God and Nature in Schelling and Whitehead (Dialogue with Rahul Sam)

I had a great time speaking with Rahul over the weekend. He’d been reading my book on Schelling and Whitehead, so we mostly discussed the philosophy of nature and process theology.

I began by discussing death and human destiny in the long term, emphasizing the existential quandary that humans face as animals aware of our own mortality. I’m critical of materialist perspectives that feign a care-free attitude in the face of what is assumed to be simply “the end” for our consciousness, as if when the heart stops and the brain shuts down, nothing whatsoever of us remains except the memories of us in those still warm. And one day, they, too will all be dead. In short, the materialist response to death is “Get over it.”

I believe this flippant attitude conceals a deeper desperation. The materialist’s attempt to brush off death only means it has not yet been fully felt through to the end of its implications. If death brings simple termination, the entire human project is a sham. All that we value and care about in life can only be a temporary make-believe charade concealing the inevitably of total annihilation.

Far from facing the reality of death, I believe such casual dismissals are a form of death denial. The fact is that death remains a mystery to us. We can attempt all means of explaining it away as if we were outside it looking in. We are not. We are always already inside of death. It has swallowed us whole. Facing it is facing our own deepest fears about ourselves: that we don’t matter.

Well, maybe, we do. Maybe there is no escape from reality, no way to simply cease existing. Maybe our consciousness is not incidental to our physical bodies and the rest of the cosmos, but intrinsic to it, an intensification of its essential nature, an expression of its meaning. Maybe consciousness is the inside of the whole world, and not just a flicker of electricity in our skulls.

Much of the rest of our conversation concerns the role of religion, spirituality, and the concept of God in human life. Rahul asks about the idea of “sacred secularity,” which involves integrating spiritual insights into secular contexts.