Transcript:

Dialogue on Raymond Ruyer with Jack and Pedro

Matt: Well, I had already been reading some Raymond Ruyer—is that how you pronounce it?

Jack: Yeah.

Matt: Close enough? Okay. I guess it was you, Jack, who first suggested him a while ago because of my interest in Whitehead. I finally got around to it. Maybe a month ago, I started reading his book on cybernetics.

Jack: Oh yeah, it’s so good.

Matt: What is that one called?

Jack: The Origin of Cybernetics, or something like that?

Matt: Cybernetics and the Origin of Information.

Jack: Yeah, yeah.

Matt: Which is so prescient. Obviously technology sixty or seventy years ago wasn’t where it is nowadays, but I think basically all of his criticisms still hold.

Jack: And he’s prepared for all these questions we’re dealing with right now—automation and all that. It really helps with Simondon, too. I don’t know how much Simondon you’ve read, but it helps with understanding where he’s coming from.

Matt: Right. And then Neofinalism, I just started last week.

Jack: That one is the core of his metaphysics. You see him applying it in the other books.

Matt: Pedro, I know you didn’t get a chance to dig into Ruyer very much, but you read some of the Plotinus, is that right?

Pedro: No, I listened to all of Jack’s video lectures. I listened to all three of those. But I’ve been grading papers in the middle of the semester and didn’t have time to sit down and read. So I’ll play the part of asking questions that hopefully come to mind for anybody outside Ruyer.

Structurally, though, the metaphysics is so similar to Whitehead and Bergson that I feel like I get the gist. There are some differences. It sounds like themes are eternal objects, for example, or roughly correspond to them. But it’s nice to see different ways of explaining similar concepts.

So thanks, Jack, for the education. I would like to read more Ruyer. Obviously Plotinus I’m a little more familiar with, but I only made time for the video lectures.

Matt: Well, I didn’t get to the video lectures, so I’ll get to those. I did do most of the reading, including the memory and embryogenesis essay.

Jack: Oh, cool.

Matt: Which is a really nice condensed statement. So, between the two of us, Pedro, we can ask Jack some good questions about where Ruyer is coming from.

There’s a little criticism of Bergson, actually, on habit memory versus image memory that we can get into at some point. It’s interesting, especially in light of generative AI and how AI is really good at understanding images. I think that’s what Ruyer’s point was: habit memory, the sort of thing an embryo does as it grows, seems very far from what AI can actually do.

Jack: Right, exactly. He has a piece on Bergson that’s very positive. I think it’s published in the Creative Evolutiontranslation by Donald Landes that just came out. So he still defends Bergson. The mnemic themes, or mnemic subsistence, are directly indebted to Bergson. He’s basically saying: thank you, Bergson, I’m taking this.

Matt: Bergson really needs critical engagement, though, not just treatment as the master or guru. We need to carry forward what works and challenge what doesn’t. I think that’s a great service.

Jack: Yeah. I’ve been on this question of essence for a while, Matt. You know I did the thing at the retreat years ago on essence, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Obviously, you’ve been working on the eternal objects question, which is arguably the same question.

Bergson says essences are not pantry items, or something like that, at one point. But he doesn’t really say that much about essences. I just taught Creative Evolution and reread it, and my mind was open to very different things than the last time I read it. I found him using “essence” many times. He talks about the essence of consciousness, the essence of life. He does want some kind of philosophy of essence. So I think it’s worth pushing back on Bergson, but also finding where Bergson actually does emphasize those things.

My reading of Bergson has become one of exaggeration: seeing the ways he exaggerates. What happens when you pull back those exaggerations slightly and see where the philosophy stands? I think it’s much more similar to Whitehead and Ruyer, even if Bergson doesn’t want to talk about essence because he wants to push thought beyond static things, and essences are typically static.

Matt: Right. He’s trying to avoid the sense of essences as frozen forms in a Platonic heaven—poor Plato, because I don’t think that is actually Plato’s view, but it gets labeled “two-world Platonism.” Still, despite wanting to avoid that view, we need to maintain a sense of formative influence that is not simply located in spacetime. It is very difficult to articulate that metaphysically in a way that satisfies materialist or physicalist critics who seem locked into spacetime as the ultimate arena within which any valid cause must be located.

Pedro: That’s why I really like Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth, which Deleuze also takes up. There is an intensive depth immanent to materiality, not transcendent. I also appreciated Ruyer’s nod to Merleau-Ponty in a couple of places that you pointed out, Jack. That was helpful.

Jack: Yes, and melody and things like that, too. One of the cool things with Ruyer’s account of essence is that it can be transspatial, transtemporal, transnumerical, and also immanent within all of that. Particularly with gesture, mobility, and motricity. He says this very clearly in The Genesis of Living Forms, where he gives a very Merleau-Pontian reading.

Merleau-Ponty was reading Ruyer during the nature lectures, when he was looking at the axolotl and those sorts of things. Movement can look back, be reflective in some sense. The movement creates a feedback loop that develops the theme. There is not a clear grasp beforehand of what swimming should look like. We are not simply following a model. We actually have to wrestle with the singularities ourselves, and in the sensory-effector feedback, the gesture itself carries the meaning of the theme. It doesn’t look to anything other than itself dynamically unfolding in time. So the theme can still be immanent to movement and yet be more than movement.

Matt: Yeah. There’s one line in the embryogenesis essay that really jumped out at me and helps with figuring out how to articulate this view while avoiding the criticism of two-world Platonism. He says, talking about memory: memory is not a property of bodies. Bodies are—does he just reverse it?

Jack: Yeah, exactly.

Matt: Bodies are the property of memory. That reminds me—because we have to rethink what we mean by a body. We have to escape the physicalist conception of a material substance that persists in space. I thought immediately of Whitehead’s view that what we call bodies are really historical routes of occasions of experience, or societies. Once you have become dislodged from the materialist common sense of reality as space with bodies floating in it, and instead recognize that bodies are activities more or less made of memory—reiterations of a common form or characteristic—then the theme makes sense.

Jack: Or the rhythm. The rhythm of an electron has consistency. That’s memory.

Matt: Right. We distinguish between an aggregate, or what Ruyer calls a crowd, and an organism or unity by whether or not there is what he calls an absolute survey present. In Whitehead’s terms, I think the equivalent concept would be concrescence.

Jack: Definitely. Later he talks about formation versus function. Formation is essentially concrescence, and function is what happens after a concrescence, once a regular path that can be repeated is established.

Matt: Right. It’s so hard to convey these process views to people inhabiting the physicalist world model. Until you can dissolve the sense of solid bodies that they’re used to thinking in terms of, what Ruyer, Whitehead, or Bergson is talking about sounds like magic.

But Ruyer was already thinking in terms of molecular genetics explanations for how an organism’s body plan could be coded and then printed from the code or whatever. If you really think that through—a series of linear causes, molecule to protein, and so on—that’s magic.

Jack: Yeah, exactly.

Matt: I appreciated that reversal.

Jack: I was going to throw in the idea of bonds, which is such a beautiful and profound area of his thinking. Did you read the part on bonds? That’s molecules and stuff. It really helped me understand Deleuze as well.

Between the idea of bonds and tubes—because a tube is a very complex bond, if you will—all of these involve absolute survey. We should definitely at some point say what that is, although it’s a really difficult question.

Very quickly, a bond is when Whitehead says the same thing: an electron in a different circumstance, in an assemblage with other things, is a new reality. It’s not just an electron floating around by itself. When molecules form bonds, there is a sui generis form irreducible to the parts making it up. It’s a parts-whole issue. The reductionist chemist will say it’s just stuff glued together. But the bond says it cannot be glued together; it has to form a new entity in composition.

Matt: Right. An embryo is not just an assemblage of cells. It is a single cell that divides itself according to a theme, with absolute survey connecting what appear to be parts according to that theme in an immediate, transspatial way.

Jack: Yeah.

Pedro: It’s super cool that he wrote something on bonds, because that’s something I’ve wondered about. I haven’t come up with my own solution, but I’ve briefly looked it up to find out whether there is a process interpretation of what chemical bonds do. The temporal evolution of two things that are bonded becomes bound. So that’s very interesting that he wrote about that.

Matt: Just like Whitehead says in Science and the Modern World: physics is the study of the smaller organisms, biology is the study of the mid-sized organisms, and astronomy or astrophysics is the study of the really large organisms.

Ruyer has this line about microorganisms: “The triumph of materialism is illusory. To affirm that microorganisms are molecules is to admit in the same stroke that molecules are microorganisms.” Which is to say, an atom already has its own absolute survey as an atom, the wholeness that it realizes. But when you bring two hydrogens and an oxygen together and form an H₂O molecule, that’s like a symbiogenesis. Now you have a new organism, because it is a different kind of absolute survey from what hydrogen had on its own. It is not just an addition problem to understand the capacities of hydrogen versus the capacities of water. The bonds have actually brought forth a new whole.

Jack: You could say it is a new concrescence, a new consciousness, a new plane of consciousness. It is a canalization. As consciousness canalizes itself, it specializes, starts down a path, enters a kind of fugue state. Nothing can stop it from making a heart and doing these things. The pesky embryologists come in and cut chunks off and graft things on, and it remains committed. I think Ruyer’s whole metaphysics is to push reality to the level of action and say: there is an act happening. It has made a decision and is committed to its action.

Pedro: Did he write anything about quantum entanglement, and how that kind of bond might be distinguished from regular chemical bonds?

Jack: There are people working in that area. I’m not well suited enough to answer that.

Pedro: It would be interesting to hear if he sees chemical bonds as similar in kind to quantum entanglement. Matt, you’re more familiar with Mike Epperson’s work than I am. Does Epperson interpret quantum entanglement as a logical relationality, an internal relationality?

Matt: Yes, something like that.

Pedro: That’s interesting. I wonder if Ruyer goes along similar lines.

Jack: He definitely talks about this stuff. It’s just that those passages are hard for me to absorb.

Matt: His whole emphasis on embryogenesis and the primary consciousness of the embryo versus the secondary consciousness of an adult—with the sensory-motor system, brain, and cortex—gives us the illusion of observing the more primary process from outside. Adult human organisms end up with a view of reality that tends toward a representationalist account of external objects, as though we were outside observers of the world. We lose touch with this deeper ontogenetic or embryogenetic dimension of consciousness.

It reminds me very much of Whitehead’s account of perception in terms of presentational immediacy and causal efficacy, or sometimes sense perception and bodily reception. Bodily reception, in Whitehead’s terms, sounds to me a lot like primary consciousness in Ruyer’s sense: the absolute survey of the body itself. And I think there are ways of cultivating modes of secondary consciousness that would allow us to recover, to some degree, the kind of absolute survey present during embryogenesis, even as adult organisms.

This is exactly what Rudolf Steiner is talking about when he tries to develop what he calls etheric imagination. Etheric is the Theosophist’s term for the life body or vital body. Steiner says: “One discovers that through this formation of the life of the imagination, one grows together with that which is the formative forces of the human body itself. After a time, one makes the discovery that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the diluted life of force of human growth.” What forms us inwardly and plastically in the physical body from birth to death is, in a diluted state, our imaginative life in ordinary consciousness. So the formative power of imagination is continuous with the formative power of embryogenesis.

Jack: Love that.

Matt: We can recover that as adults with practice. I think that is what process philosophy is about at the end of the day.

Jack: This makes me think of two things. One is the pneuma connection with Aristotle and the work I did at the biophilosophy conference last summer. The ether, pneuma, and embryogenic process in Aristotle—the nous, entelechy, pneuma, and ether—are all different manifestations of this divine energy at the root of our existence. It is still in us throughout life, even though it is kind of impersonal.

So you already have this Bergsonian idea. Bergson says the élan vital is the embryo of the universe. But it is consciousness, and embryos are always consciousness for Bergson and Ruyer. They are primary consciousness. You could say undissociated consciousness, ready to dissociate, canalize, and choose a path.

Pedro: I really enjoyed—sorry.

Jack: No, jump in.

Pedro: In your lectures, Jack, you talked a lot about how Ruyer interprets the brain. That’s the part that stuck with me the most: the brain as an embryonic organ. The example you gave about the difference between the heart and the brain was really good. The heart has to maintain a persistent, mostly unchanging structure, compared to the neuroplasticity of the brain. The brain is so plastic, and it has to change in order to maintain its function.

It’s almost like the brain is the most godlike organ—godlike in a very process sense. Structurally, it most closely resembles the creative process out of all the organs we have. That interpretation of the brain really stuck with me, and I hope it becomes more mainstream.

I’m thinking of Simone Weil’s concept of metaxu: bridges between the mundane and the divine. The brain is that sort of organ. It has a material constitution, but in its working, process, and neuroplasticity it also resembles the creative process itself.

Jack: Exactly. That’s the etheric imagination of the brain: this creative ability to live in that metaxu space. The other thing I wanted to bring up is John Sallis’s work. Matt, I didn’t know you were familiar with it, but I found online that you had written something about it. He has this idea of hovering that he gets from Husserl, which is very similar to metaxu.

In imagination, we are hovering between reality and everything that goes beyond it. When I have a metaphor, there is the concrete thing the metaphor is, in the words, and then there is the meaning that it has as metaphor, which goes beyond that. This in-between—hovering back and forth between reality and the imaginal—is the imaginal itself, rather than there being another pure imaginal realm. I think the brain does that as well. That is expressivity.

And I like that you said, Pedro, that we should make people feel this way, because I do think people sometimes hate the brain. In process philosophy, there is a tendency to denigrate the brain because of reductionism. I get that; I’ve been there too. The brain can’t do everything; we need something more than the brain. But let’s not forget how freaking dope the brain is.

Pedro: It is pretty dope. Eventually it would be cool to read Claire Colebrook’s work. She has a little book on the brain—I forget the title. I think she wrote a review of Ruyer’s book. She did a lot on Deleuze.

And you’re not alone in looking something up on Google and seeing that Matt already wrote about it. That happens to me often.

Jack: It’s not the only thing that’s happened to me. I recently found out you published on phenomenology from the Goethean side. I knew you worked on that, but I didn’t know you had published on it.

Matt: Just doing what I can to help train the AI that will replace us.

Jack: I think the AI likes you.

Matt: That doesn’t matter—priority disputes and all. But the hovering concept: Schelling writes about imagination in just that way. Sallis’s books on imagination, especially The Force of Imagination, I studied closely for my dissertation.

Jack: Epic books. And he read Whitehead.

Matt: Did he?

Jack: Yeah. He uses “prehension” in one of those books.

Matt: I must have known that. I’ve forgotten more than I know, I’m sure.

But yes, we have to redeem the brain. It is really important. But its role is mediation, not manufacture of consciousness. As I understand Ruyer, we have sense organs that bring us into relationship with the environment, and the brain modulates and mediates images coming in from the environment to help the organism enhance its primary consciousness.

Jack: And I would say it filters in order to allow for a canalizing of secondary consciousness that is consistent and coherent. This is Bergson, and maybe Plotinus too: the brain is a filter that makes the integral experience, the entirety of our perceptual experience, manageable, dissociated, and less complex than everything we could possibly be sensing at every moment.

Matt: The body forms organs. Embryogenesis generates organ systems, and the brain analogously forms concepts. These are more plastic, but they can still get canalized themselves. Does that analogy track?

Jack: I don’t remember him talking about concepts, but I just taught Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?, where they reference Ruyer a whole bunch, and “concept” is the biggest idea there. So I’m very curious about your thoughts on that. Did Ruyer use the term concept? I can’t remember.

Matt: I don’t think so in the reading I did. But having read Deleuze and Guattari before reading Ruyer, I need to go back and reread them to see what they did with him.

Jack: They say concepts are absolute survey. I think everything else you said fits perfectly with the Deleuze and Guattari view, but I’m curious whether it fits Ruyer.

Pedro: The Bergsonian point is that the brain and nervous system mostly translate perception into action. Bergson emphasizes the brain as a mechanism for action, though obviously there is a conceptual part.

Jack: Exactly. For Bergson, the concept part would be secondary and would come from a more reflective spatialization.

Pedro: Is there a difference for Deleuze and Guattari between concept and capital-I Idea from Difference and Repetition?

Jack: Difference and Repetition is just Deleuze, and there he talks badly about concepts. The Idea is more than a concept in the later work.

Pedro: Right. The Idea implicates the virtual. It is a virtual multiplicity.

Jack: Exactly. In Difference and Repetition, we have problems that then become Ideas through our interaction with them, memory, and the three syntheses of time. I think that’s more or less the plane of immanence.

In What Is Philosophy?, first you have planes of immanence, and you have to have a plane of immanence before you can make concepts. A plane of immanence is not just what we’re given at the beginning. We create a plane of immanence when we learn to swim, for instance. We inject ourselves into a problematic field of multiplicities and intensities. We territorialize it, organize it, interact with it, and regulate it. Then we can have concepts.

Technology and science change the way we form a plane of immanence. Kant’s plane of immanence is the set of problems he is capable of framing—from science, religion, morality, and so forth. Planes of immanence aren’t always the same, so concepts end up being incongruent with each other, with edges that don’t entirely work. You need imagination to link them.

Pedro: In Whiteheadian terms, would it be fair to say that what stands out as salient in the plane of immanence is a function of what’s negatively prehended? Am I using that right?

Jack: Totally. That’s beautiful. Yes. For Bergson, to connect that idea, he calls it dissociation. We have this integral experience and we lessen it, negatively prehend, narrow it, ignore. That allows it to become intense, canalized, meaningful, continuous, and consistent.

A world with tools is a plane of immanence that creates a whole slew of concepts and problems in philosophy, like in Plato. Technē would be a sort of plane of immanence that creates concepts.

Matt: Embryogenesis has always seemed so obviously purposive to me. It is so obviously an example of entelechy and generative wholeness. You can’t understand it by an assemblage of parts.

But in contemporary biology, aside from people like Michael Levin and maybe a few others, like Waddington, who was influenced by Whitehead and the organicist tradition, most biologists rule out purpose in the living world. Certainly in terms of phylogeny. I don’t know how they can get away with that in ontogeny, when you are looking at the growth of an individual organism. It is so obviously goal-directed.

At the beginning of Neofinalism, Ruyer talks about his axiological cogito. Even a scientist—and Whitehead makes a similar point—is animated by truth, a normative feature that guides investigation. You can’t rule out purposiveness if you want to account for your own scientific activity. Beginning the book there pulls the rug out from under scientific epistemologies that deny purpose to nature while still assuming it in themselves. Otherwise you end up with a weird dualism or anthropocentrism.

Jack: I love the first chapter. The move is so elegant and simple. If you go up to a reductionist antifinalist and say, “Your theory is meaningless,” they’ll say, “No, it’s meaningful.” Okay, then you have a contradiction, because you can’t deny meaning and have meaning at the same time. He connects meaning with teleology.

Matt: If your denial of meaning in the universe has any sense to it, you are locked into a performative self-contradiction. You could backpedal and say human language at some point created the possibility of meaning. But can you really explain that? Can language become meaningful in an otherwise dead, inert, meaningless universe?

Jack: This question was on Merleau-Ponty’s mind in The Visible and the Invisible, and I’m more and more thinking he gets it from Ruyer. Ruyer starts with the ontological problem of sense: how do we make meaning endemic to reality itself while allowing for different grades of meaning that are not necessarily original to nature as a whole or process in an inorganic form—if we can even still speak that way. It’s clear Ruyer and Whitehead don’t want to speak of an inorganic in that way, which may be a rub point with Bergson.

Matt: When Bergson talks about memory and matter as a kind of dualism, is matter a function of the scientific intellect? Is it an abstraction generated by the intellect? Is that the basic idea?

Jack: More or less. Bergson tackles the question “what is matter?” in Matter and Memory. He comes back to it in Creative Evolution and doesn’t think it was solved by Matter and Memory. Canguilhem draws this out well in the appendix to the Landes translation.

There is what matter is for the living organism as a living organism: that’s Matter and Memory. Creative Evolutionattempts to step outside that into what Bergson calls universal consciousness. He also uses that phrase in Duration and Simultaneity, along with “universal durée,” or the “duration of durations.”

In the end, he thinks everything is psychological, everything is consciousness. As universal, impersonal consciousness depersonalizes, dissociates, and canalizes, it creates matter.

Matt: Is that different from Plotinus and emanation, where matter is what’s left over?

Jack: I don’t think it is, though Bergson does it differently. Plotinus thinks we have something like a complete concept in the Leibnizian sense. There is a complete concept of me, or Caesar, or Socrates, existing in the intellect, and it realizes itself. You could get rid of the rest of the world and every single intellect has enough in it to create the rest of the universe. The rest of the universe would still exist even if only one complete-concept soul instantiated itself in matter.

Pedro: But for Bergson, at least in Matter and Memory, there’s a temporal aspect. Matter is the most detended kind of memory.

Jack: Yes.

Pedro: Which would make sense if a process-style God contains all of the past, and the divine mind in that detended form of memory would be the opposite side of the spectrum.

Jack: In chapter three of Creative Evolution, Bergson talks about the ideal genesis of matter. When we invent a new technology, we often find a new way of cutting the world up. The frame in which we dissociate the flow of universal duration creates matter. Not in the sense that there was nothing and then something, but that there was a fullness of duration, and now there is a way of cutting it up. The cuts follow the sinuosities of reality, though they are not reality itself. They are like grains in the marble.

He says the alphabet forms both an integral form of speech when we durationally live it and communicate, and then the analysis of that into letters and syntax. So in the creation of language, there is a creation of matter, because matter is what we cut it up into.

Of course, we always begin with big ideas, feelings, and thoughts. Merleau-Ponty says the child’s first word may mean the sky, the train going by, their desire for food, all at once. We start from complex, composite, integral, gestural expressions and then chop them up. We analyze the parts and create matter out of it.

Pedro: There’s also the backward movement that contemplative traditions try to achieve. Zen, for example, treats language as a hindrance to a one-mind sort of awareness. There’s a common theme here: you create language, atomize the world, and things appear as matter. Then contemplative practices allow you to overcome that sedimentation of language and return to universal awareness instead of atomic materials.

Jack: Yes. In some sense, for Bergson, that is the coexistence of universal consciousness with ourselves as embryos. Ruyer says we are still just embryos, and Bergson says the same: aging is the later process of an embryo.

Pedro: It also seems reminiscent of the transition from intellect to intuition. Intellect refines instinct by atomization, but then it’s possible to refine it back again.

Matt: So in Ruyer’s terms, matter is what another form or subject looks like from the outside. From within the absolute survey of one form, you take in other forms.

Jack: I’m curious how much he speaks to this. When the embryo creates its body and becomes an axolotl, does it also know the whole world? Does it have an idea of nature? Is its idea just its theme and essence, or does it also have something of that complete-concept part, even if it’s not pre-established harmony? Does it know anything beyond its inner space?

Pedro: Are you talking about the axolotl itself?

Jack: That, and any absolute surface as it generates an individual organism from an embryo. The primary consciousness that starts in the embryo and continues in the fully developed phenotype. We have all the structures and functions—the tail, the heart. Things have to stay the way they are, but there is still an embryo inside, pervading it in some sense. Is that embryo conscious of nature, or just conscious of the space in which it organizes its body?

Matt: The habit body of any embryo ultimately includes the whole history of the universe. To that extent, there is something universal forming every developing embryo, even though it is developing uniquely through its species memory.

Jack: That’s its way of forgetting all the rest of the memories. It knows all the different life that has ever existed, I guess.

Matt: I think Ruyer says ontogeny approximately recapitulates phylogeny, which Ernst Haeckel thought it did more precisely. But there’s still something to that idea.

Jack: Can you unpack that?

Matt: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny means that if you look at a certain stage of development, we all look like chickens. We gradually differentiate. Every developing individual passes through prior stages of phylogenetic development.

What makes humans unique is that we are neotenous. Our embryological development is held back and doesn’t overly specialize. So we’re closer to the earth form or universal type. That would be the Goethean way to understand it. The human being, by being less developed embryologically, is actually closer to the cosmic embryo.

Pedro: Bergson says matter is affected by every single part of the universe, and perception is discernment. To use Whitehead’s word, negative prehension: we only experience a limited number of relations. But each individual being is defined by how it takes up the totality of relations in the universe in its own particular way.

Jack: Beautiful. Exactly.

Matt: Maybe there are degrees of this. I don’t want to be overly anthropocentric, but the human being seems capable of doing metaphysics. When Ruyer talks in the final chapter, “Theology of Finality,” he says that metaphysics always consists in pretending to be God—or the witness of God—in other words, the absolute totality that deliberates with itself and takes us into its confidence.

He admits that metaphysics is a kind of fiction in that sense. He’s being humble. There is something intrinsically mythic about doing metaphysics, and I like where he goes with that.

Jack: Bergson says metaphysics comes from suggestion. It is only through suggestion that we can start doing metaphysics. So the thread of imagination, the etheric, Sallis, metaxu, and the idea of fiction in Ruyer all fit together. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that metaphysics requires suggestion and suggestibility. That’s a whole side of language different from proposition, disclosure, or description.

Matt: There are some great lines here. He says, “Every mysticism has believed in the identity of the I and the absolute.” We may as well candidly acknowledge, when doing metaphysics, that “I believe that at bottom I am identical to God Himself,” because that is the perspective the metaphysician is trying to speak from.

Jack: One chapter of Plotinus starts, “Let’s play here.” This is the one on everything being contemplation. He says, let’s playfully engage the cosmos. What better metaphysical starting point than a kind of pan-contemplativism?

Matt: And ludic. Plato says in the Laws that we are playthings of the gods, so we should live life as play.

Jack: And the organicism connection with dance. There’s a clear connection in Plotinus, and Bergson draws this out. When we dance, there is one idea and the whole body is doing it. There are a thousand movements, and it looks different at different times, but we have an intention. The organism is dance. Matter dances to the themes of the music of the spheres.

Pedro: I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve wanted to talk about dance and philosophy for a long time. I think I only really understood Merleau-Ponty experientially through dancing. During COVID, I had a friend who had danced competitively in undergrad, and we had little dance parties. He taught me some moves, and it clicked: there was no split-second difference between my body and the movement it was attuned to. I want to write more about that. Dance is philosophy for the body.

Matt: It’s a way of stepping back into the primary consciousness of embryogenesis. The absolute survey of your body makes it so there is no separation between your subjectivity and the movement. You immediately see when someone becomes self-conscious while dancing, because it breaks down fast.

Pedro: There’s language getting in the way there, too.

Jack: There’s a whole thread on this between Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on the waltz. In Spiritual Energy, which is supposed to be more or less volume two of Matter and Memory, there is an essay where Bergson talks about the waltz. If you PDF search “waltz,” he talks about it quite a bit and references Ravaisson and the idea of the fossilized residue of a spiritual activity. Habit is a fossilized residue of spiritual activity.

When I learn the waltz, first I have to have a spiritual activity where I learn it, figure it out, and create the intention. Once I’ve done that, it can become a mechanism. Merleau-Ponty picks this up in Phenomenology of Perception. Maybe there is fossilization, but there is also ongoing meaning-making, which Merleau-Ponty calls consecration. That’s an amazing word. When a pipe organist learns a new organ, they do not just learn a motor skill; they consecrate a meaning to a space. That connects to Ruyer on sense and the final chapter. He says the question of sense is the ontological question of God.

Meaning is a consecrating through movement, and dance is play in a sacred sense.

Pedro: Structurally, one of the videos you sent, Jack, was on Spinoza and opening up to the infinite intellect. That’s how I see dance: opening the borders of the body to something greater.

Jack: Definitely. I get out on a limb with this, but dance is calculus. It integrates an infinity of movements into a simple duration, a simple effective quality. It creates consistency and continuity. Every continuity involves an infinity and can be analyzed as a unity or multiplicity. This is all calculus, the organism, and dance. It links Ruyer, and it also links Spinoza.

Matt: Music is a silent arithmetic of the soul, or something. Music is unconscious mathematics.

Jack: Obscure, unconscious math. Yeah.

Matt: I don’t know how much time you guys have, but I definitely wanted to discuss what Ruyer does with his theology, and how he directly mentions Whitehead but says he’s insufficient. He constructs this beautiful vision of the agent and ideal poles of the divine, and the work of actualization that goes on between them.

I love that, but the thing is, it sounds like Whitehead.

Jack: That’s exactly what I wanted to hear you speak to, because I don’t know Whitehead well enough. He doesn’t write that much on God, at least in Process and Reality. Ruyer’s critique doesn’t feel like it hits, but I don’t know enough. I’d love to hear more.

Matt: Ruyer says: “The solution of Whitehead, with whom we have so often been in agreement, is unacceptable in this case. Whitehead splits God into an ultimate, which he dubs Creativity, and a God who is its primordial non-temporal accident.” He says either this gives us an infinite regress, poorly disguised under a non-Manichaean dualism, or, if Whitehead’s non-ultimate God is the equivalent of the ideal of the world acting as a lure, we are faced with an incomplete solution.

But what about the consequent nature of God? He doesn’t mention it. That sounds very much like what Ruyer means by the agent and the ideal. I need to better understand what he means by “ideal,” but it sounds a bit like the consequent nature of God. The primordial nature is the agent whose aim or eros gives an ordering to the realm of possibilities or themes, which then provide meanings for the rest of the universe to draw on. And the consequent nature of God is, in a sense, the end or purpose of the universe, harmonizing all the potentially discordant activities within it.

Why isn’t Ruyer mentioning the consequent nature of God? That is precisely what breaks out of the non-Manichaean dualism he is worried about between Creativity and God. It feels like he is leaving out a really important aspect of Whitehead’s dipolar theology.

Jack: I wonder about that too. Does he believe this, or is he just saying it? It doesn’t feel like it hits. Wouldn’t the embryonic pneuma, theoretically diffused throughout the world while retaining its universality and generating novelty, be kind of like the consequent nature of God at work in the world? Almost a Holy Spirit kind of thing.

Matt: I think so. I really loved the final chapter. I thought he was rediscovering Whitehead’s theology.

Jack: And giving it a new description.

Matt: Which is great. As Pedro said earlier, when someone with different terminology converges on a similar scheme or idea, it is confirming. I’m glad to see it, but the polemic against Whitehead is odd.

Jack: It’s not that polemical, but he says it is unacceptable and incomplete.

Matt: Yeah.

Jack: Speak to Aristotle here, because there’s clearly an Aristotelian vapor behind this. Whitehead says Aristotle gets the furthest in metaphysics. Hopefully Whitehead got further, but maybe not.

Pedro: To add to that, Aristotle’s God is pretty impersonal. I’m not too familiar with Whitehead’s theology, but you often refer to God as “the fellow sufferer.” There’s also the process theology tradition and attempts to approximate Whitehead’s theology to Christianity and Christology.

Based on what you’ve read in Ruyer, is he going more toward an Aristotelian, impersonal God? There’s the quote that God doesn’t care about human rights. Whereas Whitehead’s God feels a little more personal. Through the individuals who care about human rights, God cares about human rights. The lure toward beauty makes human rights a significant creation in the continual movement of reality toward greater harmonization of differences.

Matt: Whitehead’s God is more personal than Aristotle’s because Whitehead’s God is not impassive; God suffers with the world and creatures. But Whitehead is explicit that God is not a moralist. In a Nietzschean sense, Whitehead’s God is beyond good and evil. God seeks aesthetic intensity of experience, not social order or moral goodness in the sense opposed to badness or evil.

Very often, the primordial nature of God, which provides the initial eros for a particular occasion of experience to do something different from what its habitat or society has historically been doing, will be perceived by that society as evil. It may disrupt the settled order of that society. But that is evolution. Whitehead would say that when novelty occurs in the wrong season, it degrades the level of organization achieved by that society. But then there is often a response by the society to integrate that novelty, which raises the society to a higher intensity of experience than it would otherwise have achieved.

The consequent nature of God is where the Platonic transcendentals gain their effectiveness: truth, beauty, and goodness. God responds to the order achieved and actualized in the course of creative advance and emergent evolution—asterisk on “emergent evolution,” because Ruyer doesn’t like that term. As the world develops and actualizes, these ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness become more concrete in the consequent nature of God. It is as though God becomes good by co-evolving with the world.

Initially, the primordial nature of God is seeking maximum beauty: diversity held in harmony. Any harmony that grows stale needs new diversities entering into it. Initially those can be discordant, painful, and cause suffering, but that suffering serves creativity and higher intensities of beauty in the long run. Whitehead uses the word “goading”: God goads the world, like a fly buzzing around and preventing you from staying comfortable.

Jack: So God is the gadfly of Socrates.

Matt: Exactly. In comparison with Aristotle, the primordial nature of God is a lot like the unmoved mover: God alone, prior to any history, not affected by what happens. But Whitehead adds the other pole, the consequent nature, which is fully affected. It is the most moved being, in a sense. That’s the most innovative part of Whitehead’s theology. You already have the equivalent of the primordial nature in Aristotle.

Jack: Arguably, you could have the consequent nature if you call pneuma and ether a kind of consequent nature of God. Aristotle says even here there are gods when he’s looking at worms and things like that.

Matt: This is my issue with Whitehead’s theology, too. Is the primordial nature of God’s eternal envisagement of possibility truly static? Or is it affected by the creative advance of history? Because it is one God. These are not two gods, primordial and consequent. If the consequent nature is growing with the world, then if not the order of eternal objects, at least their meaning must be affected.

Jack: This is where Ruyer might be helpful. You have essences, and then you have mnemic themes, which are like what I call compositional essences. There are essences that exist only through compositions. That would be kind of like a mnemic theme. There are essences like “tube,” “tubing,” allowing things to be ducted from one place to another. Bonding itself is a general possibility. Then you have the themes by which any living thing actually enacts certain patterns, like creating tubes. How many tubes does my body have? A lot, and they’re all very important.

Maybe we can have a consequent nature of essences. This gets us out of essentialism, where we go back to some essence that is “human.” Instead, the human is a composite essence. It includes tubes and other essences in us. But our human essence is mnemic rather than simply essential. It is composed of essences and lives in the transspatial realm as a past possibility, something in the past that shapes the horizon of our possibilities.

I also want to say something about God and Spinoza. Spinoza says you’re crazy if you think God should love you. Then, a few propositions later, he says everybody loves God and loves each other by loving God, and therefore God loves us. He comes back around and says that God does love us, but only when we have philosophical friendships and things like that.

I’ve been thinking about the impersonal élan vital and the impersonality of God. Maybe instead of saying impersonal, we can say pre-personal. Or if it is impersonal, we can still say it is intimate. It still has intimacy even if it doesn’t have personality. That’s key. It’s not like Neil deGrasse Tyson saying universal consciousness doesn’t care.

I also don’t know what Ruyer means by human rights. He doesn’t say God doesn’t care about you. He says God doesn’t care about human rights. What are human rights? I’m thinking of Bateson attacking the general good. The general good is a way to bamboozle people and convince them your way of exploiting people is fine. Maybe “human rights” is that, and maybe God does love singular things and wants us to be powerful, as Spinoza would also say.

Matt: It reminds me very much of Whitehead’s position. To say God does not care about human rights is to say that God’s aims, the primordial nature of God’s initial eros, are not to preserve social habits. Human rights are a social habit.

Jack: Is that line from Whitehead?

Matt: Not exactly, but it sounds like Whitehead. I don’t think Ruyer and Whitehead are saying, like Yuval Harari, that human rights are just stories we tell ourselves, made-up constructs. I think we would still say the divine inspires us to articulate the values such that something like human rights emerges over history as a social norm we want to defend. It’s grounded in something deeper than human institutions or social contract.

Jack: This might get into automation. Aren’t rights and politics ways of automating things so that things can’t get out of hand?

Matt: In a liberal procedural state, yes.

Jack: I keep coming back to this line in Bateson: “He who would do good must do good in minute particulars.” He tirades against the general good. That’s exactly what Spinoza is saying. God at work, loving creation, is us using our intellects and feelings to do good in the minute particular. The general good is a lazy and dangerous automation.

Matt: You could be an outspoken defender of human rights and step over the homeless person on your way to Starbucks without acknowledging their humanity.

Jack: Aristotle talks about this too. Sometimes the universal and the particular don’t line up, and you have to be creative. There is this embryogenic, universal, intimate consciousness trying to be just when there is no model.

Pedro: Bergson is a good nexus for all of this. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, morality at first isn’t moralistic. It is about maintaining the closed society, maintaining social order. But once the élan vital breaks through and becomes conscious of itself in human beings—at least as far as we know—that self-awareness of the élan vital is experienced as love. If creativity becomes conscious of its own activity, that looks like love. That’s how I interpret mystical experience.

Then you have that experience and try to generate values, laws, or rights that territorialize it. Since you can’t have that mystical experience en masse, you offer rules to automate the insight. Human rights are supposed to be based on that movement toward the open society, the fraternity of universal humanity. But that itself becomes a kind of closed base.

Jack: I love this. The automation question is important. Ruyer is good on this. If you want to go to war with automation, you’ll probably end up in performative contradictions because we need automation. We have habits. This is what annoys me about adolescent Deleuzianism: the idea that we can have no attachments and no habits and just be pure novelty all the time. Calm down. You’re just regressing, and I promise you still have habits and attachments.

How do we harbor an embryonic openness? When we know our intimacy in God and in the élan vital, we aspire and feel inspired to create and be generative. That is the open side of morality.

Pedro: That’s ethics. Ethics is how you generate habits that are generative, generous, and compassionate in a way that resembles the creative process.

Jack: Yes. How can we have enough automation, just a little, so that things get more intense and we can canalize into something interesting, new, and creative, rather than just tearing down all the cellular walls and becoming embryos again?

Matt: Bodies without organs.

Jack: The embryo is a body without organs.

Matt: The adolescent Deleuzianism you’re talking about reminds me of family abolitionism: a contemporary Amazon version of Plato, somehow. But I think Plato was joking in the Republic. It’s like: let’s play Eros; yes, the rulers can control who has sex with whom, that’s easy.

You can critique the patriarchal family structure, of course. But habits exist for a reason. How do you raise a kid in a commune context? A lot of kids who grew up in that context rebelled against it and wanted structure because it was chaotic.

Jack: This is where I love David Graeber and David Wengrow. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is life-changing, and The Dawn of Everything is all about getting imagination back so we can think about how we live and structure our lives. People say patriarchy is bad, so let’s abolish the family. But what imaginative world goes beyond that? Often it ends up as a commune, which has existed for thousands of years and has the problem of becoming cult-like, among many other vulnerabilities. How do we ignite imagination to find new compositions, new bonds, new essences, new mnemic themes, new rhythms?

Matt: Experimenting around the edges is so important, maintaining that sense of embryogenetic playfulness.

Jack: Graeber and Wengrow talk about societies that switch between different political structures at different times. A gradualist view would ask how we can foster other types of organization without tearing everything down and starting from scratch. When we do that, we probably end up with fascism again. How can we slowly shift things, shifting between modalities, and come up with new patterns and habits while keeping traditions to some degree? We shouldn’t think traditions are just evil or cancerous in the Deleuzian sense.

Matt: There’s no neutral ground from which to judge our traditions. We are always judging based on inherited conceptual tools and moral philosophies. There is no outside from which to judge your society, really. You want diverse, cross-cultural influences, but we are always embedded in history. Thinking we can point to the particular tradition that is the problem, excise it, and throw it away leads to tremendous violence that I don’t think anyone actually wants when they make claims like that.

I need to go in a few minutes, but I want to talk about metaphysics and science. Ruyer is brilliant in how he draws on science to show how science depends on metaphysics, but without metaphysically bullying science. As with Aristotle, metaphysics comes after science. You need a lot of already established physics and biology before you can begin metaphysical speculation about what is being left out.

As I understand Ruyer, science focuses on work: the processes of actualization that take place between agency and ideals, between the supreme agent and the supreme ideal. Science studies the spatiotemporal unfolding between those two. But what happens in spacetime only makes sense in light of the metaphysical realities of agency and ideality. We can’t measure those because they are not in space and time.

Jack: You can’t even look at them.

Pedro: A metaphor I’m championing now when people assume physicalism is: ask them to define physical. If they say “anything you can touch,” ask, “Can you touch time?” and go from there.

Matt: That’s good. But then you still have people locked into the block universe idea.

Pedro: I don’t think that’s so difficult to argue against. Maybe some basic knowledge of physics is required, but on an intuitive level, the onus is on the physicist to show that what we immediately perceive as the passage of time is wrong. The most obvious thing about our experience is that time passes. So the onus isn’t on the person who says time is real; it’s on the person who says time is a fiction.

Matt: Yes. It requires a phenomenological attitude: we inhabit the lifeworld, and physics is an abstraction out of that. The models of physics are not the be-all and end-all basis from which to explain our experience.

Jack: Ruyer short-circuits this by saying there is action. The substrate of reality is action. There is an action required to think physicalism. That action has an agent, an ideal, and work. Action is undeniably the reality. And we can’t understand action without time, without past and future, without the incompleteness of acting.

Aristotle tries to think action without time, and I think that’s where he goes wrong. We haven’t talked about the eternal yet, and we should prioritize that in a future meeting. We’ve done a lot with process, transience, and all of that, but where do we give due to the eternal? Plotinus is big on the eternal, Ruyer is big on the eternal, and so is Whitehead. Maybe the question is more difficult for Bergson.

Matt: Just as we don’t want to place God entirely transcendent to the universe, eternity is not the opposite of time or separate from time. Time is the moving image of eternity. That line from the Timaeus reverberates through Plotinus, Bergson, Whitehead, and Ruyer. It is not two-world dualism, as if eternity is somewhere else.

Jack: Exactly. Spinoza is really good there. Bergson says Spinoza is obsessed with eternity and flees into eternity, but I don’t think that’s what he does. He immanentizes it. Whenever we feel something as necessary—the joy I feel when I talk philosophy with you guys, for example—I feel there is a necessity to that, and therefore I feel that it is eternal. Necessity and eternity are basically the same thing for Spinoza.

Matt: I always wonder where freedom fits in Spinoza.

Pedro: I like Spinoza’s idea of freedom in terms of activity and reactivity. I’m not a determinist, but I still think in terms of activity and reactivity.

Jack: You should read the article I just submitted on freedom in Bergson, Spinoza, and Deleuze. I tried to bring them together. Deleuze says freedom is schizophrenia. I don’t think he has a convincing story about freedom. “I’m free from attachments; I’m schizophrenic.” Yeah.

Pedro: Freedom would be creativity in Whitehead’s sense. We can only embody that to certain degrees because we are materially embodied beings.

Jack: Complete deterritorialization.

Matt: Freedom at that point is chance and randomness, not self-determination, which is what we mean by freedom. Freedom is not the opposite of necessity. It is being lured by an ideal and measuring yourself against your ability to realize that ideal.

Jack: This would be an amazing place to come back to this conversation. Maybe you guys could look at my piece. Can we use contingency here, or does that add a problem? Spinoza is weird on this. He says there is no contingency. Then in Book Four, he suddenly uses contingency, and it becomes essential to everything that comes after, including our ability to become free.

Aristotle is here too. He says we cannot say whether there will be a naval battle tomorrow. He leaves the future open, which means he gives reality to the future. Some people say Aristotle thinks only the present exists, not the past or future. I think he thinks both past and future exist, but they are ontologically unique. The future cannot be spoken of necessarily in the same way, so there is contingency.

Pedro: I like to think of the future in terms of probability distributions. The past constrains the probability distribution of what can happen, but the moment of choice is not completely determinate. I’m not saying there are quantum processes in the brain; I don’t know. I’m just saying structurally, I like the analogy. It seems intuitive for a process account of freedom: an objective indeterminism.

Matt: As long as the probability distribution is not in a finite phase space of possibilities.

Pedro: No, not finite. Based on what I learned when studying physics, a probability distribution in theory encompasses all possibilities. It just goes asymptotically toward zero the further away you get from the peak.

Matt: This was fun, and I’d definitely love to do a follow-up and read your Spinoza article, Jack.

Pedro: Absolutely.

Jack: Let me send it in the chat so I don’t forget.

Matt: Great. This was super helpful. We need more organic metaphysics. I’m glad Ruyer seems to be having a moment.

Jack: I totally agree.

Matt: I had a dialogue with the intelligent design theorist Stephen Meyer. It’s frustrating that we end up culturally and intellectually with the choice between being an atheist materialist who takes evolution seriously, or a creationist who thinks God intervenes and tinkers with dead matter to make life and consciousness possible.

Can we not understand what an artist does in a more concrete way, so that we see artist and work are never separate, and that the artist is transformed by the work, and that God is not separate from creation? We get so confused by rigid potter-and-clay images.

Pedro: We need to keep sharing process philosophy. I saw that there’s a new book by Carlo Rovelli. I forget the name, but from the description, I thought: if he doesn’t already know process philosophy, someone has to teach him process philosophy so he can come out as a process philosopher. I feel like there are so many people sympathetic to saying these things.

Matt: I met Rovelli at a conference in Berkeley on Buddhism and physics. He presented on Nāgārjuna and relational quantum physics. Afterward I asked him, “Have you heard of process philosophy, Whitehead?” He said, “You’re like the tenth person who has asked me that in the last couple of years.” So people are telling him.

Pedro: His most recent book draws a lot on Kierkegaard, I think.

Jack: Before I run, one last plug: Hans Jonas’s “Spinoza’s Theory of Organism.” If you’re interested in the Spinoza stuff, Pedro, it’s really good.

Pedro: Is that in The Phenomenon of Life?

Jack: No, it’s in a collection of essays.

Pedro: I’d love to talk about your paper next time.

Jack: Cool. I’ll send it by email.

Matt: Alright, gentlemen, thank you.

Jack: Thanks, guys.

Matt: Talk to y’all soon.

Pedro: Thank you, guys.