Tag Archives: Process

The Eternal Form of Philosophy (a response to Archive Fire)

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

Michael/Archive Fire has just written a gracious and astute response to my recent comment about Whitehead’s reformed Platonism. He has made me aware of the fact that my referring to Whitehead or to Plato in the hopes that they offer some sort of authoritative disambiguation is insufficient to support the arguments I am trying to make. I cannot expect Michael to read a large portion of Whitehead’s, or Plato’s corpus, nor guarantee that if he were to read these, he’d interpret them in the same way that I do. If I have any hope of adequately responding to Michael, its because I will be able to translate my reformed Platonism into forms of expression that he finds interesting (if I do draw on authority, maybe Schelling’s will be more rhetorically effective… He also is inevitably mixed up in any philosophical pie I may try to bake). Philosophical adequacy means keeping the conversation going, i.e., keeping the logos flowing.

My process philosophy is rheological, like Michael’s; but it is not just that, not just a scientific study of the flow of matter in the world. It is also a love of the way of wisdom in the world. Philosophy–at least as it was known when the word, and the way of life, was brought forth and developed in the pre- and post-Socratic philosophers–is concerned not only with contingent flows but with the “becoming of being,” the way of eternity, the living unity of the temporal universe.

Unity is the first form, the universal archetype, of philosophy; its first task is to express this unity in the multiplicities of its logoi and to discover it in the differentiations of its cosmoi. There are many important philosophical questions, among them (1) Why do things fall apart? Why Chaos? and (2) Why do things rise to attention? Why Order? I would not privilege (1) over (2), not only because both questions lead in interesting directions, keeping the logos flowing, but because I would not know what chaos was unless I had order to compare it with (and vice versa). Natural science itself already assumes the unity of the universe, that it is cosmos despite its chaos, even where it seems to methodologically require that intelligent freedom be kept distinct from a contingent and purposeless reality (i.e., that some mixture of mentality not be assumed to exist already in all materiality). This seeming methodological requirement of a modest witness to objectify neutral matter cannot be metaphysically justified. Philosophy, if it is to be anything more than an apology for nominalistic materialism, is the attempt to think the complex unity of intelligence and nature, to participate in the One Life organizing the whole. Schelling described the character of this complex unity as follows:

“Is it not manifest, that the tendency to posit the infinite in the finite and conversely the later in the former, is dominant in all philosophical speech and investigations? To think this form is [as] eternal as the essence of that which is expressed in it, and it has not just now begun, and nor will it ever cease; it is, as Socrates in Plato says, the immortal, never changing characteristic of every investigation” (from Bruno, Or on the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things (1802), I/4).

…

But what about Michael’s concern to bring forth a philosophy afresh? He called for “anarchic re-engagement” with tradition to avoid the tried and true pitfalls of ontotheological metaphysics. I share his concerns, even while I find tradition important (even if it is a pre-scientific and aristocratic tradition). When Whitehead wrote that philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, I believe he meant to say that he thought in the spirit, if not always in the letter, of Plato. After all, as Whitehead also suggests, most of the best criticisms of what has come to be called Platonic philosophy are in Plato’s own dialogues. Further, though Plato’s political views have come to seem oppressive to us today, in his own time, his critiques of myth and attempt to establish a society based on true merit, rather than tyrannical power, were rather progressive.

I’d prefer not to have this post turn into a defense of Plato, since Michael asked to know what I think, not what I’ve read. But then again, if I’m honest, it is hard to tell where what I’ve read and who I’ve conversed with ends and what I think or who I am begins. A kind of alchemical hermeneutics would seem to be at play here, making it impossible for me to disentangle my identity from my influences.

…

On to some of Michael’s specific comments:

We only have limited access to the contingencies of nature as they have unfolded so far but there is nothing that leads me to believe that the so-called “laws of nature” won’t change barring some future cosmic event.

Eternity’s participation in time does not imply the erasure of contingencies or the permanence of physical laws. Laws are cosmic habits. They could have been otherwise. What couldn’t have been otherwise is that cosmic memory (i.e., intelligence as it acts in time) would form habits of some kind. Meillassoux’s absolute contingency–hyperchaos–is an interesting thought experiment, but as a cosmological principle I just can’t bring myself to accept it. In reality, there is no pure contingency, just as there is no pure necessity: there is only a mixture of each. Laws, as habits, can and do change, but as a moving image of eternity. Like Harman, I refuse to give up on the principle of sufficient reason, even while I (following Schelling) find it necessary to think reason without the law of non-contradiction (thinking reason with contradiction is where I think a process ontology is most helpful).

Michael goes on to speak of the

“anarchistic expansion, diversification, and complexification…inaugurated by the primordial expression of potency in our cosmos, otherwise known as the ‘big-bang.’”

The “big-bang” theory is surely one of the strangest and most wonderful ideas to emerge from scientific investigation of the universe. Here, I think Michael and I have the most in common, though I’d again emphasize that I am lead by such an idea to a sense of the profound unity of the universe (i.e., all matter-energy and space-time shares a common origin) no less than to its capacity for differentiation.

There remains, finally, an important discussion to be had regarding the nature of qualities and quantities, but alas, I’ve run out of time and energy tonight and will have to take up that challenge later.

