The Beginning and the End of Positive Philosophy

Posted by Matthew David Segall on March 25, 2012

In the Theaeteus, Plato has Socrates say that “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.” In his Metaphysics, Aristotle echoes this by writing that “it was their wonder, astonishment, that first led men to philosophize and still leads them.”

In the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates say that “those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.”

Philosophy, then,–at least if we take Socrates’s, Plato’s, and Aristotle’s words for it–begins in wonder and ends with death.

To become a philosopher, you must first be astonished by your own self-consciousness of the world, by the feeling of knowing your own ignorance of the whole. There is more to this ignorance than meets the eye. Socrates would never deny the truths grasped by geometry or logic. These are true enough. His is a learned ignorance: a gnosis that consists primarily in knowing that he does not know all the things he at first seems to.

Learned ignorance is not simple knowing, since the occult knowledge it provides cannot be stated clearly and distinctly in some logical formula. The Truth it approaches is no good for building marble archways or winning arguments in court. But nor is it simple ignorance, since underlying the philosopher’s knowledge of ignorance is an intuition of the whole. The philosopher is ignorant of this or that particular thing, but of the cosmos, he can be sure it exists-as-one, that it is a unity, a universe.

To wonder is to feel the infinite Whole–and in feeling it to know that it exists (existence), even if you cannot as of yet know what it is (essence). Wonder is not the feeling of everything together, but the intuition of All at once. This is the beginning of philosophy. Emerson describes it in Nature:

Standing on the bare ground,–my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,–all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God…

The goal is not to rest in this feeling, in an immediate intuition of the One, but through it to overcome the fear of death. Such a fear is natural for self-conscious animals like us, but by learning to think and to know lovingly–that is, by philosophizing–we can come to meet death willingly, thereby relating to the body not as soul prison by as soul portal.

The soul is individual only so long as it lives with a body. To the extent that philosophy is preparation for death, for the soul’s passage beyond the body, it is the desire to think objectively, without the limitation of subjectivity. The philosopher seeks to think beyond the body. The world, then, is the arena of philosophy. Though of course it remains all the while centered on the soul–that is, the soul of the world.

Between a philosopher’s initial astonishment of the fact of the world and his passage through shadow into source, there is much to think and write about.

Kant thought quite a bit about wonder, even attempting to think methodically so as to make a science of philosophy. In the end, he could only contradict himself. He thought knowledge must begin with sensory experience, with the givens of outer spatiality and inner temporality; on the other hand, he argued that the given world of experience would make no sense in the absence of a priori concepts like substance/accident, cause/effect, and quantity/quality. Kant formulates this contradiction–which is simultaneously the generative paradox underlying the power of his entire philosophical program–with the statement: “thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind.”

Kant brought forth what Schelling would later call negative philosophy. He forgoes knowledge of the Whole for knowledge of the conditions of the possibility of knowing the Whole. Having then established these conditions (e.g., space-time, the categories), he denies theoretical knowledge of anything but the parts, since it is only parts that we experience with our physical bodies. Schelling describes this negative, critical moment in the movement of philosophy as a necessary step along the way toward a new dogmatism, or a positive philosophy. Positive philosophy is unlike the dogmatisms of old, since it does not assume that the divine’s status as “the most supreme being” leads of itself to this divinity’s “necessary existence.” To think the infinity of the Whole upon feeling it is one thing, actually knowing and expressing its reality is another.

“Schelling characterizes the execution and fulfillment of this task as the never-ending process of demonstrating God’s divinity that, as the interpretation of a process freely initiated, posits an open future incapable of being reduced to the necessary unfolding of any predetermined plan.” (-Bruce Matthews, p. 69, from the introduction of The Grounding of Positive Philosophy by F.W.J Schelling [2007]).

Theologians have long looked to philosophy to prove the existence of God. Not only does this imply that philosophy might come to glimpse God’s essence as though it were a static blueprint it could copy down on paper, it also implies that God is a mere belief in need of abstract justification. Schelling admits that no such a priori proof of God is possible–since God is not merely an idea, but a fact. Philosophy begins in wonder, which is to say it begins in an experience of the divinity of the world. To attempt to logically prove God’s existence would be pointlessly tautological, since the proof itself would always depend upon God as its own condition of possibility. For positive philosophy, the point is to communicate the divine meaning of the actual world as we experience it, to remind the actual soul of its immortality and universality while alive here and now.

“The experience toward which positive philosophy proceeds is not just of a particular kind, but is the entirety of all experience from beginning to end. What contributes to the proof is not a part of experience, but all of experience. For precisely this reason, though, this proof itself is not just the beginning or a part of a science (least of all some type of syllogistic proof posited at the apex of philosophy), it is the entire science, that is, the entire positive philosophy–and this is nothing other than the progressive, strengthening with every step, and continually growing proof of the actually existing God. Because the realm of reality in which this proof moves is not finished and complete–for even if nature is now at its end and stands still, there is, nonetheless, still the unrelenting advance and movement of history–because insofar as the realm of reality is not complete, but is a realm perpetually nearing its consummation, the proof is therefore also never finished, and for this very reason this science is only a philo-sophie” (-Schelling, p. 181, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy).

Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Activity: Socrates, Jesus, and the Wisdom of Love (footnotes2plato.com)
What Barfield Thought Coleridge Thought (footnotes2plato.com)

More Reflections on James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology

Posted by Matthew David Segall on March 3, 2012

Building on what was said here last week:

Mont Ventoux

James Hillman’s psychology, above all else, aims to remind the modern Western psyche of its roots in the Renaissance. To illustrate his methods, he dwells upon the lives of Renaissance figures like Petrarch, “the first modern man…perhaps…the first psychological man.”1 Most cultural historians focus on Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux in 1336 as the symbolic beginning of the Renaissance resulting from his discovery of the spirit of “Man.” Jean Gebser, for example, marks the moment as the dawning of humanity’s conscious mastery of extended, perspectival space as over and against an increasingly interiorized soul life.2 Hillman, who has little patience for often inflated “peak experiences” championed by the humanistic psychologist Abe Maslow, draws attention instead to the significance of Petrarch’s descent. It is not a result of “highs,” but rather the survival of depressive “lows” that determines the true worth of a person.3

Upon reaching the summit, Petrarch opens Augustine’s Confessions randomly and reads the lines:

“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains…the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by…”4

Stunned by the synchronicity, Petrarch realizes his calling in life is to look inward so as to “know thyself,” as Thales put it many centuries before Augustine. Most historians here refer to the decisive shift to the study of “Man,” to the beginning of the humanities as a distinct discipline separate from theology or natural philosophy. Hillman’s psychological project, on the other hand, is founded upon the dehumanization of the Renaissance. Despite the fact that Petrarch uses the Latin animus when recounting his experience on Mt. Ventoux,5 Hillman insists that it was essentially a deepening into soul. He points to an earlier sentence in the same section of the Confessions which discusses the infinite depths of memory, “the soul’s imaginative faculty,” and argues that

“The revelation on Mont Ventoux opened Petrarch’s eyes to the complexity and mystery of the man-psyche relationship and moved him to write of the marvel of the soul, not the marvel of man.”6

In light of the diverse array of scholarly interpretations of Petrarch’s transformative experience atop Mt. Ventoux, it seems all that can be said for certain is that it generated within him an irresolvable, yet creative, tension between spiritual transcendence and soulful immanence. He felt, perhaps more powerfully than anyone alive around him or before him, the smallness of his ego in relation to the depths of psyche and of cosmos.

English: Illustration of Petrarch's Triumph of...

Petrarch's triumph of death

There is a certain tragedy in Petrarch’s discovery, a certain dis-ease, since after the mutation in consciousness he initiated, the soul became vulnerable to a whole new set of pathologies. No longer swallowed whole by the earth and sky, the human soul began to feel utterly unlike the world around it. More than anything else, Renaissance philosophers like Petrarch, and later, Ficino, contemplated death.

