Description
Book Synopsis'Could it not be that a tremendously important Event is taking place in the world, taking place right now, of which our own contemporaries have no presentiment? This is indeed so. A highly important Event is taking place that is perceptible, however, only to spiritual vision.' - Rudolf Steiner, 25 January, 1910 What if matter is not solid, fixed and dead, but a living and creative Event? Could the concrete 'stuff' of our existence be in the process of development and becoming? Rudolf Steiner predicted that the new Christ Event would penetrate and transform all earthly and cosmic matter, life, consciousness and evolution. Through this Event, we have the opportunity to participate in the vortex of creative life. No longer detached, external spectators, we become co-creators in the drama of evolution and in the transformation of human consciousness. In this original and challenging work, Dr Ben-Aharon describes how this momentous Event is expressed in the fields of science, history, philosophy and art, and relates some of the fresh and creative concepts that have been discovered and applied in the disciplines of physics, biology, genetics and artificial intelligence. The Event, he concludes, leads us to face the central and world-historical question of our time: Are we as a human race going to use the new creative forces that are available to us positively, or will we allow this potential for good to change into its - destructive - opposite? The choice is ours.
Table of ContentsPreface - Introduction - Chapter One: The Event in Science - Part One: A New Synthesis - Creative Emergence and Becoming - The Web of Life - Humanity is evolution becoming self-conscious - The human as the growing edge of cosmic evolution - Individuation and future cosmic integration - The Two Cultures Revisited - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Ilya Prigogine - Katzir-Katchalsky: Pioneer of a bridge between natural science and the humanities - Part Two: The Whole is the Open and It is Outside - Philosophical Embarrassments: Is the 'I' Within or Without? - Embodied Cognition: The Santiago School - Out of Our Heads - "It's not what's in the Brain that counts, but what the Brain is in." - Part Three: The Involution of the Theory of Evolution - Evo-Devo and the Next Step - Growing Young - Chapter Two: The Event in History - Part One: Individuation and Reversal - In Search of the Ur-Phenomenon of Modern History 80 Modern Individuation - Failure, Regression, or Reversal? - Freedom, Privatization, Reversal - The Basic Cognitive Structure of Reversal - Part Two: Historical Reversals - The First Beast - The 21st Century and the Second Beast - Healing the Wound of Mortality - Reversal of reversal: Singularization - Chapter Three: The Event in Philosophy - Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari (D&G) - De-actualization and Singularization - Virtual actualization and Re-actualization - Virtual actualization - Re-actualization - Body Without Organs - Deleuze-Foucault (D&F) - Jacques Derrida: The General Strategy of Deconstruction - Alain Badiou: The Subject of Truth - Emmanuel Levinas: The Entry of the Other - Chapter Four: The Event in Art - Threshold Identity - Initiation language - Sensation body - Vortex (metamorphosis) - Andrew Wyeth's World: the Becoming of Free Will - Comments on "Christina's World" - Consciousness crystal - Memory and destiny (Guardian of the Threshold) - History (Resurrection)
