Another new episode of the Waking Cosmos Podcast, produced by my friend Adrian Nelson. https://youtu.be/3lRxd_A_fhA

https://youtu.be/_a0gQ_KatZ8 >More information on this course<< Recommended Readings (PDF)

INTERSECT: Science & Spirituality Join us for a 2-Day Conversational Conference (July 27-29th) for the purpose of Exploring Syngergies between the world of Science and the world of Spirituality. Topics to include Cosmology, Ecology, Sustainability, and Consciousness. Speakers include: Drew Dellinger, John Hausdoerffer, Matthew Segall and Brian Swimme (via video). Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/intersect-science-spirituality-tickets-4239963846

Here’s my talk from the INTERSECT: Science & Spirituality conference in Telluride, CO earlier this summer. It’s titled “Participatory Spirituality in an Evolving Cosmos”

Thanks to Jeremy for hosting a great conversation!

http://www.jeremydanieljohnson.com/mutations/2018/8/31/02-matthew-t-segall-of-ciis-on-consciousness-cultural-evolution-and-cosmic-celebration

Here are some clips from my video call with students earlier tonight wherein I discuss Whitehead's cosmology, including his views of God, creativity, time, immortality, and education.

I'm posting a revised version of a long essay I wrote a decade ago. It draws on thinkers including Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, William Irwin Thompson, Francisco Varela, Alfred North Whitehead, and Alf Hornborg in search of a more integral approach to economics. I had not yet encountered the social ecology [...]

Had the pleasure of dialoguing with my good friends Adam Robbert and Jesse Estrin once again (prior session from May 2018). Inspired in part by this Palladium interview with Benjamin Bratton.

Bruce Damer and I joined David Sloan Wilson on the Human Energy Project podcast for a conversation about the Hot Spring Abiogenesis Hypothesis and its cosmological implications. This was recorded late last year.

[update: video now available]

The Teilhard scholar Ursula King will speak tomorrow, May 1st, at 4pm at the California Institute of Integral Studies (1453 Mission St) about the evolutionary spirituality of Teilhard de Chardin and Raimon Panikkar. It’s free and open to the public. Join us!

See the flyer linked below for more information.

Ursula King Flyer

CIIS is accepting applications for the Fall 2017 semester for a new online masters degree program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness with concentrations in Archetypal Cosmology, Integral Ecology, and Process Philosophy. I’ll be teaching mostly in the Process Philosophy Concentration. Check out the website for more information.

Below is a draft of a paper I’ll offer at the MEA Convention in a few weeks. I share it here in the hopes that my readers may provide feedback that helps me improve it. I have something like 15 minutes to present as part of a panel on “Philosophical Perspectives,” so I’ll only be able to extemporaneously summarize the text below. I hope to submit some version of this paper to the Explorations in Media Ecology journal.

A Panel Presentation for the 18th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association

Convention theme: “Technology, Spirituality, Ecology”

Title: Toward A Communicative Cosmos: Whitehead and Media Ecology

Author: Matthew T. Segall, PhD

Affiliation: California Institute of Integral Studies

Contact: msegall@ciis.edu 

“…it is not to be wondered at, that there is nothing attributed unto Pan concerning loves, but only of his marriage with Echo. For the world or nature doth enjoy itself…but where there is enough there is no place left to desire. Therefore there can be no wanton love in Pan or the world, nor desire to obtain anything (seeing he is contented with himself) but only speeches…It is an excellent invention that Pan or the world is said to make choice of Echo only (above all other speeches or voices) for his wife: for that alone is true philosophy, which doth faithfully render the very words of the world; and it is written no otherwise than the world doth dictate, it being nothing else but the image or reflection of it, not adding anything of its own, but only iterates and resounds”
—Francis Bacon (The Essays, Or Councils, Civil and Moral [1718], 18)

“Not all communication is human communication. Animals and machines, atoms and the earth, the seas and the stars are themselves full of curious communications, and our efforts to have intelligence with such entities reform our own practices as well. A vision of communication committed to democracy cannot foreclose on entering into intelligence with radical otherness, including the earth, other species, machines, or extraterrestrial life.”
—John Durham Peters (“Space, Time, and Communication Theory”)

“We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures.”
—Alfred North Whitehead (PR, 50)

In what follows, I draw upon Alfred North Whitehead’s organic cosmology in an attempt to expand the scope of media ecology beyond its ordinarily humanistic horizon. Neil Postman defined media ecology as the critical study of how media technologies envelope and form cultures. As McLuhan famously put it, “Man is an extension of nature that re-makes the nature that makes the man” (Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, 66). This definition of media ecology is premised on the idea that human beings have a foot in two different worlds: a natural or physical environment that includes our own living bodies, and a media environment that extends our embodied expressions into a non-material space of meaning. Each form of communication technology (e.g., speech, the alphabet, the printing press, radio, TV, the Internet, etc.) creates a surrogate nature, an artificial environment within which new cultures grow, sometimes deformed due to their alienation from and lack of resonance with original nature. Today, largely because of a lack of resonance, we find ourselves the late capitalist denizens of a planet in crisis. Geologists and Gaian physiologists tell us that we have entered the Anthropocene. Technological civilization, in its rush to establish a new and improved second nature on top of the first, has neglected to consider that first nature—the Earth—is not a mere stockpile of raw material waiting to fuel the growth and innovation of the human economy, but a complex and highly differentiated ecopoietic superorganism (see Mind in Life by Evan Thompson, 120-122). The planetary ecological crisis has made the modern theory of a bifurcated nature obsolete. Cultural productions and physical processes, perhaps once separable in thought, are now irrevocably entangled at a geochemical level. Our ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology; by the idea, that is, that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies, but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s organic cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on the medium instead of the message, such that the world itself is brought into view as a medium of communication. Perhaps such an imaginative generalization of media ecology into an ecological metaphysics or metaphysics of the medium can sensitize us to the primal logos of the cosmos.

This work is already well underway, carried forward by theorists including Jussi Parikka, John D. Peters, Mark B. N. Hansen, Adam Robbert, and Andrew Murphie. They each (especially the latter three) turn to Whitehead’s process-relational metaphysics in search of a more cosmological media ecology. Recognizing that humans represent only one of the cosmos’ many forms of communicative being, and that the storage, transmission, and transformation of meaning occurs at every scale from the quantum to the geological to the galactic, opens up new theoretical perspectives on and practical interventions into the study of media as environment and environment as media. In alignment with this conference’s theme, becoming conscious of a communicative cosmos has profound technological, ecological, and theological implications.

Part 1 makes the case for cosmologizing media theory beyond the study of human communication. Part 2 engages more specifically with Mark Hansen’s Feed Forward, arguing that his “inversion” of Whitehead is an unnecessary radicalization of an already radical theory of perception.

Part 1

McLuhan and Postman theorized media largely from an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., media as “extensions of man”). There is much to be learned from such a perspective. But it is not the only perspective from which to study media. Unlike Postman, with his prophet-like criticisms of new media’s deleterious effect on contemporary culture, McLuhan’s Catholic faith sometimes led him to offer a more theologically charged take on electronic media. He went so far as to suggest that what we now call the Internet may be the technological incarnation of the mystical body of Christ (of course, he also worried that electronic media were just Satan’s latest temptation). God has an important role to play in Whitehead’s media theory, as well, though less as a subject of religious worship than as a metaphysical principle providing coherence to his cosmological scheme. For Whitehead, God is that infinite actuality which introduces an ideal harmony or aesthetic order into the world, making cosmos out of chaos by providing the initial aim or erotic lure conditioning every creative act: God “is the mirror which discloses to every creature its own greatness” (RM, 139). Whitehead’s is an aesthetic theory of Being wherein God is the poet of the world.

McLuhan said of all media prior to electronic technologies that they were “extensions” or “prostheses” of the human being, but with the emergence of digital media and the Internet, an uncanny reversal seems to be occurring: the human is becoming an extension of media. According to McLuhan, we are ourselves being “translated into information” (UM, 57). Digital media have been characterized as “environmental,” “elemental,” and “atmospheric” because they surround and dissolve our classical conception of human agency. Data is now the most powerful weapon in the world, as the governments, corporations, and anonymous hackers who wield it have the ability to shape our collective perceptions and actions, even while we continue to believe we are individuals thinking for ourselves. The situation is decidedly double-edged: we have instantaneous access to more information about each other and the world than ever before in human history, but this information also has access to us.

Whether we call it the informational revolution, the technozoic era, or the Anthropocene, it is clear that our species has become a planetary force on par with supervolcanoes and meteorites. Just as this realization begins to dawn on us, media theorists are articulating a “non-anthropocentric, non-prosthetic, and radically environmental theory of media” (Hansen, FF, 250). Hansen, Murphie, and Robbert turn to Whitehead’s panpsychism in order to re-imagine the ontology of media as part of an effort to overcome the modern bifurcation of nature. The bifurcated theory of nature has it that nature is a soundless, scentless, colorless affair, with all experience and interpretation, all emotion and purpose, all value and agency, reserved for the human or at most the animal (and for some, for God). Media theory has tended to treat human perception as though it existed in an ontologically unique domain outside and above mere material existence: humans and their technologies do the mediating, while nature itself remains passively mediated. In protest against the bifurcation of nature, Whitehead articulated a radical account of perception, whereby the affective inheritance of our own just past bodily experience becomes analogous to all of nature’s causal transactions. Human temporality, even if stretched and intricately folded, is still continuous with cosmic temporality. For Whitehead, the ultimate concrete facts composing nature are non-conscious acts of perceptivity: to be actual is to be the achievement of a specific form of feeling, or what Whitehead refers to as a “prehension” (RM, 88, 91). Causal efficacy in nature is the transmission of an occasion of feeling from the settled past into the cresting wave of the present. Once an actual occasion’s present form has reached completion, its perceptivity perishes and it offers itself as an expression feeding the emergence of subsequent prehensive actualities. “Expression,” says Whitehead, “is the one fundamental sacrament…the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace…the recipient extends his apprehension of the ordered universe by penetrating into the inward nature of the originator of the expression. There is then a community of intuition by reason of the sacrament of expression proffered by one and received by the other” (RM, 118). Where McLuhan described the “miracle” whereby “in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world, because human perception is literally incarnation” (“Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,” 82), Whitehead goes further by arguing that “Every event on its finer side introduces God into the world,” such that “the world lives by its incarnation of God in itself” (RM, 140). Expression and prehension are the systole and diastole movements of cosmic creativity, the call and response between God and the world. Every creature, whether atomic, galactic, biotic, or anthropic, is privy in various degrees to this conversation. McLuhan’s theological intuitions already offer media ecology one way beyond its ordinarily anthropocentric charter. But by accepting some version of the bifurcation of Nature, McLuhan falls short of the “becoming-cosmological of media” (Hansen, FF, 244) that is achieved by Whitehead. Media theory’s founding insight, that “the medium is the message,” must be translated into cosmology.

Adam Robbert offers one translation in the form of a “geocentric media ecology”: “Organisms are media ecologists enveloped by the media ecologies of other organisms…the Earth itself is not a passive ground upon which events unfold, but a medium that constrains and conditions the energetic cascade of organismic and ecosystemic development” (“Earth Aesthetics: Knowledge and Media Ecologies,” 6). Along similar lines, Jussi Parikka suggests that “the Earth as living creature communicates via the assembled resources it fashions and provides” (“The Geology of Media,” The Atlantic [Oct 11, 2013]). Parikka offers his own translation of “the medium is the message” into cosmology via a psychogeophysical inquiry into the memories of rocks, raising a dilemma “anyone deep into Alfred North Whitehead would find attractive”: “how do the soil, the crust, the rocks, and the geological world sense?” (A Geology of Media, 62-65. Emphasis mine). Such questions may seem odd at first, but they are an invitation to consider anew the ontological implications of the way natural sciences like geology and astronomy have taught us so much about the cosmos by treating it as a kind of recording medium.

