Metaphysics and Theology (a dialogue with Jacob Sherman)

This dialogue with my colleague Jake Sherman was recorded last week at our graduate program’s annual retreat. 

Below is a transcript: 

Matt: Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us this afternoon for a dialogue on metaphysics and theology, which I hope will be both interesting and entertaining. You should have found the score cards on your seat to decide who ends up holding forth in the most profound way. I’m going to take five or six minutes to lay out some thoughts about each of these ideas and their relationship.

I think it’s important, in the context of metaphysics, to always be engaged in dialogue. It is a dialogical form of inquiry. It’s also, I think, important to remember that it’s always provisional. It’s not about certainty or arriving at some final systematic understanding of everything.

And also—this is a more Hegelian point—metaphysics should always be historically situated, right? And so, to begin with, I want to do a very quick sort of romp through a few thousand years of philosophical history just to show how metaphysics has shifted, how theology has developed, and how the relationship between the two—the understanding of how they relate—has transformed.

And so I’ll begin with Plato. We could begin even earlier, but just for the sake of time, we’ll start with Plato, for whom metaphysics is about inquiring into intelligible form behind or beneath or above the flux of appearances. For Plato, the Good is the highest principle. And while in his dialogue Timaeus and other places he’ll make reference to God or “the god,” or the Demiurge in Timaeus, metaphysics for Plato really has nothing to do with the idea of a personal god. It’s a more abstract pursuit.

Similarly for Aristotle, there’s reference made to God, but it’s God not as a person, but as thought thinking itself, an unmoved mover, which is the final cause for all other movement. And metaphysics is the study of being, of substance, and the elaboration of categories by which we can come to understand these different polarities that he will articulate—between act and potency, form and matter, and so forth.

In Plotinus, then, we get a sense of emanation—emanation from an ineffable One—which I think is where you see the origins of what in the literature is called negative theology, apophatic theology. And out of the One, Intellect; out of Intellect, the Soul of the World; and out of that, Nature. When the One exhausts its effulgence, you get matter, which is really “nothing.”

And then in Saint Augustine, you get this shift where all of a sudden theology becomes the core of metaphysics. God is now a personal being, a creator. And God creates from nothing. God doesn’t, as in Plato’s Timaeus with the Demiurge, organize pre-existing material. God creates even the material, which is then informed. But you also get this inward movement in Augustine—here is the beginnings of a subjective turn, which becomes more apparent later in Descartes—so that it seems to me that as theology becomes more important in the Western tradition for doing metaphysics, there’s also an interiorization of this process, a movement deeper into one’s own soul experience. Augustine will say, God is closer to myself than I am to myself. And we’ll see this come back in a minute with Descartes.

In Thomas Aquinas, you get the sense that philosophy—or metaphysics—and theology are intimately related. Reason can get you to the point where you know that God exists, but in order to know who God is, you need revelation, you need religion.

In Descartes, you get the completion of the subjective turn that begins with Augustine. You get the development of doubt as a method. God becomes an infinite idea that Descartes says he can know by contrast to his own finitude. Descartes realizes he’s a limited creature, and his senses can deceive him, his imagination can deceive him, but he can’t be deceived in his own thinking activity. He knows that he exists because he’s a thinking being—he’s a doubting being. But he recognizes in his finitude that he also has, in contrast to that, an idea of the infinite, and Descartes says, “Well, I couldn’t put that idea in myself. Therefore there is God,” and God becomes a kind of insurance policy for his knowledge of nature—God is an epistemological insurance policy for Descartes.

Then in Kant you get this critical turn. Kant says the way we’ve been doing metaphysics is claiming to have knowledge of something that we actually have no experience of—and knowledge and experience must be tied together. For Kant, God is no longer an object of theoretical reflection; God is a practical postulate—which is to say, in our experience of conscience and morality we have this sense of duty. So we can’t rationally know anything about God, but we experience God in our moral intuitions.

And then in the German Idealists, Schelling has a really profound understanding of the divine. For Schelling, God becomes the ground of our own freedom and is revealed in mythology, what he calls the “mythological process,” which culminates in the historical event of the Incarnation. I think in Schelling there’s a way in which ontology becomes ontogeny—ontogeny being the study of the development of an organism. Biology was just coming into its own in Schelling’s time, and he (and Kant) learned a lot from the study of ontogenesis. For Schelling, the becoming of the world and the becoming of God are two ways of understanding the same morphogenetic process.

And in Hegel you get this elaboration of metaphysics as the study of reality’s self-unfolding. For Hegel, reality unfolds through dialectical phases. You could say God, or Spirit, unfolds through logic, nature, and history. He understands the symbol of the Trinity in the Christian tradition as, really, the conceptual core of metaphysics—so there’s a sort of translation from the symbol to the concept. For him, “God” is the process by which being becomes transparent to itself through the elaboration of logic, the understanding of nature, and the process of history.

So that’s just a brief sense of how the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and theology have developed. And I just want to emphasize again the way in which, as theology becomes more relevant, there’s a deeper interiorization of metaphysical reflection—in contrast to Plato, Aristotle, and even still in Plotinus, there’s this sense that metaphysics is the study of the structure of reality more in a sense of something external to our inner intimate experience. And as it becomes more theological, there’s a journey inward, our inner experience becomes more relevant for our understanding, metaphysically, the nature of reality.

