11/5/12

Triadic Philosophy One Reality Ethics Aesthetics

Triadic philosophy is a simple yet foundational
mode of thinkjng influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce
It thinks in threes
Firsts are realities rising and complete in themselves
the stuff that comes up
To name the first First Reality
is simply to identify this as the realm which bounds us
the penumbra
from which everything in thought and action proceeds
We could call it being or existence 
The Top First Image above denotes Reality
Seconds are blunt truths
even brutal oppositions
what we might call our realities
But because these are the objections and questions 
we bring to what rises
and because these questions all suggest values and choices
the foundational Second
may be called Ethics
The second image denotes Ethics

Thirds are the playing out of First and Second
in habits applications beliefs hypotheses  
The highest standard within Ethics
is achievement of the beautiful
The third image denotes Aesthetics

There are an infinite number of Threes
that can spring from this foundation
and each of any Three can be a First or a Second
And all can be nested within
the original three
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Belief is less subscribing than resolving to - The Tao of John 10

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Belief is central to the Seer's way
Not in some magic miracle hooray
But in the sea change everyone can know 
Believing what the Seer comes to show
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Belief is what the will does
to confirm every act
to give it the prior validation
it needs to become reality
The Seer is miraculous
because he is us in prospect
but the habit of of those around him 
is all special effects
and noise of applause
The greater miracle is that we
can see and understand
and make the Seer's way our own
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Bill Hamilton Death of God Theologian Revisited

Update of an Article Written in 2008 when Hamilton was 83
Religion News Service | Faith | Leaders & Institutions | William Hamilton, 
who said `God is Dead,’ dies at 87 http://buff.ly/QhYhUQ
I want to make three points, based on a brief friendship with Bill Hamilton 
and a significant encounter that was my last personal memory of him.
1. I went to Rochester in early 1965 to write an article on FIGHT, the community organization Saul Alinsky had helped to create in the wake of 1964 rioting in the city. Bill Hamilton kindly took me in and put me up. I wrote a piece for Christianity and Crisis (a defunct journal founded by John Bennett and Reinhold Niebuhr. whose archives should be made available online). It earned me a nasty editorial in the Rochester Gannett newspaper -- no archive exists that I can find. In any case Bill was a great host and helped me to meet the folk who contributed to the article.
2. The last night I was there I had the incredible experience of meeting Malcolm X who was speaking at a Colgate-Rochester Seminary event. Bill was on the faculty. Richard Prince describes Malcolm's visit to Rochester in the following paragraph:
"Newport, now an urban planner in the San Francisco area and a former Berkeley mayor, accompanied a 'rough, disheveled' marked-for-death Malcolm from New York City to Rochester, N.Y., on Feb. 16, 1965, five days before Malcolm was killed."
But my recollection is that he was composed and at ease. He had returned from Mecca and in his speech he imparted the serenity he felt when he had been caught in the race-transcending atmosphere of his pilgrimage.
Prior to his speech, we were in a small anteroom off the main seating area. I went up to Malcolm and asked him what book he had read lately that impressed him. He responded that he had been reading Lerone Bennett's The Negro Mood. I remember thinking, This is not a hostile human being, this is a straight-forward, inquiring and admirable person. I have always thought of Malcolm as the full equal if not in some respects the surpasser of Martin Luther King, Jr., who I also had the chance to meet and interview in Birmingham, in 1963, the day after his brother A. D. King's house (and the Gaston Motel) were bombed.
3. In 1968 Bill Hamilton and I were among the attendees at the Gallahue Symposium on Next Steps for the Church and Theology. I was one of the presenters since I had been actively promoting a structural option for the renewal of the church -- namely the proposals in my book The Grass Roots Church. Bishop John A. T. Robinson was among the participants and I noticed that Bill Hamilton was quite impressed with him. I jokingly said that perhaps someday Bill would be a Bishop -- hardly likely given the fact that he and Tom Altizer were the celebrated proponents of the death of God.
Bill's response to me was somewhat arch. "Maybe someday Steve, you'll be a theologian."
Well, I think he was being prophetic as I think the intervening years have enabled me to hammer out what I believe the be the beginnings of a viable theology for the future. It is a theology that can move past the death of God to the understandings that are explicit and implicit in the writings here -- namely that Jesus was introducing us to the God who has always been at hand, whose existence beyond our own perceptions and experience is a complete mystery.
A theology that eschews metaphysics and builds on a reappropriation of the Gospel narratives is to me the best way beyond the necessary but hardly final "death of god" theologies of the 1960s.


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Appalachian Blue My first commercial recording in Nashville - 
Demo by Shauna Lee
 – Appalachian Blue
On Spotify

How Should The East Coast Prepare for the Inevitable

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Until we move from binary to triadic thinking
from pragmatism to pragmaticism
from proselytizing to universalism
we will be doomed to make the wrong decisions
and celebrate them as master achievements
Thus Manhattan contemplates building
big flood blockades
that will protect Wall Street and inundate Brooklyn
or some such silliness
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The brutal truth is that we are already doomed to
an ongoing deluge and will 
be doomed to the current painful agonies
until we answer affirmative to the following proposition
The solution to flooding and tidal inundation
is to either create or move to higher ground
and build our dwellings there
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The pragmaticist obligation
is to stop lavishing attention on the sexy notion 
of  diverting future tidal inundations
with monstrous blockades
(the binary way)
and instead to assume
that any level above an anticipated inundation level
is the level at which it is safe to create places to be occupied
by children and women and men and pets
From this premise many fine premises can be elaborated
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IMAGE
Top First is the Sign of Unity in Diversity
Second is the cold reality of our penchant for inundation
Third is the happy intended result of a creative
collision of First and Second
issuing in
specific new solutions to
the problem of higher ground 
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The primacy and Unity of Aesthetics and Ethics - moving past a conundrum



No philosopher am I
but lives compose philosophies whether one knows it or not
so yes I share my life
Where I part company from Kierkegaard
Where I part company from Nietzsche
Where I part company from Peirce
and most likely Aristotle too
is in insisting
that value and will precede everything
and that ethics and aesthetics are 
prior to and not subordinate to any other categories
including logic and science 
What this means is that I am forced by the
logic of my own premises
to begin applying what this all means
in ways that will 
eventually make some sense to both me and the reader
from now on
if not philosophy
 contention
toward truth

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RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

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