In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters asks: “What if we took nature as the epitome of meaning rather than mind? What if the fecundity of meaning in nature provided our model of communication?” (MC, 380). Peters approaches the cosmologization of media theory by calling for an “infrastructural aesthetics” to replace both structuralism (the ambition to “explain the principles of thought…by way of a combinatorics of meaning”) and post-structuralism (“with its love of gaps, aporias, and impossibilities, its celebration of breakdown, yearning, and failure, its relish for preposterous categories of all kinds and love of breathless syntax”) (MC, 33). Infrastructural aesthetics lifts the taken for granted background of our human living and dying into the foreground, bringing that which habitual use and abuse has made imperceptible out from behind the veil and into view. Whitehead’s method of speculative philosophy could be described likewise, as for him metaphysics is the pursuit of those generalities so finely woven into the texture of our everyday experience that they become “obscured by their persistent exemplification” (PR, 5). “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake an analysis of the obvious” (SMW, 4), which perhaps explains why philosophy is such a rare vocation. But for Whitehead, philosophy must not become the enemy of habitual commonsense. Infrastructural ignorance has been an essential component of our species’ uniquely powerful form of intelligence: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them” (Intro to Math, 61). Instead, philosophy must deploy the method of “imaginative rationalization” (PR, 5) to seek out and make explicit the unacknowledged cosmological presuppositions that provide justification for our civilized commonsense. Infrastructural aesthetics is the effort to bring to light the vibrant materiality of the medium underlying the ephemerality of the messages it conveys. It is the effort to unearth the way the ground we walk on supports and enables our understanding of media, our communicative capacity, our consciousness, and our very being: “Ontology, whatever else it is,” says Peters, “is usually just forgotten infrastructure” (MC, 38). In a discussion of Einsteinian cosmology, Peters refers to the way “infrastructural warps can be embraced as epistemic sources” (MC, 364). In other words, the red shift and gravity lensing detected in ancient/distant light signals tells us something important about the universe. Distortions in these cosmic messages, far from ruining our ability to decipher their meaning, communicate something significant to us about the medium of space-time itself: “…light is not simply a signal carrier, but the basis of the universe’s structure—not just message but being…Time, the universe’s key dimension, is tied to signal velocity, and ontology is bound by the finitude of communication” (MC, 366, 368).

Whitehead’s philosophy of organism allows a radical new possibility to become thinkable, that the world can be re-imagined as a medium because the cosmos is itself composed of communicative processes at every scale. The world itself has always been, in Whitehead’s terms, “a medium for the transmission of influences” (PR, 286). “Ironically,” writes Andrew Murphie, “the idea that there’s too much mediation (a world over-run by media which would otherwise run smoothly) leads media theory and practice astray,” since, as Whitehead’s philosophy reveals, “We have too small a concept of mediation” (“The World as Medium,” 11n11).

Cosmologizing media theory means finally, decisively, letting go of the Cartesian-Kantian framework that extends mere matter forever beyond a meaning intending mind. “Nature abounds in meaning,” says Peters, “most of which we have no idea how to read or even acknowledge that it is there. There is an exquisite pattern in DNA and the neurons of sea slugs, in photons and the red shift, in the bonds of the carbon atom and the fortuitously odd behavior of water…There is clear intelligence of some kind in planetary, physiological, and genetic feedback loops. We…should understand intelligence at all scales, as the dynamic, restless, inarticulate genius of life-forms evolving in their environments…with human brain intelligence just one glorious outpost of organic evolution” (MC, 381).

Such a scale-free conception of intelligence requires a more general theory of communication (indeed, a more general general semantics!) than that which supposes the paradigm case of communication is one human mind trying to convey a thought to another. With a truly (and not just metaphorically) ecologized media theory, we can come to see the prehuman world was always already a medium for the transmission of “data.” Humans are not just now being transformed into information by digital media; like the universe, we were always already made of self-interpreting information. For Whitehead, a bit of information, a datum, is a “potential for feeling” (PR, 88), and every potential seeks satisfaction through actualization in an occasion of experience.

There is much that remains to be unpacked, but my time is short. I can only end by offering a plea to media theorists to join Whitehead’s protest against the bifurcation of nature. Contrary to McLuhan’s argument that languaging humans are unique among biological organisms in that we “[possess] an apparatus of transmission and transformation based on [our] power to store experience” (UM, 59), Whitehead’s organic cosmology invites us to recognize that the transmission and transformation of experience is the very basis of causal connection throughout the universe. Human language is just a further, loopier elaboration upon this cosmic capacity for communicative transaction. So to McLuhan I say, yes, there is a logos in the anthropos, there is a living God at the heart of our human perception and symbolism: a Spirit runneth through our alphabetic letters. But there is another logos: a logos of the cosmos. Thus the need for a cosmological media theory, not just an anthropological or theological one.

Part 2

Mark Hansen’s Feed Forward: On the Future of 21st Century Media (2015) is densely argued and full of important correctives to the anti- and post-human tendencies of many contemporary theorists. While he accepts the call for an anthrodecentric philosophy, Hansen does not seek to “eschew contact with humans” entirely, as though ontology could ever be completely purified of our existence (FF, 15). Rather, he aims to “resituate,” “intensify,” and even “enhance” human experience by bringing it back into contact with the “causally efficacious lineages that have produced it” (FF, 9, 15). As we become increasingly immersed in and saturated by new forms of digital media, Hansen fears that our species is at risk of being drowned by data: “…in a world linked together by…computational networks and increasingly populated with intelligent sensing technologies ranging from environmental sensors to the smart phones…we now carry with us as a matter of course, experience simply is not what it used to be: far more of what goes on in our daily lives is carried out by machines functioning at their own timescales, meaning outside of our direct perceptual grasp but in ways that do significantly affect our activity” (FF, 23). Hansen argues that Whitehead’s re-embedding of human perception in a cosmic vibratory continuum provides a radical corrective to bifurcated Cartesian-Kantian accounts of the relationship between physical processes and human consciousness, a corrective that may help us meet the challenges posed by 21st century digital media.

But Hansen’s reading of Whitehead, assisted by Judith Jones’ beautiful book Intensity (1998), positions itself as an “inversion” of Whitehead’s ontology, which Hansen argues is still residually anthropocentric. Much of what Hansen proposes leans heavily on Jones, even though she herself only claims to be offering a slight revision and reemphasization of concepts already present in Whitehead’s texts (I, x). Hansen summarizes the reasons for his “inversion” of Whitehead’s ontology:

“The canonical interpretation of Whitehead, which is largely justified by his own writings, holds that only concrescence is creative because it is only in concrescence that actualities wield their subjective power; once they ‘perish,’ undergo transition, and enter the settled world, actualities become merely objective (or superjectal), meaning that they become passive and inert and can only become creative again if they are taken up by future concrescences of new actual entities” (FF, 13).

This is, to put it generously, a misleading reading of the role of concrescence and transition in Whitehead’s process-relational ontology. In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead clearly characterizes objects as antecedent and given to newly concrescing occasions, but definitely “not…generated in that occasion.” The new occasion “does not create the objects which it receives.” Actual occasions do not “[arise] out of a passive situation which is a mere welter of many data.” “The exact contrary is the case,” Whitehead tells us, “[since] the initial situation includes a factor of activity which is the reason for the origin [of the new] occasion of experience” (AI, 179; emphasis mine). Objects are not inert, left to die into the past, but have an expressive capacity that itself serves as the primary phase of each new occasion’s entrance into the present. “The creative process is thus to be discerned in that transition by which one occasion, already actual, enters into the birth of another instance of experienced value” (RM, 99).

Hansen develops a non-prosthetic account of digital media in terms of what he calls “worldly sensibility.” Rather than attributing all agency and creativity to human consciousness, Hansen attributes a kind of sensitivity to data itself, a “datasense,” “[thereby positioning] data-gathering as an independent producer of sensibility (causal efficacy) in its own right” (FF, 149). Hansen claims his project involves a radicalization of Whitehead’s theory of perception, in that Whitehead’s account of concrescence still over-privileges the subject-pole, and thus by extension the humanness, of experience. Hansen instead emphasizes superjective transition over subjective concrescence, and similarly seeks to heighten the distinction between what he describes as the “empirical” and “speculative” aspects of Whitehead’s scheme. But Whitehead does not privilege concrescence over transition, or subjective prehension over superjective expression. His cosmological scheme is an attempt at harmonizing the two principles characterizing reality’s process, and his analogization of philosophic method with the flight of an airplane suggests he also sought a harmonization between speculative and empirical methods (PR, 5). Whitehead is not a phenomenologist; he is, like Schelling, an organic realist. Experience, in the most general or metaphysical terms, is an “oscillation between concrescence and transition of actual entities…or ‘societies’…ranging from the most ‘micro’-level phenomena, for example, quantum decoherence, to the most ‘macro’-level phenomena, for example, geological and cosmological processes” (FF, 14). Here, Whitehead and Hansen are in complete agreement.

Hansen claims he needs to to “radicalize” Whitehead because he sees the latter as still too centered on human consciousness. Whitehead betrays an anthropocentric residue, according to Hansen, when he defines causal efficacy merely in reference to the last tenth of a second of our human experience: “Whitehead’s…reductive rechristening of perception qua causal efficacy as ‘nonsensuous perception’…jettisons the crucial ‘vector character’ of perception, the way lineages of causal efficacy stretch far into the background of perception, and not just to its most immediate just-past” (FF, 20-21); “Whitehead effectively identifies causally efficacious perception with—and, I would argue, limits it to—the immediate past of sensory perception” (FF, 24). But Whitehead is merely using our human experience of causal efficacy as a specific example of the way superjective expressions transition into subjective prehensions, an example close to home: “In human experience, the most compelling example of non-sensuous perception is our knowledge of our own immediate past” (AoI, 178). But in the context of his metaphysics, the example is generalized as an account of causal relations as such; that is, our nonsensuous perception of our own immediate past is imaginatively extended so as to characterize the becoming of actual occasions at every scale. And it is not clear to me that causal efficacy of the sort Hansen refers to as “worldly sensibility” is completely beyond human perception, as he claims: we may have access to it in certain extreme states (psychedelics, NDEs, flow states, etc.). On the other hand, it could be that we become other-than-human during such extreme experiential episodes.

Early in his book, Hansen puts a definitional stake in the ground by referencing Husserl’s distinction between sensation and perception: “sensation [is] the nonintentional material on which perception, and intentionality, is erected” (note 3, p. 271). Hansen argues that Whitehead’s account of “nonsensuous perception” must be replaced with an account of “non-perceptual sensation” (p. 19), but I have a feeling this is a merely a definitional issue having to do with a difference in how Husserlian phenomenologists demarcate “sensation” vs. “perception.” Whitehead explicitly acknowledges the lack of consistency in the philosophical tradition’s various definitions of “perception”: Sensationalist doctrine suggests that perception is always through stimulation of the various sense-organs, but Whitehead argues that “there is a wider meaning” beyond this limited use of the term (AoI, 178). “Tacit identification of perception with sense-perception must be a fatal error barring the advance of systematic metaphysics” (AoI, 180). Below I excerpt two sections of my dissertation that unpack Whitehead’s account of the two pure modes of perception (which I also refer to as “aesthesis”), causal efficacy and presentational immediacy, which I believe makes clear there is no need for the “inversion” Hansen has attempted.

Analysis of prehensionality from my dissertation (pgs. 132-143): It is all too easy to define aesthesis according to the misplaced concreteness, so prevalent among modern philosophers of both the empiricist and rationalist schools, which has it that our primary form of sensory experience is of bare patches of qualia free of all relations. Whitehead called this mode of perception “presentational immediacy” or “sense-perception,” contrasting it with the more primordial mode of “causal efficacy” or “sense-reception.” The latter mode of perception, as its name suggests, directly links our experience to that of other actualities in our causal lineage. That human experience is linked to other actualities by such lineages contradicts the Kantian paradigm, for which perception is “mere appearance” and so causally epiphenomenal. From Whitehead’s perspective, “experience has been explained [by modern philosophers] in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first”: because presentational immediacy (i.e., derivative appearances in the subject) provides us with clear and distinct ideas that are accessible to conceptualization by the understanding, it has been given genetic priority, when in fact, causal efficacy (i.e., primordial feelings of objects) deserves this honor (PR, 162.). “The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy,” according to Whitehead, in that while Kant endeavors to construe experience as a process whereby “subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world,” Whitehead’s philosophy of organism describes experience as a process whereby the order of the objectively felt data pass into and provide intensity for the realization of a subject (PR, 88). In short, in Kant’s philosophy “the world emerges from the subject,” while “for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world” (PR, 88).

Rather than treating the objective world as an appearance constructed by subjective activity, as Kant and most other modern thinkers do, Whitehead reverses the direction of the process of perception such that each subject is described as arising from its feelings of other objectified subjects, or superjects (PR, 156). “In the place of the Hegelian [or Kantian] hierarchy of categories of thought,” writes Whitehead, “the philosophy of organism finds a hierarchy of feeling” (PR, 166).