Jake: That’s fantastic, Matt. A couple of initial thoughts on that. First, it’s not just the case that you’re leading us through a potted history of metaphysics in order to show off—although that was impressive—but also that there are certain words that we use to think with that are more deeply self-implicating. And those words we can’t define stipulatively, we can’t point to them and give just an easy definition. They’re words that—because they’re self-implicating and they’re bound up with the historicity of a being like us, and whose meanings accumulate and transform over time—if we want to come to know them, we have to run up and down the history of their use in order to begin to kind of hone in on how that word can be used, how elastic it is, when it buckles under pressure. “Nature,” “consciousness,” “freedom,” “soul.” You can define them, right? You can say, “Here’s a definition of the soul,” but that’s not going to help you actually understand how that word has functioned for thinkers throughout time, nor is it really going to help you make progress in thinking about it now. So what I feel like you were just doing is helping to initiate us into a conversation where the word “metaphysics” can be meaningful to us because we see the ways in which it mutates without bursting and still continues to have some sense.

There are contemporary uses of “metaphysics.” In the analytic tradition—it has recovered metaphysics after being really skittish about it in the first half of the 20th century—it often means an account of what there is and how it is. I think of it as like a shopping list of all the things that are and how they are, and the goal is to figure out how to place everything in this in the most parsimonious way possible.

There’s also this question about the naming of “metaphysics.” Aristotle didn’t name it “metaphysics”—it was ta meta ta physika. And actually, the book itself was probably not named that way; I think it’s Andronicus of Rhodes who probably gave it the name Metaphysics. And what I like about that is it’s one way of saying: what is metaphysics? Well, it’s just physics but meta. You know—it’s physics, but really hardcore, even if it’s meta-physics. And that’s an interesting way of thinking about it, because there is this divide between nature and what’s more than nature that runs through the heart of the history of metaphysics. And it’s always structured around those kind of questions: how do we navigate that hiatus or that connection between the natural and the supernatural?

One way I think about metaphysics is to say that all the things that are—and the whole of reality—is a question that all those things themselves can’t answer. So that all the things that are and the whole of reality pose a question that they themselves—the whole of reality itself—doesn’t answer. That’s one way of opening up the metaphysical dimension: asking, “What is there?” and “What does it mean if my being is somehow not the author of itself—if it’s contingent?” You know, we find this—we find ourselves, we find the world we’re in, we can imagine its contingency everywhere. And that contingency, that fragility—the “unbearable lightness of being,” as Kundera calls it—that poses a question then about… well, what? It doesn’t give the answer; it just orients us to that question. And that’s where I think Heidegger says, “How is it that the god comes into philosophy?” Philosophy is asking these big metaphysical questions about the nature of what is, about being, about how being is, about the fundamental categories by which being and becoming will be understood. How is it that the god enters into that? And one of the answers, from very early on—Aristotle has it already in the Metaphysics, and is it Book 6? Book 10?—Aristotle’s already throwing out that somehow the divine is the vector—or the vector of the question that all of reality asks is aiming at this thing that is the divine. And if the divine weren’t there, for Aristotle, then metaphysics would just be another branch of physika—just another branch of thinking about things that grow and become and are. And so the metaphysical is a way of asking this question. Aristotle’s god is not the God—like you said, exactly right, Matt—it’s not the God of Augustine, it’s not the God of Aquinas or Maimonides, right? It’s a different understanding of deity, but there is that trajectory that’s beginning to sort of limn a space where the idea—the unthought idea—of God begins to press its way into thought like a tractor beam or a vector, or a kind of haunting presence that you’re aware of and yet you can’t name, you can’t control or encompass.

So I think that’s one of the ways these questions begin to open up on theology. And in a minute I think we’ll get to the question of “Does it have to?” Um… but what else—there’s one more thing I wanted to say in response to what you were bringing up. Oh—well—to distinguish, just to formally distinguish (because you helped us walk through the historical bit), another formal distinction that’s helpful is to distinguish metaphysics from all of the specialized sciences. This is a classical distinction, but one that I think is still really useful. So every other specialized science has its own procedures, its own conceptual limitations. There are certain things it can’t ask and still proceed to do its work. So if I’m a psychologist trying to understand the etiology of a given ailment and I have to call into question the nature of causation or how it is that a being is capable of being a cause, or if I have to ask about the nature of act and potency and why there is becoming, I’m never going to be able to actually help you with your ailment. I’m going to just get totally stuck in these prior questions. Exactly the same for all of the specialized sciences—by which I mean everything other than metaphysics. But there still seems to be a place for human beings to ask these questions, because—and here’s where Kant is really helpful—Kant has this powerful sense of the dynamic orientation of the mind beyond itself. And it’s there in Plato, too—the zētēsis, the questing nature of the mind—but Kant really senses that the nature of reason is always infinitely stretching forward. He thought it couldn’t answer these questions; he thought these were the ideas (and sometimes the ideals) of reason. This is where reason has to go if reason is to function. The very nature of reason is such that it has to imagine an infinite horizon. When something happens—like a bang on the window—suddenly you hear “bum, bum, bum, bum.” We don’t just think, “Oh my gosh, an absurd event just happened out of nowhere.” We assume there’s a little child or something that’s banging on the door, and we look for the cause. And we do that any time something happens in the world. The nature of our mind immediately begins to look for “Why did that happen?” And how do we know that? That’s one of those deep metaphysical questions that kept the ancients up. Later on it would be called something like the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The ancients felt that was a principle grounded in reality itself—that for anything that happens there has to be a cause for it being so, or for anything that is there has to be a cause for why it is so—either it’s a cause of itself or something else caused it. But that’s the way your mind works: it looks for “Why did that happen?” Kant wasn’t sure that that’s actually the way reality was, but he thought that’s the way the mind was, and that’s where, for all of his formalism, there is this powerful sense of the mind’s levity and dynamism—always stretching out beyond itself—because he took what, for the ancients, had been out there in the world and he shoved it into the human mind and said, “That’s where that dynamism lives.” I think it also lives in the world, but I think Kant is right to see it in our mind, and that helped him discover another mode in which metaphysics could be done—not just in the mode of thinking about the structures of existence outside of us (which tends toward a certain kind of stasis), but also to recognize that the metaphysical question involves looking inside to the nature of soul, the nature of mind, of spirit—whatever you want to call it—to this kind of infinite, self-transcending… the mind is, on this account, ecstatic. It reaches beyond what it can guarantee or secure, and that’s the very nature of the mind for it to be able to reveal anything at all. And so there’s something kind of groovy about that, and about the way that metaphysics becomes, I think, mutated at that moment into something new—into something more dynamic. That would be the whole story of German Idealism, French spiritualism, lots of 20th-century Romanticism. And so there’s another dimension of the metaphysical that gets unveiled as not just a rational observation of the categories of the world, but also a dynamic participation in something that constitutes us and makes us to be the kind of creatures that we are, and sets us on this infinite horizon. And I think the question of God becomes relevant then, too.

