Definition of Proposition

What is a Proposition?

A proposition is the articulating of a tendency sensed in an experiment (an event). In creative processes, as the new first emerges, it is something fully a-conceptual, and as such, it is not directly accessible to ideation or a clear and distinct language. The new in this state of becoming is something we sense as a tendency, something pulling us into the darkness, in a new direction. Here, the word "proposition,” used as Whitehead defines it, as a “lure for feelings,” is helpful to contexify our words. We are developing a language alongside the pull of the a-conceptual new to support this propensity. Here the goal is to keep novel qualitative difference alive with a language that does not bend back to the known.

Propositions like “other worlds are possible” are not statements to be judged as true or false but as “lures” — a thing that draws the willing into a new way of sensing and feeling radical contingent possibilities. Sensing and feeling matter here, for our sensing goes “deeper” and wider than our conscious forms of knowing. And ultimately, our conscious and reflective forms of knowing grow out of our embodied sensing and feeling—out of these lures. Any creativity interested in the qualitatively new needs to go deeper than conscious forms of knowing and imagining—and to develop a novel eccentric propositional language that could give it a necessary catalytic support.

‍Propositions: “The proximity of things is poetry." (Emmanuel Levinas)

‍…And this then leads us to a critical paradox that haunts the modern approach to creativity...

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Example of Proposition

We utilize the term proposition in a unique way: it is what the philosopher who coined the word “creativity” A. N. Whitehead defined as a “lure for feelings”. Propositions like “other worlds are possible” are not statements to be judged as true or false but as “lures” — a thing that draws the willing into a new way of sensing and feeling possibilities. Sensing and feel matter here — for our sensing goes “deeper” and wider than our conscious forms of knowing. And ultimately our conscious and reflective forms of knowing grow out of our embodied sensing and feeling. Any creativity interested in the qualitatively new needs to go deeper than conscious forms of knowing and imagining.

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