On Whitehead’s reading, Kant privileges perception in the mode of “presentational immediacy” and ignores or at least marginalizes the deeper and more ontologically relevant perceptual mode of “causal efficacy.” “Presentational immediacy” displays reality in a way amenable to representational analysis, showing only the more or less clear and distinct surfaces of the world as they are presented to a reflective subject here and now. It is the end product of a complex process of unconscious prehensive unification accomplished by the society of actual occasions composing our organism and nervous system. “Causal efficacy” unfolds behind the scenes of the Cartesian theater of presentational immediacy, hidden in the unrepresentable depths of reality, carrying vague emotional vectors from the past into the present. Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is punctual (hence its relative clarity and distinctness), while perception in the mode of causal efficacy is transitional (hence its vagueness). Presentational immediacy allows for intentional consciousness, the subjective capacity for attentional directedness toward the eidos of objects. Causal efficacy is prehensional, the presubjective capacity to inherit the affective influences of objects. The former mode requires that a mind remain at a distance from things, sensing their essence rather than prehending their causal presence, while the latter implies the interpenetration of things, the transition from the superjective beings of the past into the subjective becoming of the present. Whitehead’s alchemical distillation of consciousness reveals an experiential structure even deeper than conceptuality, an ontologically primordial mode of experience shared in by every actuality in the cosmos. If anything is a priori, it is not the transcendental structures of human conceptuality as Kant argued, but the descendental processes of cosmic prehensionality.
(pgs. 156-159): Prehension should not be thought of as resulting in an actual occasion “having” experience of other occasions, as though an occasion were “the unchanging subject of change” (PR, 29). This would inevitably lead back to the classical bifurcated conception of substantial minds qualified by their private representations of supposedly public material objects. For the philosophy of organism, an actual occasion is not a pre-existent subject qualified by its representations of ready-made objects. Instead, actual occasions are re-imagined as dipolar “subject-superjects” (PR, 29). The “subject” phase of a concrescing occasion emerges from the prehensions of antecedent occasions which it unifies, while in the “superject” phase the occasion, having attained satisfaction as a unified drop of decisively patterned experience, perishes into “objective immortality,” which then initiates another round of prehension by a subsequently concrescing actual occasion. Whitehead expresses the perpetual perishing of subjective immediacy into objective immortality in terms of his “principle of relativity,” such that “it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’” (PR, 22). Actual occasions are thus describable in two ways: as “being” and as “becoming.” These ontological designations are not separable, since, according to Whitehead’s correlative “principle of process,” an occasion’s “being” arises from its “becoming”: “how an actual [occasion] becomes constitutes what that actual [occasion] is” (PR, 23). The description of an occasion according to its genetic “becoming” provides an account of the occasion’s own subjective aim (i.e., its final cause), while the description according to its extensive “being” provides an account of its superjective effect as prehended by other occasions beyond itself (i.e., as efficient cause). Creative process is said to manifest in two ways, as the concrescence of each individual entity, and as the transition from one occasion to the next. Concrescence describes “the real internal constitution of a particular existent,” while transition describes the perishing of a particular existent’s process, thereby “constituting that existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existences elicited by repetitions of process” (PR, 210). “The transition is real, and the achievement is real,” writes Whitehead. “The difficulty is for language to express one of them without explaining away the other” (Modes of Thought, 102).

End Notes

 Also quoted by Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media, 60).

Or perhaps this assumes too shallow an understanding of analogy, which is plenty cosmological (in the Whiteheadian aesthetic sense) already if, like McLuhan, we adopt the Thomist theory of analogical perception, wherein “the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos.…Analogy is not concept. It is community. It is resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the divine Logos. … [I]mmediate analogical awareness … begins in the senses and is derailed by concepts or ideas” (McLuhan to John W. Mole, 18 April 1969). In other words, perhaps analogical reasoning links us via perception/aesthesis to the cosmic logos.

E.g., consider how Postman criticisms of modern technology resemble the prophet Isaiah: “Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands” (Isaiah 2:8); or the prophet Jeremiah: “They burned incense to other gods and worshipped the works of their hands” (Jeremiah 1:16).

See my dissertation for more on the convergence of Whitehead and Schelling’s process philosophies: Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (2016). A media determinist might argue that in my attempt to cosmologize media theory, I am simply mistaking the meaning created by words for meaning discovered in the world. That alphabetic literacy serves as the media a priori for cosmological speculation I do not doubt. But Schelling’s philosophy of language reveals the way alphabetic consciousness, like the mythic consciousness which preceded it, is only an intensification of potencies already present in nature. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie allowed him to “cognize the physical in language,” and to “arrange…the history of…language…in analogy to the geological” (Schelling, Werke, vol. 8, 452-453). Do humans make sense of the Earth, or are humans the Earth making sense of itself? From Schelling’s point of view, the philosophy of nature is nature itself philosophizing, Autophusis philosophia. For more on the way human myth and language can be read as expressions of the Earth, see “Logos of a Living Earth: Toward a New Marriage of Science and Myth for Our Planetary Future” in World Futures, vol. 68 , Iss. 2, 2012. 

I had a wonderful conversation with Ilia Delio and Gabbi Sloan a few weeks ago, Part 1 of which was just released here. We discuss a number of topics, including the problem of evil. Part 2 continues the conversation here.

The podcast comes out of Dr. Delio’s work with the Center for Christogenesis. She has a great line up of prior episodes with guests including David Sloan Wilson and Bruce Damer.

I’ve pasted the transcript below with timestamps (this is autogenerated from YouTube and so has some errors, but it is readable!).

0:34 welcome back to the author series on guess what The Integral Stage. I’m Layman Pascal on behalf of myself, Bruce

0:41 Alderman, and the Unspeakable future of life on Earth. And today we’re taking a deep dive into a new work called

0:46 Crossing the Threshold. This is a philosophical text that highlights the role of imagination along with a new

0:53 appreciation of Nature and the ontology of feeling in an attempt to grow beyond the Kantian gap between subject and

0:59 object with the help of our pals Schelling and Whitehead, if that’s what sounds like fun to you–

1:04 and I will attempt to blend the ultra abstract and the quite silly in a deliberate attempt to make this fun–then

1:09 you’re in luck and I love you because today’s guest is someone I consider a legit philosopher and it’s also the guy

1:15 I’d most like to see fist fight Jeremy Johnson in the parking lot outside a Rowdy Cowboy Bar: it’s Matt Segall, hi Matt

1:22 Great to be with you Layman, I really appreciate that uh intro to the book it’s perfect and uh Jeremy and I have I

1:30 guess not had enough drinks yet to uh actually get in a fist fight but we’ll see what happens yeah I think I think

1:37 maybe you could take him. we’re similarly sized we’re in I think

1:42 we’re in the same weight class um but uh I haven’t seen him throw down yet so I can’t really prejudge the

1:48 situation. The first thing I want to do having read this book is to thank you and and

1:55 not for the nuanced way that you handle Nietzsche which is good and I think reflects some of the conversations you

2:01 and I have explored about the affinity between Nietzsche and Whiteheadian thought the thing I actually want to thank you

2:06 for is a bit more elusive than that uh it seemed to me reading this that it’s partly a a complex confession and

2:13 apologetic for Matt Seagall as shaman that the text takes a careful analysis and cross-reading of European

2:19 philosophers and uses that to justify the fact that you’re focused on etheric imagination inversions the subtle

2:27 perceptual possibilities of the senses embodiment within and as vegetal ecology

2:32 descending currents of spiritual energy and the ways in which god-like entities holds sway at a cosmic level over

2:39 Reality permeated by quasi-animistic communicative subjectivities and Powers

2:44 but for me that’s actually not just a Matt Seagall confession it’s also

2:49 something that’s needed by the broader emerging community of shamans both ancient and new the intellectual labor

2:56 that you’ve undertaken I think works to secure and encourage the validity of those modes of being from out of a

3:02 well-reasoned analysis of the of the dead white European philosophers and I think that’s that’s part of what we need

3:09 in order to legitimize this kind of Enterprise and these kinds of people in the Contemporary world so for that I

3:16 thank you. You’re very welcome and I thank you for for seeing me or and hearing me because

3:23 that’s exactly that’s exactly right I think um I wanted to look at my own lineage

3:30 and inheritance and uh obviously I’ve been influenced by um other thinkers and

3:38 practitioners who aren’t just dead white guys there’s a few living white guys and gals that I cite as well in this book

3:45 but it’s mostly dead white guys that I’m engaged in an exegesis and application

3:50 of but you know for me to make sense of my own

3:56 perspective on reality I think I really did need to go deep into that particular

4:01 lineage and show that there are resources here uh to do the sort of spiritual and embodied

4:09 transformative work that many people who are you know white guys like myself

4:15 might feel like they have to look elsewhere for and again there’s uh riches to be to be found in so many

4:23 different lineages and traditions but you know I’ve I’ve found it uh right at

4:29 home so thanks for for noticing that and and I hope it’s a fresh reading of these

4:34 thinkers there’s no doubt lots of ink has been spilled on Kant and Nietzsche and Schelling though most of it in German so

4:42 this is you know bringing him more into the English language uh and Whitehead is we’re still waiting I think we’re in the

4:48 midst of a Whitehead Renaissance and maybe much more ink or whatever we use to write in the rest of the 21st century

4:54 uh will be devoted to Whitehead we’ll see okay so there are these people who have

5:00 proposed a transcendental approach to reality and these people are pointing at a highly valuable

5:06 mode of transcendental freedom and transcendental knowledge anchored in a sense of a fundamental split between

5:11 mind and body between humanity and nature and you’re proposing in contrast

5:16 a descendental approach that situates philosophy within an organismic ecological and imaginal context so I

5:23 guess the obvious question is why do you hate trans people

5:29 well in a way um we all have to become trans

5:35 in the sense that we’re throwing off an artificial uh not just understanding

5:43 an artificial habitus like an artificial way of experiencing ourselves

5:51 that you could say is culturally constructed but the whole point of you know the methodology of this book is

5:57 that culture and nature are so thoroughly entangled with each other that you have to be crazy to think you

6:04 could Purify one side or the other of that dichotomy and so yeah the descendental is an

6:10 attempt to recover all that had been obscured repressed

6:17 and um and buried in the rationalistic but

6:22 even also the the modern empiricist approach um which though you know empiricists

6:28 would say oh we’re just really trying to pay attention to what the senses uh reveal to us the information the data

6:34 provided to the senses and so you could think that that’s embodied but it turns out that this construal of sense

6:41 experience as solely about uh sort of

6:47 um qualia delivered by the external world as a sort of just like uh

6:54 assemblage of disconnected parts uh it was kind of the way that Hume would talk

6:59 about sense impressions right um that this is a really um abstract way of construing our

7:08 perceptual uh embeddedness in in the surrounding world and so um empiricists

7:14 just as much as rationalists in the modern Western philosophical tradition and I mean we could go back to the

7:20 Ancients as well though um I don’t think they’re quite as disembodied as the modern Western

7:27 philosophers from Descartes through Hume and Kant and so on and so by by

7:33 inverting this transcendental uh maneuver uh where you know things sort

7:38 of culminate in Kant with his his transcendental approach to to philosophy that

7:45 there are there are certain cracks in the Kantian edifice that I try to sneak through here particularly his treatment

7:51 of um his thesis or or perception in his transcendental aesthetic but the

7:58 descendental approach is to say hey wait a minute perception this might sound obvious is

8:03 an embodied process and the body is not limited by the skin boundary

8:09 um if we’re to take a strictly scientific and even fully materialistic if you want

8:15 approach to that question what is the body it’s the entirety of the universe in

8:20 space and time right and so I would think

8:25 once you’ve understood that and we you know we can go more into why I would make the claim

8:31 that our our actual body is the entirety of cosmogenesis um

8:37 then perception you know the the limits of perception

8:42 becomes that question becomes totally reconfigured and

8:48 what etheric imagination means is really an effort that I fully admit is nascent

8:54 and remains to be developed and just I haven’t fully explored the potential of etheric imagination in this book

9:01 whatsoever I’m more just saying hey this is possible for us to perceive as Cosmic

9:08 beings right that our capacity to experience is not limited to just the

9:14 nervous system that we think ends at the tip of our fingers right it

9:19 it penetrates far deeper into space and time so that’s basically what I’m going

9:25 for with this idea of descendental philosophy yeah yeah we like it it’s much tidier than my

9:32 terms ciscendental philosophy

9:37 um before we dive a little bit more into Theory there are some I want to call them linguistic housekeeping things that

9:43 came up for me during the book uh partly because I listened to it read by the balaboka software how do you

9:51 pronounce the word which means of or pertaining to the work of Schelling

9:56 uh I would say Schellingian yeah okay okay how did it how did it say

10:03 that in your software it did it’s shilingian is what it came I mean that’s a little more elegant actually yeah I

10:10 kind of like Celine I might start using that okay okay second linguistic housekeeping

10:16 question why on Earth would someone write the word categoreal instead of categorical

10:23 really good question Whitehead doesn’t tell us why he calls it in Process and Reality his categoreal scheme but

10:31 um I think I suggest in this book somewhere that um he the difference between uh categorical