Matt: Groovy. Yeah, I think you really helped make clear the point I was making. For the ancient Greek philosophers, metaphysics was principally concerned with finding the source of intelligibility in the cosmos. And as you approach modernity—Descartes, Kant, etc.—intelligibility is discovered in the activity of the mind. And then any order, for Kant, that we find in the natural sciences is really a function of the order of our own cognitive capacity. And the way Kant will start the Critique of Pure Reason by saying reason has questions that it can’t help but ask, but then it can’t actually resolve—it’s almost a tragic situation that he puts the human mind in. People often misunderstand Kant as somehow forbidding metaphysics, when he’s really trying to inaugurate a new kind of metaphysics. He says the history of metaphysics is a battlefield. And he wants to find a way of doing it more scientifically, which would be coming to a better understanding of the instrument by which we come to know anything. Whitehead calls this the subjectivist turn in philosophy.

And I think in the 20th century, you have thinkers like Heidegger who become very critical of the history of metaphysics in the West as, in some sense, licensing what came to term in the 20th century as what he called the “metaphysics of presence.” He related it to technology and the way that there was this drive, as Descartes said, to master and possess nature by applying certain kinds of categories to it and enframing it. And so in 1929, when he publishes Being and Time on the continent, you also have Wittgenstein in England at the time, at Cambridge, saying from a more analytic point of view that we also can’t do metaphysics. And the logical positivists kind of misunderstand Wittgenstein, but, you know, he says things like, “Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent,” and wanting to really simplify language. This would be the sort of positivist’s reading of Wittgenstein—that the meaning of words comes through a designation to things in the world, and when we start to refer to abstract things we can very quickly lose touch with reality, and metaphysics is seemingly referring to things that we can’t tangibly perceive, that we can’t touch, that we can’t measure or easily designate. And so it’s in the early 20th century that there’s—both from the analytic point of view and a phenomenological point of view—a kind of call to end metaphysics and to engage thought and thinking in a different way. Whether or not that succeeds, or it’s just a new kind of metaphysics, is something we could talk about.

I wanted to share a little bit about how, from my point of view as someone oriented by Whitehead, what metaphysics can look like when we do it in a different way. Rather than us stretching beyond experience, metaphysics for Whitehead becomes an attempt to generalize from experience. He says that metaphysics is the search for the highest, the most general categories that apply to all of our experience—which includes experience in the special sciences like physics and biology and psychology and sociology, but also religious experience and artistic experience. Is there some set of categories that are going to be abstract—inevitably, because they’re general—that can nonetheless elucidate all of the details of our practical experience? And he doesn’t want these categories to be an imposition upon experience. He really does want them to be distilled out of and continually tested by experience. And he says metaphysics is an “adventure of hope” that the universe is intelligible. And you can’t know in advance, but it does seem that reality repays this type of inquiry. He also describes metaphysics as the “analysis of the obvious,” which is to say it’s the pursuit of all of the invariant aspects of our experience. We tend to notice things that change; we don’t notice things that don’t change. He says that we need to develop what he calls the “method of difference”—another word for that would be imagination—where we’re able to ingress novelty so as to produce difference in thought that we then compare with the givenness of experience to allow us to notice, by contrast to the novel ideas we’re considering in our imagination, all the invariant aspects of our common-sense experience. It makes reality strange again, right? And so imagination becomes a very important, sort of methodological instigator, for Whitehead, in doing metaphysics.

In terms of theology, then, it’s a kind of regional expression of metaphysics for Whitehead. He criticizes the tradition for often making God the exception to the metaphysical categories that apply to everything else—invoked to save them from incoherence—but for Whitehead, God is the chief exemplification of his metaphysical categories, so that God is no longer special, but another case of what he calls an “actual entity.”

