This was originally intended to be a response to this post on the excellent 'Only a Game' blog, but after trying to send my reply several times, with only refusals from the server, I decided that it was strong enough on its own.
I encountered the distinction between Creatura and Pleroma first in Gregory Bateson's writing, although it is Carl Jung that should take the credit for fishing out this elegant abstraction from the mystical soup of early Christian Gnosticism.
Pleroma is the 'physical' world of sand and gold and collisions between billiard balls. Creatura is the 'mental' world of information, knowledge, fantasy, form, tautology, hysteresis, observation and fiction.
As Gregory Bateson put it: Pleroma is evident when you kick a ball, creatura is evident when you kick a dog.
In one case, we have Newton's laws of motion, in the other, we have a living organism with memory and an energy supply which is independent of the energy of the kick. Newton's laws will not tell us much about which way the dog will move, and at what velocity. The dog may even bite us if we repeat the experiment too often.
Creatura is immanent in Pleroma. Immanence is the quality of being inextricably embedded in something else. The 'groovy atmosphere' is immanent in the party. Love is immanent in a loving couple etc.
If creatura is immanent in pleroma, then creatura can not exist without pleroma. This means that a transcendent God (sitting outside his creation, observing and judging) must be a fiction: God (or 'spirits' or whatever) can only 'really' exist as integrated into the physical universe, not separate from it. In this way, 'primitive' religions which employ totemism can be seen as less superstitious than the more dominant monotheistic faiths of the 'modern' world. In totemism, the spirit lives in the thing(s) - Neptune is part of any water, Thor is part of any lightning.
Another example: A software text file requires silicon or magnetised oxides or fibre optic cables or some such physical medium in order to exist. but the data exists independently of the medium. The data is 'immanent' in the disk. (This is Heraclitus' 'never the same river' - indeed a 'river', like most geographical features - dunes, volcanoes, beaches etc. - may be regarded as a 'mental' object, because it 'remembers' its form, and 'learns' to bend by eroding and depositing sediment etc. The water is pure pleroma, however. Chemists may study its chemical composition, but a biologist would be obliged to study the way that certain plants 'prefer' certain parts of the river bed). What does it mean to 'prefer'?
Science is mostly preoccupied with pleroma, and is suspicious of creatura. Creatura also includes lies, fictions, fantasies, failed hypotheses, contradictions etc. Science wants only truth, but a complete (i.e. 'real') description of [some part of] the universe requires creatura because description itself is creatura. Only creatura can specify the relationships between parts - i.e. the relationship between Newton's model of gravity and that of Einstein can only be described as creatura. Einstein doesn't make Newton obsolete, because Newton's laws are still simpler to use and easier to understand. But we need to know how his theory relates to Einstein's if we wish to choose the more suitable model for the job in hand: Are we attempting to score a goal in a football match, or travel to the nearest galaxy? Only creatura can answer these kinds of questions because pleroma has no goals - no mind.
We must be as rigorous in our understanding of creatura as is possible - which requires humility and parsimony. Some branches of science, e.g. information theory, biology and psychology, make [some aspects of] creatura their central focus. Those sciences also take great pains not to get seduced by false epistemologies. Still it took centuries to arrive at any kind of 'model' of communication, or of evolution, or personality, and we are still unravelling what these phenomena 'really' are. The unravelling itself is a mental process - a virtual one and also a fictional one, because all the evidence indicates that solving the mysteries of science only reveals new mysteries. Our 'truth' is always incomplete and therefore always somehow fictional. (Not to mention that the act of observing is fundamentally a creative act - a 'mapping' of the universe onto a sensory cortex, which then emerges into consciousness with pre-learned names ready to be attached).
Is the virgin different from the bride, or from the wife? What counts? The legal document, the religious ritual, or the biological sacrament?
Does a flock of birds 'really' exist? The materialist sees only the birds, the transcendentalist goes looking for a 'boss' who co-ordinates the flock - perhaps there is a 'boss bird', or perhaps it's God... Clearly both lines of thought are missing the point. We can model flocking behavior with an extremely simple and elegant algorithm which may be expressed in a single sentence: Move in the mean direction of your fellows.
What makes the flocking algorithm simple and elegant is that it applies to structure - the relationship between parts. You have to have fellows to have a flock, otherwise the algorithm is both meaningless and useless. Mies Van Der Rohe said "God is in the details" - but he wasn't quite right. God is in between the details, or rather in the relationship between details.
"The devotee believes that Krishna appears when his name is called. The guru understands that Krishna appears in the spaces between the name calling."
-Swami Wassermann
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"God is in between the details, or rather in the relationship between details."
Yes, that is how I have come to understand it as well. Wasn't there something mysterious (as in "unknown") about the way atoms move? But we know how and we know why they merge with others...
There is something about the way you describe things that makes me think we are seeing some aspects from completely different angles. And yet again I can't seem to point my finger at the difference. But I am going to try.
You say the river is creatura and the water itself is pleroma. But why would the river have a mind of its own? Sure, it follows a path, but if the path was to change, the river would follow these changes. It acts exactly like the billiard ball, the way I see it.
I guess it is a returning issue for me 'not getting it right' in this line of thought. It is the same that happened when you suggested that an ice tap (ehhh... istap in danish) is formed by the communication between the water drops.
To me it is pleroma, so, what am I missing in order to understand it _your_ way?
(I am sure there are plenty who would agree with either of us, but I am asking out of curiosity)
I do love your point with the flock of birds, and I see what you mean in that example, which is amazing! And there is a perfect logic in the argument about how God must be 'between' things rather than above. Mind blowing (as you know).
I know I am stretching the definition of 'communication' a little when I talk of icicles 'communicating themselves into existence', so here is another example:
In some hotels you will find private rooms which may be accessible from adjacent private rooms via 'communicating doors'. It is this kind of 'communication' I have in mind. I don't mean that hotel rooms 'talk' to each other, but if mum and dad have room 324, and the kids are in room 326, then there will certainly be a flow of meaningful information between the two rooms. Whether this is any different from totemism is a question for the anthropologists.
I am not even sure that the icicle example has been mentioned on this blog before, so any readers, may be suitably confused at this point.
Icicles are formed when there is a flow of water over an ice-cold downward-pointing 'bump'. The temperature must be below freezing, but if the temperature is too cold, there will be no flow and no icicles will be able to form. (This is a fine example of cybernetic 'restraints').
As the water flows over the bump, some of it hangs around long enough to freeze over the bump, making the bump longer and more pointed. The fact that the icicle grows is evidence of 'memory' or even 'learning'. Irregularities in the original bump will be reflected in the new layers of ice - a communication of the original icicle 'seed'.
Therefore we may say that the icicle somehow 'remembers' its past, or perhaps that its past is evident in its present form, and that its present form must somehow dictate its future form. The icicle is not just a random ice form (pleroma) but rather it is a mental object (creatura) with a history, a memory and a restrained set of possible futures.
It's true that the course of a river can be diverted, and the river will follow right along. Diverting rivers demands some kind of ecological understanding. You can't divert a river uphill, or across sand dunes, for example. Those who divert rivers must submit to the broader restraints of the landscape and even the climate.
But the undiverted river has 'carved out' its path over many centuries; It has found its own way, influenced by gravity, and it continues to interact (i.e. communicate) with its surroundings - the river banks and bed - as it develops.
A 'young' river - the part nearest the source - has a steep, sharply crooked valley, whereas an 'old' river - the part nearest the sea - has a shallow, gently winding shape. Something has happened in the progress from youth to maturity. The river has 'learned' something.
At any point, the river 'remembers' its shape from year to year, changing gradually from decade to decade, and cutting deeper inland from century to century. It is this 'memory' and interaction and growth which causes me to regard the river as a 'mental' (creatural) form, distinct from the pleromatic water molecules which flow along it.
Sorry for making out-side-blog references.
I think I'm getting closer to the point where I am not following you.
"Therefore we may say that the icicle somehow 'remembers' its past, or perhaps that its past is evident in its present form, and that its present form must somehow dictate its future form."
Yes, this is what I agree with you on! The past is evident in its current form. But the fact that 'we' can see this past, doesn't make the icicle aware of it too.
"The icicle is not just a random ice form (pleroma) but rather it is a mental object (creatura) with a history, a memory and a restrained set of possible futures."
Is the dog creatura because it might bite me, or because I know, that it might bite me?
Is it implicit in pleroma, that it is random? Let's say I had a tube that would split into two tubes, and let's say I let a ball roll through the tube. The ball would be forced to roll through it, but I would have no control over the outcome. If the ball would go left or right, when the tube split.
Would that make the ball pleroma or creatura?
Let's say then, that every time the ball hit the splitting corner, causing small fragments to crack off every time. That would somehow effect the result of the next ball-in-tube test, because eventually the corner will be so torn apart, that the ball will roll through the path of least resistance.
Is the ball then pleroma or creatura?
We know, that the reason the ball will eventually only go left, is because the repeated attempts have caused the tube to be uneven.
It is not because this ball remembers the past. We remember the past, and we can acknowledge the reason why the present looks as it does. But the 7th ball will be as smart as the 2nd and the 22nd, it will act with the exact same approach, following the path of least resistance. It hasn't learned anything, but the conditions have changed, leading the outcome to be different. And only the observer has learned something from it.
Ok, maybe I get it now... Same quote.
"The icicle is not just a random ice form (pleroma) but rather it is a mental object (creatura) with a history, a memory and a restrained set of possible futures."
So, if I understand you correctly. The fact that the object has a past that controls its future is what makes it creatura, even if it consists of small particles of pleroma.
aHA! Of course.
I was caught up in the 'mind of its own' way of looking at it. The same reason the word 'communication' cluttered my understanding.
(But I still disagree with the idea, that each drop/ball learns something from the past. However, I do agree that the past of the object controls the future.)
But obviously, when the drop becomes part of the object, it becomes part of the past and inherits the knowledge, which will create the restraints that will affect the future.
So the drop will not learn, but it will become part of the knowledge.