“Yet the more occupied with death, the more these humanists thought, built, wrote, painted, sang.”7

Death became their muse, and in this way Renaissance philosophers hearkened back to Socrates and Plato, who rather than empiricizing or biologizing the soul like Aristotle, sought to dwell upon the shadows cast by the living body, to descend into the underworld in search of metempsychotic transformation. The soul was identified with the death principle instead of the life principle, and in that way “the first metaphor of human existence” was seen through: “that we are not real.”8 The “skin encapsulated ego” (as Alan Watts put it) is a fantasy of soul.

“No longer is it a question of whether I believe in soul, but whether soul believes in me, grants me the capacity to have faith in it, in psychic reality.”9

If Hillman were a metaphysician, he’d have to say that the final real things are images, fantasies of soul. Not facts, but fictions are the stuff out of which reality is woven. Or at least, if facts be our focus, they must be psychologized into acts, the poetic creations of soul. Like Teilhard de Chardin in the preface to The Human Phenomenon (itself a profound metaphysical work), Hillman dubiously claims early in Re-Visioning Psychology that he is not a metaphysician. In fairness, perhaps it would be truer to his intentions to call him a “meta-psychologist” always in search of an ensouled cosmology. After all, his skepticism regarding metaphysics as it has been articulated in the modern West is well-founded. The Cartesian ego’s paranoid search for absolute certainty and formulaic Truth leads to the repression of the ambiguities and paradoxes of soul-making in the valleys of the world.

His emphases upon death and depth are not simply a matter of coming down to earth from the heights of the sky, however, since for Hillman the planets are gods “by means of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.”10 His turn away from the methods of the modern metaphysician to the therapy of the ancient “Doctors of Soul” is not a retreat from the cosmos, but the longing for the renewal of “relations with archetypal principles personified by the planets of the pagan pantheon.”11 Like Plato, Hillman longed to relate to the universe as a living creature, a being ensouled. His dwelling upon individual death is meant to remind the living soul of its embeddedness in and dependence upon the anima mundi, the soul of the world.

“If we could reoriginate psychology at its Western source in Florence, a way might open again toward a meta-psychology that is a cosmology, a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul’s need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things.”12

The problem for the disenchanted metaphysician is not that Truth is “merely” fiction–that the real is forever beyond the mind’s conceptual grasp–but that the world’s meaning is immense, immeasurable. There is too much meaning! The literalistic mind’s attempt to explain the real can never be completed. It is for this reason that the metaphysician has so often failed the polyphonic psyche by repressing its desire for soul-making. The philosopher’s search for system, for some Grand Synthesis or Theory of Everything, is all too easily psychologized:

“Western metaphysics, with its inherently world-denying, abstractive tendencies has been thought mostly by men…who did not wed, who did not spawn, who touched the world with mind in such a way that its existence became a ‘problem.’”13

Hillman, then, seeks to return metaphysics to the world, to think the real in service of soul-making. He is after a “metaphysical praxis,” a “psychological metaphysics” closely bound up with the practice of therapeia.14 Existence then becomes, not a problem to be solved, but a pathos to be deepened into in search of insight.

Hillman demands that we stay close to the practical effects of our abstractions by paying attention to the power of archetypes to recursively shape both the creation of theories and the discovery of facts: an archetype is both a way of seeing and a thing seen. True to the etymological meaning of “fact” (from the Latin facere: “to do”), Hillman implores us to ask: What do ideas do to soul, to world? Sticking close to the effects of metaphysical pronouncements means asking of their Truths, “True for who?”

The metaphysician must situate himself in the mythic context of psychic life, where everything is personified and speaks through the masks of image and symbol. Truth is not “mere” fiction if the deeper structure of the universe is semiotic: The Truth is story; theory is a special kind of myth. Where literalisms (whether of the metaphysically scientific or religious sort) would replace–or paste over–the given with their favored abstractions, a psychological metaphysics (or meta-psychology) drops the bottom out of the given by forestalling the paranoid rush to formulaic certainty. Metaphysical knowledge is here checked by–not the limits of–but the infinity of metaphor.

“We practice an alchemical metaphysics: ‘account for the unknown in terms of the more unknown.’”15

Hillman has always defended the poetic basis of mind. In making his imaginative psychology cosmological, he is forced to posit as well a poetic basis of the universe.16 He affirms the inherent intelligibility of things: “The cosmos has a logos.”17 He then asks why this intelligibility has become obscured to the modern mode of intelligence, concluding that we have lost the perceptual capacity to connect soul to world and world to soul. We lack the requisite organ of perception: the “imaginational heart.”18

“A living sense of world requires a corresponding living organ of soul by means of which a living world can be perceived.”19

The heart is no mere pump. Neither is the heart the organ of personal sentiment or subjective feeling. For Hillman, the heart is the seat of the imagination, the microcosmic Sun around which all the world’s meaning revolves.20 It is through the heart that the individual finds their point of entry into the anima mundi. To perceive with the heart is to “[hear] the confession of the anima mundi in the speaking of things.”21 This is a form of aesthesis, of “breathing in” the world, that un-Lockes perception from the chains of prosaic empiricism and places the soul’s horses22 before Descartes’ rationalistic reductionism.

¹ Re-Visioning Psychology, 195

² The Ever-Present Origin, 12-15

³ Re-Visioning Psychology, 66

⁴ X,8

⁵ Richard Tarnas, personal correspondence, 12/29/2011

⁶ Re-Visioning Psychology, 196

⁷ Re-Visioning Psychology, 206

⁸ Re-Visioning Psychology, 209

⁹ Re-Visioning Psychology, 50

¹⁰ Archetypal Process, 220

¹¹ Re-Visioning Psychology, 202

¹² Anima Mundi, 110

¹³ Archetypal Process, 218

¹⁴ (ibid.)

¹⁵ Archetypal Process, 220

¹⁶ Archetypal Process, 221

¹⁷ Archetypal Process, 225

¹⁸ The Thought of the Heart, 7

¹⁹ Archetypal Process, 225

²⁰ The Thought of the Heart, 28

²¹ The Thought of the Heart, 48

²² See Plato’s Chariot Allegory in Phaedrus

James Hillman obituary (guardian.co.uk)
James Hillman on Metaphysics and Cosmology (footnotes2plato.com)

The Copernican Odyssey: From Kantian Skepticism to Tarnasian Participation, or from the Dawn of Modern Science to the Wisdom of the Midnight Sun

Posted by Matthew David Segall on October 14, 2011

The following is a rough draft of a presentation I will be giving next week as part of a panel discussion on the philosopher Richard Tarnas’ Archetypal Cosmology. Tarnas’ essay entitled Two Suitors: A Parable may aid the reader’s comprehension of what I articulate below.

——————————————————————————————-

The Copernican Odyssey: From Copernican Illumination through Kantian Skepticism to Tarnasian Participation, or the Dawn of Modern Science to the Wisdom of the Midnight Sun

The 20th Century philosopher, Samuel Alexander (a major influence on Whitehead) articulated what could be said to be the basic metaphysical formula underlying archetypal cosmology: “Time is the Mind of Space.”

Time, for Plato, is a “moving image of eternity,” a living copy of God. Like Alexander, Plato often related Time to the World-Soul, that intermediating matrix that allows invisible eternal forms, or archetypes, smooth passage into the visible motions of the animated physical world. When Plato looked to the heavens he perceived in their hidden harmony the very source and destiny of cosmic history. Time, he intuited, must be created and ordered by the movement of the spheres. Even two thousand years later, planetary motions and qualitative time were still seen to be intimately connected: Copernicus only began his reform of astronomy as a result of being asked by the Church to reform the calendar for liturgical purposes. Without an accurate calendrical sense of the rhythms of time, religious rituals could not tap into and participate in the life cycles of the cosmos and so could not keep humanity synced up with the sky.

By the death of Newton(about 200 years later in 1727), cosmic time was well on its way to being reduced to a uniform mathematical magnitude devoid of all texture and qualitative meaning. Newton himself went to a lot of trouble attempting to calculate the exact date of the crucifixion and of end of days, which suggests that the calendar had already lost its deeper cosmic significance by becoming over-literalized (though to be fair, he did still think it had something to do with lunar cycles). When it came down to it, time, for Newton, was just a constant background rate of change against which the rate of all motion could be measured. Time was t, an algebraic function in a differential equation.