10:38 and categoreal I think has something to do with the way that Whitehead’s trying to uh re-embed mind and its categories

10:47 in real nature right um

10:52 categories are ideal, Whitehead’s categories are real right what does that

10:58 mean well one thing that’s different about how uh Whitehead discusses

11:03 um the role of of categories is that uh well first of all new ones are being

11:09 created all the time for Kant no they’re just this this fixed

11:14 table of categories um I mean there’s four big ones and then 12 minor ones if you unfold them each

11:21 dialectically uh and that’s it there’s just that table of categories once and

11:27 for all to interpret and determine all of our experience nothing about experience is ever going to lead us to

11:33 need to change or update these content categories. it’s very different for Whitehead he does have his table of

11:39 categories uh things like actual entities and eternal objects and so on but one of his

11:45 categories is um what he calls them contrasts and every occasion of experience is

11:52 achieving realizing new contrasts and so he says about this category of contrasts

11:58 um there are indefinitely many new categories that would be brought forth

12:04 as a result of contrasts achieved aesthetically in any given moment of

12:09 experience right and so categories are proliferating spilling out of this text Process and Reality

12:16 um even after you finished reading it he would Whitehead would say keep going you know and so categoreal I think is his

12:22 way of suggesting that uh yeah categories are part of and produced by

12:27 encounters with the real. Nice distinction thank you

12:35 um how would you how do you summarize what Kant is best known for and and

12:40 relative to that where do you think his thought was starting to go at the end of his life

12:47 well he lived uh long enough to go through at least three phases I’m not a

12:53 Kant scholar necessarily but I think I can detect three phases I mean his

12:58 earlier phase his pre-critical phase we could say he was very interested in

13:05 uh cosmology and um he wrote this great text uh Universal

13:11 Natural History and Theory of the Heavens in 1755 which is

13:17 um pretty close to a kind of evolutionary cosmology and he’s he’s

13:24 really in that text he has to do a lot of work to say to the theologians like look look I’m not

13:30 saying God’s not real I’m just saying maybe God’s method of creation is a little different than you’ve been

13:36 suggesting so far uh maybe God’s so perfect and Powerful that God created

13:43 um mechanistic rules for dead matter and

13:48 set it in motion and all by itself it gave rise to all of these

13:53 um spinning orbs and stars and creatures like us and so he goes through you know

13:59 drawing a lot on on Newton uh Newton’s understanding of universal gravitation to say hey all I need is

14:05 this law and maybe one or two others and I can give you the entirety of of what we observe

14:12 um and he even was one of the earliest to suggest this might seem obvious to us nowadays but in

14:18 seeing the Milky Way right this band of stars that runs across the sky sort of

14:24 crisscrossing with the ecliptic of you know or the Sun and the Moon and the planets uh move through

14:31 um this guy he suggested that this might be a

14:37 Galaxy he didn’t use the term Galaxy yet but there were astronomers had known about

14:42 um what they called uh nebulae at the time which were these little fuzzy disc shaped things in the sky and they’re

14:49 like what is that um and Kant was like where inside of one of those and there’s lots more of these

14:57 milky ways so he used Milky Way in the plural like to refer to the fact that the universe is pretty vast in other words

15:03 there are these huge star systems everywhere um and so you know he’s he was quite a

15:10 talented um insightful imaginative natural scientist and cosmologist right but then

15:18 he reads David Hume who had been freshly translated into

15:23 um into English or sorry into German um not long before and he says famously

15:30 that he was awakened from his dogmatic slumber and what he means by that is con

15:37 um is that Kant had been assuming this sort of naive realism that’s

15:43 baked into the Newtonian perspective on nature that we can sort of look out there and see

15:49 causation and necessary connection between the bodies that whose motion

15:54 we’re measuring right and David Hume the empiricists did a uh just

16:00 you know really precise analysis of his his sensory experience and said look when when that billiard ball hits the

16:06 other billiard ball I don’t see causation I don’t see necessity in the connection uh which unfolds as forces

16:15 transferred from one ball to the other all that I see is uh what he he called

16:20 constant conjunction and So based on my past experience he said yeah it seems like this ball will do that when it hits

16:27 that ball but uh that’s not a law I have no basis for the formation of laws which

16:32 would be necessary and Universal and Kant took this in and said yeah you know

16:38 what you’re right and he set to work developing what became called critical or transcendental philosophy and in

16:45 order to respond to Hume’s criticism which it might not be immediately apparent but for Kant this like

16:53 um this this Insight of Humes that causality is is not necessary connection

16:59 for Kant was potentially going to topple the entirety of Natural Science

17:05 and so Kant’s maneuver into this transcendental form of philosophy is basically to say

17:12 well Hume um you’ve taken space and time for granted as just sort of out there and

17:20 that you know you come to know about space and time through your experience but actually space and time are these a priori

17:26 structures they precede our experience and provide for the possibility of our

17:32 experience of any objects and similarly causality is not something we learn about through experience it’s it’s this

17:40 necessary structure uh that’s pre-installed in our mind

17:47 which provides for the very possibility of any experience at all if we didn’t have this category of causality

17:54 um we could make sense of our perceptions and so transcendental maneuver is basically to say that

18:02 the subject doesn’t conform to objects in its environment the objects have to conform to the subject’s way of sensing

18:09 and knowing those objects right so we have space and time as what he called

18:15 forms of our intuition and we have um the categories I spoke of earlier as

18:20 the the concepts that we that we use to determine to organize uh to

18:28 um to logically relate uh what comes to us through our sensory perceptions that

18:33 are pre-formed by space and time and so in this way

18:38 um Kant’s able to re-establish The Logical foundations

18:44 and the the metaphysical possibility of science but the problem is after this Kantian move

18:50 scientific knowledge of nature is merely apparent merely phenomenal right we know

18:58 nature as it appears to us in this lawful way that Newton and other mathematical physicists were describing

19:05 what nature is in itself Kant said we can’t know

19:11 he said that this realm of things in themselves or noumena as opposed to the phenomenal

19:18 realm uh we could mark with a mere X like an algebraic symbol as a

19:24 placeholder just to say we know that it exists but we know absolutely nothing about what it is

19:31 and the problem though for Kant was that um he contradicts himself on this point because he says that this X this this

19:40 noumenal realm of things in themselves beyond the phenomenal or apparent uh

19:45 domain that science can know things about he says it causes our sensory experience now

19:52 it might not be immediately obvious why this is a contradiction but the category of causality is only supposed to apply

19:57 to the phenomenal realm in Kant’s scheme but here he is saying uh that the numeral realm is causing

20:04 our sense experience and that’s uh one of those cracks in the Kantian edifice and I’m not the first to

20:10 notice it Kantians might say oh well that’s not really what he means and they try to

20:17 um you know make amends for this apparent contradiction but

20:22 the German idealists who followed in Kant’s wake, Fichte foremost among them really made a big deal about this this

20:29 contradiction and it broke open Kant’s critical philosophy into a far more speculative form of idealism that

20:36 followed in his wake and Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel um were all the

20:43 explorers of the domain which opened through this crack right and um I I

20:49 chose Schelling in particular to build on uh for specific reasons I mean they’re

20:55 all called German idealists but I would say that uh Fichte over emphasizes the role of the

21:01 ego and Hegel over emphasizes the role of abstract

21:08 Concepts and Schelling was known for his natural philosophy which uh

21:16 he carries forward this this Kantian evolutionary perspective but he does so

21:22 in a way that doesn’t evacuate nature of mind right but that sees nature as

21:29 to varying degrees ensouled and intelligent and that whatever evolution

21:36 is is the in a way the potentization of Nature and that the human form is the

21:43 flowering of this this process of unfolding potencies through different stages of

21:50 self-organization right and so um Schelling is a precursor to Whitehead in

21:55 the sense that he’s he’s going through the Kantian threshold

22:00 like taking this new transcendental method very seriously but then seeing how in Kant’s own philosophy certain

22:08 cracks open up and that we need to go further than Kant right we can’t go back before Kant

22:14 but we need to go further than Kant something I find uh

22:20 almost Charming about the way in which the attempt to say we don’t know

22:26 anything about the objective World actually forces us to presume a few

22:31 things about the objective world so that we’re never in a position where we don’t think we know something about it that’s

22:39 kind of a it gives me joy to think of that fact but um can’t whatever it is seems to me

22:47 was extremely empowering for people because he sort of asks us to undertake a difficult skill building task which is

22:55 to pause at this threshold of knowing and not assume that our obvious types of cognition and perception are necessarily

23:02 evidence of the nature of the world beyond our minds there’s an extraordinary epistemic humility and a

23:08 beautiful discipline to that which has been very productive for modern science

23:13 but it also seems like it represents or contributed to a grave doubt maybe even

23:18 a depression about the human capacity to see and touch the world

23:24 um that that’s maybe one of the generators of the meaning crisis so to speak but what I think I’m hearing lately what

23:30 I’m hearing in your book what I’m hearing in my conversations with John Vervaeke is what I would describe as a

23:36 new kind of optimism uh complex intellectual renewal of the confidence that there really is a reality and we

23:44 really can’t engage with it because we’re part of it and that our inner knowings are reflective of the structure

23:50 in which we are embedded rather than being some weird solipsistic anthropocentric Twilight Zone isolated

23:56 from the rest of reality do you do you sense that there’s a new confidence about knowing among Leading Edge

24:02 thinkers today absolutely um

24:08 you know there was a lot of um

24:13 in a sense is doing in a German way what the French were doing in a in a in a

24:19 French way with the political revolution which had occurred uh 1789

24:24 um Kant is liberating Philosophy from certain

24:31 um dogmatic forms of knowing which were too quick to project

24:37 our own habits and our own um uh culturally inherited modes of

24:44 understanding onto the real and say well this is just how it is because that’s how my dad told me it is and that’s how

24:49 his dad told him it was and Kant didn’t actually see himself as

24:55 um building a wall between um the human mind and reality he wasn’t

25:01 trying to say you we just can’t do metaphysics he was trying to inaugurate a new method of metaphysics that would

25:08 be scientific um and so

25:13 he didn’t intend to lead to this cynical form of postmodern uh

25:21 pessimism about what we can know and what’s real and the reduction of all knowledge claims to uh

25:28 the imposition of some power structure or what have you but that’s that’s that’s what the effect

25:34 has largely been and so I do think yeah of late that um

25:41 various thought movements are saying um no we can know the real but not in

25:48 the way that we thought one of the things that happens in the in

25:53 the the wake of Kant and Fichte who I who I brought up is

26:00 um that uh you know this dichotomy that’s in Kant between practical philosophy and theoretical philosophies

26:07 it’s important to understand theoretical knowledge would be more of this sort of

26:12 passive observation of what’s going on practical philosophy is more about what we do in the world

26:19 um our action and one of the ways to interpret what

26:24 Kant did and Fichte really makes this quite quite plain uh is the theoretical

26:30 philosophy becomes um somewhat derivative of practical philosophy and so in other words

26:38 um knowledge is a constructive act it’s a it’s something we do right it’s not

26:43 just something we have it’s something we bring about and so for Fichte for us to know nature

26:52 recognizing kant’s whole project to show how nature as it appears to us is a kind

26:57 of construction of our mind uh Fichte said well to get over this boundary between the realm of phenomena

27:04 how things appear to us and what’s real um we’re not going to do it just by contemplating appearances we’re going to

27:12 actually have to actively transform nature into mind

27:18 right and there’s some ways in which the techno-industrial

27:23 um remaking of the planet that has accelerated geologists refer to

27:30 it as the anthropocene and whatnot um this discourse is widespread today you could see it as the Fichtean approach

27:37 having kind of won out right the human being has gone about uh transforming the earth into

27:45 something artificial right and so it’s as if we’ve stamped our freedom onto the world and

27:51 and and and uh claimed ownership over it and and in so doing we’ve known it but

27:56 we’ve known it in a very instrumental way what what Schelling does and Schelling was

28:04 a student not only of Kant’s but of Fichte’s is he he points out the way and he says this

28:10 that all modern philosophy lacks a living ground because real nature is not

28:15 available to it right and it became modern philosophy became so obsessed

28:20 with the the freedom and the power of the Mind uh that it neglected the life of of

28:28 Nature and which is its own life ultimately and so mind became kind of ossified

28:36 um and what Schelling does is is inverts this

28:41 kantian uh picture not to deny our freedom not to deny the

28:47 power of the mind but to say instead of um what must the mind be such that

28:52 nature can appear to us in the way that it does which is the kantian and the Fichtean question

28:57 Schelling says well what must nature be such that mind could have emerged from

29:04 it such that our consciousness could have emerged from it in this evolutionary process

29:10 and this this reconfigures the whole uh philosophical Arena and lets us lets us