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God and the Chaosmos: Thinking with Catherine Keller

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

Several months ago, a discussion erupted across the SR/OOO blogosphere concerning the implications of various forms of nihilistic and theistic realism. Some of my critiques have since ended up in a Wikipedia article. In one of my responses to Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, I toyed with the idea of Whitehead’s panentheism as a kind of “wilderness theology.” A quick google search reveals that theologians have been playing with this idea for some time. Just recently, I’ve been reading Catherine Keller’s exquisitely written Face of the Deep: Toward a Theology of Becoming (2003). The book is a meditation on the first few verses of Genesis, specifically the meaning of the phrase “tohu vabohu” in the second verse. Keller disputes long established interpretations by some Church fathers who claimed that these verses depict an omnipotent God’s free creation of the universe from absolutely nothing. Creatio ex nihilo. She argues that there is no biblical basis for the ex nihilo doctrine, that Genesis in fact describes a far messier, polytonal, and co-creative event. Creatio Cooperationis.

The first two verses of Genesis are usually translated as:

1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Keller cites the 11th century French-Jewish grammarian Rashi, whose translation of bereshit preserves its literal meaning as written without an article (not “in the beginning,” but “in beginning,” implying that God’s “beginning” is not an absolute start, but a “beginning again”). He also preserves the plural noun Elohim, usually translated by nervous monotheists into the singular God. Further, Rashi’s hermeneutical care leads him to suggest that the first verse is not a complete sentence, but a dependent clause, making the second verse a parenthetic clause and the third the independent clause (114). The first three verses, then, should read:

¹When Elohim began to create heaven and earth²–at which time the earth was tohu vabohu, darkness was on the face of the deep and the ruach was moving upon the face of the waters–³then God said, “Let there be light…”

Keller dwells rhapsodically (173-182) upon the meaning of Elohim, which is plural for Eloah (not a personal name, since it can be used to describe any deity). The plural noun is accompanied by a singular verb, bara, “create.” Some interpreters, like the 11th century Spanish-born poet Abraham Ibn Ezra, have claimed that Elohim refers to God’s angels. Indeed, there is a rich tradition of hermeneutical heretics that draw upon angelology to refute the ex nihilo doctrine. Keller’s Whiteheadian understanding of God as a persuader rather than commander shines through when she writes regarding the implications of the Elohimic plurisingularity:

Crowding and complicating the hermeneutical time-space, the turbulent swarm of godhood has always transgressed any possible boundaries between the One Original Creator and the many derivative creatures…According to this imaginary of bottomless process, the divine decision is made not for us but with and through us. Amidst the chaosmic committee work of creation, what work remains for a creator to do–aside from its decisive delegations (“let the earth bring forth,” etc.)? Can we say with process theology that the creator emits an eros…to which every creature willy-nilly responds? …Some respond more responsibly than others to the cosmic desire. Committees and democracies make a lot of messes…Our responses…generate our own plurisingular inter-subjectivities–out of the multiples of elemental energies, codes, socialities, ecologies that any moment constellate our cosmoi…Elohim arises out of those unruly depths, over which language catches its breath. The creator, in creating, becomes. In singular plurality (178-182).

Keller is a skilled hermeneut, capable of holding her breath long enough to dive into the polysemic depths of scriptural meaning, and of surfacing to tell the story of her journey without superficially collapsing it into a monotone theology or exploding it into relativistic jelly. She carefully unwinds the palimpsestic threads woven into the poetic phrase tohu vabohu to discover evidence of a goddess’ murder. The Hebrew poet who wrote Genesis was clearly influenced by the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which depicts the warrior God Marduk’s slaughter of Tiamat (related to the Semitic Tehom, “abyss”). The traditional interpretation of the phrase, under the monotheistic pretense of demythologization, denies all agency to the Tehom. The ex nihilo doctrine requires that God be alone in the beginning, the sole creator of everything, even that out of which creation is shaped. Keller reads into tohu vabohu and uncovers its prepatriarchal significance enfolded just beneath the surface. Rather than traditional commentators, who point to the monotony (“God said…God said…God said…”) of the creation narrative as evidence of its utter transcendence over any other merely mythic event, Keller focuses on the “flirtatiously alliterative wordplay” (116) of these same verses. The “monotonotheism” (Nietzsche) of the ex nihilo tradition is replaced with the participatory eroticism of Elohim’s creative persuasiveness: let the earth produce (tadse) vegetation (dese) (1:11); let the waters produce (yisresu) sea creatures (seres) (1:20). Tohu vabohu is read with the “shinning wake” of its animistic origins in tact, such that the precreation elements are read not as “formless and void,” but as active participants responsive to God’s angelic call to cosmos. In effect, Elohim had to ask permission before creating.

These exegetic exercises, I hope, help further the cause of a wilderness theology. In my own recent effort to bring forth a creation imaginary in service of wildness (Remembering Creation: Towards a Christian Ecosophy), I argued that some form of theological realism will be necessary in order to counter the nihilistic myth of the market. Theology, though marred by the “light supremacism” of its patriarchal past, must be resuscitated, less the chthonic waters of the unhinged psyche continue bubble up and reap havoc upon the earth. Theology of the traditional sort may be impossible, but theology of some sort remains indispensable. Theology, without denying its scientific aim, must also become poetic. It is crucial for anthropoiesis, for humanity’s ongoing political struggle to compose a cosmos, a collective dissipative structure, between the infinity above and the entropy below. Following Keller (and other feminist theologians like Luce Irigaray), we need not merely dress theology in drag, but rather simply queer its (te)homophobic roots, such that they bring forth blossoms of an earthier hue.

