Retrospective 2020-29

This is a summary of my painting, reading, and writing this week (week 29, 2020).

Painting

I painted this from on a photo by Skye Hirst.

Related to my painting, I also made the following note to self:

Maybe the universe is Whole the way a painting is Whole? A brush stroke in a corner of the painting affects the overall painting, even though there are corners the brush has not touched. If the universe is work in progress, then what we do are brush strokes. What do we paint with our lives?

Reading

I started reading David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order. It’s a collection of essays representing the development of Bohm’s thinking over several decades. David Bohm’s main concern is with understanding consciousness and the nature of reality as “a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment“.¹

I have continued to immerse myself in Norm Hirst’s writings. This week I have read Hirst’s:

• Living Combinators
• Combinator Logic
• Preface to a New Logic
• Norm on Values
• Hartman’s Science: Use of the Transfinite
• Foundations For An Axiological Science: Hartman’s Science Realized

Here is my summary of Norm Hirst’s Propositions on a New Metaphysics and Science of Life-Itself from last week. What is called for is a new logic adequate to understanding life.

Interestingly, David Bohm also realized the limitations of traditional logic. Bohm writes:

This [Aristotelean logic] may be called the logic proper to things. … When we come to consider the ‘totality of all that is’, however, our primary concern is…with the unconditioned totality that is the ultimate ground of all. Here, the rules enunciated by Aristotle break down, in the sense that there is not even a limited domain or set of conditions under which they could apply…²
— David Bohm

Writing

This week I started this wiki where I will string together the materials I have gathered over the years into a coherent whole. This is going to be personal work which I need to do in my native language. For those of you who don’t have access to the Swedish language, I will summarize what’s happening in my weekly retrospectives.

Notes:
1. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p. x.
2. Ibid., p. 77.