Engaging the new

A new maxim crystallises as layers of memory, pressure and concern reverberate together in a new situation. 

The new is ushered into being through processes that exceed either rational thought or the derivation of pragmatic implications from universal principles. To engage with the territory of the new we might turn to the immanent naturalists. Via immanent naturalism we might project an open temporal horizon exceeding human mastery, irreducible to radical transcendence. Here we might list Democritus, Spinoza, Thoreau, Deleuze, Foucault, whereas those embracing immanence in a world of becoming sustained with a trace of transcendence include Bergson, William James and AN Whitehead.

Both groups emphasise remaining sustained in fecund moments of duration, where care for the world, informed by exquisite sensitivity in an unpredictable moment, sets the conditions for the ushering in of new ideas, maxims, becomings. All modern thinkers listed are philosophers of time as becoming - time for them is not linear, circular or purposive, rather time periodically (!) folds the new into being in a universe that is intrinsically open to an uncertain degree.

This way, emergent formations are not reducible to patterns of probability or efficient causality. Rather, becoming occurs as a periodic intersection between different force fields, where the psychological, biological, social, cultural, geographical and climatic forces set on different tiers of chrono-time infect each other, in part through periodic emergence of new and surprising capacities for autopoesis when such collisions occur, in part through patterns of reverberation back and forth between collision and autopoesis during periods of disequilibrium.

A world of becoming is not only open to an uncertain degree, but each temporal force field in it periodically encounters an outside that affects it profoundly. Transcendence, for those that embrace it, typically demands an idea of the outside.

The relative stability or equilibrium of the force fields within may be disturbed by varied means - a powerful virus jumps species, a period of capitalist growth accelerates climate change, a group of devout Christians encounter Buddhism and become thus irreversibly transformed in view, and so on.

Dwelling in fecund moment where the layered past communicates with a new encounter, something second to the new is ushered into the world, filtered by duration and touched by the sensitivity and intelligence with which it is engaged. It cannot be represented before it appears - it has no shape to represent. It first emerges as a sense and later as an idea, and for all we know the change between may be comparable to the passage of carbon, from nonlife to life. The latter is certainly irreducible to that from which it emerged.

There is something deep and still in here, about causation through resonance, about the nature of disequilibrium, induced.  

Ref:

Connolly, W.E. (2010). Belief, Spirituality and Time, in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Craig Calhoun), Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 126-144.