Philosophy’s strength is that it doesn’t deny that we are each partial. It’s many branches offer ways of navigating the real feedback of Being, and sometimes the Becoming too. Which brings me to summarize philosophy as the exploration of, or Becoming towards, the ideal of Full Unconditional Listening. Listening to what? To that which we know to be relevant to our inquiry and yet beyond the frame of our direct personal experience.
Put another way, getting philosophical is playing shrink to the mysterious and wondrous What Is. That can mean inquiring about what What Is is as in metaphysics, or how What Is is expressed through language as in epistemology.
Dysfunction is inherent to “analysis” by shrinks, and truly, to the degree we are aware of our separation from the whole, and thus our partiality towards a given subject of inquiry, philosophy functions by forming knobs with which to adjust Listening frames with a measure of consistency. Effectively engaging inquiry in a way that includes philosophy means willingness to adjust the knobs of our own Listening and our reporting on what such Listening reveals.
Being in terms of process (Becoming) is not a new philosophical frame. I read Bergsen many years ago and appreciated it greatly.
There’s a paradox in acceptance of process philosophy that makes it seem self-defeating though. It demotes the very person using it because a larger frame of Becoming cannot itself be solely informed by process philosophy. It must be informed by the states of Being themselves that make Being real.
Thus it would seem that while the art of Philosophical Listening and Responding has a place, it cannot itself complete the metaphorical circuit to Being in a way that is consistent with the dynamic Being-Becoming. So why even bother?
The paradox can be resolved by accepting that there’s not a contradiction with viewing reality as both perceptual field and perceptual void. (For more on that, see Reality Science: perceptual field or perceptual void?)
One barrier to taking a meta-analysis of Listening seriously, especially on the question of ontologies and Being-Becoming, is the elevated status of current shoddy solutions. The core example at present is physics’ conflated and confused love relationship with its slight of hand observer-dependence doctrines, which hypnotize many with cosmic fantasies. Fantasies in general are abominable things for full and unconditional existential Listening.
How can philosophy articulate alternatives to the metaphysics of being? Given that the term ontology refers to the conceptualization of being, what philosophical terms and concepts represent an alternative metaphysics of becoming? (original Quora question)
Original publish date Jan 13, 2018