Weird Studies/JFM philosophy

01 Jan 2025 - 01 Jan 2025
Open in Logseq
    • I think I have profound disagreements, trying to get at their nature. Will say one thing for JFM, he is always clear and articulate about his beliefs.
    • As Edgar Spence implied with his question, it really comes down to how we define nature. For me, nature is *phusis, *the process by which one thing follows another with such robust regularity that we can derive wondrous things like the laws of physics from observing it. Nature in this sense corresponds to the causal; all that happens under the force of necessity (ananke). From there, I describe as "supernatural" anything that happens gratuitously, without necessity, out of a radical freedom that is not reducible to any natural process.
    • The natural is all causal processes, the supernatural is anything irreducible (esp consciousness or other mind-like things). The supernatural does not obey laws like causality does, it operates on radical freedom and grace (which seems to mean you can't really think about it)
    • When an elderly man thanks a young woman for giving him her seat on the bus, he is acknowledging, by this "thank you," a supernatural event -- something which no law of physics (or psychology) necessitated, something that happened through a kind of irruption of grace (i.e. the supernatural) in the world. In other words, the supernatural is the acausal. It is that which escapes -- radically transcends -- the system of eternal debt implicit in the machinery of an absolute causation. As I've said in previous courses, the creative imagination is supernatural because it involves a causal leap out of phusis and into the realm of the possible (the imaginal). Indeed, ultimately, even nature has a supernatural basis, since causation cannot have a causal foundation. Seeing this moves nature out of the realm of debt and turns it into pure gift.
    • I can't go with this. Why should an ordinary social interaction be supernatural? Animals have social interaction, is that also supernatural? Or is it somehow that human interactions are marked with the transcendent? But even if you put them on a higher plane, why the emphasis on "acausal"? A "thank you" has plenty of causes – why is it so terrible to acknowledge them?
    • To JFM (and many others, including William Blake ), the causal world is cold, lifeless, dull, incapable of generativity, and the imaginal realm is another plane on which all the stuff we care about exists, including ourselves (as minds).
    • Whereas a cybernetic nondualist or weird naturalism person says, there's only one world which undergirds all physical and imaginal phenomenon, our task is to see how that works.