Over on Substack, I shared an essay based on the transcript of my remarks at a presentation earlier today for the Center for Process Studies. You can read that essay here.
Below is the exact transcript of my remarks:
I am going to be discussing some ideas from one of Owen Barfield’s essays, “Where Is Fancy Bred?,” about the nature of imagination, and linking them to Whitehead’s protest against the bifurcation of nature and his sense that imagination is of profound philosophical significance as a way of knowing—as a means of contacting a deeper layer of reality than our physical senses might otherwise allow. I will begin by talking about Whitehead’s account, in Science and the Modern World, of what he calls the “enfeeblement of thought” in modernity, a weakening that results from this bifurcation of nature and from the dualism whereby mind and matter are separated and everything valuable—all qualities—is removed from the natural world, which is left bare, mute, lifeless, and dead.
Whitehead foresaw that this dualism would have, and already was having, terrible effects on the ecology in England, where he lived and where he was most attuned to the results of this split, but also obviously around the rest of the world as well, as a result of industrialization and other forces. Once I have laid that out, I will introduce some of Barfield’s ideas and show how I see a remarkable convergence in their understandings of imagination as a way of knowing and as a source for how we might recover our connection to the intrinsic value of the natural world.
In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead articulates his concern that modern scientific cosmology had expelled value from nature, and that this is not only a metaphysical falsehood but also has cold and concrete ecological consequences. I quote Whitehead from page 17 of Science and the Modern World, where he writes: “There persists… the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter or material spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless; it does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being.” This is the mechanistic picture of nature.
He goes on to talk about the more or less Lockean theory of perception. John Locke distinguishes between primary and secondary qualities, a similar distinction to the one Galileo made. The primary qualities of nature are thought to be all of the things that are measurable and quantifiable—mass, dimensionality, and so on—whereas the secondary qualities are everything added by the perception of organisms: colors, sounds, scents, and so forth. These are “secondary” in the sense that, on this view, they are not really a part of nature; they are not relevant to science in its pursuit of the mechanisms that determine the activity of nature.
Whitehead famously says of this distinction between primary and secondary qualities—what he will call the bifurcation of nature: “Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” He means that nature gets credit for what should in truth be reserved for ourselves in the sense that, in parallel with the development of scientific materialism, there was also the development of Romanticism as a cultural movement and the emergence of nature poetry. Whitehead was a lover of the poetry of Wordsworth. In the nature poets, we get this celebration of the intrinsic value and beauty of nature. According to scientific materialism, the nature poets are giving nature credit for something that, in fact, should be reserved for us, because we are supposedly adding all of these qualities and these values, projecting them onto nature.
This leads to a view of imagination, which is really what I want to focus on in the modern period, as a subjective organ involved in make-believe and fantasy, with no purchase on reality and no relevance to science—except perhaps in the limited sense of helping someone like Einstein “ride a beam of light” in order eventually to arrive at the mathematics that would describe objectively measurable, primary characteristics in nature. On that view, imagination occasionally assists a scientific genius, but that assistance is accidental and dispensable. Scientific materialism has dissuaded us from taking imagination seriously as an intimate way of knowing. On the other hand, we have the Romantic movement, which is trying to valorize imagination as putting us in touch with a deeper reality. So there is a conflict between two cultures in the modern world.
Whitehead goes on to trace the dangers of this split, this bifurcation. On the one hand, as I have been saying, we have a scientific realism about the mechanisms of nature. On the other hand, we have a practical and moral belief in the fact that we are self-determining, that we are free, and that we are motivated by values as human beings and as living organisms. These two views simply do not cohere. Whitehead writes: “A scientific realism based on mechanism is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of human beings and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the base of modern thought enfeebles it.” There is an inconsistency lurking in the background of modern thought that divorces the value we feel in our inner lives as human beings from nature, which scientific materialism has reduced to mechanism. The deepest assumptions of modern Western civilization thus stand in profound contradiction with one another.
Whitehead also regrets the reduction of morality to mere private psychology. Descartes’ separation of mind and matter made it so that all of our aesthetic and moral values became private, privatized, with nothing to do with the way bodily substances exist or the way material bodies in nature operate. This led, in Whitehead’s view, to a civilization that treats the outer material world—including, he notes, even workers, not just the natural environment—as mere stuff to be used and manipulated. He gives the example, in his own context in England, of the Charing Cross railway, which had been built during his lifetime, wantonly defacing the curve of the Thames River. Because there was no sense that nature has intrinsic aesthetic or moral values, the aesthetic value of the Thames River could not be treated as a real feature of the world. When human beings build, we therefore feel free to ignore the context of what we are building.