And, you know, they’re not exactly parallel, but last thing I’ll share—we have this distinction between science and religion nowadays. And these are not synonyms for metaphysics and theology. Because science presupposes a certain metaphysical background. But when we think about science and religion, I think it raises all sorts of metaphysical questions about, well, how do we differentiate the two? And Whitehead has a really helpful way of doing this. He says that science is the study of what we are aware of in perception; religion is concerned with our emotional responses to those perceptions. And so science is the study of the, say, systematic connections among the perceptions that we have of nature, whereas religion, he says, is concerned with the transformation of character. And that type of definition of these two very important domains of human experience, I think, helps avoid conflict, but it doesn’t set them totally apart from one another either. You can do a science—you can have a science of religious experience. Whitehead says, well, then you’re usually studying other people’s experience and not your own, or at least you’re taking a bit of a distance from your own experience to do that. Whereas if you’re having a religious experience, it’s all-encompassing, and it’s transforming you at a very deep level.

Jake: That’s awesome. I love that. This is the part I get to fight. The question of how metaphysics relates to God, I think, is a crucial one. And the place where Matt and I entirely agree is on the skittishness with which early 20th-century philosophers on both sides—analytic and continental—comported themselves toward metaphysics and theology. For both of them—especially when you work on metaphysics—which is kind of funny—“metaphysics” is the really bad word.

Heidegger says, “If I were to write a theology—which I would like to do, which I think I might do someday—the word ‘Being’ would not occur in it,” because he doesn’t want theology to have anything to do with Being, with metaphysics, whatever. And he thinks the whole problem of metaphysics is that it’s related to God in this negative way that Matt described—Heidegger calls it onto-theology, taking the term from Kant. And then, after that, for every postmodern philosophy, it’s been the majority posture for the last 50 years. That just means: God conceived as the summit of all being and the guarantor of being. So that’s the quickest shorthand for what onto-theology means—the summit of all being, the guarantor and source of being, the ground of grounding.

And the problem with that is it then authorizes the idea that the entirety of reality is exhaustively knowable. Because God, as the guarantor of rationality and of being there at the tippy-top, is the ground of it and guarantees it all the way through. It means that everything is rationally knowable, and so it can be cognized by me without any remainder. Not necessarily that I can do it, but that in principle it could be. An infinite computational intellect could get the algorithm of the whole universe and just run it all the way down. And that induces in us this terrible way, I think, of relating to the world. The extractive, objectifying mode of treating the world as if it could be exhaustively narrated—it turns it into (Heidegger would also say) a standing-reserve, that kind of stuff, right? Technology, blah-blah-blah.

In my mind, this was actually avoided by premodern philosophers. The point is that God was never understood as subject to metaphysics. The place of God—the grammar of the very word “God,” of deus—was such that it stood outside of the domain of metaphysics. It was that toward which metaphysics oriented itself, as a compass orients itself to the pole, but it wasn’t that which could be encompassed by it. And then, the difference is: it also wasn’t… God wasn’t a guarantor of metaphysics in some stable sense, the way that Heidegger’s tippy-top onto-theology is—like a capstone at the top of a pyramid. Rather, God is that toward which one asymptotically approaches in metaphysics but never achieves. And that serves, instead of a guarantor, as a little bit of a rift. If that’s the case—if all of the beings orient in this vector towards something that they can never encompass, because an infinite distance is never traversable by finite steps—then there’s also written into the very center of things (like the yin-yang, the little fish-eye) something that opens out into and releases itself into the infinite. So I can never come to the end of describing even an insect, a spider, a seed. And so what Whitehead’s doing—I don’t actually have that much of a problem with it. I just think that he’s not naming what I would want to call “God.” Whatever Whitehead’s calling “God” is something different than the way that word functions in the grammar I’ve been initiated into, and that I find meaningful for thinking about metaphysics and the relationship to theology.

The theological is that which, for me, relativizes the metaphysical. In the absence of the theological, the metaphysical—and it’s always tied to the capacity of the rational, the intellectual mind to understand reality—in the absence of the theological, the metaphysical presents itself as equal to existence. But that hidden whirlpool of the theological in thought is what sets all of that fluctuating in motion and dissembles it. My mind is never fully equal to existence, but it’s always carried still by that infinite drive that I was talking about with Kant—that infinite drive to know. It’s always carried towards that. And there’s a sense—there’s a capacity, there’s a faith—that the world will still unveil itself as intelligible, but its intelligibilities are inexhaustible. And there’s a big difference between saying “the world is not intelligible” and saying “the world is completely intelligible,” defined that way. Because I think you can get the world wrong. The intelligibilities of the world can be falsely narrated, and I can be wrong about whether you’re in this room with me; I could be wrong about your beliefs; I could be wrong about the atomic weight of a given element. I can also be wrong about things like God, freedom, immortality, reincarnation—whatever. I can pick various metaphysical things that I could be wrong about. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a way in which it could be infinitely describable. There could be an infinite number of ways in which you could be right about it—you could be getting part of the picture. But it still always opens out infinitely beyond it. For example (I use this one a lot), which is a sort of cribbing from Cantor—who was much more sophisticated about it—but the set of all even numbers will never include 1, 3, 5, 7, etc., right? But it’s infinite. There’s an infinite number of ways I can describe what’s in the set of all even numbers. Likewise, in an analogous—very cheap analogy—but still, in an analogous way, there is an intelligibility to the world that I never am equal to, that I never exhaust, but that also still holds me to account as I try to live in fidelity to what it is.