29:16 play a very different game whereby we recognize

29:22 um that you know nature is this uh living process and indeed for schelling a

29:28 Divine process and that rather than imagining um God as uh or the the ultimate being

29:37 as Kant did as a kind of idea of reason that we can’t know but

29:43 that we’re justified in believing in for different moral reasons um and theoretical reasons

29:49 um for schelling God rather than just an ideal becomes something real that’s actually present

29:57 in our experience all the time we just either um

30:02 well it’s so terrifying and and awesome in in the sense of terrifying that

30:08 our habit is to is to cover that perception of the Divine ground over

30:16 um but schelling says no no um we need to dive into that and recognize that um

30:23 you know God’s not an old man in the sky God is a living process that we are

30:31 um participants Within finite participants within though um were only finite because we’re caught

30:40 up in a process that from God’s perspective is eternal but for us is is not

30:45 um right for us um there appears to be time and space uh and and I don’t deny that time and

30:52 space are appearances in in my book um I rather suggest that

30:59 um time and space rather than being forms of intuition that human Minds come

31:04 pre-installed with, time and space are more like um the fabric of relationship that binds

31:11 All Creatures together right uh and so who am I in that process

31:19 I become a a Nexus of relations and while relatively speaking you know I

31:26 am me and you are you, we’re constantly passing into and out of one another through space and time

31:33 and so space and time become the tissue of our shared organismic

31:39 feeling as one one body and and in fact

31:45 ultimately that is God’s body and The evolutionary process Cosmic evolution is the Incarnation of of this of this deity

31:54 and um you know schelling allows us to think

31:59 thoughts like this but it’s it’s it’s more an invitation to feel

32:04 this as a reality right and so there’s a there’s a deep spiritual practice in here and I think

32:12 the optimistic uh the upside of all of this is that um human life has purpose

32:19 and meaning again uh we have a role to play in

32:24 furthering the Incarnation of God if you want and what that what that what that means I

32:33 think is um I would hope open to a plurality of of different

32:39 um approaches but for me you know it means continuing the philosophical quest to

32:47 to understand but to recognize that we will never have knowledge we will just continue to learn

32:54 um so you could say descendental philosophy rather than as Kant had it with

33:01transcendental philosophy where it was about the conditions of knowledge the the

33:07 categorical conditions that make knowledge possible, descendental philosophy is more about the conditions

33:13 of learning, what makes learning possible right and this is the the perceptual

33:18 dimension of descendental philosophy but it’s also the the aesthetic Dimension

33:23 and it’s the spiritual Dimension because in effect God is learning through us

33:30 and you know it it I think opens life up again to be an adventure that really

33:35 matters it has ultimate significance uh what we do what we think what we feel

33:41 because we’re contributing to the growth of this this organism that we ourselves within

33:48 and so yeah I hope it’s I hope people find it inspiring and A Renewed source of

33:54 purpose and meaning in a world in a culture that in so many ways tells us

33:59 that um all that matters are uh material sources of of pleasure

34:07 money sex power Etc um nothing wrong with those things but

34:13 uh there’s a there’s a larger event unfolding and and we’re participants in that

34:20 I’m hearing you say words like us and we a lot and when I was reading the first

34:26 half of the book especially which I mostly listen to while shoveling snow in the backyard

34:32 one of the thoughts that kept coming up for me is oh Matt’s trying to introduce

34:37 intersubjectivity where Kant’s just focused on subjectivity does that sound reasonable yes

34:43 mm-hmm yes now one other thing that came up for me is

34:50 so effective Schelling Hegel are standing before Kant and trying to figure out Pathways that move on from the event of

34:58 his thoughts where is Schopenhauer in all of this because he doesn’t seem to be mentioned

35:03 in the volume yeah he’s not you know I’ve I’ve read The World as

35:09 Will and Representation and when I read it I was myself I was

35:15 going around calling myself a Buddhist for all the wrong reasons

35:20 um and I think Schopenhauer is he was a troubled soul and that he

35:26 was um a pessimist and also he was brilliant and his challenge to

35:34 um all of these fancy idealist professors and he didn’t like any I mean he especially hated Hegel he was he was

35:41 more uh amenable to Kant and in fact you know he kind of takes Kant and reads uh

35:48 through Buddhism and gives a one of the earliest sort of

35:53 um Western inflections of Buddhism it’s not Buddhism it’s it’s a western inflection

36:00 just like Alan Watts is not really Buddhism not that there’s anything wrong I mean not really Buddhism Buddhism can

36:07 be whatever it wants to be wherever uh and whenever it wants to be it’s a living tradition right and

36:14 I can’t really answer why Schopenhauer is not in this text other than to say

36:19 um I went with Nietzsche instead uh and I think Nietzsche might be a

36:26 slightly more well way more optimistic thinker in the sense that you know for

36:31 Schopenhauer um all of reality is just this sort of

36:38 accumulation of of will or desire and there’s

36:45 nothing we can do except

36:50 you know release ourselves from the striving to know because there’s nothing to know and it it it’s it ends in a kind

36:57of nihilism and there I’m sure people who would defend Schopenhauer from from this but

37:03 uh I preferred to think with Nietzsche just because he is very clearly striving

37:09 for a post nihilist um relationship to the real

37:15 and that’s what I’m striving for too and so I didn’t mean to slight

37:20 Schopenhaur again I think he’s brilliant it just um he wasn’t uh a thinking partner that I

37:26 wanted to dance with in this particular round

37:34 Matt what is Imagination

37:41 well most people would say um just to start with the sort of common definition that it’s this

37:48 faculty or this power that that we have to um take sensory Impressions that we’ve

37:58 that we’ve gathered up from past experience and um rearrange them we can like take this

38:07 color of red that we really like and um you know sort of detach it from the

38:12 stop signs that usually display it to us and we can in our imagination paste it

38:19 onto a beautiful balloon uh and you know so imagination

38:25 can be can be thought of in this sort of really deflated way as as just uh

38:30 the capacity to um break down sense perceptions and

38:36 rearrange them into um Fantastical objects in our Mind’s Eye

38:42 that is a capacity that we have but I would I

38:48 would agree with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and and say that that’s not the full

38:53 extent of our imaginative capacity Coleridge would call what I’ve just described is fancy

39:01 and he would say that imagination as opposed to fancy is actually a creative

39:06 power it’s not just a merely reproductive power in other words it’s reproducing what we’ve

39:12 already experienced but more than that thinkers like Coleridge and here he’s cribbing

39:18 schelling actually literally um Coleridge would translate schelling from German

39:24 into English and uh pass it off as his own schelling later forgave Coleridge for

39:30 this just because he really appreciated the uh that he’d been understood by an English person

39:36 but Coleridge would say that at the in the depths of our imagination our

39:42 creative imagination we’re actually participating in a cosmic power and indeed a divine power so imagination in

39:49 this higher sense functions as a kind of portal through which we come into

39:55 contact with and participate in creation like uh Divine creation Cosmic creation

40:03 cosmogenesis uh if you want and so out of imagination

40:09 pours the future forms that that the world can and and and will take

40:16 and so it’s not merely reproductive right it’s productive it’s creative

40:23 um and it’s it’s the engine of evolution and so I I want to view imagination not

40:30 just as a faculty of the human mind uh but as the ground of existence in a

40:37 sense and we um partake of this ground of existence

40:43 this this Divine or Cosmic imagination to varying extents I think we can

40:48 cultivate uh our our connection uh to this to this ground of existence it’s

40:54 not like uh we all have um immediate access to its most profound

41:00 depths but there’s nothing to prevent us from going all the way to the creative

41:05 core by cultivating this imaginative capacity right and so

41:12 it is a uh it rather than thinking of it as fantasy that it disconnects us from

41:17 reality I think it’s only through imagination that we could contact the real

41:26 so later in this book you take a deep dive into these considerations of a like

41:33 the vegetal and organismic nature of reality and cognition and

41:39 what kept coming up for me personally was you know whether or not there’s a

41:45 like a normative Dimension to that and what do I mean like Heidegger famously

41:50 said we’re the beings who’s being is in question right we’re available to our own inquiry about our nature because we

41:55 have a certain freedom from what we see as the roles and constraints of other species

42:01 but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re at Liberty to do whatever we want like if our subjectivity has evolved within a

42:08 much older biospheric domain of subjectivity which in turn evolves within and mediates the potential

42:15 sensitive intelligence of the solar system then our inner life might have a function within those systems just as

42:22 our organs have a functions within our bodies the real agency might reside in

42:27 in the voluntary choice to fulfill a kind of ecological function rather than

42:32 to deviate from it and I’m curious how that lands with you do you suspect our species has a has like a unique role or

42:40 normative function within the ecosystem that we might or might not be successfully fulfilling

42:46 yeah yeah absolutely um I mean I I I’m not sure if this is part

42:53 of your question also but um you know that the human has a different role than animals and a

43:00 different role than plants and so why am I saying that that human imagination is

43:05 plant-like and what’s going on there

43:12 and then I’ll get back to the responsibility that I think human beings have to wake up to their ecological

43:17 function as it were so in the Timaeus which is Plato’s

43:24 cosmological dialogue uh he describes the human being as an upside down plant

43:30 um because just like plants most plants we we grow vertically whereas animals are horizontal right and so but we’re

43:37 inverted so um Our Roots uh our our heads are um in the sky

43:46 right and our branches our limbs grow down to the Earth and I think what Plato was suggesting

43:54 here is that um we are nourished by Divine ideas right

44:00 and we are um growing into the Earth and that we do

44:05 have a mission on the earth and so Plato is often read as a kind of Two World dualist who thought we would we should

44:11 escape from our bodies into the purity of of the Soul I think that’s a

44:17 misreading of of Plato uh all due respect to Nietzsche and many others who have read Plato in this way

44:23 I think this apparent dualism in Plato’s thought is more of a it serves a pedagogical

44:29 purpose um he’s trying to guide us Across the Threshold because until we’ve crossed

44:35 the threshold as it were we might think that we might have the wrong idea about what bodies are

44:40 thinking Plato wants to disconnect us from our body he wants to say uh that bodies

44:45 are incarnate ideas right so in any event we’re inverted

44:51 plants right okay but what is this what does this mean practically speaking uh for us as human beings and what I how I

44:58 would read this is it’s it’s an invitation to think about knowledge uh

45:04 differently than we have been prone to in the modern period which is as I said earlier kind

45:10 of instrumentalist approach to knowledge where it’s more about technologically

45:15 manipulating some we say we know something when we can reverse engineer it

45:20 um and build one right well I know we know what life is when we can build an organism

45:27 um and as opposed to the sort of instrumentalists understanding of of

45:33 knowledge Plato is is suggesting that we think of ourselves as um as plants and plants unlike animals

45:41 aren’t as good at um manipulating their environment uh they’re more they communicate uh with

45:48 their environment in in deep and Rich ways but if we were to plant the human being and

45:54 recognize that um yeah of course we’re mobile it makes us different from Plants but uh that

46:00 Mobility might be distracting us from this more rooted sense of of knowing whereby

46:07 we’re always already connected with that which we are attempting to know we don’t need to go get it over there

46:12 um we don’t need to manipulate something in order to turn it into knowledge um that in some sense

46:19 um we’re always already at the center of things everywhere we go

46:24 and this you know Whitehead’s understanding of concrescence and what an actual occasion of experience very much

46:29 speaks to this sense of um always being at the still center of a

46:35 universe which is nonetheless in constant process but then you know in terms of there’s more I could say about the whole

46:42 vegetable ontology that is at work in the book but I want to speak to the other part of

46:49 your question which is like the ecological function of the human I think

46:55 there’s a lot of there’s a tendency in contemporary environmental philosophy and

47:01 environmental ethics to really um rail against anthropocentrism

47:06 uh and rightly so I think there’s a certain kind of anthropocentrism that puts

47:12 a diminished sense of what the human being is at the center of everything as

47:17 though we’re the apex predator and so um all of the Earth’s resources and all of the Earth’s organisms should be

47:24 harvested for our pleasure that form of anthropocentrism does need

47:32 to be um challenged but I think there’s a a higher sense in which if that the human

47:39 being is is the consciousness of the Earth and that unless we

47:47 become responsible for the power that we have

47:53 and unless we live up to our potential as participants in Cosmic imagination

48:00 what makes the human unique I would say is that we can participate with full consciousness

48:08 because we have freely decided to whereas there’s no

48:15 freedom in the behavior of other organisms I’m not saying they’re not all

48:21 creative and wonderful uh and capable of novelty I think freedom is something

48:26 different um it’s in human beings that freedom and the capacity to love

48:33 become possible and unless we recognize this unique difference about the human being and

48:39 live up to this higher calling then we’ll continue to think of ourselves as just another animal

