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C H A P T E R 8 MISPLACED CONCRETENESS Suffer me not to be separated. —T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday T here is a certain uncanny quality to the processive being/becoming of the human person. The dominant organization of our experience according to the conceptual entertainment of alternative formal possibilities presented within our given actuality allows for a high degree of plasticity in our becoming. It even, as indicated in the previous chapter, makes alienation possible. Heightened conceptuality provides us with alternatives— even with the alternative of reifying our very ability to abstract. And here is the greatest irony: that the remarkable extension of conceptuality operative in human being, that which serves as the organ of novelty and therefore as the ground of our effusive creative ability, also simultaneously presents us with the possibility of creating ourselves as less or more productive of novelty. Our plasticity, our malleability, the ease with which we can change ourselves , mold our environment, shift gears, or just dream, the flexibility of our purposes and the purposiveness of our flexibility, are functions of the dominant role played by our intelligence within our self-creation. Our human conceptuality insinuates itself in every fiber of the fabric of our self- and world-creation; it touches and retouches, shapes and reshapes our projects. And precisely because it is the organ of novelty, of change and difference, it is a key that can turn two ways: it can lock or unlock, or, more important, it can lock as it unlocks and vice versa. One door opened necessarily means others closed. As Whitehead points out, “selection belongs to expression” (MT, 21) and expression is “the activity of finitude impressing itself on its environment” (MT, 20). To be is to be as this relational selection and not that. It will be the purpose of the present chapter to investigate what doors appear closed and locked within capitalism as a historical mode of social 147 production; it will be the purpose of the next chapter to show how that locking is simultaneously an unlocking of productive alternatives. The underlying foundation of this project has been the explanatory framework provided by the intersection between the philosophy of internal relations and dialectics. This framework was examined from the perspective of metaphysics. Process metaphysics was found to be a metaphysics of internal relations whereby each and every metaphysical occasion was a relationalaesthetic patterning of the data provided by its unique perspective on the actual world and thus an achievement of relational valuation. Additionally, because such occasions are both constituted by their internal relations and simultaneously metaphysical, they are fully dialectical individuals, their being is constituted by their activity of relating (doing) which, on “completion,” is always already data for the actualities of becoming beyond them. The metaphysical individuals are thus unities in difference: simultaneously actualities and actualizing, intensive and extensive, subject and superject, relational integrations of many actualities and achievements of a singular actuality, and so on. The dual or dialectical character of the ultimate metaphysical individuals makes them the only “reason” for process. Each actual entity is the “between” generating both the continuity and the change of the processive universe; actual entities are the relationally generative universe. Process is generated by the internal relations of metaphysical actualities. These internal relations reveal the dialectical character of being that serves to ground the ontological paradigm of production. In keeping with their fully dialectical nature, each metaphysical individual exhibits the operation of a physical pole responsible for the causal transmission from past data of simple physical feelings and the concurrent operation of a mental pole responsible for the introduction of novelty by way of entertainment of alternative arrangements of formal possibilities inherent in that data. Thus, where a society of such metaphysical entities is found, it will exhibit the operative dominance of one or the other of these poles. The pervasive character of any enduring macroontological society will, therefore, be explainable by the degree of such polar dominance. Physical objects that exhibit massive stability are directed almost exclusively by those constitutive societies dominated by the reiterative physical pole. Living beings that display traits of adaptation to changes in their surrounding environment are composed of societies wherein the conceptual pole achieves prominence. The ontological landscape is populated with every conceivable degree of equilibrium between physical reiteration and conceptual novelty. Within our experience, just as rocks or mountains stand out as paradigms of societal dominance of the reiterative physical pole, so on the other end of the...

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