View source for Creative Piety

== Commentary ==

By Robert Hanna and Otto Paans:

"In a closely related way, in the late 18th and 19th century, Goethe (especially in The Metamorphosis of  Plants), the British Romantic poets, Henry David Thoreau, and  the  Impressionists  all  made  the  excellent  point  that  being  truly  able  to  see  what  already  lies  right  before  one’s  eyes  in  the  fundamentally  organic  cosmos  requires  a  special  kind  of  cognitive  humility,  cognitive  openness,  and  cognitive  self-discipline: for example, resolving to live self-reliantly and simply, in the woods beside  Walden  Pond.  Wordsworth,  Shelley,  and  the  early  20th  century  British  philosopher  Samuel  Alexander  aptly  call  that  special  cognitive  attitude  or  standpoint natural piety.

...

There’s an analogous, parallel phenomenon in the formal sciences — exemplified,    for    example,    by    Cantor’s    mathematics    of    transfinite    or    ‘transcendental’  numbers,  which  bears  witness  to  higher-dimensional  infinities,  by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which bear witness to the inherently non-logical character of mathematical truth, and by Tarski’s semantic conception of truth,  which  bears  witness  to  Gödel-incompleteness  and  the  Liar  Paradox  alike — that  we’ll  call  '''formal  piety'''.  

Again,  there’s  another  analogous,  parallel  phenomenon in the social sciences and political anthropology — exemplified, for example,  by  Wilhelm  Dilthey’s  notion  of  Verstehen,  by  what  Wittgenstein  calls ‘agreement (Übereinstimmung) ... in form of life (Lebensform) ’, and by what James C.  Scott  calls  metis — that  we’ll  call  '''social  piety'''.  

Similarly,  there’s  another  analogous,  parallel  phenomenon  in  moral  theory  and  ethics — exemplified  by  Kant’s  notion  of  respect  for  human  dignity — that  we’ll  call  '''moral  piety'''.  

And finally,  the  correlate  of  all  these  in  organicist  metaphysics  is  what  we’ll  call  '''metaphysical piety'''.  For  convenience,  and  to  distinguish  all  these  modes  of  piety  sharply  from  ''religious  piety'' — which (to  mix  metaphors)  is  a  horse  of  a  different  color  and  a  different  kettle  of  fish — '''we’ll  group  them  under  the  general  term  creative  piety'''. 

Creative piety is bearing witness to the essentially rich structures of organic formal systems, organic cosmological systems, organic social systems, organic moral and ethical systems, and organic metaphysical systems. 

'''An  essential  feature  of  creative  piety''',  in  every  one  of  its  modes,  is  that  it  inherently  involves  taking  a  critical,  reflective  standpoint  on  some  or  another determinate domain of content, a standpoint that’s at once 

(i) higher-dimensional—for example, generating a ‘transcendental’ third-dimensional point-of-view out of an  array  or  spreadsheet  of  that  content  that’s  otherwise  merely  ‘flat’  or  two-dimensional,  

(ii)  synoptic  with  respect  to  the  entire  determinate  domain  of  content—for  example,  seeing  a  landscape  as  a  dynamic  three-dimensional contour  map  from  the  vantage  point  of  an  airplane  flying  over  it,  and  also  

(iii)  fully  critical  cognizant  of  the  inherent boundaries  or limits  of  that  determinate  domain of content — for example, its Gödel-incompleteness or Tarski-irreflexivity with  respect  to  logico-mathematical  truth,  truth-definitions,  or  alethic  self.


...


'''Just to give this standpoint a handy label, let’s call it ''organic meta-cognition''.''' An important emergent feature of organic meta-cognition  is  that  even  though,  as  per  element  (iii),  it  always  involves  a  critical  recognition of the inherent boundaries or limits of some determinate domain of content, nevertheless, in view of elements (i) and (ii), it also yields  a  new  kind  of  creatively unbounded   or   unlimited   cognition   of   that   bounded   or   limited   determinate  domain.

...


For  these  reasons,  organic  meta-cognition  via  creative  piety  should  be  sharply  distinguished  from  the  merely  Turing-computable,  recursive,  rote  generation  of  higher-order  levels  of  content  from  lower-order  levels  of  content,  that  we’ll  call  mechanical  meta-cognition—for  example,  Russell’s  theory  of  types..

''All in all, therefore, achieving the special organic meta-cognitive attitude or standpoint  of  creative  piety  is  a  cognitive  revolution.  So  in  this  way,  for  genuine  progress  in  human  thinking  to  occur,  in  any  domainn—nformal-scientific  or  natural-scientific,   applied-artistic   or   fine-artistic,   philosophical,   moral,   or   sociopolitical — '''we  must  emancipate  ourselves  from  the  mechanistic  worldview'''.''

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/923/1560)

== More Information ==
* [[Theory of Thought-Shapers]]

[[Category:Integral Theory]]
[[Category:Intelligence]]
[[Category:Encyclopedia]]
[[Category:Relational]]
[[Category:P2P Theory]]
[[Category:Cosmobiological]]