Whitehead foresaw, with considerable prescience, the direction things would head in the century after he wrote this book in 1925. He describes an “unholy alliance” between scientific materialism and capitalist economics. He says, “Social organization expressed itself in terms of material things and of capital. Ultimate values were excluded. They were politely bowed to and then handed over to the clergy to be kept for Sundays.” So we have this split between science and religion, between scientific materialism and human value and morality.
Most of us probably know Whitehead’s alternative. He develops a “philosophy of organism” that would reintegrate value into our picture of nature, where every organism is the realization of a definite shape of value. Every fact, in some sense, is the achievement of value in Whitehead’s cosmos. In Process and Reality, several years after Science and the Modern World, Whitehead more fully fleshes out his metaphysics. There he develops what we might call a metaphysical method of imagination. He says that metaphysics is, in some sense, about analyzing the obvious, and that it takes a very unusual mind to analyze the obvious. Metaphysics is about the invariant features of our experience which, precisely because they do not change, are difficult for us to notice.
Imagination, he suggests, can propose alternatives to our habitual modes of perception, to that which remains the same across all of our experiences. Metaphysics is trying to surface those general categories that could apply across all experiences. Whitehead is somewhat unique among Western philosophers, especially modern ones, in acknowledging that imagination has a role to play in bringing us into more intimate contact with reality.
Here I can transition to Owen Barfield. I am curious, if we were in a room together, how many people would be familiar with Barfield. Owen Barfield was a member of the Inklings, this group of writers that included J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. They would meet at a pub in Oxford called The Eagle and Child, which they affectionately referred to as “the Bird and Baby.” They would read their latest writings to one another and offer critique.
C. S. Lewis and Barfield had a deep friendship, though it was a tumultuous one because they disagreed vehemently on many topics. Part of the reason Lewis ended up converting to Christianity was conversations with Barfield. Similarly, conversations Barfield had with Tolkien were quite influential in the development of The Lord of the Rings. Barfield was also an anthroposophist. He studied the work of the Austrian, German-speaking esotericist Rudolf Steiner and, in some ways, helped translate Steiner’s work into English.
Steiner is an enigmatic figure who emerged from the study of German Idealism. In his youth he wrote a doctoral dissertation on Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Steiner also studied Goethe and was the editor of Goethe’s scientific works. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was not only a poet, statesman, and privy counselor to the Duke of Weimar; he was also a scientist. If we take Goethe’s own estimation of his contributions to humanity seriously, he thought that his scientific work was more important than his poetry or novels.
Goethe studied color and articulated an alternative to Newton’s understanding of color as something produced when white light is split by a prism. For Goethe, careful observation suggested that color emerges when light and dark mix. He also studied the growth of plants, the morphology of animal bones, and made a number of interesting discoveries. Steiner edited these scientific works and tried to surface the methodology that Goethe was using—a participatory methodology in which imagination becomes a sympathetic mode of perceiving nature as a verb, as a process. Rather than merely observing nature’s products or finished forms, Goethe was able to imaginatively penetrate, or come into resonance with, the deeper dynamics of the living world.
He developed a science that, unlike the Cartesian approach, did not sever subject from object, fact from value, or consciousness from nature, but rather regarded human consciousness as, in some sense, a flowering of nature. Through proper training—Goethe may have had an innate gift for this, but Steiner thought others could be trained—one could learn to perceive nature as Goethe perceived it, imaginatively, where human imagination is in some sense the same productive power of nature, the same creative power of nature, appearing in human form. If we cultivate our imagination as a way of knowing, what we are actually doing is learning to feel the formative forces at work in the plant, in light, in embryological processes, in ontogenesis, in the growth of an organism.
Goethe was able to perceive, for example, that in the growth of a plant there is an underlying Urpflanze, a primal shape or shaping power. He said “all is leaf,” meaning that every part of the plant, as it moves through various phases of development—expansion and contraction, leaf to bud to flower to fruit to seed—is the expression of one primal form or formative activity. “All is leaf” captures this insight. In the context of animal morphology and bones, he would say “all is vertebra,” meaning that the central column of vertebrae can be understood imaginatively as undergoing processes of expansion and contraction during development to give rise to the skull and the limbs. Goethe cultivated a kind of time-perception, seeing that a plant or an adult animal is not just a finished form presented to our physical senses, but the result of a process of development drawing upon deeper, archetypal powers. We can think of these as formative forces, as “phytonutrients” of form, that he was able to grasp imaginatively.
