affirm the vitality, the energies and the creative animations of existence.

Rhizomes

We might be tempted to think of becoming in terms of where or who we were when we started and where or who we are when we end up. But becoming is not about origins, progressions and ends; rather it is about lines and intensities [...]

Deleuze and Guattari have described the movement of becoming as "rhizomatic", a term that refers to underground root growth, the rampant, dense propagation of roots that characterizes such plants as mint or crabgrass.

Each rhizomatic root may take off in its own singular direction and make its own connections with other roots, with worms, insects, rocks or whatever, forming a dynamic composition of "interkingdoms [and] unnatural participations" that has no prescribed form or end.

Immanence

Deleuze's philosophy is often called a philosophy of immanence because it is concerned with what a life can do, what a body can do when we think in terms of becomings, multiplicities, lines and intensities rather than essential forms, predetermined subjects, structured functions or transcendent values.

[...] a plane of immanence has no structure and does not produce predetermined forms or subjects; instead, there are "relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness ... molecules and particles of all kinds".

[Patty Sotirin]
Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, p.99, 100-1, 103, 108-9

Aversion to the possibility that wholes might act on their parts betrays both the continuing and uncritical acceptance of philosophy's refusal to countenance self-cause as well as the prevalent philosophical tendency toward reification: an ontological bias that favors concrete things over processes and relations, substances over properties.

It is true, of course, that wholes do not act on their components forcefully; but neither are wholes other than or external to the components that make them up. And to claim that they do not causally affect their components at all begs the question by assuming that all cause must be billiard ball-like to be causally efficacious at all.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p.129

As Saussure memorably puts it, we have to think of a system of differences without positive terms. The differences come before what they differentiate - language forms a network in which what we thought were the elements are like the holes in the net.

If Saussure is right, then the whole notion of the sign begins to crumble.

What we thought we needed was a signified to complete the sign, what we got was a bunch of interrelated signifiers that seemed to do the trick just fine, though we always might add new signifiers […]

So I say, let’s just ditch the whole business of the signified, and try to complete the linguistic turn - or turn it a little further - by saying that it all starts, not with the supposedly whole sign, but with the signifier. And what we were always temped to call ‘meaning,’ or signified, just emerges a bit like a ghost or a spectre from the interrelation of signifiers among themselves.

[Geoffrey Bennington]

‘Geoffrey Bennington on Derrida and Deconstruction (Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series)’

To Derrida, a sign is the play of identity and difference; half of the sign is always "not there", and another half "not that" (We define everything negatively, a chair is 'not' a table, 'not' five-legged, one-legged, 'not' animate, 'not' of flesh).

The sign never leads to the extra-linguistic thing, it leads to another sign, one substituting the other playfully inside the structure of language. We do not feel the presence of a thing through a sign, but through the absence of other presences, we guess what it is.

To Derrida, trace and not "being-there", difference and not-identity, create meaning inside language.

‘Trace (deconstruction)’, Wikipedia

One of the important characteristics of post-structural thought, especially in the work of Jacques Derrida, is the denial of the transparency of language. The idea that the meaning of a word is 'present' when the word presents itself creates the illusion of determinate meaning.

This identification of a word with a specific meaning is an instance of what Derrida calls the 'metaphysics of presence'.

He argues that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between a word and its meaning. Meaning is the result of an interplay between all the words (or, rather, all the signs) in the system. It is an effect of the dynamics within the system, not of direct relationships between components of the system and objects in the world.

This does not deny all relationships between the world and the system. To the contrary, the success of the system depends largely on the effectiveness of the interaction between the system and its environment. What it does deny is that these relationships can be unpacked in determinate terms when we deal with a complex system like language or the brain.

Complexity cannot be simplified into direct relationships without losing exactly those capabilities of the system we are interested in - the capabilities that emerge as a result of the non-linear, distributed relationships between the constituents of the system.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.80

'Idealised future state'

Systems thinking [...] defines an ideal future state and tries to close the gap, and of course it never gets there.

Complexity says what matters is accurately describing the present out of the things in the present you can change, where you can monitor the effect of the change, and effectively move to a safe-to-fail experimental management of the present, to evolve forwards to a future state which is more sustainable and more resilient.