48:45 and if we’re just another animal then yeah we’re the apex predator this Earth belongs to us and we’re going to do whatever we want with it

48:51 but if if we’re able to become conscious of our power

48:57 and freely choose to be beings of love then

49:03 I think the Earth Community would would welcome our presence

49:11 and um this this is a you know a nuanced point

49:16 right because we’re de-centering a less developed understanding of what the human being is

49:22 absolutely but we’re re-centering our spiritual uh potential and saying that you know we

49:29 really do need to wake up and take responsibility for who and what we are the Earth actually wants and needs us to

49:36 do that and and stop with this sort of cynical like oh well everything would be

49:41 better if human beings just weren’t here because I don’t think that’s true

49:47 so yeah in an oversimplified way

49:54 if you if you take Kant and you add in schelling and relativity Theory and quantum mechanics then maybe get

50:01 something like Whitehead what does Deleuze bring in that isn’t

50:06 already in Whitehead so you know Whitehead is in so many ways

50:14 kind of a Victorian in his uh his the mood that comes through in

50:22 his writing whereas uh Deleuze is a bit of a Chaos Agent um

50:28 and I if Kant is the guardian of the threshold of

50:36 sort of representing modern philosophy Deleuze is the guardian of the threshold representing post-modern philosophy and

50:42 I think I’m really trying to not only go through kantian the kantian critical phase of

50:50 philosophy but also to go through the the post-modern phase of the development of philosophy and so it’s the same

50:57 reason I think with Nietzsche’s um at play when I think with Deleuze and

51:03 the benefit of Deleuze is that he himself inherited and digested both

51:10 schelling and Whitehead’s philosophies and I I treat him

51:17 um as a someone to think with because of just how damn creative he is and you know in

51:23 this text as someone who’s not a mathematician who’s not a physicist I’m

51:28 nonetheless trying to engage with um some of the the concepts at play in

51:36 um relativity quantum theory and the development of non-euclidean geometries

51:41 which allow us to gain a foothold in our scientific study of space and time and

51:47 whatnot and Deleuze has this wonderful notion that you know philosophy in some senses is a kind of science fiction

51:53 writing um and that you know Deleuze would engage with the history of mathematics and uh

52:00 with different scientific Concepts and um he had deep understanding of these

52:06 scientific Concepts but he’s trying to not and he’s not just using them as metaphors but he’s trying to get at the

52:13 um the metaphysical underbelly of these Concepts from physical science and I’m

52:21 trying to do something similar and so I couldn’t help um but um appropriate his methodology here right I

52:28 say in the beginning of the book that I’m engaged in a kind of Science Fiction and he also says that philosophy is a is

52:34 like a kind of detective novel which similarly you know in my attempt

52:40 to to follow the way that imagination has been treated and mistreated

52:46 um by modern philosophers uh it’s a I refer to it as a an attempt to

52:53 to to understand this murder mystery of imagicide uh why why did modern

53:00 philosophers feel the need to so violently restrain this this creative

53:06 power right and so um de loses is hip to all these things and so I couldn’t help

53:11 but um um emulate his method on the other hand

53:16 Deleuze is also um more prone to a kind of atheism or

53:23 pantheism uh I mean he’s he’s like Spinoza in that sense that

53:29 um you know even though Spinoza was clearly a pantheist he would often get called an atheist because

53:35 uh God and nature are the same thing right and I I try to think with and and

53:42 through but beyond Deleuze also because rather than an atheism or pantheism

53:48 um I really do try to articulate uh panentheism which is just a you know

53:53 higher Octave of the um the dialectical process here um but I I want to be able to without

54:01 embarrassment you know use the G word uh and and think about liturgy and ritual

54:06 uh and prayer and all these things that get packaged in in the suitcase of religion

54:13 and say hey this is all still relevant and to Deleuze or maybe more so Deleuzeans

54:19 nowadays might scoff at that whole project um so as much as I do draw upon him I

54:27 also try to do something a little bit differently than he might well speaking of Science Fiction

54:33 I know Roger Penrose has this really intriguing notion that like times definition in the physical Universe

54:39 ceases to apply under certain special entropy conditions at which point the universe can’t tell the beginning from

54:46 the end of time and it starts again with maybe some slight residual effects

54:51 on The Descendant universe and a bit like that you have this para

54:57 whiteheadian notion of different world-souls that might hold sway over different Cosmic epochs in which the

55:04 community of onological beings invents their common intelligence and common

55:10 divinized potential differently is that right

55:15 yes and yes so this is um actually a an amendment or a creative extension of

55:25 Whitehead’s idea of um what he calls Cosmic epochs

55:30 but in Whitehead’s philosophy so far as I can tell the way it’s written

55:35 different Cosmic epochs uh or sort of evolutionary phases of creation and

55:41 destruction where a totally new form of order displaces the old form of order so

55:48 it’s as if you’re in a different Universe um Whitehead would still say that God

55:53 the primordial nature of God has remains unchanged throughout this process of

55:59 different Cosmic epochs arising and and perishing and because I’m

56:07 in dialogue with you know like Deleuze and Nietzsche I wanted I needed to make some concessions somewhere about

56:14 Whitehead’s Theology and so I I play with this idea that okay maybe God does die

56:22 uh as each Cosmic Epoch or phase of cosmic order reaches its Climax and and

56:28 then begins to wither away God dies with it but um God is also reborn as this you know

56:36 Penrose refers to it as the um cyclic cosmology that there is this there are cycles of

56:42 death and rebirth and in a Dionysian way God’s going through this and is it many

56:48 gods or is it a lineage of Gods kind of God family is there kinship

56:54 some inheritance preserved as we move from one Cosmic Epoch to the next and I think

57:00 you know embedded within one of these Cosmic epochs such as we are there’s so

57:06 much Beauty and Order there seems to be something happening here and for all of that to just have

57:12 emerged from scratch at the Big Bang uh seems rather unlikely to me and so

57:20 I’m speculating in in this book that something like what Penrose is describing is going on

57:26 um Lee Smolin has a similar idea about black holes giving birth to new

57:32 universes when there’s a kind of evolutionary process whereby organizational

57:37 tricks that work in one Universe are preserved and advanced upon in the next universe and you know so I’m just trying

57:43 to expand a kind of evolutionary thinking to the cosmos as a whole

57:48 while retaining aspects of Whitehead’s process theology but just

57:53 um not allowing this primordial nature of God which is a key category in

58:00 whiteheads scheme to remain fixed and

58:07 Eternal as if disconnected from all of this Cosmic process that’s going on I want God to

58:13 die with the world but you know also to be reborn

58:18 but God going through the threshold of death I think is perfectly in line with various religious and Mythic Traditions

58:25 or Christianity obviously and so you know there’s a way in which even Nietzsche and his sense that God is dead

58:30 is just Nietzsche trying to really give more potency to this incarnational idea

58:37 yeah God died but um in some sense that that just means that

58:45 we God died into us and like now we are responsible for continuing this work of divine creation

58:51 right and so um yeah I don’t know I don’t know what cosmologists will think of this idea I

58:57 don’t know what theologians will think of this idea but I’ll probably upset everybody equally

59:03 I want to see my my least well-formulated question I’m not even

59:08 sure exactly what I’m trying to ask with this but I’m going to try to ask it anyway and see if anything happens

59:14 um there’s an apocryphal tale about Wittgenstein and that he asked the

59:19 scientist why people used to believe the sun went around the earth and the scientists said that’s the obvious

59:24 conclusion to draw because that’s how it looks and Wittgenstein said well how would it look if the Earth went around

59:30 the Sun so of course it would be the same we can’t just tell ourselves a story about

59:35 getting over naivete we have to interrogate our assumptions about what constitutes conventional knowledge

59:42 itself and this popped into my head reading the book because I began to wonder if the

59:49 etheric imagination vegetal thinking whether these things constitute a

59:54 reversal of how we normally see the world or whether they’re an articulation of how we normally see the world right

1:00:01 when is it valid to say descendental thinking is a shift Beyond something and when is it valid to say well that’s how

1:00:07 it looked all along regardless of what we were saying does that make any sense yeah it does

1:00:13 and I I think that’s not actually an apocryphal story that um that this is a conversation that one

1:00:19 of Wittenstein’s students Elizabeth Anscombe records and you know it’s it’s

1:00:26 a thought-provoking um response from and question from Wittgenstein and I think

1:00:33 what I’m trying to do in in this book is actually um

1:00:38 do justice to Common Sense like I’m not trying to affront common sense I’m not trying because

1:00:45 there’s so many ways in which the Kantian point of view and the whole idealist point of view is like

1:00:50 um saying everything you thought was real is is an appearance all right

1:00:56 um and and is a mirage and you need to adopt this very technical

1:01:02 form of um a critical reflection upon your experience to recognize that it’s a sham

1:01:08 and to begin the long arduous process to its really scientific way of of

1:01:14 experiencing and then understanding the world and you know it’s not that um there isn’t some importance to being

1:01:22 um attuned to the ways we can deceive ourselves but at the end of the day we don’t want to negate common sense

1:01:30 um we need to I mean Whitehead says the Philosopher’s job is to weld imagination

1:01:36 and Common Sense right and so there’s a speculative imagination that wants to go beyond

1:01:42 first appearances but we also need to at the end of the day return to our

1:01:47 everyday encounter with the world and and find it meaningful rather than denying that it is in

1:01:54 contact with uh with the ground of being of existence

1:02:00 and so yeah I think we want the world as it immediately appears to

1:02:07 us uh to contain within that appearance of profound meaning

1:02:14 right rather than it just being a veil uh that in some sense

1:02:19 you know the the elemental structure of our everyday experience while we uh we

1:02:25 we tend not to notice that Elemental structure because it’s um in a way it’s too obvious it’s it’s too close to our

1:02:33 eyes that we just see past it uh but there’s a there’s a profound meaning

1:02:41 just in the fact that up is up and down is down that this like that that we live

1:02:46 on the earth Beneath The Sky and to really take in

1:02:51 um it’s it’s a kind of Elemental phenomenology I draw on John Sallis

1:02:57 um in a short chapter in this text who has written some beautiful texts on the

1:03:02 phenomenology of our encounter with these what he calls elements the sky

1:03:07 the Earth The Horizon the sea the sort of natural powers that that

1:03:14 are present in every like air the things that are present in our everyday experience that we just don’t notice you

1:03:20 know Whitehead similarly says that it takes a rather unordinary mind to do

1:03:26 metaphysics because metaphysics is an analysis of the obvious right all the

1:03:31things that we take for granted and so rather than philosophy being this

1:03:36 uh esoteric pursuit of some hidden secret truths uh in so many ways it’s

1:03:42 really just about paying attention to what everybody already knows

1:03:49 I like this idea that the philosopher is trying to weld imagination with common sense I think you mentioned the book The

1:03:56 Whitehead also called the philosopher a Critic of cosmologies uh I sometimes call philosophers

1:04:02 difference workers who are like sex workers who specialize in determining whether a common distinction is unreal

1:04:08 or whether a seemingly singular concept conceals the need for an additional distinction uh Nietzsche kind of described the

1:04:15 philosopher as a commander of World Views who discovers new values by making

1:04:21 new arrangements and new orderings of the virtues um what’s the matter what’s a

1:04:27 philosopher man I mean I can’t do better than uh than

1:04:33 Plato here and even having created the term lover of wisdom

1:04:38 um because you know as I was saying earlier about this shift from philosophy being about knowledge to being about

1:04:44 learning I think it’s it’s contained in this idea that despite hegel’s claim you

1:04:50 know to have finally become wise and no longer just be loving uh wisdom he is

1:04:55 wise think that’s you know he’s claiming to be a sage um I wouldn’t I wouldn’t claim that I

1:05:02 would claim to be in love with wisdom and to be in love with wisdom is

1:05:08 um to be

1:05:13 engrossed in a in a process of learning uh and every

1:05:19 every conversation with other lovers of wisdom uh is an opportunity to deepen

1:05:25 learning and so I think yeah for me to be a philosopher is to never be satisfied

1:05:33 um with the knowledge I might think I I’ve collected in my in my backpack like

1:05:39 um it’s it’s rather to be perpetually open to surprise and to

1:05:46 uh the the novelty that comes through

1:05:52 um relationship uh the novelty that that comes through

1:05:57 being always open uh to to deep dialogue across difference and to recognize I

1:06:03 mean it’s kind of a faith I guess that I have that um differences can always be reconciled but

1:06:10 never once and for all there will always be new differences which arise that need to be reconciled but that they can be

1:06:17 reconciled I think as long as we are in love with wisdom

1:06:23 that reconciliation can be achieved

1:06:29 uh and it’s a philosophical Faith right that would um that I that I hold that leads me to