Rudolf Steiner builds on this Goethean method to develop an entire view of the spiritual world and its relationship to nature. Barfield inherits Steiner’s work and the broader Romantic tradition. Barfield studied Coleridge very closely. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a collaborator with William Wordsworth. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead talks about both Coleridge and Wordsworth, though he dwells more on Wordsworth. He thinks Coleridge may have been able to philosophically understand what Wordsworth was doing, but Wordsworth was the poetic genius. Coleridge wrote some great poems, but in a sense his greatest “work” was Wordsworth, in that Coleridge fed Wordsworth ideas coming out of Germany—from Schelling, Fichte, Kant, Hegel—and helped keep Wordsworth inspired to write the poetry he did.
Coleridge is very important for Barfield in understanding imagination, again, not merely as an organ of fantasy or make-believe, but as a pathway into a deeper substratum of reality where the forms of nature themselves are created. Coleridge and Barfield also believed that it is through imagination that we contact the divine and that, in fact, the entire cosmos exists, in some sense, within the divine imagination.
I want to quote Coleridge on imagination from his Biographia Literaria to give a sense of where he wants to lead us. Coleridge writes:
“The Imagination I consider either as primary or secondary. The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The Secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”
Here we have the primary imagination, our connection to the infinite “I AM,” to what Whitehead would call God or the primordial nature of God, and the secondary imagination, which Coleridge says is an echo of the former and to which we have some conscious access. It differs only in degree from this deeper divine imagination.
In addition to imagination in its primary and secondary forms, Coleridge also speaks of “fancy,” which would be the usual way imagination is conceived in a materialistic culture: as nothing more than a rearranging of sensory percepts in a mechanical way. David Hume, for instance, thinks of imagination as merely recombining impressions derived from the senses—having seen red stop signs, we can extract their color or shape and recombine those elements in new images in our heads. Imagination, on this view, is reduced to a kind of brain mechanism: there is nothing in the imagination that was not first in the senses, as Hume and Locke would say.
What Coleridge, Barfield, Steiner, Goethe, and I would add Whitehead are saying is that imagination is not mere fancy in that reductive sense. It is not just a brain mechanism limited to what we have experienced through the senses. Rather, imagination potentially puts us in touch—consciously in touch—with the creative power that grew our organism into the form it has taken and that allows plants, animals, and the entire natural world to take form. What we experience consciously as imagination is, on this view, the activity of the deeper creative ground of the natural world itself. That is the claim.
In “Where Is Fancy Bred?,” the essay by Barfield in the collection The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays that I highly recommend, Barfield traces an evolution of consciousness to explain how we came to have what Whitehead would call the bifurcated consciousness of the modern period, which has reduced imagination to mere fancy. Barfield discusses how, at various moments in the history of the West, there have been influxes of ideas from Asia. He mentions the influence of Indian philosophy on Pythagoras in ancient Greece. He notes that Alexander the Great, who conquered territory all the way to India, initiated a major influx of Indian ideas into the West; around that time we even find statues of the Buddha in the Greek style as a result of that cultural interface. Later, the Crusades represent another moment of complex cultural contact.
During the Romantic period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was yet another influx of Indian thought as a result of British colonization of India. Many British and European thinkers began learning Sanskrit. Wilhelm von Humboldt produced translations and philosophical works on the history of language and what it suggests about the evolution of consciousness. Similarly, Friedrich Schlegel learned Sanskrit. Barfield highlights the sense, in these thinkers, that the history of language is a kind of fossil record that allows us to trace the shifting forms of consciousness humanity has moved through over thousands of years.
Schlegel ends up arguing that, rather than thinking of contemporary modern consciousness as an expansion of what was once a simple and primitive consciousness, we should see things differently. Because European languages share a common root with Sanskrit in the so-called Indo-European family, understanding Vedic and Vedantic forms of thought suggests that consciousness actually began as a universal immersion in the cosmos. Evolution, on this view, is more like a contraction or diminishment of consciousness than an expansion. Initially, human awareness was more non-dual: an immersion in a spiritually saturated consciousness. Evolution toward the modern West is more of a contractive movement.
In Barfield’s terms, we become self-conscious by exclusion, not by expansion. Schlegel and Barfield thus suggest that the evolution of consciousness is not a simple expansion, but a contraction from an original unity. The modern ego has arisen by cutting itself off from what Barfield calls an original form of participation in a universal field of meaning.