[...] managing the evolutionary potential of the present rather than constantly failing to achieve an idealised future state which might not be the best place to get to anyway.

[Dave Snowden]

According to Deutsch, current theories of physics based on quantum mechanics do not adequately explain why some transformations between states of being are possible and some are not.

For example, a drop of dye can dissolve in water but thermodynamics shows that the reverse transformation, of the dye clumping back together, is effectively impossible. We do not know at a quantum level why this should be so.

Constructor theory provides an explanatory framework built on the transformations themselves, rather than the components.

'Constructor theory'

Wikipedia

This is not the place for a detailed examination of these theories, but attention must at least be called to certain features closely connected with the subject of this book. The first is their 'evolutionism', which remains unbroken and is carried to an extreme, for all reality is placed exclusively within 'becoming', involving the formal denial of all immutable principle, and consequently of all metaphysics; hence their 'fleeting’ and inconsistent quality, which really affords, in contrast with the rationalist and materialist ‘solidification', something like a prefiguration of the dissolution of all things in the final chaos.

For [Bergson] therefore there are two sorts of religion, one 'static’ and the other ‘dynamic’, alternatively and somewhat oddly called by him ‘closed religion' and 'open religion'; the first is social in its nature and the second psychological; and naturally his preference is for the second, which he regards as the superior form of religion - we say ‘naturally’ because it is very evident that it could not be otherwise in a 'philosophy of becoming’ such as his, since from that point of view whatever does not change does not correspond to anything real, and even prevents man from grasping the real such as it is imagined to be.

But someone will say that a philosophy of this kind, since it admits of no ‘eternal truths’, must logically refuse all value not only to metaphysics but also to religion; and that is exactly what happens, for religion in the true sense of the word is just what Bergson calls ‘static religion', in which he chooses to see nothing but a wholly imaginary ‘story-telling'; as for his ‘dynamic religion', the truth is that it is not religion at all.

His so-called ‘dynamic religion' in fact contains none of the characteristic elements that go to make up the definition of religion: there are no dogmas, since they are immutable or, as Bergson says, 'fixed'; no more, of course, are there any rites, for the same reason and because of their social character, dogmas and rites necessarily being left to 'static religion'; and as for morality, Bergson starts setting it aside as something quite outside religion as he understands it.

[René Guénon]

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 221-2

We have seen that the obscurity already inherent in existentialism is exacerbated in Heidegger by his view of man as an entity that does not include being within itself (or behind it, as its root), but rather before it, as if being were something to be pursued and captured.

Being is conceived here as the totality of possibilities, with regard to which one is to blame, or, taking the other meaning of Schuld, in debt. The existentialists never explain why this is the case, or why one should feel this destiny of seizing a pandemic totality at all costs.

We can explain it with reference to what I have already said: that it is all symptomatic of someone who suffers the unfolding or activity of the transcendent as a coercive force, with no feeling of freedom. It is as though the possibilities necessarily excluded from a finite being (finitude being negation) were projected onto goals and situations deployed in time; as though man had being before him, running ahead of him [...] in a process that can never lead to a real possession, in a "horizontally ecstatic” succession (ecstasy here in the literal meaning of exit from a stasis) that constitutes "authentic temporality."

This is how Heidegger presents things; no other meaning is permitted for man’s being, as long as he is alive, because he always suffers from nontotality.

Dasein, the I, which is nothing in itself, pursues being that is outside and before it, and this runs through time, in the same dependent relationship as the thirsty man seeking water - with the difference that it is inconceivable that he will ever reach Being, when he does not already possess it […]

[…] to the human type that interests us […] becoming and existing in time are substantially transformed in their structure and significance. The dark downward pull, the neediness, compulsion, and unquiet tension are destroyed, and existence takes on a character of acting and living decisively, arising from an existing principle that is detached and free with regard to itself and its determined action.

This happens naturally when the accent falls away from the I, or is transferred to the transcendent dimension - to Being.

Someone has spoken of a “frenetic desire to live, to live at any price, which is not the result of the rhythm of life within us, but of the rhythm of death.” This is one of the principal traits of our time. One would not be rash in saying that this is the ultimate meaning of Heidegger’s existentialism, when thought through to its foundations, that is, of existentialism that admits no religious opening.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 95-6

And the idea of this is not truth as a thing or correctness - which lies in a way behind all the left hemisphere versions of how we get at truth, including the coherence theory and the correspondence theory - it’s not so much like that, as a clearing a way of error.