And the sea can shed shimmering scales indefinitely. Her depths peel off into innumerable thin, shinning layers…And with no end in sight. -Irigaray

Occasionalism in Whitehead and Harman

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

An important discussion continues to unfold in the comment section of this post over at Knowledge-Ecology. We are trying to figure out what metaphysical work Whitehead’s eternal objects do, among other things.

Here is my last comment:

I think Whitehead gives you withdrawal without returning to an ontology of substances. Adam and I have been trying to figure this out for months, and I will admit that Whitehead does sometimes seem to reduce occasions to their relations, since in time (and his is a process metaphysics after all), no occasion or society of occasions ever remains identical to itself. There are no enduring substances, only enduring societies.

However, withdrawal can be saved due to the technical features of Whitehead’s system. Whitehead risks a set of abstractions by analyzing an indivisible moment of concrescence into its component parts. An occasion can be said to be withdrawn from its relations at a certain point in the process: just before it passes over from a subject to a superject; precisely when its relations are self-characterized or decided upon as the complex character of eternal objects to be included in its experience, there and then it is withdrawn from every other occasion. At this slice of time in the process of concrescence, abstractly analyzed, the occasion is dipping below the surface into eternity while still riding upon the wave of time. The “who” experiencing the world in this or that way at the molten core of the occasion is God; and though allured by the world, and the world by it, God is withdrawn from direct contact with it. God isn’t making a totally free decision in any given occasion, since it must deal with the emotional consequences of prior occasions.

We should not forget Harman’s fascination with occasionalism.

We all want some kind of withdrawal… the question for me is whether we want to bring back substance ontology or theology in order to get it. I’d rather do theology, maybe only because I’m more of a Platonist than an Aristotelian.

Here’s a Platonist for you:

“…every visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany, that is, a divine apparition. For…the more secretly it is understood, the closer it is seen to approach the divine brilliance. Hence the inaccessible brilliance of the celestial powers is often called by theology ‘Darkness.’”
– John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon

Towards a Cosmotheandric Re-orientation: Response to Knowledge-Ecology

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

Adam Robbert over at Knowledge-Ecology recently responded to After Nature’s (Leon Niemoczynski) post on anthrodecentrism in Object-Oriented Ontology. I’ve visited this topic several times lately, but I’d have to admit that I seem to have failed to fully develop my own position in regards to the place of the human in the universe.

What I have suggested thus far is that we make a distinction between the particular earthly species we call Homo sapiens and a universal anthropic evolutionary potential, or Anthropos, characterized by its archetypal intelligence and compassion. The Anthropos is not yet an actual being, but remains a possible being. Teilhard de Chardin calls this being the Omega toward which cosmic evolution inevitably tends. I am not always able to muster the same metaphysical optimism that Teilhard does, but I am unable to shake the sneaking suspicion that the continuity of human civilization ultimately depends upon each individual’s faith in the possibility of realizing the absolute wisdom and love of the Anthropos. Civilized life is predicated on the assumption that our species, at least at its scientific and spiritual best, represents a unique example of a universal anthropic tendency intrinsic to cosmogenesis. Without faith in this highest human potential, I believe we simply lose the will necessary to live together peacefully on earth. Without an anthropic orientation, in other words, our ethicality and zest for life (as Teilhard calls it) would shrivel and die within a generation or two. Indeed, I think European civilization is growing precariously close to the death of belief in the Anthropos, just as it has already killed God. Perhaps now, in our thoroughly disenchanted historical moment, all that is left to us as a “live option” (as William James would say) is the Cosmos; but even there, late industrial capitalism continues to man the helm of an economic system pushing the earth into ever-worsening mass extinction and global climate change.

Adam writes:

“[OOO] reveals that the human has not been traumatically ‘decentered’ by the triple revolutions of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud (feel free to add to this list your favorite ‘traumatic’ decentralists…). This decentering, we can now see, was actually only a traumatic event from a particularly eurocentric, dualist, and transcendentalist perspective. I think its time we stop whining about the poor european psyche’s ‘displacement’ and realize that immanence, ontological parity, and evolutionary cosmology actually center us within the context of things.”

I am all for immanence, ontological parity, and evolutionary cosmology; but I affirm the importance of these principles right alongside those of transcendence, ontological depth, and involutionary metaphysics. There are cross-cultural parallels in the philosophies of India and of various indigenous traditions for these three notions; they are not simply anomalies of a deranged European mentality (e.g., the Indian Vedas and the Mayan Popul Voh). The modern scientific “displacement” of humanity is unavoidable, but if our civilization is to survive the 21st century, I think we must also seek out and discover some sort of cosmotheandric re-orientation. Instead of understanding Cosmos, Theos, and Anthropos as ontologically dissociated and isolable substances as the ancients often did, and instead of annihilating each one-by-one as the moderns have, we must enact a weltanschauung wherein this trinity becomes complexly interpenetrating and dependently co-arising.