Less than a century later, Kant, who today remains so influential that we might simply refer to him as The Philosopher (as the ancients referred to Aristotle) preserved qualitative time from total annihilation, but only by sequestering in within human subjectivity as a form of inner intuition. Plato’s forms, once living cosmic powers, became for Kant fixed concepts within the human mind with no intrinsic relationship to the dead material objects they supposedly represented. Human consciousness was meaningful, qualitatively rich, and intelligent; but the soulless world upon which it gazed-whether it looked vertically to the sky or horizontally around the earth-was thought purely in terms of mechanism.

The picture painted by Kant is not so clear cut, however; he never suggested that the universe actually is a giant machine. He only argued that the human mind is unequipped to grasp it intellectually in any other way. He speculated, especially in the Critique of Judgment, about the possibilities of some supersensible substratum responsible for the organic formation of the visible world (e.g., the World-Soul), but remained in the end unable to defend such a view with the science and logic available in his day.

By the first few decades of the 20th century, things had changed dramatically: relativity and quantum theories destroyed the Newtonian clock-work universe with even more force than Copernicus’ discovery had shattered the static crystalline spheres of the ancient world.

Physicist Sir James Jeans remarked late in his life that

“Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”

The quantum revolution, in this sense, overturned the mechanistic pretensions of Newtonian science and made possible new forms of empirical, experimental, and experiential participation in the cosmos.

The Western mind has thus come full circle, such that the true spiritual meaning of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory now becomes clear. By astronomically de-centering the earth, Copernicus initiated a mutation in consciousness that simultaneously severed humanity from and sutured it to the solar logos—severed by exiling us from the cyclical-seasonal rhythms of the cosmic womb of geocentrically arrayed constellations; and sutured by lifting the earth into heaven in order to perceive its and the other planet’s motions from the perspective of the Sun. Both the light and the shadow of modernity here come into focus: the excellence of our intelligence was finally able to solve the millennia-old problem of the planets; but as a result of this solution, the Sun no longer could be understood to die into the underworld each night and each winter or to be reborn each morning and each spring. The synchronistic stories within which earth was embedded, especially the death and rebirth of the Sun and Moon, were revealed to be a hoax, an illusion of the senses. Instead, the Sun remained a hero undescended and unrisen; an invincible god unburdened by (e)motion of any kind; a distant, objective observer. This provides a telling analogy for the hubris of the newly empowered solar ego whose great flash of insight had lead it to forget or repress its shadow by pushing the death-rebirth mystery into unconsciousness.

This repression is cosmic in extent, and so requires humanity to enter into a form of personal and collective psychoplanetary therapy, which is just another name for archetypal cosmology. We must rediscover the Soul of Time in the archetypal rhythms of the planetary spheres. Unlike the skeptical Kantian consciousness which we are attempting to transform, ideas must no longer be hidden away in the private recesses of the human mind. The ideas, the forms, the archeptypes and ordering patterns of the visible world, are not projected upon that world by our consciousness, but discovered there in the motion of the heavens, in the growth of plants, in the flight of birds, and the songs of poets. But the planets in particular are the most potent communicative organs of the invisible because all-encompassing World-Soul; they distill the meaning of the Archetype, the Idea, most clearly, since they circle overhead providing a universal background for our particular earthly endeavors. They are the closest image humans have of the Transcendent, the Pleroma, Reality.

In order to correct our characteristically modern hubristic over-emphasis on the Sun (an important but not all-determining influence), the archetypal significance of the outer, transpersonal planets is especially important.

Uranus is in one sense is misnamed, reflecting its role as trickster (i.e., Prometheus), but in another sense is aptly named, since only with its discovery did the human soul breakthrough the threshold of personal death (i.e., Saturn) in order to be initiated into the libratory and immortal wisdom of heaven. The discovery of Uranus, the patron saint of astrology, represents the cutting of the 7 strings of the planetary marionette, and the release of the puppet: from that point forward, the human spirit was free to dance, or not, with the song of the spheres.

Neptune reminds the alienated ego that, despite all its frightened and anxious thrashing, it remains embedded in a nurturing cosmic womb of untold proportions.

And Pluto, the furthest planet from the Sun, is no less powerful for its great distance: it communicates the death-rebirth mystery that the heliocentric re-orientation had temporarily hidden from view, thereby correcting the hubris of the conscious ego by bringing it back into touch with its chthonic source.

Earth, too, must not be forgotten, since she is the planet whose destiny it is to reconcile the others, to integrate their powers into one Self. Consider the strange synchronicity expressed by solar eclipses: the Sun and Moon are the same size, but only from the perspective of Earth. Perhaps this is why Plato elevated geometry above all other sciences, since Earth truly is the measure of all things.

In closing, I will leave you with a short excerpt from one of Kepler’s works on astrology:

“There is a much more noble and miraculous unity of the sky and the earth than the material one. This unity is incapable of doing anything material. It is formal. It moves through forms in this world below, and it does not do so simply through the mute forms, as are found in stone and bone, but rather through the spiritual powers, through soul, through reason — indeed through the grasping of the most subtle things that are present in the whole geometry of things. For earthly creatures are so constituted, that they might thus be capable of channeling the celestial realm.”

Archetypally, astrology is the science of the Night, while astronomy is the science of the Day. Geometry, in the Platonic sense, can unite the two by reminding the sun-worshipping astronomer of the meaning of their embodied earthly perspective. Astrology is concerned more with Wisdom than with Knowledge; it involves participation in what could be called the non-ordinary reality of playful spirit. Knowledge, on the other hand, is concerned with the ordinary time and space of the toiling body, where energy (the cause of motion, and so of time) is defined as the ability to do work. From an astrological perspective, energy is not, or at least not only, work, but, as Blake said, is also “eternal delight.” Energy as eternal delight reflects a cosmic process that is ensouled and archetypally alive.

The Poetics of Copernican Cosmology (footnotes2plato.com)
Plato and Astrology: the Wisdom of the Sky (footnotes2plato.com)
The Universe as a Work of Art (footnotes2plato.com)
The Role of Imagination in the Science of the Stars (footnotes2plato.com)

Speculative Philosophy and Incarnationalism in Whitehead and Meillassoux

Posted by Matthew David Segall on October 4, 2011

I’ve just finished Whitehead’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, published as Religion in the Making (1926). He intended these lectures to “show the same way of thought” displayed in his lectures a year earlier, published as Science and the Modern World, only this time directed at religion. The last several thoughts expressed by Whitehead in these lectures, some of which will be quoted momentarily, brought my mind immediately to the implications of Meillassoux’s way of thinking the inexistence of God. At first glance, the two thinkers appear diametrically opposed in method and in aim. But I am increasingly convinced that there is a covert process theology hiding in the margins of Meillassoux’s texts; or at least that these texts will come to record his eventual conversion to some form of incarnationalism (or what I’ve elsewhere called Christological realism). Meillassoux’s philosophy is an account of the world-process, of that which is and is not, in terms of what is absolutely contingent: hyper-chaos. Whitehead’s philosophy is inclusive of Meillassoux’s hyper-chaos (termed creativity), but it is perhaps most clearly characterized by his panentheistic cosmology. Whitehead is explicit about the metaphysical function of God in the world, while Meillassoux has thus far only speculated on the moral function of God’s future act of world redemption. With the deepening of speculation into the real comes an appreciation, I have found, not only of the “physically wasting” aspect of the universe, but also the “spiritually ascending” (RitM, p. 144). Meillassoux appears to agree, even if he has only suggested God’s existence as a future possibility. Whitehead goes further in articulating a cosmological scheme in which God is the primordial and everlasting actuality; but he does not, in so doing, ignore contingency:

“[The Universe] is thus passing with a slowness, inconceivable in our measure of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from non-entity. The present type of order in the world has arisen from an unimaginable past, and it will find its grave in an unimaginable future” (ibid.).

