r/ProcessRelational

40 archived posts · Feb 2013 – May 2020

processrelational

r/ProcessRelational

Archived posts from r/ProcessRelational, Feb 2013 to May 2020.

Created Mar 8, 2023 · restricted

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40Archived posts

What is process-relational thought?

Process-relational thought is a form of metaphysical realism that can be found articulated in a variety of philosophies around the world, from ancient times to modern (/r/HistoryofIdeas):

in Heraclitus and the later Hellenistic Stoics (/r/Stoicism), in Nagarjuna and the Madhyamika philosophers of India (/r/Hinduism), in Zhuang Zhu and the T’ian-t’ai and Hua-Yen Buddhists in China (/r/Buddhism), in the Zen Buddhism of Dogen (/r/Zen) and the later Zen-inspired Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy (/r/KyotoSchool).
but also, in one form or another, in such western philosophers as Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Friedrich Schelling, Henri Bergson, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Wilmon Sheldon, Wilfrid Sellars, Justus Buchler, Charles Hartshorne, Gregory Bateson, Gilbert Simondon, Cornelius Castoriadis, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. (/r/Autonomia, r/Nonphilosophy, r/GermanIdealism, r/PostPoMo)
Contemporary thinkers working in a process-relational vein include Nicholas Rescher, Richard Neville, Robert Corrington, John Deely, David Ray Griffin, Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Xavier Zubiri, William Connolly, Catherine Keller, Brian Massumi, Manuel DeLanda, John Protevi, Freya Mathews, Roland Faber, Michael Weber, and Jane Bennett. (/r/Theopoetics, r/radicalChristianity, r/SystemsTheory, r/Posthumanism)
Process-relational thought also characterizes significant aspects of the thought of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, and of many who follow in the wake of these influential giants of modern philosophy. (/r/ContinentalTheory, r/CriticalTheory, r/DebateCommunism)
In a more general sense, process-relational themes can be found scattered across a range of intellectual and artistic traditions including those of European and North American Romanticism and Transcendentalism (as in the art and thought of Coleridge, Goethe, Emerson, and Muir); (/r/ArtTheory, r/Transcendentalism)
a variety of African and indigenous philosophies; the writings of mystics and spiritual philosophers from Plotinus and Shankara to Jelaluddin Rumi, Jakob Boehme, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and others; and much of what falls into the Buddhist, Daoist, and neo-Confucian traditions of South and East Asia (sometimes collectively referred to as “Asian field theories”). (/r/Psychoanalysis, r/Taoism, r/Asceticism, r/Mysticism, r/Sufism, r/Jung, r/Occult)
Such themes are also deeply influential in recent post-constructivist and “non-representational” scholarship in the social and cognitive sciences, including in actor-network theory (/r/ActorNetworkTheory, Bruno Latour, John Law), enactive cognitivism (Francesco Varela, Evan Thompson), developmental biology (Susan Oyama), ethology and biosemiotics (Jakob von Uexkull, Thomas Sebeok, Jesper Hoffmeyer), and relational and non-representational geography (/r/UrbanStudies, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Nigel Thrift, Sarah Whatmore, Steve Hinchliffe);
in the speculations of theoretical physicists and biologists including David Bohm, Ilya Prigogine, Brian Goodwin, and Stuart Kauffman; and in East-West philosophical “fusions” like the “integral theory” of Ken Wilber and western variations of Asian nondualist philosophies (such as the work of David Loy, Herbert Guenther, and others) (/r/SpeculativeRealism, r/Integral, r/Biocosmism).

While not often articulated as a single, unified tradition, a set of common themes justify its identification as an alternative to two forms of thought that have become dominant in western philosophy.

A range of interactive and dialectical philosophies have been proposed to mediate between the material and the ideal, but many of these presume the underpinning of a relatively closed binary structure of one kind or another, such as matter versus spirit, idea, or mind, or, alternatively, a conception of opposites, such as Yin and Yang, in which homeostatic balance rather than evolutionary change is considered the baseline norm.

Process-relational thought, by contrast, focuses on the dynamism by which things are perpetually moving forward, interacting, and creating new conditions in the world. Process-relational thought rejects the Cartesian idea that there are minds, or things that think, and bodies, or matter that only acts according to strict causal laws.

Rather, the two are considered one and the same, or two aspects of the same evolving, processual reality. In this sense, process-relational views are related to certain forms of panpsychism and pan-experientialism, that is, to philosophies that understand “mind” or “mental experience” to be not the possession of specific objects or subjects, but part of the relational expression or manifestation of all things.

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