Adam goes on to suggest that OOO may be the first substance-based and anti-essentialist philosophy. I’m still not convinced of the linguistic utility or metaphysical validity of returning to a substance ontology. I remain committed to the process-relational paradigm. If we consider the main thrust of the scientific displacement of human beings from the center, most of its momentum seems to come from the discovery of the deep time of evolution and thus the developmental nature of the universe. As Teilhard conveys it, 19th and 20th century cosmology has made it clear that the Anthropos is not the static center of a hierarchically arranged Great Chain of Being, but the “axis and arrow” of a complexly organized creative process of unfolding. In other words, our species, as a result of a longing for the anthropic ideal, is near the leading edge of the cosmogenic rush toward deeper interiority. Everything actual possesses a degree of interiority (and so withdrawnness) precisely because it is a process of becoming (I’ve developed the reasons why here and here).

In Defense of Wonder: A response to Naught Thought on Whitehead’s Philosophy of Dawn

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

I cannot, without much hesitation, identify myself as either a “prickly” or a “gooey” philosopher. It depends on who my interlocutors are. If I am in a philosophical conversation with, say, a professional biochemist with a reductionistic orientation, my attempt to wipe away and retrace the horizons of their world will inevitably come off as vague, pretentious, and mystical. If I enter into discussion with a musician or poet, my need to reflect upon and conceptualize the beats and flows of lived experience will probably upset their vibe.

Naught Thought/Ben Woodard recently posted about the “rhetorical disadvantages” of process philosophy resulting from its habit of embracing “ontological fuzziness.” He does nonetheless ally himself with the process perspective, speaking approvingly of Grant’s and Meillassoux’s philosophies of becoming by defending them from Harman’s worry about the “mining” of objects. The point of Woodward’s post, it seems to me, is to encourage the process wing of Speculative Realism to tidy up and formalize its rhetorical style:

“Too many thinkers who work with becoming or process are okay with operating in the twilight of becoming…this allows for becoming to be utilized as an escape hatch in argumentation.”

I definitely appreciate any call to clarify my philosophical position. While I guess I am one of the “process-relational folks” (Woodard’s phrase), in the sense that I have participated in some PR blogalogues recently, I probably wouldn’t employ the phrase to describe myself. Whitehead is one of my most significant philosophical influences at this point in my short philosophical career, but I don’t think the term “process-relational” quiet works for him, either. If pressed, I’d be more likely to describe myself as a Christian Hermeticist. I’m all about “process,” but my heart and mind lead me to affirm that the cosmic process is evolutionary in the teleogenic sense. On a purely metaphysical level, I agree that hyper-chaos/creativity reigns; but on a cosmological level, God’s Love guides physical processes toward an increasingly intense harmonization of aesthetic contrasts, which is Whitehead-speak for Beauty.

Whitehead, like James, is a metaphysician of experience as much as process. Granted, he holds that, ontologically, only becoming is real; but physically, which is to say experientially, becoming is atomized. As James’ put it, experiential reality is both “substantive,” consisting of discrete and unified buds, and “transitive,” with buds flowing out of and into one another as a continuous stream. James suggested that the transitive phase of experience unfolds on the “fringe” of consciousness; it is made conscious only in non-ordinary situations (like that generated by nitrous oxide, in James’ case), and then only with great difficulty. Consciousness of the flow between buds is difficult because, as soon as consciousness attends to the multitude of feelings unfolding on the edges of experience, it transforms them into a unified drop of experience with a new center of subjective identity withdrawn from a new circumference of mostly occluded processes. But still, these flows are only mostly occluded, and many of our commonsense beliefs about the world depend upon our taking for granted that true relation is possible, that each discrete moment of private consciousness is causally bound up (and so continuous) with public processes.

I disagree with Woodard that process philosophy, at least that of the Whiteheadian variety, does violence to commonsense. On the contrary, Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme is an attempt to cosmologize the commonsensical ethical arguments of David Hume. Whitehead’s Jamesian inheritance leads him to elevate experiential adequacy to the very top of his philosophical priority list. His is a scientifically informed plea for re-enchantment, a spirited defense of human freedom and creativity against the radically non-commonsensical reductionisms of mechanistic materialism.

The more I begin to grasp Meillassoux’s process approach the more strikingly similar it becomes to Whitehead’s. The only major difference (and I still have to read The Divine Inexistence for myself) seems to me to be that Meillassoux focuses almost exclusively on (at least the future possibility of) the consequent pole of God’s experience, denying any primordial element. There is no reason at all for the way the universe is, despite its aesthetic beauty and mathematical intelligibility, and there would be no reason at all if a God capable of world redemption were one day to emerge. Whitehead, on the other hand, adheres to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He does so without separating thinking and feeling such that the intellect is forced to disenchant and mechanize the cosmos in spite of the heart’s protests. God, the eminent actuality and chief exemplar of Whitehead’s occasionalist ontology, is the dipolar embodiment of Reason; that which is responsible for experiencing both Reason’s eternal potentiality and its temporal actualization. Creativity remains Whitehead’s ultimate category, but absent God’s valuation and enjoyment, there can be no Cosmos. It is not a given that there is a Cosmos, but if we aspire to bring forth order and harmony in the world (i.e., if we aspire to cosmologize), then we do so under the assumption that a World Soul exists beyond our own soul to hold it all together.

Whitehead has been called a “philosopher for the muddleheaded,” and there is no doubt that he is an eccentric and complicated thinker. But I don’t think this implies that those philosophers (like myself) who share his attitude toward the real are necessarily at a rhetorical disadvantage. It all depends how one construes the end of philosophy. Some think philosophy, while it may begin in wonder, should end in precise understanding. This is not how Whitehead judges the success or failure of speculative metaphysics. For him, metaphysics should begin and end in wonder.

