Monday, June 5, 2017

What is postmetaphyical spirituality?

Continuing this post, an excerpt from the referenced paper follows as partial explanation of the subject heading:

So how then does spirituality express postmetaphysically? First of all it is no longer a domain diametrically opposed to the material domain. Another hallmark of metaphysical thinking is this opposition, with the spiritual or absolute domain the source and cause of the material or relative domain. Postmetaphysical spirituality acknowledges the virtual realm, akin to the absolute realm, but in a very different relationship with the actual or material domain. The virtual domain is still generative of the actual, but its own genesis lies not in a metaphysical plane but within its relationship to the actual in a co-generative process.

Alderman (2013) discussed this process via the emerging field of object-oriented ontology (OOO). A number of metaphysical systems, both east and west, saw the absolute realm as a primal whole underlying the relative realm, or fundamental element(s) from which the rest of the material realm was constructed. However OOO equally opposes an overlying process relationship between all things, that objects can only be understood in their relationship to each other. The idea of an object’s substance is reconfigured avoiding either of those extremes that express more generally as ‘the myth of the given.’ More specifically, e.g., it expresses as the reduction of reality to our direct access to it in toto like the metaphysical notions of eastern meditative traditions, or our direct access to reality via representational models of reason typical of western empirical traditions.

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