John Briggs

John Briggs (born 1945) is an American author and co-author of general audience nonfiction books in the fields of holistic physics; aesthetics in the arts; creativity, creative process, and consciousness studies. Emeritus Distinguished CSU Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at Western Connecticut State University, Briggs lives in Granville, Massachusetts, where he has served as a Selectman and a police officer. Themes Holistic approaches to nature, art and indigenous traditions, and reflections on the ways that human consciousness experiences the whole. His early work explored metaphor as a holistic deep structure principle in the arts. More recently, he has linked this metaphor principle to the holistic (holomorphic) mode of consciousness utilized by Native American and other Indigenous cultures. He has advanced the theory that a primal form of ambivalence fulminates at the core of consciousness: the irresolvable paradox between our existence as separate individuals and our existence as inseparable from the whole. His work includes critiques of reductionist assumptions in science, in arts theory, and in anthropocentric thinking generally. Education and career