Matt: We definitely want to open it up for questions, but I just can’t help but respond briefly. Where I think Whitehead has something analogous to that sort of “excess” that you’re saying theology brings to prevent the closure of metaphysics—he calls it Creativity, and distinguishes it from God, where God becomes a creature of Creativity. Which leads to this whole movement of process theology, which influences a lot of liberal Protestant theologians and pastors, and… but for many theists, that’s highly heretical, or at best unorthodox, to say God is a creature.

Jake: You don’t have to go… I mean, that’s true for a lot of people, but my reasons for not signing on to that wouldn’t be because it’s heretical, but actually for metaphysical reasons that I can debate about. Because I think abstraction… I think it costs something—there’s a fee. And that Creativity, as not actually an actuality, can then be the explanation for something else. So there are ways you can debate this—it’d be really fun to do—but I also do want to open it up. You can have the last word.

Matt: I think in the tradition, God has been understood as that which has necessary existence. And part of the problem with onto-theology (as the Kant and Heidegger critique has it) has to do with that idea of necessary existence. And Whitehead has a very, I think, cool way of getting around this issue where he says God is metaphysically contingent—which is to say, God is an accident of Creativity, not exactly caused by Creativity—an accident of Creativity. So God is metaphysically contingent but categorically necessary, which is to say: for us, as finite, reflective creatures, we can’t help but think Creativity through God. Very subtle distinction, but I think it’s important.

Jake: We will put a pin in that, then.

Matt: Okay, we’ll put a pin on that. Do we have another mic to pass around, or is that one dead?

Audience: Thank you all so much. Um, Jake, you mentioned earlier about the questions arising from navigating the supernatural versus the natural—all of these theories and philosophers—and commerce and both just discussing intelligibility. And this whole part of being—like, Indigenous cultures (if not all of them) had the answers to these questions for thousands of years before Westerners and Europeans started talking about it, and just like… just kind of like, what are your feelings about the exclusion of bringing in their viewpoints and a relationship with metaphysics and the divine into reality, and just like how different philosophy and theology would have been if that was brought more into the table in the conversation?

Jake: The way I think about answering that is: I think a lot about how do we talk across different traditions that have very distinct conceptual grammars. And in my mind the way we have to do so is we have to find the right—like that history that Matt was talking about—in the history of metaphysics when we’re running up and down it… By paying closer attention to that, you can find points within a tradition of speech that have greater ability to reach out to another community fruitfully. So, for example, with Indigenous traditions—and I don’t want to universalize or reify that term—but let’s just say, for the moment, that in most traditions that don’t recognize a distinction between the natural and the supernatural, or don’t recognize a strong distinction between it—how do you enter into dialogue with those kinds of traditions when you already have this strict distinction? The way I think to do it is to recognize that the strict distinction between the natural and supernatural is a pretty late artifact of this history of thought. It’s not until the 13th century that it begins to even be drawn at a kind of mild conceptual level. And even at that point, it’s not a strict, like, layer-cake view of reality where there’s the supernatural and there’s the natural and there’s the infernal, or something like that. The supernatural and natural exist almost as adverbial descriptions of different ways of looking at things at that point. And it turns into the strict distinction much later, around the time of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. So if you can look back to those—and I actually think those older accounts have more conceptual and metaphysical and intellectual integrity to them—there’s a sense in which you have to deconstruct some of these dualistic binaries that have come to structure our thinking, that prevent us from entering into a real dialogue with cultures that haven’t gone through that kind of dualistic structure. It may be that you just find your way back, and then you go forward, right? But I think of it as finding the right meridians within an intellectual tradition to activate so that you can have a better resonance with traditions outside. With Zen Buddhism rather than, say, Indigenous or animist traditions, you might want to look for something else. But that process—I see mutual understanding across traditions as an achievement and never a starting place. Like, we don’t start from the same place. But we can work together to find that place of mutual understanding. It’s hard enough for me to come to understand texts I read all the time, to understand people who have been enculturated in a different way than my culture—who have a different intellectual history than the one Matt laid out to begin with. That’s an achievement, but it’s a powerful achievement—one that I think we can realize, and that I hope we do realize.

Matt: Yeah, that’s a great answer, Jake. I really appreciate that question, and it’s an invitation to me to remember to situate myself even more concretely in a particular lineage and history. And I wouldn’t pretend to be able to speak with any authority whatsoever about any of the varieties of different Indigenous perspectives. I think that type of inter-tradition dialogue is really valuable—and actually essential. But what I was trying to do in that given history and the conversation we’re having here is very much situated in a particular lineage. And I wouldn’t want to pretend to know from the inside any other tradition than the one that I have been schooled and formed by, you know? But certainly, there are ways in which, from, say, a process-relational ontology point of view that I get out of Whitehead, that’s a really—I think—a powerful basis for doing that type of dialogue. You know, what modern or contemporary philosophers call panpsychism, or anthropologists are calling “new animism”—like, obviously this is fertile ground for that type of conversation to happen, and it’s really important. I think that would be a different way of approaching this topic. A lot of the problems that we have in the West just… yeah, they don’t come up in these other traditions.

Audience: I’ve been an interfaith minister, so it’s just like constantly something about how to bring them all together, include everyone in the conversation—whatever I’m saying—but yeah, I hear your answers.

