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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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I. Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

A. Historic Prescience: Individual Homo Sapiens

Rochberg, Francesca. Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. The UC Berkeley professor of Near Eastern studies is cited on Wikipedia as a circa 1500 BC Assyrian-Babylonian scholar. This volume gives a sense of how early human beings, in this cradle of civilization, might have originally wondered about these august environs whence they came to find themselves. In so doing, they began to express across pictogram to alphabetic etchings. As I enter this some three and a half millennia later, how tragic it is that our anthropo birthplace is now beset by blind mechanized slaughter and destruction, especially of children. Men seem to have learned nothing, nor able to do anything else over all these ages.

In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it. Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult to imagine. Yet, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world.

Cuneiform script, one of the earliest systems of writing, was invented by the Sumerians. It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The name cuneiform itself simply means "wedge shaped". Emerging in Sumer in the late fourth millennium BC, cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms. In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use grew smaller. The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs. (Wikipedia)

Rothman, Aviva. The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession, and Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. A University of Chicago historian of science offers latest insights on Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) mid-millennium endeavor, along with Galileo, Copernicus, Leibniz, and others to gain entry into this numinous worldly and stellar realm. A tacit incentive was a deep accord with biblical scripture. In regard, created reality ought to be a written text, while also graced by a musical score. Kepler’s special contribution was to embrace both a harmony of spheres and a natural alphabetic language. As we look back from our global millennium upon this renaissance revolution, a complementarity of these archetypal modes becomes evident even across the celestial raiment.

A friend to Catholics and Calvinists alike, a layman who called himself a “priest of God,” a Copernican in a world where Ptolemy still reigned, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler was a complicated figure. Aviva Rothman offers a new view of him and his achievements, one that presents them as a story of Kepler’s attempts to bring different, even opposing ideas and circumstances into harmony. But it was an elusive goal amid the deteriorating conditions of his world, as the political order crumbled and religious war raged. In the face of that devastation, Kepler’s hopes for his theories changed: whereas he had originally looked for a unifying approach to truth, he began instead to emphasize harmony as the peaceful coexistence of different views, one that could be fueled by the fundamentally nonpartisan discipline of mathematics.

Rudwick, Martin. Earth’s Deep History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. From this worldwide 21st century vantage, an emeritus UC San Diego historian recounts the long, hesitant course of human realizations of ancient planetary origins, geologic and atmospheric ages of both fire and ice, drifting, crashing continents, as they reach our biospheric, sentient phase. We cite a closing paragraph to convey just how incredulous this perception and place then seems as a vast exoplanet neighborhood opens for us.

In the light of this novel cosmic perspective, the history of the Earth itself was re-conceived in the later 20th century and early 21st as one specific case in a much wider set of divergent planetary histories: one specific pathway of change among others, each probably as individual and contingent as the rest. This focused attention on the very specific circumstances that had underlain the Earth’s particular history—for example, being neither too near the Sun nor too far away—which in turn governed the astronomers’ search for indirect evidence of “exo-planets” orbiting other stars (the first was reported in 1992) and their estimates of how many of these might be rocky or even Earth-like. This was combined with biologists’ conjectures about all the further circumstances that might enable, or limit, the generation of any kind of life on other planets. In this context the evolution of highly complex forms of intelligent life, which might give substance to earlier speculations about a possible “plurality of worlds,” became more constrained and improbable than ever. That one of the rocky planets orbiting our local star had nonetheless become the abode of living organisms—and eventually of intelligent beings capable of discovering and reconstructing its past history with some confidence and reliability—was just the most remarkable of all these complex contingencies. (291)

Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980. A lavish survey of universal evolution from its origin to networks of galactic civilizations. As humankind awakens to this beckoning vista, an immense challenge arises to unite as a global species by which to eliminate nuclear arsenals.

For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for the Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. (345)

Salk, Jonas. Anatomy of Reality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. The physician-philosopher offers a lucid survey of an intrinsic cosmic emergence from matter to mind. A quarter of a century ago this perennial alternative was self-evident if only we could allow its perception. This website seeks to document its 21st century confirmation.

Matter at each level of complexity appears to consist of two interdependent, nonidentical elements in dynamic interaction and in integral relation to each other. It appears that an interacting, dynamic, asymmetrical binary relationship is the fundamental module of order in the cosmos. (37)

Sarasohn, Lisa. The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy During the Scientific Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. An Oregon State University historian achieves a well studied, long overdue, account of the Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), considered to be the only woman natural philosopher of the 17th century. A contemporary of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Henry More (1614-1687) Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and the Royal Society (1660- ), whose Fellows denied her admission, Cavendish offers a clear, salient counterpoint to the “vitalistic materialism” of the age. She entertained the phrase, but with an emphasis on an innate life-giving essence, not as a mechanism. By so doing, a gendered alternative is introduced with this difference – an external, masculine agency is replaced by a nurturing feminine force within nature, one may quite read father or mother. These moribund or organic options remain in parallel dissonance to this day, but the male machine at its present nadir denies even any such intervention, while a woman’s cosmos still needs to sufficient cite and qualify its animating source.

