Gregory Aisemberg

Either beauty is the beholding of a fixed and final aesthetic essence discontinuous with the rest of nature, or it is an intuitive grasp and encompassing feel of a consummated movement of natural energies and elements through their inner relations into a single, qualitative unity, whose pervasive tonality is a situational emergent from the biologically active, temporally continuous, and reciprocally constituting-constituted transactional dialectic between a human creature and the world. If aesthetic-mystical experience is indeed something “eternalized” out of all connection with ordinary experience and the flood of moving fact, then what is immediately entailed is a phenomenological profile conceived as..

In describing the mystical as a swift and progressive obliteration of empirical individuality and its history, of sensation, of time and space, and of the world’s multiplicity of forms, the otherworldly mystic grossly distorts the experience by interpretive tropes that uproot it from its animal soil of impulse and habit, of human perspective, and attribute its genesis to the intermediation of supernatural factors in order to account for its simplest rudiments. What is presupposed in otherworldly interpretations is that sense experience is the veil of Maya cast over Reality leading man away from the spiritual and, as John Dewey says, “tolerated only as a vehicle through which man may be brought to an intuition of ..

At the fore of concern within Whitehead scholarship are the main interpretive issues revolving around the relationships of God, creativity, and the world. Some critics have charged that Whitehead’s mature thought suffers from a lack of coherence in his formulation of the relationship between God and creativity as they function in cosmic generativity, a charge proven difficult to overcome. Such critics have posed the following question. In light of Whitehead’s commitment to the Ontological Principle, how can God and creativity stand as separate formative elements in the world’s creative advance? This question illustrates, some say, how the separation of God from creativity within Whitehead’s process philosophy..