Drawing on Steiner, Barfield suggests that there is still a kind of recapitulation of this history of consciousness in each day and night of our individual experience. When we are awake during the day, we experience the sensory world and have the capacity for reflective thought about it. When we go to sleep at night, our sensory experience and reflective conscious thought go dormant, and we are resubmerged, Steiner would say, into that original state of unity, an immersion in the spiritual world. When we wake up the next day, we forget that unity, but we retain an afterglow of it in what we experience as conscience.
You can think here of Immanuel Kant’s account of conscience and moral duty. For Kant, in our sensory experience and reflection upon it, we are limited to the phenomenal world. That phenomenal world is constructed, in his view, by the activity of our own mind—our categories and forms of intuition—and we cannot access the realm of things-in-themselves; we cannot access the noumenal or spiritual world, at least not in theoretical cognition or natural science. But Kant also says that in moral experience we do contact the noumenal world; we do have a direct line to the realm of spirit through conscience and moral obligation.
Steiner is trying to give an account of how this is possible. Unlike Kant, Steiner, Goethe, Barfield, and I would add Whitehead think that we can experience the spiritual world not only through conscience and our sense of the good and of moral freedom, but also in our encounters with the natural world. We can cultivate a Goethean method of intuitive perception that allows us to see not just the outer surfaces of nature, displayed through our eyes, but the deeper formative powers at work beneath the surface.
Here I can reconnect to Whitehead and his theory of perception. Whitehead is very critical of modern philosophy for putting the cart before the horse and imagining that what he calls perception in the mode of presentational immediacy—perception mostly through the eyes, a predominantly visual mode that presents a world of colored surfaces with no depth—is the fundamental mode of perception. Presentational immediacy, taken in abstraction, makes the world appear dead and external to us. The deeper mode of perception, which Whitehead calls causal efficacy, has been neglected by modern philosophers. He says modern philosophers have been obsessed with their visual feelings, with presentational immediacy, and have neglected their visceral feelings.
Causal efficacy, for Whitehead, is our bodily feeling, our sense of inheriting the emotional impulses of the past as they compel us in a certain direction into the future. There is a sense of process, meaning, purpose, and emotional depth in causal efficacy that presentational immediacy lacks. Presentational immediacy is useful for precise scientific measurement—for cultivating geometrical methods to measure how one surface relates to another and so on. Whitehead is not saying we should do away with presentational immediacy; he is saying that we need to recover what has been forgotten, namely this mode of perception that he thinks nature poets like Wordsworth were more attuned to.
Causal efficacy gives us, in Whitehead’s terms, a sense of the “brooding presence of the whole” and of the intrinsic value of nature, which we feel. But modern egoic, empiricist, scientific consciousness represses that feeling and treats it as merely subjective. In its pursuit of a true understanding of nature, it seeks something neutralized, valueless, measurable. Whitehead wants to bring these two modes of perception back into better balance so we can avoid what Coleridge called the “despotism of the eye,” his phrase for the dominance of presentational immediacy.
This despotism of the eye is the mentality that reduces imagination to mere fancy, understood as a private recombination of sensory percepts. It closes us off from awareness of the deeper, invisible activities of nature—“invisible” only to our physical senses, not necessarily to our imaginatively enriched perception.
I will eventually close with a final thought and then open things up for discussion, but let me first draw out a parallel I see between Barfield’s account of the evolution of consciousness, drawing on Schlegel and Steiner, and Whitehead’s account of consciousness in Process and Reality. Barfield and Steiner argue that modern consciousness is really a contraction of a primal, universal, non-dual awareness. Some of you may recall that at the beginning of Process and Reality, on page 15, Whitehead talks about consciousness in a very similar way. He writes: “Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin, additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements, by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual of such higher grade has ‘trucked’ with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.”
Whitehead is a panexperientialist, a kind of panpsychist, but he does not think consciousness, as such, goes all the way down. He has a very specific and technical definition of consciousness, which makes it relatively rare and derivative. Experience or feeling, including unconscious experience, pervades the natural world at all scales. Consciousness, for Whitehead, is the last and greatest of the elements by which selection from the totality occurs. Consciousness actually obscures the totality from which it originates. The task of philosophy is to correct for that process of selection so as to recover the totality. This is very similar to what Barfield, drawing on Steiner, would say is the task of our time.
Our consciousness has become so contracted and, as a result, has become quite powerful in terms of the technological, technoscientific capacities it has developed to remake nature—a nature conceived as mute matter in motion, awaiting the anthropocentric values we might want to impose upon it. This has put us in a very dangerous situation. This contracted state of consciousness is leading us to destroy the Earth.
My overall point is that the ecological crisis has many causes, but that it is primarily a crisis of perception—both self-perception and perception of nature. Cultivating the Romantic imagination, cultivating a deeper sense of participatory attunement whereby our inner imaginative activity can be recognized as an expression of the same formative forces and creative power at work in the natural world, is essential to responding to the ecological emergency. It is not just a matter of shifting our economic modes of production; those shifts are downstream from a deeper shift in perception. It is not just about educating people about the scientific consensus on climate change. Without this deeper transformation of perception and consciousness, scientific information will not become meaningful enough to motivate habitual change or to transform the deep motivational structure of our modern consumer-capitalist worldview, in which nature exists only for human exploitation.
I think Whitehead and Barfield converge on this point: imagination, far from being an escape from the real world or from the urgency of the ecological emergency, is perhaps one of the most important ways we can directly confront and respond to that emergency with the level of transformation necessary to pass through our current evolutionary bottleneck.
Consciousness is such a polysemic term, and Whitehead has a very technical definition of it. In the context of contemporary consciousness studies, everyone has their own definition. In contemporary spirituality, “consciousness” sometimes becomes an alternative name for God; many people influenced by New Age movements feel uncomfortable with the word “God” and prefer to speak of “consciousness” in a theological sense. I like Whitehead’s definition. I will not go into all the technicalities, but roughly: consciousness is a result of the intensification of feeling that arises from a contrast between possibility and actuality.
For Whitehead, the germ of consciousness may be present in all living beings, perhaps down to a single cell, but it fully flowers in what he calls the higher animals and in the human context, where there is the capacity not only to see what is there—to perceive facts—but to perceive those facts as haloed by a network of possibilities, which he calls eternal objects. Holding together the perception of a fact through our physical senses (what he calls physical prehension) with the conceptual prehension of possibilities intensifies consciousness. Imagination is therefore absolutely essential for consciousness in Whitehead’s sense.
For Whitehead, feeling and affect are not only at the core of consciousness but also of causal transmission through nature. Causal efficacy is affective. I have written an essay, which I sometimes share, in which I explore Whitehead’s account of causal efficacy in relation to Wordsworth’s poetry. Because Whitehead was so enamored of Wordsworth, and because he devotes significant attention to Romanticism in the “Romantic Reaction” chapter of Science and the Modern World, I wanted to highlight how Whitehead came to appreciate the limitations of modern concepts of perception inherited from Hume, Locke, and the classical empiricists. I think he realized those limitations in part through reading the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and other Romantic nature poets.
Wordsworth, in his poetry, exhibits a sensitivity to what Whitehead calls the “interpenetrating prehensive unities” of nature, a sense of the brooding presence of the whole and of what Wordsworth himself calls the “life of the great whole,” the world-soul reverberating in every rock and every flower. Whitehead believes we needed the poets to remind us of what scientific materialism had left out, and he takes the testimony of the poets as metaphysically significant. I cannot go into great depth here, but I have a chapter where I elaborate on how Wordsworth exemplifies the mode of perception Whitehead calls causal efficacy.
With respect to the two modes of perception—presentational immediacy and causal efficacy—Whitehead urges us to be careful. He distinguishes them as pure modes for analytical purposes, but warns us not to divide them, because in concrete experience they are never actually separate. This is crucial. It is also something Coleridge thematizes. For those in whom imagination has been awakened not only as a poetic power but as a power of attunement to nature’s creativity, one sign of that awakened imagination is precisely the ability to distinguish without dividing.
For Whitehead, this manifests in his preference for polarity over duality. Presentational immediacy and causal efficacy are polarities, not separate substances. Symbolic reference is the mode in which the two are related. Causal efficacy—our bodily feeling inheriting the world’s energies and anticipating their direction—is primary for Whitehead. Presentational immediacy is the visual display of surfaces and geometric space. Symbolic reference is the synthesis of these two pure modes. Whitehead distinguishes them only abstractly, for the purposes of philosophical analysis.
It is in symbolic reference that we can best understand the work of imagination. Participatory imagination draws on the felt depth of bodily feeling and causal efficacy to interpret and transfigure what presentational immediacy gives us. Whitehead says that the living body as a whole is our primary organ of perception. The five senses then pick out particular channels and abstract from the totality particular streams of data—visual, auditory, and so on—out of the underlying causal efficacy of nature.