In many genres – essays, treatises, poetry, romance, orations, plays, and treatises – Cavendish brought intellect and awareness to analyzing the implications of the new science for nature and women. (2) Cavendish adapted the ontology of the mechanistic philosophers – matter in motion – but reconfigured it to suit her own view of nature. Her natural philosophy, a form of vitalistic materialism that posited a universe composed of three kinds of matter – rational, sensitive, and inanimate matter… (2)

Cavendish’s natural philosophy represents a gendered reading of the new science in which all of nature is invested with life, knowledge, and feeling, and each kind of material being – human, animal, vegetable, and mineral – has its own worth. (3) In Cavendish’s natural philosophy, God gives the ordering of the world to a female Nature and is rarely seen again. (3)

Boyle (Robert, 1627–1691) felt that experimenters revealed the glory of God when they investigated his handiwork and denied nature an active role in the ordering of the universe, either as a force operating on matter or as an internalized principle of being. But Cavendish thought that nature was full of activity, both as a personified female semidivine regent, like the Empress of the Blazing World (her narrative volume), and as the entirety of vitalized matter constituting the universe and its parts. (10)

Saunders, Peter and Patricia Skar. Archetypes, Complexes and Self-Organization. Journal of Analytical Psychology. 46/2, 2001. A review of the archetype concept in evolutionary biology and in Jung’s psychology contends that its fluid, emergent properties appear because the brain/mind acts as a dynamic, self-organizing system.

Scheler, Max. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. A translation by Karin Frings and introduction by Eugene Kelly of the last, succinct work by the German philosopher (1874-1928) who taught at the University of Cologne. Written after WWI, it illustrates the idealist vision still held at the time, but quite lost and banished in our day. A life “impulsion” force of being and psyche is seen to ascend through floral, instinctive, behavioral and cognitive modes. At the human phase its liberation is achieved as numinous spirit. In regard, our personal role is to be microcosmic co-creators of this original, emergent, and inchoate, uncompleted Divinity. A past gem of perennial wisdom that illumes how much we now deny and that yet may augur a 21st century recovery by a worldwide sense of a cosmic genetic code.

Seager, William. The Philosophical and Scientific Metaphysics of David Bohm. Entropy. 20/7, 2018. In these late 2010s whence olden machine views become bereft, a University of Toronto philosopher (search) reminds of the lifelong essence of this sage mystic physicist (1917-1992), whose name here brings some 27 citations. To wit, a seamlessly unified cosmos comes alive again from quantum realms suffused with consciousness to our integral human intelligence. I heard Bohm speak at Harvard and at Hampshire College, where students later sat at his feet in the presence of such wisdom.

Although David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics is sometimes thought to be a kind of regression towards classical thinking, it is in fact an extremely radical metaphysics of nature. The view goes far beyond the familiar but perennially peculiar non-locality and entanglement of quantum systems. In this paper, a philosophical exploration, I examine three core features of Bohm’s metaphysical views, which have been both supported by features of quantum mechanics and integrated into a comprehensive system. These are the holistic nature of the world, the role of a unique kind of information as the ontological basis of the world, and the integration of mentality into this basis as an essential and irreducible aspect of it. (Abstract)

Far from an attempt to return to something like a classical mechanistic world view of independent interacting particles, Bohm’s interpretation is philosophically extremely radical. Three key features of Bohm’s view are especially worth emphasizing: holism, information, and mind. (6)

Sheehan, Jonathan and Dror Wahrman. Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. UC Berkeley and Indiana University historians achieve a unique, well researched survey of original inklings of a more spontaneous creativity than vested Divine design and direction. A novel reality is glimpsed which somehow arranges itself from disorderly potentialities to living, sentient beings. The transitional period is engaged through four sages – Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755), Alexander Pope (1680-1744), Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), and concludes with Immanuel Kant 1724-1804, the premier advocate of a numinous, self-emergent procreation. Into the 21st century, might a present project, by way of a prodigious global intellect, be at last able to witness, quantify, and affirm, especially by a natural genetic code? The intent of this Natural Genesis bibliographic resource is to report, document and illume.

Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect—but with them also a new ability to imagine the world’s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction. (Publisher)

Montesquieu, Vico, Mandeville, Pope. Four European writers who presented visions of order in the aggregate, order emerging – mysteriously, and perhaps by itself – from chaotic disorder at the level of the constituent elements of the greater whole. All four thus elaborated key components of the family of conceptual moves that we group together in this book under the umbrella of “self-organization.” To repeat again what we mean by this, the fundamental insight that was common to them all was the notion that even if God was no longer the active hands-on guarantor of order, complex systems, left to their own devices, still generated order immanently, without external direction, through self-organization. (9)

Shklovskii, Ivan and Carl Sagan. Intelligent Life in the Universe. San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966. A classic collaboration between a Russian astrophysicist and the Cornell astronomer. Its final chapters consider “Intelligent life as a factor on a cosmic scale.”

Shulman, Helene. Living at the Edge of Chaos. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 1997. A profound synthesis of dynamical systems theory and archetypal psychology. One of the most comprehensive, insightful works of its kind.

Thus, Jungian archetypes can be thought of as a reflection of the structure of complex adaptive systems on a psychic level. (137) The new model of complex adaptive systems, explored on these pages, with its emphasis on constant change and renewal at the edge of chaos, presents a possibility for a relationship between the culture of science and experiences of de-ideolization, healing, individuation and synchronicity. Connectionist ways of thinking have a capacity to link the inner workings of community and individual, soma and psyche, biological environment and spirit. They constitute an important step toward the integration of science, religious experience, social change and psychological healing….Throughout our lives, we are always participating in a biological and spiritual individuation process that has taken billions of years. (237)

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