Extinction is here given its due. But for Whitehead, the arche-fossil is always also a zoö-fossil (as Jacob Sherman put it in his lecture on Meillassoux earlier this year). “The world lives,” says Whitehead, “by its incarnation of God in itself” (ibid.). The world lives. Our daily life is the gift–the miracle–of divine incarnation. We do not merely inherit the past as a mute necessity, but breathe its feelings through the divine element in our experience, “[clothing its] dry bones with the flesh of a real being,” receiving the pains and purposes of its life anew within ourselves (Process & Reality, p. 85). The achievements of times past seem to recede into infinite darkness, but God remembers everything by giving to the passage of finite matters of fact an immortality of spirit.

Knowledge of ancestrality, from an explicitly incarnational perspective, is recognized to be possible only given the felt presence of the World-Soul or Cosmic Christ–that Life which breathes through all things to connect the (dis)orders of the past (chaos) with the order of the present (cosmos) (i.e., which redeems all injustices through the harmonizing power of Love). The omniscience of omnipotence, or absolute knowledge of contingency foretold by Meillassoux leads inevitably, not to nihilism, but to the spiritual realization of omnibenevolence, of the Love that “is before all things,” and in whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). If this analysis is correct, Meillassoux only dismisses fideism to re-affirm its object through the apotheosis of reason.

The New Reformation: Whitehead on Christian Metaphysics (footnotes2plato.com)
The Divine Function in Whitehead: Not Your Grandpa’s Occasionalism (footnotes2plato.com)
Intuitive Thinking vs. Reflective Thought: Harman on Meillassoux (footnotes2plato.com)

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

Posted by Matthew David Segall on August 17, 2011

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.

The Universe as a Work of Art: Images of the Cosmos in Plato, Descartes, and Kepler

Posted by Matthew David Segall on August 16, 2011

In his lecture series become book, Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey defines imagination, not as a specific faculty alongside others, but as “that which holds all other elements in solution” (p. 275). Imagination, according to Dewey, is a uniquely human power, rendering experience conscious through the mutually transforming fusion of old meanings with new situations.

“For while the roots of every experience are found in the interaction of a live creature with its environment, that experience becomes conscious, a matter of perception, only when meanings enter it that are derived from prior experiences. Imagination is the only gateway through which these meanings can find their way into a present interaction; or rather,…the conscious adjustment of the new and the old is imagination…There is always a gap between the here and now of direct interaction and the past interactions whose funded result constitutes the meanings with which we grasp and understand what is now occurring” (ibid.).

In preparation for a talk I’m giving at Burning Man in two weeks on “Platonic astrosophy,” I want to attempt to use Dewey’s understanding of the role of imagination in perception to make Plato’s vision of the Cosmos more accessible to the contemporary mind.

In the Republic, Plato ranks imagination quite low on his hierarchy of knowledge, since it is partially derived from sensory experience. For similar reasons, even though he praises astronomy for “[compelling] the soul to look upwards [leading it] from this world to another,” he nonetheless tells astronomers to “let the [visible] heavens alone” if they hope to “approach the subject in the right way” (book 8). This is because the Plato of the Republic chose to elevate the study of invisible geometrical harmonies known only by the intellect over and above the study of the motion of visible bodies through space. He recognized the same gap described by Dewey between direct perception and meaningful conception, or between sensing and thinking, but instead of calling upon imagination to bridge the gap, Plato often emphasized the difference. In the ancient world, a solution to the difficult problem of the planets had not yet been imagined. Plato was therefore skeptical of the merits of empirical observation in comparison to geometrical reasoning.

In Timaeus, he writes:

“That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.”

Despite his seeming desire to affirm an experiential gap, rather than an imaginal bridge, the Plato of Timaeus goes on to offer a “likely story,” or mythopoeic narrative, concerning the generation of the heavens. Given Plato’s doctrine of anemnesis, discussed at length in Meno and Phaedo, I want to suggest that Plato actually did articulate an imaginal function meant to bridge the cognitive gap between appearance and reality.

The soul, according to Plato, is “the oldest and most divine of all things” (Laws). It participates in the eternal, and so all the soul’s learning while incarnated in an earthly body is really a form of remembrance of knowledge that was already present in it from eternity.

The soul is said to forget its divine origins as a result of the trauma of physical birth. During birth, the soul descends from eternity to earth through the heavenly spheres of time. Once on earth, the now embodied and half-aware soul gazes back into the sky in awesome wonder. From childhood on, the soul dimly intuits its true birthplace in the stars, but only a lifelong dedication to the philosophical contemplation of the geometric motions of the stars and planets can finally cure the soul’s forgetfulness. This is why Plato praises the study of the stars as a divine science (let us call it “astrosophy”).

Just as Dewey suggests that the imagination unites the old with the new, the already experienced with present experience, Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis allows the embodied experience of the beauty of the present sky to act on the soul so as to remind it of the knowledge lying dormant in it from eternity.

Plato’s reasoning goes something like this: if the visible universe is intelligible, then it must be a work of art. Its beauty is thus the sensible sign of its creation by an invisible intelligence. In Timaeus, Plato seems to hold to two contradictory opinions on the nature of the creation and its creator. He suggests on the one hand that the universe is a “living thing” continually birthed out of a formless maternal Receptacle, or World Soul. On the other hand, he suggests that the universe is a “crafted thing,” the mere imitation or copy of an Idea, formed by a paternal demiurge into a “moving image of eternity.” The universe is conceived of as having both a mother and a father, both an immanent bearer who participates in its coming-to-life and a craftsman who orchestrates it from beyond; it remains unclear, however, how the two are to be married.

At this point, I’m forced to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that even “the acutest searcher, the lovingest disciple could never tell what Platonism was; indeed admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question, from him” (journal entry, Oct. 1845).

Instead of looking to Plato for a further account of the maternal and paternal aspects of creation, let us turn to two early modern thinkers influenced, in the own way, by Plato: Descartes and Kepler. Their differences as regards the proper study of the Cosmos may provide us with a way forward. Both were Platonic in the sense that they believed in the transcendent origin of mathematics, but the similarity ends here. Descartes invented a way to translate geometric figures into algebraic equations, thereby enabling abstract measurement of the geometrically continuous by way of the numerically discrete. Kepler, on the other hand, did not think algebra was relevant to the study of cosmology:

“I do not treat these matters by numbers or by Algebra, but by the investigation of Spirit; my interest in these matters is not for keeping a ledger but for explaining the cause of things” (Harmonices mundi, 1619).

Descartes, aligning himself more with Plato’s paternal notion of creation, found evidence of a transcendent cause in his innate knowledge of geometric form. His own cognitive activity as a mathematician, in other words, was understood to be the effect of his having been created in the image of a divine craftsman. Kepler’s approach, in contrast, suggests a more maternal notion of creation, where participation in the archetypal pattern given expression by the heavens reminds the human soul of its embeddedness in the World Soul. For Kepler, the musical harmony of the spheres grounds geometry in the experience of beauty rather than in the intelligibility of abstract numbers.

In short, while Descartes thought the universe was an imitation of mathematical formalisms in the mind of an absent demiurge, Kepler saw it as the body of God, a living symbol of divinity. Philosophical contemplation of the heavens, for Descartes, leads to demonstrative knowledge of their eternal algebraic form; for Kepler, it leads to generative participation in the same life presently animating them…

I hope this admittedly oversimplified characterization of these thinkers was at least somewhat illustrative of the tension inherent in the Platonic worldview. I think a more developed account of the ontological role of imagination will help to marry the masculine and feminine poles of Plato’s cosmology.