1:06:35 believe that but I definitely see the the the philosopher is not a Lone Ranger

1:06:41 um not only do we do I need my fellow philosophers other

1:06:47 human beings but um there’s something to be learned from every creature uh something to be

1:06:54 learned from plants there’s something to be learned from a specific species of plant I don’t want to just use a sort of

1:07:00 generic category here um really there’s no such thing as plants and animals there’s like specific

1:07:07 individual beings that we categorize in these ways right it’s easier to come up

1:07:13 with a generic category for plants and animals and even the the idea

1:07:19 of a species is still an abstract categorization of individuals each one

1:07:24 unique but many thinkers from Teilhard de Chardin to Rudolf Steiner have said um

1:07:31 the human being isn’t just another species we’re like another kingdom of life right and so I think the philosophical

1:07:38 project is a uniquely human undertaking even if we human beings have much to learn from other

1:07:44 creatures there’s a sense in which um

1:07:49 there will always be a multitude of cosmologies and that I don’t expect to

1:07:55 have the final word on the right cosmology right because each of us is a walking cosmos A microcosm and it’s it’s

1:08:03 through dialogue that we come to come to overlap to some degree or another and

1:08:09 arrive at some common sense of or for what’s what’s going on here uh

1:08:15 but yeah it’s an endless process so that’s why I’m a process philosopher I guess

1:08:21 the possibility of deep differences amongst plants puts me in mind of plant

1:08:28 medicine and it leads me to a question that’s a bit like uh okay we’ve got this uh

1:08:37 dialogue network of philosophers we have these love driven or seduced followers

1:08:42 of wisdom trying to reconcile positions and elicit the forms

1:08:48 of knowing which have the force of being but it seems like most people are not capable of or interested in doing real

1:08:56 mind work in that sense what do you think the role of other other Technologies are

1:09:03 neurochemistry psychedelics participatory ritual in bringing many

1:09:08 people into the embodied relational contemplation of the real um

1:09:14 well I mean I think immediately if the um platonic Trinity the the true the good

1:09:19 and the Beautiful and those who do mind work who who fashion Concepts you know

1:09:26 we’re really oriented towards the truth you could say but the good and the Beautiful uh are

1:09:32 co-terminous with the absolute and so artists who

1:09:39 you know work with material uh to bring to bring new shapes

1:09:45 and sounds um textures into the world uh are are

1:09:50 engaging in Cosmic imagination just as much if if not in some likes more so

1:09:55 than those of us who work with with Concepts um and you know those who are oriented

1:10:01 toward compassionate work in in service uh of of sentient beings who suffer

1:10:10 um you know are aligning with the good and in this way also advancing the work

1:10:15 of cosmic imagination and so you know improper integral spirit I

1:10:22 think you know those of us who do have more facility or who are just more called to one or another

1:10:27 aspect of this Trinity really do we do need each other and we do need to

1:10:34 attempt to balance ourselves out you know and so

1:10:40 I can speak personally that uh I’m still seeking that balance

1:10:47 um I really do need to cultivate more

1:10:53 artisanal skills as a as a craft a Craftsman right

1:11:00 and I I kind of long for this because it’s a underdeveloped part of myself right and so you know for those for whom

1:11:07 um the conceptual realm and is not as as developed and for whom

1:11:13 um books of philosophy or the last thing that they’d ever want to to read whether

1:11:18 they just find it boring or um can’t make sense of it you know I would say

1:11:24 um you do have the capacity to think uh and

1:11:29 um you just need to let your eyes adjust to what might first appear to be darkness

1:11:35 and you’ll begin to see uh the Contours of these Concepts so you know we just we need to uh

1:11:44 recognize that inevitably there are differences in capacities across these domains of

1:11:49 human expression and uh and try to you know grow into those

1:11:55 areas where we’re underdeveloped right and so I certainly don’t think of the work of the philosopher uh as

1:12:06 as most important in any sense philosophers need art to provoke them the philosophers need uh virtuous people

1:12:15 to emulate um but you know at the end of the day I

1:12:21 hope that being a philosopher is is not um you know absent the pursuit of

1:12:27 excellence in these other domains as well so other than simply being done what are

1:12:35 you proudest about in regards to this book I’m proudest of um my complete lack of

1:12:45 respect for disciplinary boundaries it’s it’s a wild text that transgresses

1:12:53 the science and religion dichotomy that transgresses methodologies

1:13:02 um you know I try to be rigorous in my thinking but I also try to say hey you’re not going to understand this unless you’re willing to feel what I’m

1:13:10 talking about and most philosophical texts just stick

1:13:15 to conceptual argumentation and I say right at the beginning of the book this is not a logical argument I’m not going

1:13:21 to prove anything to you this is an experiment and

1:13:27 I think we need more philosophy like that and I hope that um this this can

1:13:33 serve as an example uh to be improved upon um but uh but yeah I think I’m committed

1:13:41 to transdisciplinary work and I’m proud of the way in which this book

1:13:47 cannot be at least easily um categorized

1:13:53 yeah there’s something in it for everybody and something in it that will I I I I don’t expect that any readers

1:14:00 even those who love a lot of it will agree with everything I think I tried to be

1:14:05 equally uh provocative both to academic

1:14:11 philosophers to scientists to yeah cult practitioners so

1:14:16 yeah is there uh is there next text on the

1:14:22 horizon is there a further reaches of the etheric imagination or what are you

1:14:28 looking forward to doing creatively it’s it’s hard to say

1:14:34 um what’s next because you know I have I can tell you about my

1:14:39 plans but knowing how things have unfolded in the past um what I plan to write is often not

1:14:45 when you end up writing um but you know I’ve I’ve been um deepening

1:14:51 into the work of Rudolf Steiner and I do

1:14:57 include some of his ideas in this text but I’m really interested in trying to

1:15:03 um write a book about something like the the place of the human being in Cosmic

1:15:11 evolution and I think the title I’m playing with is the cosmological context of human

1:15:18 evolution and to try to um integrate the very esoteric and often

1:15:26 um mind-blowing crazy sounding ideas that Steiner comes

1:15:32 up with with Whitehead who is more grounded in

1:15:38 um Natural Science not that Steiner’s not grounded in in the Sciences but

1:15:43 um I think Whitehead’s cosmology provides some helpful ways of elucidating

1:15:49 what in Steiner remains somewhat esoteric and obscure and so I’m I’m hoping to be

1:15:55 able to unpack some of the connections I see between their thoughts and really bring two very different

1:16:01 communities together um anthroposophists and uh academic

1:16:07 philosophers um though you know those interested in Whitehead among the academic philosophers are a strange enough breed

1:16:13 that they might be open to this sort of uh attempted synthesis so that’s what I’m planning to move towards in terms of

1:16:20 a next book but uh don’t hold me to it we’ll see what happens great this has been uh

1:16:27 lovely and fun and um intellectually challenging thanks very

1:16:33 much for having this conversation with us Matt my pleasure Layman you’re very good at what you do and it’s always

1:16:41 wonderful to be in dialogue with you so thank you

As a teacher, I do my best to actively encourage deep and sustained dialogue about the racism, implicit or explicit, that shows up in the statements or actions of any figure studied with my students. Many modern European and American thinkers, including all the German idealists, Darwin, Nietzsche, Emerson, Whitehead, Jung, Teilhard, Heidegger, etc., have made statements that are racist. 

There are a few things that can be said about this. In an educational context, it is essential that we distinguish the teaching of some aspects of a historical figure’s philosophy from an endorsement of their racist views. We can study the ideas of, e.g., Heidegger, while simultaneously condemning Nazism. Indeed, one reason to closely study such thinkers is to better understand why those who show such wisdom in some areas nonetheless succumb to such detestable political and social views. Sometimes the links between a philosophy and racist views are clearer (e.g., again, Heidegger). But in the case of Rudolf Steiner, I personally believe there is much of tremendous value, not the least of which being that his core insights into the nature of individual freedom and human destiny stand flatly opposed to racism.  

Nonetheless, Steiner has made statements that in my opinion are impossible to describe as anything other than racist. As far as I am concerned, Steiner’s comments (GA 174b) about the significance of skin color with regard to receiving the Christ impulse into human evolution are false and must be rejected. That ideas of racial hierarchy were pervasive among European scientists and intellectuals in the 19th and early 20th centuries is no excuse. One way of addressing this problem is to juxtapose his racist statements to his many other resolutely anti-racist (and anti-sexist) views. For example, from a lecture during WW1:

“… anyone who speaks of the ideals of race and nation…today is speaking of impulses which are part of the decline of humanity. If anyone now considers them to be progressive ideals to present to humanity, they speak untruth. Nothing is more designed to take humanity into its decline than the propagation of ideals of race, nationhood and blood.” 

Oct 26, 1917; GA 177

While no one is under any obligation to take Steiner’s cosmology seriously, it is important to consider how dramatically these issues are reconfigured depending upon whether one takes an edic or emic approach. From an emic perspective, Steiner’s esoteric understanding of reincarnation is such that each of us has in prior lives belonged to various ethnicities and genders. Further, anthroposophy teaches that, while we embody the cultural stream of our birth during our waking hours, during sleep we mix and mingle with all others. The notions of a fixed racial hierarchy or of race as somehow essential to an individual’s identity are incompatible with Steiner’s central ideas of reincarnation and the four-fold human being (e.g., while physical and etheric bodies carry and express generic characteristics, astral body and ego do not). Humanity is rather a plurality-in-unity. Here’s another excerpt from a lecture delivered a few years after WW1: 

“It is just when we penetrate into the inner nature and essence of the Peoples of the Earth that we find the differences of their individual natures. And then we realize that the all-embracing sphere of the ‘human’ is not expressed in its entirety through any individual person, or through the members of any one race, but only through the whole of humankind. If anyone would understand what they are in their whole being, let them study the characteristics of the different peoples of the Earth. Let them assimilate the qualities which they themselves cannot possess by nature, for only then will they become fully human. Full and complete humanity is a possibility for everyone. Everyone should pay heed to what lives in their own inner being. The revelation vouchsafed to other peoples is not theirs and they must find it in others. In our heart we feel and know that this is necessary. If we discover what is characteristically great in other peoples and allow this to penetrate deeply into our own being, we will realize that the purpose of our existence cannot be fulfilled without these other qualities, because they are also part of our own inner striving. The possibility of full humanity lies in every individual, but it must be brought to fulfilment by understanding the special characteristics of the different peoples spread over the Earth.” 

March 1920; GA 335

To reiterate, whether it’s Steiner or other figures like Emerson (who Cornel West referred to as “a typical nineteenth-century ‘mild racist,'” but who nonetheless stood with abolitionists against slavery and spoke out regularly regarding the US government’s treatment of Native Americans) or Whitehead (who ignorantly referred to “the discovery of empty continents” in a treatment of European history while at the same time arguing for the essential values of diversity and freedom for all peoples), I believe we can view their racist statements as not only exceptions to but in contradiction with the core thrust of their thinking and social activities. As always, it is important not to treat anyone, no matter how impressive, as an infallible guru. But nor should we rush to condemn a thinker’s entire philosophical contribution without first making a clear case that racism is so interwoven with the whole that nothing can be salvaged. As I say in the video discussion below, those who find value in Steiner’s work have a responsibility to separate the diamonds from the coal.

I realize that there’s a lot more that could be said, and that others are likely to fill in the gaps. I welcome good faith dialogue about these contentious issues. I also want to acknowledge that discussing racism on the level of ideas, no matter how powerful or transformative we might believe those ideas to be, risks overlooking the ways racism pervades—often violently—the everyday lives of so many people in the US and around the world. There is much work to be done on that front. But I take my task in the role of university professor to be to work toward an understanding of how ideas have shaped consciousness in the past and to retrieve or create those ideas that have the potential to help us develop more virtuous and clear-sighted human individuals and communities today and into the future.

All of this is by way of preface to the following recording of a discussion with a reading group called Urphänomen. After studying Steiner’s Riddles of Philosophy & Philosophy of Freedom together, we turned our attention to two lectures delivered to German anthroposophists on Feb 13 & 14, 1915 in Stuttgart (GA 174b). The issues addressed are controversial and deserve careful consideration. Much has already been written from diverse perspectives on the topic of race in Steiner’s work. We have decided to make our conversation public with the intention of modeling a new kind of dialogue among anthroposophists as well as with the broader public. Our interpretations of these and other lectures by Steiner may differ, but we all believe that the future of humanity depends in large part on how we find our way through these problems. This is just a beginning.