Matt: Thank you.

Audience: I want to push back maybe on a couple of the frames. Well, for one, I think that—I mean, I agree with your kind of description of metaphysics in ancient Greece being more about less personal, less kind of inward—but I would say that Socrates would be the big outlier there, and the Phaedo and other places where it’s really all about the soul and the interpersonal. And that’s the area of metaphysics. And then Aristotle on God—I mean, I think… we don’t have enough, more or less, but I think we also know that what he says in Metaphysics is a very small slice of what he meant, and Jake, I think you did hint at this a bit, but I mean he says, even here, there are gods, which he takes from Heraclitus, and a Heraclitean view, and I mean I really don’t think God is abstract for Aristotle. And I don’t think Aristotle’s metaphysics is abstract at all. This is like one of our anticipations. And again, I’m fighting against the entire body of scholarship when I do that, so it’s not… It’s okay that people still talk about it that way, but it’s really about—it’s really metaphysics of the concrete. So we can go from that on another occasion maybe, but I just wanted to throw those out as an alternate. Because I do think that in general I’m trying to be describing it as accurate—I’m not saying that it is not accurate.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate it. I agree with those points. Helpful nuance.

Jake: Yeah.

Audience: I think mine is mostly a clarification question on what sounds from over here really nuanced, the distinction that each of you are making. So maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on, in the wake of Heidegger’s onto-theology critique and the sort of extreme version that we find in analytic philosophy where metaphysics is a site for describing matters of fact—can metaphysics… can one conceive of a metaphysics without theology? I wasn’t clear on either of your… it seems like you’re sort of triangulating that question, and I’m curious, because when you describe the kind of lure that you’re talking about, Jake, that more seems to me to imply that theology is a necessity, and in one way or another. If that’s true for you, what are both of your takes on that? Because that makes some question—makes sense.

Jake: Yeah, I love this question because it’s what we intended to talk about. So why don’t you go for it, Matt?

Matt: I think—so, obviously, let’s say if you’re a Buddhist or a Daoist or in a variety of different Indigenous traditions, you don’t need theology to do metaphysics or to describe the nature of reality. I think in the particular lineage that Jake and I are speaking out of, it would seem—even if you’re an atheist—you’re still doing theology in some sense: you’re negating something that, you know, other traditions might not even feel the need to mention. And so I think in a Western philosophical context, it’s difficult to do metaphysics without engaging theological questions. But there are a whole variety of different ways of doing that. I mean, you could be like Spinoza and say that God as an infinite substance could also be called Nature. So, you know, pantheism or panentheism—or I like to call Whitehead’s view pan-gen-theism, because the world and God are in a mutually generating relationship with each other. So pan-gen-theism. But these are all varieties of theism, and even atheism is a variety of theism. So, yeah, that’s how I would approach that question.

Audience (follow-up): Some philosophers make an attempt to sidestep theology altogether, and do you think also there’s almost like a covert… like God becomes covert in the conversation, consciously or unconsciously? That’s my question.

Jake: Yeah, I think… yes. I think that—but what I mean by that is back to Heidegger’s onto-theology, where you’ve got the onto-theological god sitting at the top of a pyramid of existence, guaranteeing it all. I think we put a lot of different things there. Sometimes we put Capital, sometimes we put infinite Reason, sometimes we put Materialism. Anything that you stick at the tippy-top of your ontic pyramid in order to guarantee the universal intelligibility and the exhaustibility of all existence is functioning as a covert onto-theological deity. So it’s covertly onto-theological in a lot of ways. And, I mean, this is actually not even that controversial a claim—it gets thrown out by post-structuralists all the time: “Oh, that’s onto-theological,” and it happens to be a Marxist reading of something or whatever. But I think that’s true. Also, though, I would add: I think that—at least in the traditions that Matt and I were describing—I do think there is an implicit theological drive. There’s a theological shape to the thinking itself. That’s different than saying you believe in God. But I think that there’s a theological shape to the very structure of thinking and existence that’s being narrated. And then, one more thing I would add is: I think there’s a lot of explicitly theistic thinking out there that is covertly atheist—that the shape of its thinking is actually atheist or nihilist. It doesn’t believe that there’s an infinite dignity and inexhaustibility to creatures; it actually believes they’re a resource that can be exhaustively narrated and calculated for finite human ends. I think that’s a—however confessional that might be—I think that’s a covertly and practically atheistic stance to take to things.

Matt: Or a deification of instrumental reason.

Jake: Yeah. Yeah, both. And they tend to go hand in hand.

Audience: Thank you both for inviting us into this. So I really love this notion of a mind as ecstatic—like reaching out beyond itself, and maybe finding itself in something that is both foreign and familiar at the same time. And it put me in mind of the early Socratic dialogues and the Socratic method. And I think oftentimes there’s an interpretation of something like “surprising ignorance,” and I think it involves this as a claim of humility in the pursuit of wisdom. But there seems to me to be something deeper there, too, in a Socratic orientation, where we’re actually sort of dispossessed of the categories we’ve brought to bear on the world. And in that uncertainty, in that unknowing, something new and fresh is enabled to come through—be seen in a new way, maybe for the first time. And so my question, though, is: after Kant, I think there is a sense that we have to recognize the historical contingency of our metaphysical projects—maybe even our theological projects as well. And that introduces, I think, an interesting dilemma for me, because on the one hand it does seem to me we are doing metaphysics all the time, and we’re tracking something that is really occurring. And on the other hand, we’re also bringing something to it—we’re also doing something creative and imaginative. And maybe a temptation is to move to one extreme or the other: to say metaphysics (or theology, for that matter) is going to give us the final, complete picture of what is; or, on the other hand, to abandon those projects entirely as constructivist or imaginative in a pejorative sense. But it does seem like both of those are involved to some degree. So I’m wondering how you think about walking that tension or holding that tension between, on the one hand, metaphysics genuinely tracking the real, and on the other hand, the kind of contingent, imaginable dimension that we are bringing to bear on that ourselves. Does that make sense?