Plato and Astrology: the Wisdom of the Sky (footnotes2plato.com)
The Poetics of Copernican Cosmology (footnotes2plato.com)
The Role of Imagination in the Science of the Stars (footnotes2plato.com)

Whiteheadian Panentheism and Ralph Pred’s “Onflow”

Posted by Matthew David Segall on August 8, 2011

I’ve just been skimming Ralph Pred’s naturalization of Whitehead’s process-experiential ontology (see Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience, 2005). Pred attempts to naturalize Whitehead by explaining away the need for any divine function in cosmogenesis, but in critiquing Whitehead’s speculative scheme, Pred focuses exclusively on the unconscious, primordial nature of God, leaving unmentioned the conscious pole of the Universe: God’s consequent nature. Instead of placing Creativity (infinite potentiality) into relation with God (determinate actualization), Pred believes he has found a “less interpretive name for the ultimate” (p. 180): a unified stream of experiential becoming called “onflow.” For Pred, onflow “is less susceptible [than Creativity/God] to a reading in terms of divine purposiveness, or an evolutionary accrual of value” (p. 181). This is certainly true, but I wonder why –if we are indeed to adhere to a radical empiricism as articulated by Pred– “divine purposiveness” and “accrual of value” are not considered to be ingredients in the experiential habitat humanity has inherited from the prior evolution of the world. An ordered creation has emerged and continues to develop; we live in a civilized cosmos, albeit one enduring amid a background of death, chaos, and inertia. Still, these negative elements thus far remain the background. The love of life and existence continue to win out over ignorance, hatred and extinction. The present Universe appears to be in the most complex and radiant state it will ever achieve in its macrocosmic evolutionary history, coincidentally just as human consciousness is gaining the technological capacity to scientifically study it. In several billion years, according to some astrophysicists, the inflation of space between galaxies will have accelerated beyond light-speed, meaning that even if a future alien civilization becomes technologically capable, it would never see any evidence of its own intergalactic history. But entropy is more extravagant a metaphysical ultimate than Creativity given the circumstances of our current cosmic moment. Yes, human civilization is bringing about the 6th Mass Extinction Event, the first in 65 million years; even so, more biodiversity exists today than ever before in our planet’s history. We have every reason to believe, given that so many mass extinctions have occurred before on this planet, that life on earth will survive and continue to flourish.

The speculative imagination can discover the divinity at the base of actuality only if the philosopher is able to think through the grave implications of her own incarnation. Philosophy is, first and foremost, learning to die. Only after encountering the Mystery of death can the embodied soul awaken its supersensory organs of imaginative and intuitive perception, granting it participation in the everlasting World-Soul. Only then does the Universe openly display itself as an ongoing achievement of spiritual expression, a scintillating symbol of the divine mind at work in the world. My body and its ego will die, but the soul of the world will go on. This ongoingness, and the objective immortality of the experiential valuation of each and every occasion, is God’s consequent nature.

Pred maintains that human valuation and aesthetic enjoyment can be accounted for without God, solely by the “hybrid feeling of self [and] the memory and imagination, stirred by aim in the concresence in question” (p. 178). Whitehead’s panentheism, in contrast, reflects his desire to affirm the highest aspirations of the human spirit. In Process and Reality (p. 31-32), he writes:

”[The primordial, non-temporal accident] is here termed ‘God’; because the contemplation of our natures, as enjoying real feelings derived from the timeless source of all order, acquires that ‘subjective form’ of refreshment and companionship at which religions aim.”

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I do think Pred argues convincingly that one need not adopt Whitehead’s fully-deployed panentheistic metaphysics to recognize the value of a “concrescual approximation.” One can remain agnostic on the issue of a divine function while still accepting the reality of meaning and purpose in human life. But I also believe the human soul is capable of directly experiencing the divine function in the world, of feeling the eternal aims of God as they embrace the process of infinite creativity and lure chaos toward cosmos.

Plato and Astrosophy: The Wisdom of the Sky

Posted by Matthew David Segall on August 5, 2011

The School of Athens (detail). Fresco, Stanza ...

Image via Wikipedia

Scholarship has been unable to determine who the true writer of Epinomis was, but it is generally assumed that the text available to us today is either what remains of an unfinished wax-tablet manuscript left behind by Plato at his death in 347 BCE, or is an extra chapter added later by a student of Plato’s, the astronomer Philip of Opus, who is known to have transcribed the first 12 books of Laws after his teacher’s death. Whatever the case may be, we can at least say that the dialogue provides us with perhaps the earliest example of a Platonic answer to the central question of philosophy: what must a mortal know in order to be wise?

In the dialogue, a Cretan, a Spartan, and an Athenian are said to come together to discuss that which is more important than their respective forms of political organization: namely, Wisdom. Epinomis seems more than just a clerical, but a highly significant title for a Platonic dialogue, since certainly what should come after (“éπι”) the laws (“νομίς”) of one’s local polis is a discussion of the universal principles from which all human laws are derived by way of feeble mimicry.

Plato wrote the Laws only after the political utopia he outlined in the Republic had failed to materialize in 4th century Syracuse. It represents the opinion of an older, more cynical thinker for whom the notion of rule by virtuous philosopher-kings came to be replaced by the “second-best” rule of constitutional law. With the addition of the Epinomis as a 13th chapter, Plato’s younger idealism is allowed to shine through the wear and tear of age. In it, he (or his student) points to the importance of an understanding of the harmonious motions of the heavens, because they transcend the petty disagreements of earthly men and so provide all with a publicly apparent source of Wisdom.

The Athenian begins the dialogue by offering an insight articulated by Gautama Buddha more than a century earlier (483 BCE), that, basically, life is suffering:

“I say it is impossible for men to be blessed and happy, except a few ; that is, so long as we are living : I limit it to that. But one may rightly hope to attain after death all the things for whose sake one may strive both in life to live as nobly as one can and in death to find a noble end. What I say is [973d] no subtle doctrine, but a thing that all of us, Greeks and foreigners alike, in some way perceive — that from the beginning existence is difficult for every living creature : first, partaking of the state of an embryo, then again, being born, and further, being reared and educated — all these processes involve a vast amount of toil, [974a] we all agree.”

Wisdom, then, begins to dawn upon the human soul only after she has realized that life is full of suffering, that happiness and blessedness are impossible until she has dealt squarely and honestly with the traumas of birth and death. The death-rebirth mysteries at Eleusis into which Plato was initiated provided the ancient Greek soul with an opportunity to die in spirit before dying in flesh. The philosopher’s task upon being reborn is to integrate the vision of heaven and immortality with their participation in political life on earth. This is no easy task.

The Athenian continues:

“the soul firmly believes and divines that in some fashion she has [Wisdom], [974c] but what it is that she has, or when, or how, she is quite unable to discover. Is not this a fair picture of our puzzle about wisdom and the inquiry that we have to make?”

As Plato articulates in the 7th letter, wherein he reflects on his failed experiment in Syracuse, Wisdom cannot be finally attained through verbal discussion of names, through written formula, or through sensory experience of any kind. All that can be said for certain is that the soul knows that Wisdom is possible for herself, that it is asleep within her and can sometimes be awakened through the application of the proper technique (i.e., philosophy).

The Athenian then runs through the various technologies employed by human intelligence: the cultivation of land and the production of food, the building of homes and the smithing of various tools and weapons, artistic reproduction like poetry and painting, the arts of sailing and of medicine. He concludes that none of them are productive of wisdom, since each deals only in conjecture and opinion. The only technique productive of Wisdom–the only way to become “a wise and good citizen, at once a just ruler and subject of his city, in tune with himself and the world as well”–is the study of the heavens, of the stars and the cosmos, the ordered motion of which is responsible for “[giving] number to the whole race of mortals [976d].”
The Athenian suggests that the rhythmical motions of the sun, the moon, and the planets through the sky taught the human soul to count and to record time. Modern paleoanthropology lends some support to this idea, since one of the earliest known forms of writing consisted of notches carved into bone fragments to record the phases of the moon. This science of seasonal time learned by contemplating the motions of the heavens, he argues, provides the foundation of every other technique that has subsequently been acquired through the exercise of human intelligence. “Thanks to these celestial events,” he says,

“we have crops, the earth bears food for all living things, and the winds that blow and the rains that fall are not violent or without measure. If on the contrary anything turns out for the worse, we must not blame God [who orders the heavens and provides for their participation in earthly events], but humans, for not rightly managing their own lives [by living in harmony with the seasonal motions of the planets] [979a].”

At this point in their search for Wisdom, the Athenian, the Cretan, and the Spartan agree that they will need to pray for the guidance of God himself if they hope to understand the true meaning of the planetary spheres and the process of their generation. Philosophy here becomes beholden to the power of faith. The seekers of wisdom pray that they might be granted Her council, that the Soul of the World might speak within their humble and open hearts.

