In 1870, Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883) wrote an essay to celebrate the centennial of Beethoven’s birth. In this essay Wagner made the case that music is, unlike any other object we create or are attentive to in experience, in an immediate analogical relationship with the activity of the Schopenhauerian “will” and is always enlivened. By drawing on this idea, we can not only conceive of music as in an immediate analogical relationship with our personal experience, but as perhaps the only object of cognition that is in a constant state of personal vitality. It is by that very continuous vitality that it can return us to our own personhood with deeper insight and perspective. The essay concludes by exploring how attending to the musical object as a spiritual (existential) exercise might reconnect us to our roots in sensus communis, educate us on our common personhood, and play an ethical role in our lives.
This article argues that Joseph A. Bracken’s revisions of Alfred North Whitehead’s derivative notion of “society” are plausible in view of developments in physics since Whitehead. In particular, Bracken argues that Whitehead’s derivative notion of “society” should rather be a category of existence equiprimordial with “actual entity,” and that contemporary actual entities in concrescence do influence each other as they directly prehend the society as a nexus. The article begins with Whitehead’s view of the metaphysical project as empirical, tentative, and subject to ongoing revision. Next, the essay explains Whitehead’s view of societies and contemporary actual entities. Following this is a survey of developments in physics since Whitehead that are relevant to his understanding of “society” and contemporary actual entities. The article then explains how Bracken differs from Whitehead on these points and argues that the physics developments corroborate Bracken’s proposed revisions to Whitehead. The essay ends with a restatement of Whitehead’s view of metaphysics as provisional and in need of ongoing revision.
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