Matt: I want to ask Jake to lay out his “genealogy of participation” here, but it might take too long—because I think it speaks (if you all haven’t read Jake’s essay on a participatory turn) to that polarity between creation and discovery as we relate to the structure and intelligibility of reality. One thing I want to say about myth that I really appreciated—that you are bringing up in the dialogues, Plato’s dialogues, and the Socratic aporia, and whatnot: Plato wasn’t afraid to say, “The best I can offer here is a likely story.” And some people would really want to rigorously dichotomize metaphysics from myth. I think in the Platonic sense you really can’t, and we’re better off doing it explicitly—where we see myth as a way of imaginatively participating in the truth rather than thinking that we could exhaustively rationalize it.

Audience: Jake, I wanted to ask about something that you said about Kant, because I haven’t ever thought of it this way. You said “a dynamic participation that constitutes us,” and so I’ve been… I’d always considered, in a way, that he cemented the turn to subjectivism because the world was an object upon which we needed to imprint, and we don’t really… can’t even assume that we know it. So I felt like it was a kind of enclosure. And so for you to say that—my mind just did a little burn inside. Could you say just a little bit more about that?

Jake: When it comes to Kant, I’m always like: two cheers for Kant. Because what he accomplishes, I do think, introduces us to this fantastic dynamism that opens up what Eckart Förster calls the “25 years of philosophy” that follow afterwards. Something was unleashed because of this, and that’s the dynamism I’m talking about. And I think it led to this really powerfully dynamic view of the mind and its stretching forth, even though for Kant it can’t stretch forth beyond itself. He says what we can know is that we’re surrounded by the sea of illusion and we’re on the island of truth, and everything outside of it… All we can know is the categorical structures of the mind itself, etc. So there is a sense in which—yeah—he closes it down. He thinks of what he’s doing as closing what can be known. But at the same time, he’s opened up this enormous dynamism. On his tombstone it says, “Two things fill the soul with awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” The moral law sounds pretty oriented inward in that phrase, but actually it’s this sense Kant has of this vector—this vector inside of us that is compelling, cleansing, bracing, and dynamic; that there’s this dynamism to the mind that by restricting what can be known to the subject, he also suddenly looks at the subject as this almost supernova of energy. And so that’s what I’m trying to get at. He’s contained it, but he’s contained it almost the way a nuclear reactor contains something. And then it spills out in these subsequent philosophies that follow in his wake—that Matt teaches a wonderful course on.

Audience: If metaphysics is a history of metaphysics, there are different histories that are possible. So then the question becomes: how do we assess one’s history or somebody else’s history? Here I go back to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. If you want to say that one history is more true than another, then how do we decide whether it’s true—especially if it’s the truth of… We can’t appeal to facts—perceptible facts—necessarily in the same way. But we can appeal to coherence: how does it hang together? A story I heard: an Indigenous thinker, Lyons, is in dialogue with another West Coast Indigenous thinker, and they’re comparing their creation stories, and those were very, very different. And when he was finished, [the other] said, “That’s beautiful; it must be true. Now let me tell you my story.”

Matt: You asked me about Goethe last night—I couldn’t recite his line about the split in our hearts— But there’s another Goethe quote that I love that I think resonates with this, where Goethe says he’s a monotheist in morality, a polytheist in art, and a pantheist in science.

Audience: I want to go back to where Jake was, because I’m only trying to understand where you were sort of different on the Whitehead piece about Creativity and God. Because, you know, obviously Creativity, in the way that I have come to think about it, is very participatory. And so I get that sort of engagement with it. Did I miss it, or am I just slow? Where exactly are you having an issue with that? Because, I mean, you sort of alluded that there’s more there to dig into. And I’m just really curious about sort of where it goes.

Jake: Do you want to ventriloquize what my objection is, or do you want me to do it?

Matt: Well, I think Jake’s concern is that by making God an actual entity, the risk is that God’s another stick of furniture in the universe. This was Rowan Williams’s concern, actually, in a dialogue (that turned into a debate) with Iain McGilchrist, who was expressing a more process-theological point of view. And, you know, Rowan Williams—former Archbishop of Canterbury, really profound theologian—took issue with it, which—well, I’m supposed to be steel-manning— It seems like a misunderstanding of what Whitehead is saying, what the process theologians are saying, to say, well, because God’s an actual entity, therefore God is just another being among beings. Because what Whitehead is really saying is that God is nowhere but in each actual occasion of experience as the eternal impulse toward beauty, truth, and goodness. And so it’s both a profound immanentization of God, but also the other way of looking at it is to say it puts the transcendent right into the heart of every creature.

