Philosophy of Magic
New Course with J.F. Martel, Podcast Appearances, and Temporal Entanglements
Dear readers,
Here are a few updates, new course offerings, podcast appearances, and what I’m currently reading and writing about.
News and Upcoming Events
Tonight, J.F. Martel returns to Nura Learning for his third course offering, “Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic.”
It starts at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET and is hosted between Nura’s Mighty Network platform and weekly Zoom calls.
In this seven-week series of exploratory lectures and discussions, writer and filmmaker J.F. Martel, co-host of the Weird Studies Podcast, will argue that reality rests on a foundation of fantasy, in the truest sense of the word.
Whereas most attempts at “re-enchanting” our world have hinged on damming up or diverting the currents of reductive materialism, a different slant may be all it takes to see that even the most dogmatic iterations of modern thought presuppose a magical cosmos in which all things are possible. Martel will draw deep on philosophy, literature, art, religion, and the occult to reimagine what it means to be real.
The course aims at inspiring a new vision in its participants. It amounts to an act of weirding, whereby the foundations of experience are restored to the strangeness, danger, and hope of an existence rooted in story, meaning, and mystery.
As you might guess, I thoroughly concur with J.F.’s notion that we can, in some sense, turn “dis-enchantment” inside out, recognizing that even reductive materialism is a misplaced enactment of an enchanted cosmos, or what Eugene McCarraher has notably called “misenchantment.”
Here’s the course outline and schedule:
May 3rd Lecture 1: The Black Iron Prison and the White Whale
May 10th Lecture 2: Hyperchaos
May 17th Lecture 3: Pulp Metaphysics
May 24th Lecture 4: The Known Unknown
May 31st Lecture 5: Mythical Creatures
June 7th Lecture 6: The Second Spear
June 14th Lecture 7: Toward a Philosophy of Magic
You can read the full course description here on the registration page. I look forward to seeing some of you on the call this evening.
One more note: this coming weekend, I have the honor of co-hosting a panel for the Integral Practitioner Convergence (May 6-8th). My panel, “What is Integral Leadership?” is convening on May 8th at 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern.
This will be a roundtable discussion between myself and my Integral Leadership Review colleagues Dr. Eric Reynolds, Dr. Natasha Mantler, Turquoise Sound and Adam Wright. You can register on Meridian University’s website.
Entangled Time
Time, as Gebser notes, “appears to be of a most complex nature.” I am continuously awed by the entanglements and affinities not only between art and science but the artist and scientists as individuals.
There is some unthinkable continuity, a relationship that is characteristically transversal, between our deeply subjective, intersubjective realms and the world seemingly out there, in that greater communion of beings in which we all participate. There and here share a strange intimacy, openness, like then and now, past and future. As T.S. Eliot wrote in poetic verse: “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration… history is a pattern of timeless moments… History is now.”
All of this being a preamble for some recent and gracious entanglements.
Maria Popova, who many of you already know from The Marginalian (previously known as Brain Pickings), just published a wonderful introduction to Jean Gebser.
I wrote about Popova’s work on “combinatorial creativity” and “networked knowledge” in the final chapter of my book, Seeing Through the World (2019):
“For every good idea that sprouts up on the surface of culture, there are a thousand nodes—like a mycelial web—that had to first connect under the surface.”
Networked knowledge was not only an illustration of the aperspectival “attitude” showing up in the present day (through Popova’s writing, more recently through her book Figuring, on the entanglements between ourselves and our world, art and science), but also a helpful way to understand the “aperspectival subject,” the self, which I imagined to be “an assemblage… an ecology, the network” of relationships and impressions. “Integral florilegium.” Relational networks that, for all their colorful variety and distinctiveness, are still suffused with this sense of unthinkable continuity, a sense of wholeness.
Images, like my friend and colleague Cheryl Hsu’s “time tangles” (as part of her torus-a-day drawing series) come to mind when attempting to visualize the emerging aperspectival world.
It arrives in the ecological context, the relational middle; hidden in plain site in the hyphen, between I- and -Thou.
Cheryls’ work on “thinking transversally” implicates the continuity (which here achieves a transparency) between creativity, design, and contemplation.
Time is entangled. Its nature is something “most complex” as Gebser wrote about. We might more effectively realize this emerging sense of “complex” temporics in consciousness — i.e., we might body it forth in our subjective, cultural, and senseful learning — through working with rhizome and root in our thinking.
Time as rhizome, time as wholeness. Now, speaking of past-future entanglements, how might we re-imagine our maps of the world, our sense of world, from Cartesian space to Gaia-graphies of entangled time?
Temporal Wanderlust
“Answers to long-term questions can only be found by looking at the times in which the past Earth mirrors what we expect of future Earth… To consider the landscapes that once existed it so feel the draw of temporal wanderlust. My hope is that you… begin to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.”
— Otherlands, Thomas Halliday
Podcasts
Check out my recent podcast with Amit Paul on “Words of Wisdom.”
”Gebser, Development, Liminality, Relationality and Why it’s Crucial to Decenter Progress.”
I also had the pleasure of appearing on the inaugural episode of my friend Benjamin Life’s podcast, Omniharmonic, with Joe Lightfoot, Turquoise Sound, and Alex Kennedy.
Stay tuned for a few more coming up, including one with Joel Monk on Coaches Rising and Sacred Wisdom podcast with Arabella Thaïs (who, I was delighted to learn, is a fellow doctoral student in my program at CIIS).
Mutational Logic
“…it is worth remembering Derrida’s suggestion in his late essay, “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)” that perhaps the deepest logic of his investigation… in in fact “viral,” in the specific sense of a mutational logic of the trace structure of… any semiotic system, that exceeds and encompasses the boundary not just between human and animal but also between the living or organic and the mechanical or technical… this mutational… form of thinking… “has enormous potential for resisting the self-assurance of any hegemonic discourse, or practices, because it infects and mutates through the very structures… within and between the ontological pretension of an is and the thetic possibility of an in.” — Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?