After this discussion a few days ago with our Urphänomen group, Ashton and I discussed some further thoughts on a walk. Listen:

Our Urphänomen reading group is back in action, this time reading Steiner’s lecture cycle titled Interdisciplinary Astronomy (1921, GA 323). Frederick Amrine recently published a wonderful new translation. Earlier this week I summarized lecture 5 (video above). Below is a rough transcript of my reflections:

The key issue here for Steiner is that we need to let go of this desire to find a better model as though the goal would just be to replace the Copernican model with a more mathematically or scientifically adequate mechanistic picture of the cosmos. He is just making sure that we understand at this point that we’re never going to be able to fit the heavens into our head. In other words, we’re never going to be able to intellectually figure out in a mathematical way how to compute the motions of the heavens because inevitably we run into irrational numbers. Instead of a new model, he is trying to coax us into a different feeling for the cosmos, a different way of relating to the phenomena that would not simply be through our sense organs and our ideation or intellect. He then in this chapter goes into his threefold picture of the human being. His basic idea here is that the threefold human being and the various organ systems that establish our humanness are internalizations or in some kind of rhythmic participation with the broader cosmos. Then if we want to understand the cosmos in its totality concretely rather than just making pictures of it in our head, we need to understand the way in which our full human composition – physical, etheric, astral and spiritual – and the way that our various organ systems are in some ways in correspondence with aspects of the universe. Steiner talks about the nervous system and the senses, the rhythmic system – the heart, the lungs – and the metabolic system and the limbs, and the ways in which these different systems relate us to the cosmos. He describes this inward movement related to the nerves and senses, and then he describes a kind of outward movement related to metabolism and the limbs.

I’ll put a body here without a head, and this is the head (all eye), and then in between is the rhythmic system, which is sort of mediating between the inward and outward movements. With the head and senses we get the cosmos streaming into us, and then we go to work on this with our ideas, with our thinking, whereas in our metabolic system and limbs, he says there’s a kind of analogy between the role that ideas play in our thinking and sensory life and the role that fertilization plays in the metabolic system. Steiner says that it’s much easier for us to bring consciousness to the relationship between our breathing, our blood flow and our thinking and sensing. So it’s much easier to illuminate this relationship with our consciousness. For instance, we can easily control our own breathing, and with practice learn to slow our heartbeat. But when we try to turn our attention to the metabolism, things get hazy, as you know Steiner often says we sleep in our will. So it’s much, much more difficult for us to understand or control what’s going on at the level of metabolism and the functions of fertilization which tie us back into the cosmos. Our ideation pulls us deeper into ourselves whereas the sexual reproductive process pulls us back into the cosmos. Steiner says there’s a kind of chaos that we discover at either extreme. So when we take in the motions of the heavenly bodies through our senses, there’s something about the beauty of that scene that leads us to believe there must be some order at work there. But then when we go to work with our thinking trying to calculate a model that might explain that order, we end up with these irrational numbers and so arrive at a kind of chaos. Similarly, the inverse of this occurs when we look at the embryological process of fertilization – there’s a sense in which we move from a chaotic state, an unformed state into something that’s more ordered and more amenable to a kind of geometrical, even mechanical study. So the ovum itself, as it begins to divide after being fertilized into the human form, is something that seems to come out of chaos into order, whereas when we look at the heavens, there seems to be an order displayed, but as we reflect on it more and more, it leads us to chaos. Somehow we need to find and cultivate an organ of perception that would be something like what the ancient Indians developed through their yogic breathing techniques, which Steiner associates with attempts to balance the rhythms of human perception with the rhythms going on in the cosmos, and so to develop a sense of spiritual perception of the cosmos as a whole. But he says we’ve outgrown this particular approach; we can’t do what these ancient Indian practitioners did with their breathing techniques. We need to cultivate a new kind of organ of perception. I thought of a neat connection here between Steiner’s claim that basically astronomy is deficient in reality whereas embryology is deficient in concepts. There’s a way in which our sense perception and intellectual reflection upon sense perception remains too abstract and removed from the real, whereas our metabolic and will life is so immersed in the real that we don’t have adequate concepts for it. There is an interesting correlation here with Whitehead’s theory of perception. One of Whitehead’s important innovations in his study of the history of philosophy, something he is very critical of and something he introduces to try to bring philosophy back to its senses, as it were, is he distinguishes between two modes of perception. One which he calls “presentational immediacy” which would be akin to what Steiner talks about just in terms of sense perception. Empiricist philosophers would describe our sense perception as giving us primarily patches of color that then the mind goes to work associating. Ideas for the empiricists would just be faded impressions, but even the rationalist philosophers still construed sensory perception in this way – that as human beings our most immediate, primordial means of accessing the external world is just through the five senses. That’s the basic idea that all modern philosophers, rationalists or empiricists, would accept even if the rationalists and empiricists have some differences of opinion about the role that thinking might play in ordering those sensory perceptions. What Whitehead introduces is this other form of perception which he calls, instead of sense perception, “bodily reception” or he also calls it “perception in the mode of causal efficacy.” It is that part of our experience which we barely notice because we’re so focused on our sensory experiences. We barely notice the fact that we have this deeper visceral experience which he identifies with causality or causal efficacy. It’s this reality principle that puts us in touch with the rhythms of the cosmos around us, but because these rhythms are generally much slower in their changing, in the degree to which they change in comparison to, say, what we see with our eyes – the visual field is constantly changing – so it captures our attention, whereas these deeper rhythms, which Whitehead is not as explicit about but Steiner really describes these deeper rhythms quite concretely, like the lunar rhythm for example or the day-night cycle, our experience is obviously deeply affected by the shift in light during the course of a 24 hour cycle, and these deeper rhythms of feeling are part of what Whitehead calls causal efficacy. It is part of what modern philosophy and science have totally ignored in its study of the universe and instead focused only on sense experience and developing instruments which extend that sense experience and then spinning all sorts of abstract models meant to explain that sensory experience. It’s as if modern science and philosophy have been operating in an attempt to understand the universe as if the human being were just a head with no body. I think what Steiner is inviting us to discover is very similar to what Whitehead was attempting to do in bringing our attention back to bodily perception of these cosmic rhythms. If we want to understand the universe as a whole, we need to develop a new kind of science which would be attentive to these subtler rhythms not discoverable through our outward facing senses. Steiner sees an intimate relationship between the human being and the cosmos. They are related topologically like the inside and outside of a glove. To fully grasp that interplay requires a new kind of imaginative perception that can perceive the correspondences between our organ systems and cosmic rhythms. Steiner does seem to be influenced by Hegel’s phenomenological method, in that his metaphysics is not an attempt to explain reality independently of the human explainer. For Steiner, metaphysics is participatory – there’s a different metaphysics for each cultural epoch and stage of evolution. It’s not a fixed, final truth, but something open and evolving. This participatory approach to truth and metaphysics aligns with Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of “hyperphysics” and the importance of integrating the human being and human knowledge into our understanding of the cosmos. It requires flexibility rather than fixation on a final answer.

Below is a draft of my chapter to be published as part of an anthology coming out of the Teilhard and Whitehead conference hosted by the Center for Christogenesis at Villanova University a few weeks ago.

I gave this presentation at my graduate program’s retreat earlier this week.

This was a really fun conversation with Formscapes (check out his content on YouTube).

The dialogue begins with Whitehead’s ideas on hybrid prehension and how they might relate to Steiner’s cultivation of higher organs of spiritual perception. Whitehead appears to have been open to esoteric ideas, based on some evidence that he tried contacting his deceased son through mediums via the Society for Psychical Research. Whitehead’s metaphysics seems compatible with the exploration of realms beyond normal perception.

Steiner went further in articulating a layered ontology of etheric, astral, and spiritual planes. His spiritual science aimed to develop new faculties like imagination, inspiration, and intuition to perceive these realms directly, not just conceptually. Language currently limits this, since we can only describe spiritual worlds in physical terms until new percepts give rise to new concepts.

The conversation then turns to cultural histories and their shaping of identity. Different folk souls respond uniquely to historical inflection points. The French and American Revolutions expressed different inflections of “freedom” — the French more communal, the American more individualistic and capitalistic. But both stem from Christianity’s secularizing influence in modernity.

We critiqued reactionaries who romanticize premodern eras, noting you can’t put the modern freedom genie back in the bottle. The challenge is reconciling individual autonomy and social cohesion. America exemplifies excessive individualism, contributing to civilizational clashes. Beyond abstract liberalism, we need a concrete universal sense of shared humanity.

The discussion explores how science and the metaphysics of money shape political possibilities. With cracks forming in the standard cosmological model, our self-understanding may shift in healthier directions. Rethinking money creation could also spur new social arrangements, like Steiner’s ideas about diversified currencies and social threefolding. Corporations rightly form human associations, but need changed values beyond profit alone, serving human flourishing holistically.

We both concurred that secularization remains a profoundly Christian process. There is no neat boundary between religious, political, economic, and scientific spheres. To be fully human means participating in all domains spiritually, culturally and politically.

Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness are invoked to analyze patterns of cultural regression and inversion. Hegel’s brilliant sense of dialectical movement through contradiction allowing new forms of consciousness to emerge via mutual recognition is relevant, but we can’t passively rely on the dialectical process. Conscious human freedom must now initiate change.

In conclusion, the dawn of integral consciousness and the time freedom it promises will require East and West to meet in mutual transformation. This could happen violently or consciously. But one way or another, a new integration of human potential is imminent.

Our conversation weaved together many philosophers and spiritual thinkers to paint a picture of humanity’s crossroads. Outdated modes of thought shake under science and technology’s own revelations. At the edge of history, both darkness and light call to the human spirit. The choice ahead hinges on realizing integral consciousness. This means wedding social harmony to individual freedom. Philosophy and spiritual practice can guide this journey beyond abstractions into wisdom and compassionate action.

Roman is a songwriter based out of Los Angeles with credits for K-Pop band BTS and legacy artists like Elton John and Stevie Wonder. The first 15 minutes of this didn’t record because of a technical glitch, but we felt the rest was worth sharing. We explore questions like: Where does spirituality fit into (post)modern life? What draws so many people to determinism. What kind of freedom might still be possible? Is suffering avoidable?

We discuss the complex interplay between oneness and human agency in the context of contemporary Western society. Roman asked me to reflect on the idea of perennialism and the potential dangers for contemporary individuals of dissolving into Oneness. In the past, people could renounce society to achieve spiritual release, but today’s world calls for more involvement.

The concept of a Cosmic will is explored, suggesting that true freedom comes from identifying oneself with this Cosmic will. This doesn’t negate individual free will; rather, it’s about understanding our interconnectedness and how we all contribute uniquely to the expression of this Cosmic will.

We address the dangers of deterministic narratives and the equally damaging impact of pushing for extreme control over life. We can take a balanced approach, recognizing our role as co-creators in the world while being aware of the larger forces at play. 

I suggest taking a process-relational view, where the history of the universe is seen as an expression of creativity, with decisions made by atoms, stars, galaxies, and other entities. This view posits that every decision actualizes one possibility while leaving infinite others unactualized, highlighting the contingency and unpredictability in both cosmological and biological evolution. This implies that the future is open-ended.

I suggest that our human interior experiences of thinking, feeling, and willing amplify something latent throughout the cosmos. This implies that what we cultivate within ourselves is not unique to us but is a broader cosmic process.

I introduce some key themes from Rudolf Steiner’s work, particularly from his book Philosophy of Freedom. Steiner distinguishes between sense-perception of the external world, self-perception of our bodily feelings and emotional responses, and conceptual activity or thinking. The latter is where human freedom manifests.

According to Steiner, becoming conscious of our thinking activity is a crucial step towards freedom. This process involves recognizing and strengthening our capacity for moral imagination, which entails creating and translating ideals into actions. This is not about creating our own reality at will but about enhancing our ability to translate moral ideals into concrete actions.

Tim and I continued our dialogue about the Free Energy Principle and Whitehead’s cosmology. I began by recounting a short video of Karl Friston saying all human perception is fantasy. From there we discussed FEP’s instrumentalism, the Peirce-James pragmatist difference, and explored the implications of evolution as a general principle extending beyond just biology.

We also returned to Whitehead’s “Propositions.” No doubt, Whitehead’s theory of theories (aka propositions) is weird. But I am inclined to give the coauthor of Principia Mathematica broad leeway to challenge the limitations of formal logic. 

Whitehead’s theory of propositional feelings implies that thought extends far beyond just language possessed human beings. In Whitehead’s cosmos, as in Plotinus’, nearly everything in the universe is contemplating; that is, everything is considering propositions, and it is through the systematic relations of these propagating propositions that past and possible are synthesized in each and every actual entity. But unlike Plotinus’ Eternal One from which all things emanate and contemplatively return, Whitehead’s Creative Advance assures that new propositions are continually coming into being, new truths are being added to creation. In the creative decisions of each creature, novel values incarnate to grant the Many the power to continually recreate the world with God.