The Athenian then says, “as a whole, soul is older than any body. Do you recall? You surely must remember.” He adds to his anamnesiac appeal that the celestial spheres are to be considered “living things…endowed with the finest body and the best and happiest soul [980d].” Either these spheres are indestructible, or “each of them is content to possess such a vast length of life that they could never possibly demand more [982a].”

Wisdom, the Soul of the World whose voice is made audible in the Song of the Spheres, is embodied by Plato’s Fifth element, also mentioned in Timaeus and his 7th letter. Soul is without name or color or shape or weight, no more made of fire than it is earth; rather, it is the invisible intelligent force underlying the harmonious activity of the other Four elements.

“Let us suppose,” suggests the Athenian,

“that [the divine stars and the creatures of the earth] are two kinds of living things, that both are visible, the one made entirely, as it might seem, of fire, the other of earth, and that the earthly kind moves in disorder, while the one of fire moves in perfect order. Now what moves in disorder (which is exactly how the kind of living things around us behave for the most part) we ought to consider unintelligent. But if something has an orderly path in the heavens we should treat that as powerful evidence of its intelligence. For if it always proceeds in its course uniformly and without variation, and always acts and is affected in the same way, it gives ample evidence of intelligent life. The necessity of the soul that possesses intelligence is by far the most powerful of all necessities. For it is a ruler, not a subject, and so ordains its decrees. When a soul reaches the best decision in accordance with the best intelligence, the result, which is truly to its mind, is perfectly unalterable…Humans should admit as evidence of the intelligence of the stars and this entire movement of theirs, the fact that they always do the same things, because they are doing what was decided an astonishingly long time ago and do not change their decision back and forth, sometimes doing one thing and at others doing something else, wandering and changing their orbits. This opinion of ours is the exact opposite of what most people believe–that because they do the same things uniformly they do not possess soul. The crowd has followed the fools in supposing that the human race is intelligent and alive because it undergoes change, whereas the divine is unintelligent because it remains in the same orbits. But in fact a person can adopt views that are finer, better and acceptable, and could have understood that whatever always operates uniformly, without variation, and through the same causes is for that very reason to be regarded as intelligent. Such a person could also understand that this is the nature of the stars, the finest of all things to behold, and further that moving through their march and dance, the finest and most magnificent dance there is, they bring to pass what all living things need [982a-e].”

The Athenian establishes that one Life moves through all things earthly and astral, that a single invisible Soul animates each and all. Even if the visible planetary spheres are but the elemental images of Wisdom, rather than the eternal gods themselves, still “no other image will appear more beautiful or more widely shared by all humans than these [984b].” He goes on to discuss the role of various atmospheric mediators, or daemons (i.e., angels and demons), who facilitate communication between gods and humans:

“…some of them have had various types of encounters with humans, whether through dreams in sleep or in audible communications through divine voices or prophecies to certain people whether healthy or ill or even at the point of death. The resulting beliefs affect both individuals and communities and have been the origin of many religious rites for many people and will be in the future as well [985c].”

Religious revelation, in this sense, is true, a fact about the Universe that reason must take into its consideration of the whole. But revelation must be checked through comparison to the meanings of the visible motion of the stars and planets, since “the worst people are those that do not dare to declare to us the gods that really do appear to us [985d].” Private, inner revelation is not enough. The words of God’s messengers must be plainly present for all to see and hear. The sun, moon, and other planets are these words, publicly available to all with ears to hear and eyes to see. Each one of them “contributes to the perfection of the visible cosmos established by the most divine law of all [986c].” In this way, the science of the heavens, astrology (which is not other than astronomy for Plato), is said to have provided humanity with God’s true revelation of Wisdom.

The Athenian summarizes what Plato treats more fully in Timaeus concerning the character of the 8 “powers,” or “orbits.” The first 7 appear to move to the right (from East to West), while the 8th, the cosmic sphere of fixed stars, appears to move to the left (from West to East). By holding together and harmonizing the different movements of the 7 inner spheres with the stable identity of the outer 8th, the World Soul creates time, perpetually birthing the visible Universe as “a moving image of eternity.” Through the unifying animation of the World Soul, all things in heaven and earth are made full of gods (991d).

Without the study of the heavens, according to the Athenian, “no one in cities will ever become happy [992a].” A true participatory democracy, where every person is both ruler of themselves and subject of their civilization–each full members of the Nocturnal Council capable of contemplating the true meaning of the morning sun–requires that all be initiates into the Mysteries of the Sky.

“Let no Greek ever fear that being mortal we should not concern ourselves with the divine Universe. We should have quite the opposite thought; the divine [i.e., the Cosmos] is never without intelligence nor is it at all ignorant of human nature, but it knows that if it teaches we will follow along and learn what we are taught [988b].”

De Anima Mundi (footnotes2plato.com)
Soul and World (footnotes2plato.com)
The Poetics of Copernican Cosmology (footnotes2plato.com)
Archetypal Cosmology

Philosophy Blogging, OOO/SR, Nihilism, and God

Posted by Matthew David Segall on July 28, 2011

It is difficult to describe the effects of the blogosphere on consciousness, especially when the information communicated via blogs pretends to be philosophical. The blog, as a medium, has not yet been swallowed as radio by TV, or the printed word by the digital hyperlink, and so gaining perspective on its effects remains difficult. We’re still in it, like a child in her mother’s womb. I think by the graces of, and so cannot yet understand, this electronic medium. I think the obscurity of the blogosphere’s effects are magnified for academic philosophers, since there are no disciplinary boundaries carving it up in order to assure that interlocutors play the same language games (which is what always happens at university conferences). Academic philosophy, as practiced at conferences and published in journals, is usually myopically specialized. Arguments take place within some narrow field of relevance, while the truly important questions of life on earth remain backgrounded. This is, of course, a caricature. But so long as we are caricaturing, let us hear from Alan Watts:

“This is the current movement in philosophy: logical analysis says you mustn’t think about existence. It’s a meaningless concept. Therefore philosophy has become the discussion of trivia. No good philosopher lays awake nights worrying about the destiny of man and the nature of God and all that sort of thing. A philosopher today is a practical fellow who comes to the university with a briefcase at 9 and leaves at 5. He does philosophy during the day—which is discussing whether certain sentences have meaning and if so what. He would come to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it.”

Even where philosophy begins not with pretense, but with the love of wonder and the desire to know the nature of things, it remains subject to the effects on consciousness of the variety of species of media used to communicate it. Modern consciousness, despite its claim to have dropped sophistry for science, learns to think only given the cognitive augmentation provided by the alphabet.* Postmodern consciousness, similarly, thinks by the graces of the blogosphere, the apogee of the electronic medium. The democratization of information has now become at least technologically feasible, if not politically actual. I don’t think the rise of the blog signals the end of the university (or at least I should hope not), but it does mean that the individual is now shouldering a good deal more of the weight of human knowledge than before.

I am in graduate school myself, though I attend CIIS, an academically marginalized school started by an Indian yogi in the middle of the New Age capital of the world (Watts was once on the faculty). It is impossible for me to escape this context, even though I aim to think individually much in the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment…” -Self-Reliance

Thought does not take place in a vacuum, however. Philosophy is not best done alone in the woods. Institutions, with all due respect to the likes of Emerson and Thoreau, are an indispensable part of the evolution of consciousness. The blogosphere is alluring to me because it is both individualizing and institutionalizing. It is a distributed institution of localized individuals, each capable of participating in the co-production of a planetary ecology of ideas, images, and symbols unhindered by the disciplinary boundaries of traditional universities.

This is the ideal, at least. All of this meta-reflection on philosophy blogging is by way of introduction to some final thoughts in response to what is by now old news, namely the discussion surrounding nihilism and theology that took place earlier this month amongst OOOers. Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Tim Morton, Adam Robbert, Jason Hills, Tom Sparrow, Leon Niemoczynski, and others all took part.

More recently, Kris Coffield over at Fractured Politics has posted a summary and some suggestions. I wanted to clarify some assumptions he makes regarding my position.