So it’s working apophatically, in the way that science actually works, which is to clear away mistakes. Science never says this is true, it just says, this doesn’t look true on the basis of what we know now. And that leaves you with something else that you can work with.

[…] truth [is] as a process […] a never ending journey of a reverberative kind in which our consciousness and the consciousness of what is around us come into alignment. And this doesn’t really have the same features as a world of things that are in principle knowable, even if we can’t actually know them too well.

I oppose to that, the idea of truth as unconcealing, in other words, clearing away so that we see the picture ever more clearly, rather as a sculptor makes a statue, not by putting together an arm, a leg ahead, and a torso, but by actually clearing away the stone, that makes the thing stand out.

[Iain McGilchrist]
‘EP 154 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things’, The Jim Rutt Show, YouTube

Since Faraday's time, particle physics has steadily moved away from [the] static model. Forces and fields are now the main players in the game and mass is interchangeable with energy.

Particles are defined in terms of their capacities for action, which naturally vary with the contexts in which they are placed.

There is genuine interaction between them. But this scientific development was delayed for a long time by the imaginative grip of the static model - by the belief that impact was indeed the only possible source of movement, the only force that reason could recognise.

We are free now from the metaphysics which seemed to go with the old physics, from the notion that only the unchanging is real. We don't any longer need to posit static units as the terminus to explanation, treating all explanations as provisional until they reach it.

Change, in fact, is not unreal, it is a fundamental aspect of reality. Parmenides thought that changeable, interacting things were unreal because he thought change could not be understood. But this idea flows from a special notion of what it means to understand something.

Certainly there are some forms of understanding which abstract from time and change, notably in mathematics. And this timelessness does give these explanations a specially satisfying kind of completeness. But for other problems, such as when we want to understand fire or explosions, time and change are part of the subject-matter. And there are other situations again, notably ones involving living organisms, where whole sets of interconnected changes are going on at the same time.

Yet we do gain some understanding of these matters. Thermodynamics and climatology and biology are not just a string of lies and delusions. Their explanations are in a way less complete, less final than those of mathematics, but this is because, being less abstract, they do so much more work.

[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.85, 87

Within our Western worldview agents carry out actions, nouns/objects interact and bring about changes in each other.

The author of a process is a noun; an object and the verb is its action. But for the Montagnais, reality is profoundly different; it is flux, process and change within which individual human beings are transitory forms; and manifest expression of temporary alliances of powers, spirits, and energies.

Thus, no human can bring [a] song into existence. Rather, the singing itself is the primary reality, the vibrational process that floods across the world [...] It is as if many nouns emerge out of the verbs, the object out of the process.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.144-5

In order to acknowledge, celebrate, and come into relationships with the flux and movements of the world, and the spirits and energies that lie behind the appearances of things, Indigenous science developed a mathematics in which the numbers are not static objects of thought but dynamic processes and actual living beings.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.170

Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.

Name and person are part of the west’s quest for form. The west insists on the discrete identity of objects. To name is to know; to know is to control [...] the west’s greatness arises from this delusional certitude.

Far Eastern culture has never striven against nature in this way. Compliance, not confrontation is its rule. Buddhist meditation seeks the unity and harmony of reality. Twentieth-century physics, going full circle back to Heracleitus, postulates that all matter is in motion. In other words, there is no thing, only energy. But this perception has not been imaginatively absorbed, for it cancels the west’s intellectual and moral assumptions.

The westerner knows by seeing. Perceptual relations are at the heart of our culture, and they have produced our titanic contributions to art. Walking in nature, we see, identify, name, recognize. This recognition is our apotropaion, that is, our warding off of fear. Recognition is ritual cognition, a repetition-compulsion.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.5

All these features of the basic relationships between men and the land in Africa have restricted the growth of the kind of agrarian superstructure associated with Asiatic despotisms, and left instead a very amorphous and fluctuating system in which no complex exploitative system could be screwed down on the masses of the people because these people were too free to move elsewhere.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The New Era,’ p.752

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