Bertrand Russell, about as prickly a philosopher as they come, recalls that Whitehead once remarked to him that:

“You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.”

Woodard’s comment about the “twilight of becoming” certainly seems accurate given this candid statement by Whitehead himself. I see his “philosophy of dawn,” not as a liability, but as perhaps his most important attitudinal contribution to intellectual culture. Unlike Woodard, I think metaphysical speculation is necessarily affective and existential. Philosophy must be involved  in the ethical complexities of everyday life among others, since it is only in response to these complexities that thinking emerges at all. If affect and ethics are not properly “metaphysical” topics, then I say to hell with metaphysics.

Ontology and God: a further response to Levi Bryant

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

I posted the following as a comment to Bryant’s short response. Adam Robbert has a nice comment there, too.

There is no necessary relationship between OOO (or ontology generally) and theology or morality, but certainly every ontology has theological and moral implications. To the extent that OOO has something in common with Whitehead’s process ontology, the possible role of a panentheist God should remain an open question. In Whitehead’s system, according to Stengers, “God is not what explains: he is what is required, in terms of the conceptual scheme, by the cosmological perspective” (Thinking With Whitehead, p. 424). Perhaps OOO differs sufficiently from the Whiteheadian scheme to avoid this requirement. But I don’t think it is fair to dismiss “God” in ontological discussions just because many believers have a philosophically immature picture of God (and I do agree with your criticisms of such pictures, Levi). Whitehead’s God is first a construction meant to solve a philosophical problem, and only secondarily an object of religious feeling.

“The concept of God is certainly one essential element in religious feeling. But the contrary is not true; the concept of religious feeling is not an essential element in the concept of God’s function in the Universe. In this respect religious literature has been sadly misleading to philosophic theory, partly by attraction and partly by repulsion” (Process and Reality, p. 207).

God’s function in the Universe may have very little to do with the way the majority of humanity has felt or believed that God relates to the Universe. The desire for personal immortality and for an all-powerful deity who insures that the good and the evil are properly sorted at the end of time is an example of our initial excess of subjectivity demanding something unreasonable. The function of Whitehead’s God is not to actively intervene in the course of natural events, but to gently influence the free decisions of actual occasions as an element in their prehension of the actual world. God allows actual entities to experience the relevance of eternal objects for their situation as temporal subjects. Without God, Reason would remain a floating abstraction, an ideal without reality; Whitehead argues that actual entities are the only reasons, and so God is that actual entity embodying Reason.

Also, keep in mind that God is not ultimate in Whitehead’s system. God is a creature of creativity like every other creature, though unique in that the poles of God’s concrescence are reversed (finite actual occasions move from a physical to a mental pole, while God begins with a conceptual envisagement of the definite possibilities for actuality before moving on to physically feel and integrate the resulting decisions made by actual occasions).

So in short, there are philosophical reasons to think God and there are sociological/psychological reasons to believe in God. There are plenty of bad ideas about God, and as you point out, Levi, plenty of bad beliefs about God that lead to unethical behaviors. But I remain convinced that religious feelings, in one form or another, are here to stay. Humanity, it seems to me, will always be a spiritual animal. The question then becomes how we are to bring religious feelings into harmony with the demands of rigorous philosophical reflection and with scientific facts. I think Whitehead comes very close to doing both.

Imagining the Cosmos: notes on my dissertation…

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

In the past year or so, the blueprint of my dissertation topic has gone through multiple iterations. Last year, while applying for my PhD studies at CIIS, I wrote a goal statement that still reflects the general theme I am envisioning. Now that I’m entering the last term of course work, I wanted to take the opportunity to further articulate the aim of my research.

When I composed my goal statement, I was as yet unaware of the Speculative Realist movement. It turns out that two of the philosophers I’d planned to bring into conversation with one another, namely Whitehead and Schelling, are right at the center of this still emerging school of thought. Despite the resurgence of interest in process thought and metaphysics more generally that this movement represents, there seems to be a gap in scholarship bringing process ontology and naturphilosophy into constructive cross-fertilization with what I’ll for now refer to as Western Esotericism. This may be a good place to focus my dissertation.

I’ve written somewhat extensively on the esoteric cosmology of Rudolf Steiner, specifically his understanding of the Imagination. For Steiner, the Imagination is an organ of perception, a window into the world of otherwise supersensible realities. As a graduate student, Steiner edited Goethe’s scientific writings. He argued that Goethe’s was a more adequate form of empiricism than that of his mechanistic contemporaries, since it granted the Imagination is proper role in the perception of the deeper archetypal patterns, or ur-forms, at work beneath natural phenomena. Perhaps Steiner’s ablest English-speaking interpreter, Owen Barfield, conducted a similar case-study of imaginative cognition on the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (whose thought is closely linked with Schelling’s, to the point of verging on plagiarism!–a charge examined by Barfield in What Colerdige Thought).

More recently, I’ve begun reading some of Henry Corbin’s work on Active Imagination and the mundus imaginalis. Like Barfield and Steiner, Corbin argues that modern philosophy has all but forgotten the important role of the intermediate imaginal plane between matter/sensation and mind/intellection. The result is a superficial fissure within philosophy itself, wherein idealists battle with realists, and rationalists with empiricists, over whose ultimately one-sided conception of the universe is valid.