I have argued that, without some divine function (whether of the theist, pantheist, or panentheist variety), ideas and meanings can have no reality in the universe. I make this claim in order to remain metaphysically consistent, not because I think atheism is immoral. Obviously, atheists can still be ethical people, operating in the world with meaning, purpose, and even humanitarian idealism. I would never dispute this. What I have argued is that atheists who are also scientific materialists/naturalists risk falling into blatant contradiction unless they are able to articulate how thinking, feeling, and willing (faculties normally associated with consciousness) remain possible despite their metaphysical commitment to a thoroughly non-teleological, disenchanted cosmology. If it is the case that the universe operates according to efficient causality alone (as most materialists traditionally assert), then how is it that human beings are capable of entertaining ideas and engaging in meaningful projects? The validity of scientific knowledge rests upon the assumption that the thoughts and purposes of scientists are real. The atheistic materialist is left with two options in order to remain consistent with this assumption: either ideas and meanings are uniquely human capacities not present in the rest of the universe, or human consciousness itself is an epiphenomenal illusion that neuroscience will eventually explain in mechanistic terms. I think both of these options are inadequate: emergentist dualism is too anthropocentric, and eliminativist monism is too mechanomorpic. I maintain that the human soul is not ontologically distinct from the rest of the universe because the universe is ensouled. Whitehead’s panentheist conception of God functions in a way similar to the World-Soul as described in Timaeus; only, instead of actively shaping passive matter as Plato’s demiurge, Whitehead’s dipolar God bends the infinitely diversifying flow of Creativity into the finite occasions of a unifying Cosmos (and is bent, in turn, by these same occasions).

Coffield argues that, despite my apparent support of the anthrodecentric tendencies of OOO, I am “ultimately unable to escape” a human-centric ontology. He continues:

“Even if the noosphere is more putatively sophisticated than the nonhuman objectsphere (a debatable point), it does not follow, from an object-orientation, that the relations of the former should be given precedence over the latter. Instead, as Levi Bryant has previously indicated, existence entails perpetual differentiation, such that to be is to differ. Thus, the very concept of a singular noosphere or inanimate objectsphere is conceptually shaky, and any entity inserted to bridge the sides of this infinitely regressive binary—God, game, golden goose, or Gandalf—is rendered, to borrow Morton’s word, irrelevant.”

Much of the philosophizing I do on this blog reflects my struggle to steer clear of all binaries by weaving Wisdom’s wandering story into a differentiated whole. There are many objects, many perspectives, both human-related and not. In calling them all objects, I aim to think the Absolute, or the identity of identity and difference. My philosophizing is a cosmologizing, and in that sense, all my thinking is in the service of anthropogenesis. I aim to cosmologize the human by anthropomorphizing the Cosmos. Perhaps this sounds tautological, but if we think in terms of process or genesis instead of being or ontos, the Anthropic Principle becomes among the most profound of metaphysical insights. Anthropos is already implicit in Cosmos, not because our particular species represents the supreme achievement of the universe, but because thinking has always been a more than human activity rooted in the nature of reality itself.

“The forces which are at work inside my body”, suggests Rudolf Steiner,

“…are the same as those which exist outside. Therefore I am really identical with the objects; not, however, “I” in so far as I am a perception of myself as subject, but “I” in so far as I am a part of the universal world process [...] The universal, primordial Being permeating all humanity thus takes hold of us through our thinking. Life within reality, filled with thought content, is at the same time life in God.” -Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, p. 98 and 236

I do not think that the noösphere should take precedence over the non-human universe, because I do not conceive of the universe as lacking in νοῦς or ψυχή. The noösphere is a cosmic event, something the whole of Gaia is doing in conjunction with the solar system and galaxy within which it is nested. God, or the World-Soul (ψυχή κόσμου), is not irrelevant to philosophy if the philosopher hopes to think the Cosmos. If, as Bryant suggests, “to be is to differ,” then it is nihilism, indeed, that we are left with. Not that I want to homogenize the individualities of reality; I would just rephrase Bryant’s important insight: “to become is to differ.” Process philosophy is then an attempt to identify and re-enact the divine aim of creative differentiation, to participate in its latent holotropic tendencies by uncovering the divine presence in all temporal things. Only then does the Universe become a reality.

Coffield continues:

“If nihilism fears really are concerns over the implications of anthrodecentrism (a clever term coined by Segall) for value judgement, then demonstrating the capacity for deriving value under realist conditions may allay anxiety about affirmations of meaninglessness, making the more radical articulations of object-oriented ontology mare palatable. Crafting a coherent variant of anthrodecentric normativity can be accomplished, in one sense, through an appeal to naturalistic realism…[or] a radically flattened version of natural selection [productive of] moral norms consonant with an instrumental social rationality, wherein moral arrangements that impede group interests animate the potential for unrest, creating feedback that promotes the development of norms aligned with social rationality.”

In order to avoid being misunderstood as advocating subject-centrism over object-centrism, or unity over variety, or hierarchy over ecology, I should further unpack my cosmotheandrism. Attempts to naturalize our moral needs/wants in this way seems to me to be a form of greedy reductionism neglectful of the extent to which the ultimate values of the Universe pre-exist the species level, since it is these values (like Beauty, Goodness, and Truth) that provide the metaphysical condition for the possibility of local accomplishments of normativity. Reducing morality to an accident of social and/or natural selection does not lead to moral realism, but to relativism. If we seek an object-orientation in ethics, then value must be rooted in the world process itself. Our human characteristics are microcosmic inflections of the divine character of the macrocosm.

This microcosm-macrocosm relation is not deterministic or coercive, such that God becomes responsible for every decision made by human beings or any other organism. The World-Soul is not a universal tyrant, but a poet, who, “with tender patience [leads] it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (Process and Reality, p. 346).

Whitehead goes on:

“God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast [...] God and the World stand over against each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn apart: each is all in all. Thus each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God. In God’s nature, permanence is primordial and flux is derivative from the World: in the World’s nature, flux is primordial and permanence is derivative from God. Also the World’s nature is a primordial datum for God; and God’s nature is a primordial datum for the World. Creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and flux when it has reached its final term which is everlastingness—the Apotheosis of the World. Opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement. In their unity, they inhibit or contrast. God and the World stand to each other in this op-posed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finites, actualities seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty” (ibid., p. 348-349).

—————————————————-

*The alphabet begins with A. A is for aleph, א, which to a mystic’s ear symbolizes to the polar unity (or Trinitarity) of God:

“The letter can been seen as being composed of [1] an upper yud, [2] a lower yud, and [3] a vav leaning on a diagonal. [1]The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffible aspects of God while [2]the lower yud represents God’s revelation and presence in the world. [3]The vav (“hook”) connects the two realms.” -Wikipedia

God and Religious Experience in Whitehead: another response to Levi Bryant

Posted by Matthew David Segall on July 16, 2011

Levi Bryant has problematized my attempt to clarify Whitehead’s position on the function of divinity in the universe. He writes:

“You make the claim that without God there would be chaos and no order. This is a problematic claim for two reasons. First, you have repeatedly tried to claim that God isn’t supposed to explain anything, yet here you are evoking God to explain order. Second, it is unclear why, 1) God is required to explain order (the fact that order exists doesn’t entail that it must have been designed), and 2) it is not clear what God would explain about this order in such an account…”

I will admit that I am still thinking through these issues myself. Whitehead’s writing in this area is illuminating, but much remains obscure. I am struggling to “think with” Whitehead, not so much because his “arguments” are convincing, but because I come to his work already sharing many of the problems he found interesting. One of these is the problem of God, but I did not come to philosophize about God in order to rationalize my faith. God was not at first a religious belief for me. Though I went to temple and church as a child (mixed religious family), I began referring to myself as an atheist at 12 years old after learning a bit about cosmology from Steven Hawking and biology from Richard Dawkins. I remained highly skeptical of religious claims as my understanding of science and cultural relativity grew throughout my teens. Then, as a 17 year old, I learned a bit about the psychology of religion from Carl Jung. I came to to realize that our scientific narratives about the origins of the universe and life on earth are still mythically structured and shaped by cultural attitudes. Jung lead me into a deeper study of anthropology and the evolution of consciousness, allowing me to bracket the “reality” of God in order to consider God’s effect as a symbol, or archetypal complex, on the history of the human psyche. Soon after, I discovered the work of cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (a friend and associate of Jung’s), who completely transformed the way I conceive of the relationship between rational and religious consciousness. Eventually, like Whitehead, I came back to religion and theology (I feel most at home in the dialogue and practice emerging from the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity) as a result of philosophical reflection upon life. As a teenager, I thought God seemed like a belief added to experience by religious doctrine. After reading Jung and Gebser, I came to see the experience of God as constitutive of the order and harmony of our human consciousness of the world. After reading Whitehead, I saw that, for the sake of metaphysical coherence, God must also be constitutive of the order of the world itself.

One of Whitehead’s colleagues at Harvard, Ernest Hocking, reports that (Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on his Philosophy, 1963, p. 16), in regards to the concept of God, Whitehead once told him:

“I should never have included it, if it had not been strictly required for descriptive completeness. You must set all your essentials into the foundation. It is no use putting up a set of terms, and then remarking, ‘Oh, by the way, I believe there’s a God.”

Is God an explanation for order in Whitehead’s system? Not exactly. God is not best described as the cause of harmony, nor the designer of the world, since Whitehead’s God is involved in the world, as much the effect of its harmony as its cause. It would still be true to say that, without God, chaos would reign; but this doesn’t necessarily mean God is the explanation for order. Rather, God is the very presence of order in the world, not an absent designer who orchestrates the world’s order from a position beyond it. God is embedded in the world as a kind of aesthetic gravity holding otherwise conflicting possibilities together so as to transform them into novel contrasts in the experiences of actual occasions. Actual occasions are the only reasons for Whitehead, which is to say that God is not an explanation for the order brought forth by their individual decisions. God is also an actual occasion, a creature of Creativity, but God’s creatureliness is everlasting. As a result, God’s primordial nature conditions all temporal experiences as an ingredient in the concrescence of those experiences. God is what mediates between the infinite possibilities of Creativity and the finite actualities of the Universe. God is the World-Soul allowing ideas passage into reality. In this sense, Whitehead’s reformed Platonism is similar to Schelling’s, who built on the description of the World-Soul and its role in the realization of Ideas given by Plato in the Timeaus (I unpack these ideas in this essay on Schelling).

It may still remain unclear to Bryant exactly why God became necessary in the course of Whitehead’s, and my own, reflection upon reality. As I said at the outset, I struggle to think with Whitehead because I share his sense of what matters, of what the problems of philosophy ought to be given the facts of experience. Given these facts, as I experience them, the most urgent philosophical task is to bring together the insights of scientific experiment and religious experience into one rational scheme of thought.

Bryant writes:

“Throughout this discussion you have repeatedly appealed to 30,000 years of human religious experience that philosophy has a duty to account for. You seem to take this experience as evidence that there must be some ontological truth to the claims of religion (i.e., that God exists). Over at Knowledge Ecology’s blog I pointed out that there are at least 30,000 years of racism and sexism and that the form of your argument about God seems to commit you and Whitehead to the position that the ontological claims of racism and sexism must contain some truth.”

Adam has offered a response that I am largely in agreement with. He distinguishes between facts of experience and truths of experience. Religion, racism, and sexism are each facts of experience, though I am not prepared to claim that the content of these experiential modes necessarily corresponds to reality. I take a broadly Jamesian/Deweyan/Peircian approach to truth, however, in that I am more concerned with the effects of our descriptions of reality than with their accurate correspondence to a supposedly pre-given world. The truth of the claims arising out of religious experience are to be judged, from the pragmaticist perspective, by a “consideration of the experimental differences in the conduct of life which would conceivably result from the affirmation or denial of the [claim] in question,” as Dewey puts it (Century Dictionary, 1909). I think certain religious ideas and meanings stand on far better footing than racism and sexism in this respect, since the later two modes of thought have only been productive of hatred, violence, and injustice. I judge the experiential possibilities of racism and sexism to be undesirable based on “the experimental differences in the conduct of life” that their practice has been productive of in the past. No doubt some religious ideas have also been productive of violence and injustice, but I think it would be disingenuous to claim that religion has offered nothing positive to humanity. My pragmaticism may go beyond traditional definitions at this point, but when dealing with the ontology of the claims arising from experience, I take a radically participatory view. The history of humanity represents the Universe’s struggle to discover its own nature: we are the Universe’s conscious testing ground of truth, beauty, and goodness. These are ideals which are still in the process of working themselves out in our (and the universe’s) history. It is not simply a given that racism is wrong; its wrongness is a fact that must be discovered in our moral feelings and defended by our ethical practices. If Nazi Germany had won WW2, and its Final Solution had succeeded, we might be living in a world where the experiential facts confirmed the truth of racism. Fortunately, because of an outpouring of ethical will, this possibility was kept at bay. It has now become an ethical fact that genocidal racism is wrong, but only because the moral feelings of one sector of global society won out over another. Goodness is always at stake, always being defined and redefined in the adventure of civilization.

I’ve written about what a participatory spirituality looks like for me. I have more work to do to flesh it out, of course…

Finally, Bryant writes:

In your post over at footnotes2plato you make the odd claim that somehow naturalism prevents us from fighting neoliberal capitalism. This ignores the rather obvious fact that 1) Marxist thought is a naturalistic position, 2) those European countries that are most socialized are also overwhelmingly secular, and 3) religion has repeatedly sided with capitalism throughout history and provided support for forces that underly these forms of capitalism.

I would make the claim that atheistic naturalism (wherein the whole point of the scientific endeavor becomes the thorough disenchantment of the universe) makes criticism of neoliberal capitalism more difficult, since I think such critiques must penetrate to the metaphysical underpinnings of capitalism in order to be effective. These underpinnings include what Donna Haraway has referred to as “productionism”:

“Productionism and its corollary, humanism, come down to the story line that ‘man makes everything, including himself, out of the world that can only be resource and potency to his project and active agency’” -”The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies (1992), p. 297

Marx’s humanistic orientation and productionist metaphysics suggests to me that his naturalistic assumptions leave the deeper metaphysical structure of capitalism (that which makes it so socially and ecologically disruptive) untouched. Also, even if Marx himself was less than enthusiastic about religion, there are plenty of examples of religious communists, for whom it is religious experience that compels them to adopt communist ideals. Marx’s may have been a naturalistic position, but the Marxisms emerging in his wake have not always been.

As for “secularized” Europe, polls suggest that as much as 76% of Sweden, 80% of Denmark, 79% of Norway, 61% of France, 72% of Germany, 71% of the Netherlands, and 78% of the United Kingdom either believe in God or in”some sort of spirit or life force.” Church attendance may be down across much of the Continent, but this seems to be reflective of a move toward less conventional, more individual forms of post-religious spiritual expression.

A religious revival itself will not necessarily put a dent in capitalism. Žižek is fond of pointing out how New Age spirituality only functions to support the commodification of religious practice. And in some sense, even religion as understood esoterically (in both Western and Eastern contexts) may only foster a withdrawal into the apoliticism of mystical contemplation. This is why I think Whitehead’s philosophical project is so important, since it presents us with a way to bring science, religion, and politics into a more mutually enhancing relationship.

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Footnotes to Plato

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." -Alfred North Whitehead

Tag Archives: world-soul

The Beginning and the End of Positive Philosophy

More Reflections on James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology

The Copernican Odyssey: From Kantian Skepticism to Tarnasian Participation, or from the Dawn of Modern Science to the Wisdom of the Midnight Sun

Speculative Philosophy and Incarnationalism in Whitehead and Meillassoux

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

The Universe as a Work of Art: Images of the Cosmos in Plato, Descartes, and Kepler

Whiteheadian Panentheism and Ralph Pred’s “Onflow”

Plato and Astrosophy: The Wisdom of the Sky

Philosophy Blogging, OOO/SR, Nihilism, and God

God and Religious Experience in Whitehead: another response to Levi Bryant

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