Organizing retrospective 34

This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. This is a retrospective of what has happened during the week. The purpose is to reflect on the work itself. Here is my previous retrospective. Here is my next retrospective.

What has happened? What needs to be done?
I needed to take a break this week after having read Alfred North Whithead and Robert S. Hartman. Here is my review of Sherburne’s A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. And here is my review of Hartman’s The Structure of Value.

A week ago, Sky Hirst sent this post on Why War: Einstein and Freud’s Little-Known Correspondence on Violence, Peace, and Human Nature by Maria Popova. I was struck by the big difference between Freud and Hartman’s perspectives. Freud thinks, for example, that “the Roman conquest” brought a boon, while Hartman sees the Roman conquest as the “Tragedy of Rome – military despotism.”¹

This is an example of how Freud turned Hartman’s axiological priorities (intrinsic > extrinsic > systemic) upside down (systemic > extrinsic > intrinsic). This is very common, and it has all sorts of pathological consequences. Hartman goes as far as to say that the ”danger that threatens life” is the “tremendous gap between those who think in terms of [intrinsic] human values and those who think in the collective terms of [systemic] non-human systems “.² I think Hartman is right. This means that, deeper generative orders for organizing need to be grounded in intrinsic values.

Now, I’m reading Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order by Lloyd Lee Wilson. I’m interested in how organizing order might be related to Quaker gospel/right/good order. I’m also interested in how Quaker good order might be related to Hartman’s axiology and definition of goodness.

Next, I’ll read Floyd Merrell’s Change through Signs of Body, Mind, and Language, which arrived this week.

What was good? What can be improved?
I’ve become very good at absorbing large amounts of text. I need to improve the sharing of my observations.

Notes:
¹ Robert S. Hartman, Freedom to Live: The Robert Hartman Story, p. 115.
² Ibid., p. 124.

Related posts:
Organizing in between and beyond posts