Articulating an ontology of the Imagination seems to me to be a prerequisite for any truly coherent speculation on the nature of the Universe. Whitehead characterized his adventure in cosmology as an “imaginative leap,” and Schelling often drew connections between the work of the artist and that of the philosopher, suggesting that philosophy is a generative, rather than demonstrative activity. I think this makes a study of their respective approaches to cosmology fertile ground for an explication of the role of Imagination in speculative philosophy.

Redeeming Imagination as an organ of cognitive import, thereby correcting the bias of much modern positivistic thought that it produces only fantasy and illusion, will allow for the development of a more textured ontology that does not simply reduce reality to the domain/s of the material-sensible and/or the mental-intelligible. Jonael Schickler, whose life was cut short in 2005, argued in his dissertation that Steiner’s four-fold ontology of material, ethereal, astral, and spiritual planes clarifies many outstanding aporias in contemporary philosophy, including the relationship of life and consciousness to matter.

The major hurtle, as Schickler saw it, standing in the way of the widespread acceptance of this more complex picture of reality are the epistemological limits placed on human thought by the critical philosophy of Kant. Kant did not believe that human consciousness could develop beyond its normal capacities of sensory intuition and categoreal understanding. For him, the human soul was forever denied access to its own conditions of possibility, whether they be ultimately spiritual or material. Schickler, following Steiner, believed that the contemporary human being is still in the process of awakening to its higher spiritual capacities. The human is more an idea struggling to be realized than a being fixed in its current form. How far into Steiner’s account of this evolution of consciousness I will delve into in my dissertation remains to be seen, but suffice it to say that I will have to find a way beyond Kant’s epistemic skepticism. Schelling and Whithead will be of great service in this respect. And luckily, there is in Kant already the germ of an understanding of the mysterious role of Imagination in cognition.

…

If anyone has any suggestions or sources that might be of assistance, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Process Ontology in Schelling and Whitehead

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

In preparation for a larger speculative project, I’ve been reading a translation by Judith Norman of the 2nd draft of Schelling’s unfinished manuscript entitled Ages of the World (1813). I’ve been intrigued by Schelling’s philosophies of nature and freedom for several years, but never had the time to do a closer study. Iain Hamilton Grant‘s well-researched text Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (2008), on which I presented a few months back in a panel discussion on speculative realism, reminded me just how compelling his ideas and methods are. My own philosophical approach remains thoroughly Whiteheadian, though I continue to aspire to deepen Whitehead’s more naturalistic tendencies by bringing him into conversation with the hermetic occultism of Rudolf Steiner. I think Schelling may offer a bridge between the two, since his system has both a processual materialist aspect and an evolutionary spiritualist aspect. Schelling’s direct influence on Whitehead is minimal, if there is any at all; Steiner, on the other hand, clearly felt an affinity with him.

I am drawn to the thoughts of these three men because they offer a picture of the universe, and humanity’s place within it, that preserves the best of ancient philosophy alongside that of modern science. In our now postmodern context, there is no doubt a need to update and amend some of their ideas. Meeting the challenges of the ecological and social crises of our time demands an unprecedented transformation of human consciousness, and with it our philosophy and science. Anthropocentrism, whether that of the religious or technoscientific sort, is perhaps the most difficult conceptual obstacle standing in the way of an adequate form of thinking the cosmos. The universe is far stranger and more alien than we could ever have imagined. Matter, for centuries science’s most dependable and fundamental explanatory category, has become as “dark” and mysterious as spirit.

This darkness, and the need to break free of anthropocentrism, is, in part, the motivation underlying the emergence of object-oriented philosophies like that of Graham Harman, Tim Morton, and Levi Bryant. I am not as familiar with the latter two’s approaches, though I believe Bryant is more amenable to a process ontology like Schelling’s or Whitehead’s than is Harman. For Harman, objects are substantial and not processual. “Time,” he writes in Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005), “is the strife between an object and its accidents” (p. 250); time is not “an absolute constant force that wheels onward regardless of the deployment of specific objects” (p. 249). Whitehead would agree that time is not independent of objects, but rather, as Harman suggests, unfurls within objects. In this sense, every object has its own time. As I’ve outlined, albeit briefly, in another post, Whitehead does not entirely reduce the substance of an object to its relations as he is often accused of doing by Bryant and Harman alike. Time, nonetheless, does seem to play a more fundamental role in the production of objects in Whitehead and Schelling.

In Ages of the World, Schelling unpacks his understanding of material products in the context of a philosophy of time:

Even the smallest grain of sand must contain determinations within itself that we cannot exhaust until we have laid out the entire course of creative nature leading up to it. Everything is only the work of time, and it is only through time that everything receives its particular character and meaning.

Nature, for Schelling, exists in contradiction, and so becomes in time. It is both creative process and created product, influenced both by the powers of forward striving and backward inhibition (novelty and habit). Without the retarding force of habit, time would not exist, “because development would occur in an uninterrupted flash rather than successively…” Nor could time exist without the driving force of novelty, since without it “there would be absolute rest, death, standstill…”

“Every entity,” writes Schelling,

everything that is, wants to be in itself and out of itself at the same time. It wants to be in itself inasmuch as it posits or collects itself together as what-is [als Seyendes], as a subject; to this extent it opposes development and expansion. It wants to be out of itself inasmuch as it desires to be what it is in itself once more, and hence externally. In the first case, it is something withdrawn by itself, which sets itself in opposition to what is outside of it; but it sets itself in opposition only in order to reveal and declare itself against this outside as what it is in itself. It cannot, therefore, remain in this withdrawn condition.