Jake: You started to steel-man me, and then you switched. I mean… My view on it: I love Whitehead. The first time I experienced my thought moving in conjunction with the rotation of existence, I was reading Whitehead and walking on Holy Hill up there outside of Berkeley, near the GTU library. I was thinking about Whitehead, and I suddenly realized I wasn’t thinking about Whitehead—I was moving with my mind in conjunction with the contours of the real—and it opened up a whole new way to understand what thinking could be for me. So I’m not knocking Whitehead. I love Whitehead. That said, I think when it comes to God, Creativity, and the Eternal Objects, I think there’s confusion there. And the confusion is… I wouldn’t quite put it the way Rowan Williams does, because Whitehead’s God is not the same as all the other objects in existence—Whitehead’s God is an infinite “concrescence.” But at the same time, Whitehead wants God not to be an exception to the categories of existence, and yet God’s kind of concrescence is the only one that operates in exactly the opposite way of every other concrescence that is. So it seems to me that actually you haven’t achieved your metaphysical aim of rendering God in harmony with all the metaphysical principles, because God is the one inversion where actuality precedes concrescence.

The second point is: God is the first creature of Creativity, and Creativity is a general characterization of the nature of existence. So it is the “universal of universals.” And in that sense, Creativity is a description and a kind of abstraction, and so I don’t see how it can have efficacy. I don’t see how something can be an actuality of Creativity unless there’s an actuality before. And this gets really in the weeds, but I’m convinced, metaphysically, that actuality is either coincident with potentiality or precedes potentiality—that potentiality is a shadow cast by actuality rather than the other way around. Whitehead, I think, thinks about it in the inverse way. I think we have different metaphysical intuitions in that sense. And the task would be to then do a sort of autobiography to try to understand how we come to those different metaphysical intuitions. But I can’t shake that one—it just seems to me indubitably clear—and to others, it seems otherwise. I recognize that. But that’s why I get skittish and why there’s this small amount of space between Matt and I. But it makes for a lovely chance to wrangle with one another. I’m convinced later on tonight… maybe we can—anyone interested in the minutiae of this can gather around, and we can get into it more deeply.

Matt: Yeah because I’m not sure we do disagree. Which would be good. 

Audience: So, it seems that philosophy used to play a very common role in ancient civilizations—certainly Asia, Egypt, and generally Greece, maybe the medieval world—but not at all today. So what are your thoughts as to how can philosophy play a role in our society, economy, education, and what would be a concrete point of entry or model that would be made better?

Jake: Should we make this last question?

Matt: Yeah. Great question. Well, we would know that philosophy had become important again if Jake and I were sentenced to death by the state. So… we’ll see what happens.

I don’t think the problem is that philosophy is not relevant. I think it’s just that there’s a lot of bad philosophy. You know—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon—these are the intellectual architects of, you know, the current administration in many respects. You know, the distinction between ideology and theory, I think, is really important here. I saw some statistics about literacy in the United States and where the majority of our fellow citizens are at in terms of reading comprehension, and I don’t know that you can have democracy, and an informed citizenry, if reading comprehension is at a third-grade level for the majority of the population—through no fault of their own, you know. And I don’t mean to be elitist about it, but sometimes I think about Plato’s criticisms of democracy and how we ended up in our current situation as a result of a popular vote… Whitehead says—as a sort of transcending and including of Plato’s view of democracy—Plato thought the philosopher-kings and queens should rule over society and come up with a noble lie and keep everybody else sort of in line; Whitehead says, look, in the modern period every individual must become a philosopher. Not just a few elites. But we need to foster the type of pedagogy and educational context wherein that’s possible. And we don’t have that.

Jake: I’ll just say the three quick reasons why I think philosophy is crucial for the 21st century. First, we are losing our capacity to form human beings in an intentional and human way by increasingly allowing ourselves to be subjected to a pedagogy of the technological. Philosophy from its very outset is about the pedagogy for how to shape free human beings, capable of orienting themselves to their highest ideals. That’s what the entire book of the Republic is really about. Pedagogy is at the heart of it, and it’s about a pedagogy that frees the person. It’s the liberal arts, in the best sense—the arts that liberate and free one—and we need that probably more than ever, because we find ourselves instead subject to the pedagogy of the machine.

Second reason: we need good philosophy because there’s so much bad philosophy out there, as Matt was saying. Wittgenstein calls it “philosophy as therapeia.” He says, what’s the point of philosophy? It’s to show the fly how to get out of the bottle. And the bottle is all the bad, constrained, dualistic, fragmentary ways of thinking that you’re working with—in which language has gone on a holiday and isn’t functioning in its proper domain—but you continue to run these scripts, and they trap you in poor ways of thinking, in poor ways of acting, and they cut out from under your feet the capacity to live in a richer, more participatory ethical relationship to one another.

And the final reason is because philosophy is—and this doesn’t have to be sophisticated philosophy. I don’t think philosophy because you read Plato or Spinoza or whatever. I just mean standing in and bringing to self-reflective articulation your relationship to the ideals that structure your life—that capacity to exist in relationship to those ideals that work like a kind of magnetic center, drawing us out, energizing us for moral and spiritual and intellectual and imaginative pursuits. That’s also crucial to what it means to be a human being. And that’s what Philosophy with a capital “P,” in the biggest sense, I think has always meant. And I think we need that now as much as we ever have—maybe even more.

Matt: Well said. We’ll have to end there, but “to be continued.”

Jake: To be continued.