The transformation of imagination that I am pointing toward is really a transformation in our mode of symbolic reference: how we relate the two modes of perception. Causal efficacy has been submerged and repressed by the modern ego. How do we reopen ourselves to that influx of creative power without being overwhelmed by it? We do not want to lose the mode of presentational immediacy entirely, because it is what, in some sense, allows us to remain individuals.
Barfield speaks of “original participation,” a boundaryless dissolution in which the human being is submerged in the spiritual cosmos, and “final participation,” which would allow us to recover that sense of participation without losing individuation. We would regain the totality while remaining conscious. In Whitehead’s terms, we would recover the fact that we have “truck with the totality of things.” The whole cosmos is flooding into our experience moment by moment. We need some filtering of that to remain conscious, but the modern filter is clogged. We have to clean it out.
In this transformation, nature ceases to be a mere collection of inert objects for professionals and technocrats to manipulate, and becomes instead the outer expression of an inner formative power that we experience in our own inner life. Barfield quotes Shakespeare in “Where Is Fancy Bred?”—the same lines that give the essay its title. Shakespeare writes:
“Tell me, where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished? Reply, reply.
It is engendered in the eyes,
With gazing fed;
And fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring fancy’s knell.
I’ll begin it: Ding, dong, bell.
Ding, dong, bell.”
The question here is: where is imagination? Is it in the head or in the heart? And what would it mean to consider the heart an organ of perception—not just a pump, but an organ of perception? “Heart,” in this context, can be extended to include the blood and the whole body. When Whitehead says the living body as a whole is our primary organ of perception—not the eyes, not the ears, not just the brain, but the whole organism—what would it mean to take that seriously?
I try to cultivate this in simple practices, like going for a walk. I am currently living in Humboldt County in Northern California, amidst redwoods and Douglas firs and beautiful rivers. To sit by the river and hear the water rolling over the rocks, and to let go of the need to translate the meaning of that perception into English, to allow it its own intrinsic value and intrinsic meaning as an emotional, affective meaning—this is a practice. Poets are those human beings who can translate such experience into language in novel ways that convey something of the sound of water over rocks. But how do we attune ourselves to that sound without rushing to translation?
This reminds me of something Whitehead says in his little book Symbolism on his theory of perception. We often think that words symbolize things: “tree” symbolizes the trees in the forest. Whitehead notes that, for poets, this often works in reverse: the poet goes for a walk in the woods so that the trees might symbolize the words. Symbolization runs in both directions.
This mode of attunement is not easy. It is easier if I leave my phone at home. It is easier if I go on a long walk where there are no other human voices around and I only have to deal with the voice in my own head. But the challenge is: how do we make ourselves transparent to the meanings of the nonhuman world? Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, offers a wonderful suggestion. She notes how difficult it is to refer to a tree with a proper pronoun. It does not feel right to say “he” or “she,” but “it” denies personhood to nonhuman beings. Drawing on Anishinaabe language, which has a more relational ontology, she suggests “ki” for the singular and “kin” for the plural. We can refer to the tree as “ki” and to the forest as “kin,” with a nice double meaning.
The emphasis here on language is not to say that language necessarily gets in the way. Romantic nature poets show that there is a way to language this attunement poetically. Scientific prose might deaden perception, but rendered poetically, even English—a somewhat noun-heavy language—can convey the living pulse of the natural world. For Barfield, language shapes consciousness. One of the practices I try to engage in is to imagine that the Earth community wants to be heard and understood by human beings, and that human beings are not aliens on this planet but can become organs of the Earth’s deeper self-understanding. What if our role were to be in service to articulating the meanings of the sound of the brook or the wind through the leaves—to become as intensely attuned as possible to that beauty, rather than imposing our industrial designs?
Kimmerer’s work, like Barfield’s, brings us back to language with fresh ears, so we can see that our meanings and our capacity for language are derivative of a deeper mode of communication that has always already been going on in the natural world around us. Earlier I mentioned polarity. Polarity goes beyond dualism by acknowledging a hidden third that mediates between opposites, and by noticing how opposites tend to coincide at extremes. There is something spiritual in that coincidence of opposites that cannot be captured physically or cognitively; it requires participation, experiential involvement.
Whitehead has his own way of expressing this kind of trinitarian or threefold structure. Steiner, in his account of the evolution of consciousness, emphasizes the gradual loss of a sense of the threefoldness of the human being: body, soul, and spirit. At some point the Catholic Church adopted the view that the human being is a body–soul unity, and spirit got lopped off. If you acknowledge that each human being has a direct connection to spirit, you open the door to unorthodox mystical insights. To maintain institutional power and authority, the spirit-dimension had to be kept under wraps. The Church, in effect, de-emphasized spirit and put itself in the position of necessary mediator. The Protestant Reformation challenges that, opening its own can of worms and leading to a deeper alienation.
Steiner and Barfield’s understanding of the evolution of consciousness helps us see that the intense alienation of consciousness from nature today is not simply a mistake or wrong turn. There is something important about the way it has allowed individuation and a kind of freedom. I do not mean only political freedom, though that is related, but a deeper spiritual freedom. In Jean Gebser’s terms, the “magical” structure of consciousness, or what Barfield calls original participation, was such that spiritual meanings seemed to flow into the human being from outside. There was little sense that the human being is a co-creator with spirit.
From Steiner’s and Barfield’s point of view, the aim of human evolution is for us to become aware of our own spirit and to become co-creators with the world spirit in final participation. The individuation process that has led to various negative consequences is not a place to get stuck; it is a set of growing pains to be moved through, recovering what was lost while retaining what was gained through narrowing and contraction. We cannot simply go back.
There are pathological forms of attempted regression—for example, in the abuse of alcohol to avoid the difficulties of egoic consciousness. We can sedate ourselves and regress to a more infantile form of consciousness, appropriate for infants but not for adults. We have to be careful not to take the analogy too literally and imagine so-called “primitive” peoples as childlike. That would repeat the scientific racism prevalent in the nineteenth century, when evolutionary theory was first popularized and European scientists viewed surviving Indigenous populations, often after genocide and cultural erasure, as more childlike than “rational” Europeans.
At the same time, there is a real parallel between how an individual human moves from being in the womb to independent birth and growth and how humanity as a whole has evolved. Steiner designs Waldorf education to recapitulate this evolution. He suggests delaying reading and writing until around age seven and a half, because humans did not have written language for a long time and lived in oral cultures of story and myth, with meaning that was reverberative like sound. When you learn the alphabet, the “despotism of the eye” begins.
David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, discusses how primal animate consciousness is, in a sense, lost as written language comes into prominence. In order to learn an alphabet, we de-animate nature and animate little marks on the page; meaning shifts from being present in our perception of rivers and trees and sky to being sequestered in written words, in the “dead letter.” Learning to read reorganizes the sensorium and creates a more abstract form of consciousness. Once you become literate, you cannot return to the pre-literate experience of being a child in awe and wonder at a shiny pebble on the ground—anything that can open up the child’s imagination because they are immersed in flows of feeling, in causal efficacy.
Wordsworth’s poetry recollects the loss of that childhood participation, Barfield’s “original participation,” and gestures toward what final participation might look like—recovering meaning through written words but no longer being bound by them, granting animacy again to the natural world. We cannot go back in the sense of forfeiting the spiritual individuality that has been won. Becoming alienated from nature is, in Steiner’s and Barfield’s view, part of an educational process that allows us to become aware of our human role as co-creators, to recognize that we participate in creation rather than simply receiving meanings.
Consciousness depends, at least historically, on contraction. The promise of final participation is to release the contraction while maintaining conscious individuality so we can freely participate in cultivating meaning, not just receive meaning from nature. Error, in this process, is largely a result of symbolic reference, in the sense that in presentational immediacy we cannot exactly be “wrong” about what appears; it appears as it appears. Similarly, in causal efficacy, we are simply inheriting what is given in feeling. Error enters in the attempt to bring these together.
To simplify somewhat: causal efficacy is a kind of time perception, while presentational immediacy is a kind of spatialized perception. How do we relate movement through time to what is displayed before our eyes now? Consider an outfielder in baseball: the batter hits the ball, the outfielder runs to catch it. If perception were just a series of freeze frames—like an animation in the brain—we would have to imagine the brain calculating the ball’s trajectory from the changing size of the ball’s image on the retina, frame by frame, adjusting bodily motion accordingly. Whitehead thinks it is absurd to imagine perception working that way.
Instead, causal efficacy is a kind of intuitive resonance with flows of feeling, transmitted through light reflecting off the ball, but also through our physical body’s natural attunement to the ball as another physical body. We feel, rather than calculate abstractly, the trajectory. Yet we can be wrong, particularly when highly refined rational consciousness becomes fixated on presentational immediacy. If we try to verbally explain to ourselves how to catch the ball, we may lose touch with the deeper feeling that intuitively guides us to the right place.
Similarly, consider an infant encountering a mirror for the first time. The child might think that a mother walking up behind them is walking toward them in the mirror. That is an error of symbolic reference: presentational immediacy tells the child that the reflected figure is “in front,” while causal efficacy reminds them, when the mother touches their shoulder, that she is behind. There is something mythic here about the role of error. Think of Adam and Eve eating the apple—often interpreted as the original sin, the original error. That act allows them to recognize themselves; suddenly they see that they are naked. Being severed from the causal flows allows self-consciousness to arise. The risk of error is the price we pay for self-consciousness. Symbolic reference is dangerous, but it affords us creative powers we would not otherwise have.
Steiner has been an important influence on my spiritual life, and I am beginning to bring him more into my academic work. It is serendipitous that Harvard Divinity School is hosting a conference on Rudolf Steiner, which I was surprised to learn. Steiner is quite popular among spiritual practitioners, but among academics, those who have heard of him often respond with ridicule and scorn because his claims shock the usual intellectual mentality of our time. There are certainly problems in Steiner’s work, but I think there is also great value. Whitehead provides a cosmological context and an account of perception and a metaphysical scheme that, I believe, help us begin to take seriously some of Steiner’s suggestions, based on his claimed clairvoyance—his capacity to perceive not only what physical senses reveal, which we can all do if healthy, but also what is at work beneath the surface, behind the scenes of visual and auditory perception, to perceive spiritually.
Steiner offers various meditative exercises—many of you may be familiar with them—to help people cultivate what seems to have been an innate gift in his case, and he believes this type of imaginative perception is something all human beings can begin to cultivate. Our evolutionary task, he suggests, is to develop imagination as an organ of perception. Rather than thinking human consciousness is finished—that we have reached the end with ego and abstract thought and sensory perception—Steiner says: no, keep going. There is more to be seen and felt if we cultivate imagination as an organ of perception.
We learn to see with our eyes naturally and instinctively. We do not learn to perceive imaginatively in the same instinctive way; it requires conscious effort and will. We have to devote ourselves deliberately to that type of perception. It is hard work. The payoff is not immediate. You do not get instant gratification. It takes years of practice and attunement. It is humbling.
Whitehead’s criticism of the “sensationalist” doctrine is directed primarily at modern philosophers, not at gardeners, hospice workers, or people who work directly with the natural world in a sensuously attuned way. Gardeners, for instance, engage causal efficacy as they are deeply affected in a bodily way by the smell of a rose, which evokes emotion, not merely a universal concept, as Hume might say. Whitehead’s target is the philosophers’ abstract understanding of sensory perception—Hume’s and Locke’s theories—not the gardener’s lived perception.
All of the thinkers I have mentioned—Barfield, Coleridge, Steiner, Whitehead—I consider to be Neoplatonists. Many will know Whitehead’s famous line that all of European philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Much of Arabic philosophy could also be described as footnotes to Plato. It is a shared common root. So what is added by these Romantic and modern thinkers that is not already present in ancient Neoplatonism or in Plato himself?
I think here of a great chapter by my colleague Jacob Sherman, “The Genealogy of Participation,” in the book The Participatory Turn. Sherman traces a shift in the understanding of participation from Plato through Aquinas to Schelling. In Plato, participation has to do with recollection of eternal ideas and a participation in the realm of forms. There are different readings of Plato—whether the realm of ideas is separate from embodied experience, whether there is a “two worlds” metaphysics or something subtler—but in any case participation is directed toward an ideal realm.
Whitehead inherits Plato but inverts him. For Whitehead, it is not that embodied experience is a pale imitation of the realm of forms; rather, the forms are in a certain sense deficient, and all value is realized in experience. Whitehead stands at the far end of this genealogy of participation. The line runs from Plato’s participation in a separate realm of forms, through Aquinas, who introduces more of a sense of embodiment and parity between realms, to Schelling, who introduces the notion that human beings are creative participants, co-creators of form. We are not merely imitating eternal form; we are expressing and co-creating form. This Romantic shift gives us a stronger sense of the human being as co-creator.
This was not as prominent in ancient Greek thought and early Neoplatonism. Whitehead, in Adventures of Ideas, talks about the gradual ingression of the idea of freedom, which was not central in Plato but becomes central in modern thought—not only political freedom, though that is very important, but a deeper spiritual and creative freedom in relation to the ground of being, to the divine. This is one stream of Platonic thinking developing over the centuries. I do not think there are sharp breaks; indeed, many of the best refutations of Plato’s ideas can be found already in Plato’s own dialogues.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?