Chronological version of index page

Site established 9 April 2007

last updated 29 December 2008

6 April 2007 What is ‘Habitude’? – Some dialogues may help to explain.

27 April 2007, Towards an Introduction

29 April 2007, Bibliography (MS Word download) for combined research (Rabindranath Tagore, India, Voltaire, Enlightenment, Rupert Sheldrake, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze)

8 May 2007 The next thing to appear on this site will be an essay entitled: ‘Dream On!: A Philosophical Study into Why Big Visions “Fail”’. This will be about habitude as the ‘stuckness’ of society, whereby its predominantly capitalism-serving patterns repeat without challenge or depth of awareness: of the consequences, of the absurdity, of what else is possible; such that, whereas reforms are tried, sometimes with world-changing passion on the part of campaigners, visionaries such as Rabindranath Tagore and Bill Mollison, “Fail” (the scare quotes indicating that visions can be reborn) to get their big visions to germinate, thrive and be propagated, to such an extent that the sick old growth withers away.

13 May 2007 ‘Dream On!: A Philosophical Study into Why Big Visions “Fail”’, (incomplete) version 1.

15 May 2007 Dream On! section 2 added.

16 May 2007 Next to appear: a piece on ‘The whats? and whys? of “capitalist” philosophy.’ This belongs in Dream On!, the joy of writing for a web site is being free of a strict linear structure, and being able to branch out.

17 May 2007 ‘The what?s and why?s of “capitalist” philosophy.’ (incomplete) version 1.

21 May 2007 Some Sheldrake links.

23 May 2007 Next piece to come: ‘Refuting the mechanistic paradigm’.

25 May 2007 Yesterday I met again Oskar, the person who told me about the McKenna / Sheldrake connection, whose website is http://www.fighthabit.org/.

26 May 2007 Discovered the following in a book of Bergson’s lectures:

Ravaisson’s doctoral thesis, sustained about that period (1838), is a first application of method. It bears a modest title: De l’habitude. But it is a whole philosophy of nature that the author sets forth in it. What is [end p.274] nature? How is one to imagine its inner workings? What does it conceal under the regular succession of cause and effect? Does it really conceal something, or is it not perhaps reduced, in short, to an entirely superficial deployment of movements mechanically enmeshed in one another? In conformity with his principle, Ravaisson seeks the solution of this very general problem in a very concrete intuition; the one we have of our own particular condition when we contract a habit. For motor habit, once contracted, is a mechanism, a series of movements which determine one another: it is that part of us which is inserted into nature and which coincides with nature; it is nature itself. Now, our inner experience shows us in habit an activity which has passed, by imperceptible degrees, from consciousness to unconsciousness and from will to automatism. Should we not then imagine nature, in this form, as an obscured consciousness and a dormant will? Habit thus gives us the living demonstration of this truth, that mechanism is not sufficient to itself: it is, so to speak, only the fossilized residue of a spiritual activity. (Henri Bergson, ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson’, in The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp.261-300, extract pp.274-5)

26 May 2007 Reading through the material on fighthabit I was struck by its solipsistic youthfulness. We do think differently at different ages or stages of life, perhaps due to changes in cognition as we accumulate knowledge, with declining affective cognition and increasing conceptual thinking, as described in a favourite book, David Gelernter’s The Muse in the Machine.1 If one goes back to an earlier life stage, to childhood, one discovers something quite extraordinary which is seldom cherished and recorded, the ecstatic outpouring of imagination by a loved child, a child who is listened to. One such whom I know well is my granddaughter, Thalia. Together we are starting to write up her ‘Witches World’.

26 May 2007 Pending ‘Refuting the mechanistic paradigm’, see Bergson on Wm. James’s Pragmatism. Also definitions of organicism and vitalism.

27 May 2007 Rupert Sheldrake’s response to the question ‘What Do You Believe In?’

28 May 2007 ‘Refuting the mechanistic paradigm’.

29 May 2007 Coming next ‘Experience and belief, nonsense, and the land’.

29 May 2007 Recap: habitude as a concept.

31 May 2007 ‘Experience and belief, nonsense, and the land’ (incomplete, added to 2 June).

8 June 2007 ‘Habitude and “the spirituality thing”’ (incomplete).

10 June 2007 ‘Habitude and “the spirituality thing”’, new section (but still incomplete).

13 June 2007 Chronological version of index page – this one.

15 June 2007 Finished with ‘Habitude and “the spirituality thing”’, with new section on ‘holistic teaching’ and all that.

15 June 2007 Next piece to come will be back to ‘Dream On’, with more on what I mean by ‘Big Visions’. As a taster – and relief from spirituality stuff – the Introduction from The Culture of Cities by Lewis Mumford.

25 June 2007 What is ‘Habitude’?, updated 29 June.

1 July 2007 Rather personal piece on ‘the proof delusion’.

2 July 2007 Review of Black Mass by John Gray.

23 July 2007 Landauer, anarchist visionary

26 July 2007 Thalia’s myth

26 July 2007 No human-like mind, no God, could create the extraordinary life of the deep ocean; surely proof of habitude: an evolving universe in which increasingly complex forms emerge and are reinforced by a tendence for patterns / habits to persist.

4 September 2007 Chomsky on the Responsibility of Intellectuals.

6 September 2007 Thinking about handicrafts.

16 December 2007 Jesus Radicals?

20 December 2007 Eagleton’s review of The God Delusion.

28 December 2007 Monocultures of the Mind, extract

2 February 2008 Is there a God or not?, from ‘The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare’, Dostoyevsky

10 February The Latest on Witches World, and Thalia’s poem ‘Enchantment’

16 February Breaking the Supermarket Habit – Starting in Dawlish

23 February Granddaughter

24 February Tell Me More

8 May 2008 Transition Town Dawlish

8 May 2008 Danger and Opportunity

11 May 2008 Developing thoughts on Dawlish

23 June 2008 Thalia’s Lilac Dragon

15 August 2008 Latest on Witches World

29 December Thalia’s book-in-process Bomb City

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1 David Gelernter, The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (New York: Free Press, 1994)