“Thus,” he concludes, “the principles we perceive in time [and nature] are the authentic inner principles of all life, and contradiction is not only possible but in fact necessary.” I don’t think Schelling’s approach here is opposed to that of Harman. Their respective positions may be complementary, if different in emphasis. I am not sure of the German word used above for “withdrawn,” but I found these lines especially significant in this context. Withdrawal is perhaps at the very center of Harman’s conceptual scheme, and indeed it plays an important role for Schelling, as well. But in Schelling’s ontology, withdrawal is only one moment in a polarized process. Beings love to hide, but also to show themselves. This contradiction is what puts existence into motion.

In the context of a process ontology, withdrawal can remain a central concept without becoming ultimate. Objects need not be dissolved into relations, but can be understood to hide from one another precisely because they exist in contradiction and so are always becoming in time. An object, then, withdrawals from itself and from other objects because it is never simply at rest as itself. Heraclitus wrote that “you cannot step twice into the same stream,” but in Schelling’s sense, perhaps we could say that it is impossible to step even once into the same stream.

Process Philosophy of Science

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

I’m pasting a dialogue that I’m having on Facebook with Steven Goodheart here so others can chime in if they so please!

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Steven remarked that my comment about the paradox of science’s ancestral statements reminded him of Roger Penrose‘s somewhat Platonist take on the matter.

I responded by saying:

Steven,

I think my statement about a witness being present at the big bang is really just to say that appealing to contemporary physical cosmology to debunk non-materialist accounts of consciousness actually raises more philosophical quandaries than is often assumed. “Science” can’t take a side in this issue. Maybe observation and mathematical inference will eventually allow us to figure out where the “laws” of physics were for the first few seconds of creation, but even if this is understood, basic philosophical questions about the relation between subject and object remain as perplexing as ever.

To which Steven responded:

I think that’s true, and may always be true, because if (and I don’t know if this is finally and only true) IF the stuff that philosophy is perplexed about exists as some sort of emergent aspect of “intelligent matter,” if the qualia of thought are in fact just that and nothing more, with no real referent to some “real” or “deeper reality’ (and again, I don’t know if this is so) then whatever neuroscience and physics can say about the *emergent* philosophical perplexities of this kind of mind and consciousness is, ipso facto, limited and provisional. More simply, the Schrodinger Equations have nothing to say about a Bach cantata, and never will. And the way neural nets fire and how they are organized will never tell us anything definitive about why “Starry Night” is so beautiful.

If there’s some deep, as yet unknown connection between the realm of values and meaning, and the realm of quarks and black holes and Big Bangs, I don’t think that’s obvious. Maybe there is; I’m open to the idea. But in the meantime, I think we do less violence to truth and avoid error if we don’t try to blend the two realms in terms of a “metaphysics” but rather keeping do the hard work of investigation and see what appears as we continue to learn about the nature of mind, consciousness, and matter.

My view is that the two domains–the domain of the qualia, the mental realm where things like meaning, values, truth, beauty, and “the good”—and the realm of brain chemistry and neural nets—are interdependent, are profoundly interrelated, but their subject matter is utterly different and, I believe, disjunctive in some basic way. I think there’s interplay between the two, and increasingly science has had a huge impact on philosophy since the age of science, apparently “solving” or making meaningless some of the old “problems” that reflected the biases of a non-scientific age. But, ironically, now, at the very limits and limitations of physics, are finding that the minds that do the science find that their “philosophy,” their view of “the beautiful, good and true,” seems to be utterly bound up in what mathematical vision of the universe is “right!” Does this mean, that, finally, it’s all been metaphysical and philosophical all along? I don’t think so.

The math of a Wheeler or a Penrose is no less beautiful (and self-consistent) than that of a Susskind or Hawkings (I *don’t* say this as one who can follow it, either, but I can get some of it) but some physicists find Penrose’s mathematical universe compelling, but more, probably, feel an affinity for that of Susskind and Hawkings. But the theory that finally “wins” is the one that proves most predictive, the one that’s verifiable, the one that can be test, and then, whether the theory is “beautiful” or “compelling” finally won’t matter. What’s matters is does the theory explain matter in a way that we can test and prove.

It seems to me that philosophical or metaphysical theories of mind and consciousness that want to, so to speak, step out of the realm of the qualia and their emergent value systems and say something about the physics of matter, space, time, energy, have to meet the same “test” criteria as Penrose’s math or Hawking’s math. And this is exactly where such theories fail again and again, however convincing, self-consistent, (and even true!) the theory may be in the realm of qualia and values.

My response:

Steven,

I don’t think avoiding “error” is necessarily the best way to further Truth. Let me explain: The most disturbing thing about the scientific era for traditional philosophy and metaphysics is evolution. I mean evolution in its cosmic, not just its biological sense. Evolution is the idea that the cosmos is really a cosmogenesis, that it is a process of becoming and not a finished product. It has an origin, and everything that there is emerged from this origin. We can’t yet say if the universe has an end, or if this end is somehow “on purpose,” but we can say that there is something more than the playing out of random collisions between particles. Chaos may be the basis of order, but still, there is order. However, this order is always developing, always evolving. What is “Truth” in the context of an ontology of process and becoming? It cannot be other than “error”; somehow, Truth is produced at the edge of chaos and order, the result of the wanderings and mistakes of the evolutionary process in its human form. It is not quite discovered and not quite created. Truth, because it is not waiting out there for us to find or represent, cannot be understood in isolation from Beauty and Goodness. We know Truth as Truth only when we feel its Beauty and will its Goodness. Truth needs to be appreciated and protected. It never simply is. It is always contested, even at an ontological level. Science discovered evolution empirically, as fact, and philosophers have thought out its implications for our knowledge of Truth (fact is not Truth until the particular instance is unpacked to reveal the universal principle underlying it). Now we need to find a way to apply it to our civilization’s ethical, aesthetic, and theological assumptions, which continue to fragment society and destroy the biosphere. I see natural science as a subset of philosophy. Science is one of humanity’s organs, perhaps the eyes; philosophy is the mind of the whole organism.

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The Sokal Affair has also been mentioned in my discussion with Steven and Julian. Here are some of my thoughts on that:

About the Sokal affair… one of Sokal’s main foes is the sociologist of science Bruno Latour. He has published extensively about the way that science “constructs” its facts. He really just goes behind the scenes to reveal how messy the process of scientific research is, how bound up in politics and economics it is; in short, he reveals that science is a cultural activity like any other, as much an art as a “science.” Is it really accurate to say, for example, that LHC particle collider is ‘discovering’ something about nature in its undisturbed state? Clearly, we are learning something about nature, but not nature as it would be independent of the artifice of technology that has been constructed to contort and torture matter so as to get it to reveal its “secrets.” In a radically evolutionary context, where even atoms are the products of irreversible processes, how do we know that what is going on in the tunnels of this accelerator isn’t actually changing nature, causing it to wander from its “normal” course? Science and art cannot be so easily separated.

Constructive v. Critical Philosophy – Responding to Isabelle Stengers at CGU

Posted by Matthew David Segall on

Once it has begun to swallow the overwhelmingly wondrous fact of existence–that there is anything at all!–philosophy can perhaps catch its breath and ask the most fundamental question: what is there? From this comes the only slightly more specific questions: What is a thing? What is an idea? Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway spoke on Thursday night at Claremont Graduate University on behalf of certain risky abstractions pertaining to the reality of things and ideas, and of how they merge and diverge in the natures-cultures that constitute human sociopolitical life.

For Stengers, there are basically two approaches open to the questioning post-Kantian philosopher. The first is to ask, “What do I know?”, the second, “What can I know?” The former is speculative thinking, leaping across the gap in the circuit of perception between matter and mind by seeing into the web of relationships within which one is embedded. The latter, the critical approach, separates the knower from its object, directing attention almost exclusively to one’s own subjective activities. When the philosopher asks, “What can I know?”, she means to turn attention to the enduring conditions of subjective experience which shape and make possible any perception or understanding of the ongoing phenomena corresponding to the extra-subjective world. What the world is in itself, the realist’s question, begins to seem like a grandiose search for God’s view of the cosmos. Hubris, says Hume. Impossible, says Kant. Whitehead says not just that we can ask the first question, but that we must! Life is innately risky, because it is primarily a speculative affair.  As human creatures endowed with symbolic intelligence, we become with the spatiotemporal world of physical events and participate in the realm of eternal ideas. Like the plant-clothed entangled banks described in the final pages of Darwin’s Origin, the networks constituting the ecology of classrooms, books, images, and ideas (the philosopher’s habitat) are discernible, intelligible even, but these are definitely not actually separable one from the other, or explainable one in terms of the other. There is no dualism between mind and matter, or between discourse and nature, such that one might reduce to the other. For Whitehead, as for Stengers, propositions infect experience at all levels, from the electronic and protonic subjective forms of subatomic particles to the visual and auditory subjective forms of intelligent animals. Nature thinks about itself, whether it be the thought of hydrogen expressing the self-love that is gravity to give birth to stars or the thought of Einstein riding upon a beam of light, giving the power of the sun to earthly hands.

Abstractions, for Whitehead and Stengers, are lures for feeling. Each form of abstract description allows a different world to take shape before our imagination. We have no choice but to have speculative trust in our descriptions and the images they suggest, because we have no other basis for continuing the adventure of rationality. Contradictions and antinomies, which are oft met along the road of rational discourse, must be transformed into constructive contrasts. This transformation is the work of common sense, that most spontaneous and marvelous judge of truth, beauty, and goodness, and the light of our humanity. Not theory, but common sense, ought to be the final arbiter of our judgments. This is the Jamesian pragmatism and precursive trust that Whitehead and Stengers are committed to.

The Golden Rule of Whiteheadian philosophy of organism, according to Stengers, is that one ought never to offer abstractions that erase situatedness. Perhaps it is this very situatedness, the sense of being embedded in ecologies of meaningful matter, that generates the philosopher’s original sense of astonishment at the fact of being. Philosophy need not outgrow wonder in order to reveal the deeper nature of things. Its revelation in fact preserves wonder, opening our common sense to the adventure of a world in the making.

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A response from 9macrina9: