Rev Left Radio - Crossing the Threshold: The Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Professor of philosophy Matthew D. Segall returns to Rev Left to discuss his newest book, which is based on his disseratation, titled "Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead". Together, they discuss the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, and Alfred North Whitehead, and work through the vision of the cosmos - and of our place in it - that emerges from their work.   Check out Matt and his work here: https://footnotes2plato.com/   Check out our previous interviews with Matt here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=segall   Outro music: "Death Machine" by AJJ   Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have back on the show philosopher Matt Siegel to talk about his newest work, which is really a publication of his dissertation. He got his PhD in philosophy with this work called Crossing the Threshold, a theoretic imagination in the post-Cantian process philosophy of shelling and whitehead. And I certainly know that people who are not, not in philosophy or not train in philosophy, might think that title sounds challenging above and beyond what they're capable of comprehending. But I promise you, if you struggle and challenge

yourself to kind of learn, we lay out some of the basic philosophical concepts we're working with, and then this picture emerges of the way that Matt thinks, the way he's engaging with philosophy, and it is dialectical to its core. It is all about the things I talk about here on the show, whether I'm talking about Buddhism, or dialectical materialism or doing our dialectic's deep dive series, it is constantly re-sort of addressing and coming back to this dialectical way of apprehending the cosmos, apprehending our place in it, apprehending our deep connections with the earth and nature, as expressions of the earth and nature,

this overcoming this delusion of separateness that we feel. And Matt is doing that work as well at the high levels of philosophy. And so I really appreciate his work and the vision that emerges from it, which we talk about at length in this episode, is absolutely in line with the vision that emerges, hopefully, from RevLeft Radio as a whole and all the work I do, which I can think of and conceptualize as absolutely pointing in the same exact direction that somebody like Matt is pointing in and so many other thinkers, whether in philosophy or outside of it, have pointed in from Marx, to the Buddha, to, you know, Alfred North Whitehead, which we talk about in this episode and many, many other figures. So this is really powerful, important, moving stuff. And I just can't say enough kind words about Matt and his work. So I'll leave it up there for now.

And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev. Left Radio, you can join our Patreon for pretty much the cost of a single cup of coffee every month. You can support the show, keep us going, and get access. to three to four bonus episodes every single month that patrons get access to. And I do a lot of other stuff on the Patreon that I don't necessarily do on the public feed, including covering like timely headlines, responding to anti-socialists or anti-left-wing arguments by popular right-wing or centrist figures, and just kind of, you know, let my hair down a little bit on the Patreon in ways that I don't

always do on the public episode for obvious reasons. So if you're interested at that, you want to support the show. you can go to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio sign up for five dollars a month and get three to four bonus episodes every single month and we deeply deeply appreciate it it's what keeps this show going on so thank you to everybody who supports the show thank you to everybody listening without further ado here's my conversation with matt seagull on his new book crossing the threshold enjoy so i'm matt seagull i am a teacher and researcher uh uh transdisciplinary researcher, I like to say, applying process philosophy to the natural and social

sciences, as well as the study of consciousness. And I'm very glad to be back on a rev left. Yeah, happy to have you back. It's an honor and a pleasure every time we get a talk. I know it's only been like a year or so since we had our first episode and already we're on episode number three, but that's a testament to the interesting work you do and my interest in it and the audience's interest in you and your work and having you on the show. So I'm happy to have you back. Yeah. Well, glad to hear there's been some receptivity from the audience. And hopefully we can continue that today. Totally. Yeah. And for those that don't know, we've had you on to talk about the work of Whitehead, which will be revisiting today. We also had you on our German Idealism

episode, which again, Schelling is one of the figures of German Idealism, which we'll be touching on again today. So if people listen to this episode and like it, there are two more with you that they can go check out and have deeper dives on, you know, two main philosophers that you wrestle with and work with in this text. But this text is a standalone book in and of itself, and the new book is titled Crossing the Threshold, Atheric Imagination in the Post-Contin Process Philosophy of Shelling and Whitehead. So as a way to sort of orient our audience to this book and what we'll be talking about today, can you just kind of talk about why you wrote the book, what you wanted to explore with it, and what exactly,

is the threshold that is being crossed. Yeah, happy to. So this was actually my dissertation for my PhD in philosophy. And I've thoroughly revised it. And it's taken six or seven years to finally publish it as a book. But what I'm trying to accomplish in this book is to approach the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. as a sort of necessary phase of maturation that the human being in its pursuit not only of scientific knowledge of nature, but of moral freedom, that we need to pass through, but that we can't stop there. I try to pay respect to Kant's methodology and to, you know, explicate the reasons that he tried to, as I,

I think we'll get into as we move forward here. He tried to limit human knowledge in order to leave room for freedom, which is basically a paraphrase of what he says in the preface to the critique of pure reason. And I try to draw on Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Schelling to cross the threshold, as I put it, beyond the limits of knowledge that Kant erected in his transcendental approach to philosophy. One way of thinking about what that threshold is is to think about sense experience, sensory experience, as Kant understood it. And, you know, drawing on Whitehead and showing, I try to suggest that the construal of our sensory experience offered by Kant, and not just Kant, but other modern philosophers that he was in dialogue with, particularly David Hume, that this construal of our sensory experience offered by Kant, and not just Kant, but other modern philosophers that he was in dialogue with, particularly David Hume, that this construal of the of our sensory experience is probably incomplete

and in need of some amendments. And as amended, I think we can re-articulate an epistemology or a way of knowing that would not be limited by our sense perception of spatially arrayed surfaces, as it were. And we'll get into more deep. about what exactly is entailed by that sort of definition, but both Whitehead and Schelling reject the idea that our most primordial or basic form of experience is just sense experience

in this way that I've just defined. They think that we actually have a form of experience, which Whitehead calls bodily reception as opposed to sense perception. He also refers to it as perception in the mode of causal efficacy. So what that means in layman's terms is that our perception through our bodies is rooted in these causal vectors, which don't really respect the skin boundary, that there are, in Whitehead's terms, feeling vectors that are sort of vibrating into us from the environment and vibrating back out of us to alter that environment. And so crossing the threshold means coming to recognize this deeper form of perception that puts us back in touch with the natural world around us

in a way that Kant did not think was possible. How is that? Yeah, this deeper form of perception would sort of take for granted that we are embedded and a part of nature as opposed to something put inside of it, trying to analyze it, or trying to find an objective viewpoint to stand outside of it? Is that kind of a fair way to think about that? Exactly. Yeah, that's very well put. Okay. Cool. And I know this is, you know, for people in the audience that aren't trained in philosophy, and even those that are, I mean, Emmanuel Kant can certainly be difficult to wrestle with, you know, his critique of pure reason. I remember reading it as a grad student and having a

really tough time with it. So I guess, and since it's an important part of your book, in a lot of ways, the starting point of your book. I kind of want to maybe lay some of Kant's basic philosophy on the table. So can you discuss the parts of Emmanuel Kant's philosophy that you're taking up in this work and kind of help our audience to orient themselves to the basic philosophical terrain that you're treading here? Yeah. So Kant is a crucial philosopher.

And, you know, what he does with his late work, really, it was towards the end of his life. that he wrote his three critiques, the first of critique of peer reason and then a critique of practical reason, and finally a critique of judgment. And what he's doing here is kind of reversing the relationship between the subjective knower and the objects known that he felt had been presupposed by all philosophy prior. So what Kant called dogmatic philosophy was basically this view that the subject or the knower must conform to the objects that are out there. And knowledge consists in such a confirmation, the subject in some way or other mirroring the objects that are around it and thereby coming to know them.

And what Kant does is reverse this and says, no, no, the objects must conform to the subject. In other words, the way that our mind is organized and our senses are organized, shapes a priori, he would say, which means shapes before experience the objects that are possible for us to know. So objectivity in Kant's inverted view, as it were, becomes something that subjects construct. The subject constructs, or he would say determines the objects that it comes to know by applying its own pre-installed categories, as it were, and by shaping those objects through its forms of intuition, is Kant's phrase, which he says we have two forms of intuition,

spatial and temporal intuition, and spatial intuition is our outer sense, and temporal intuition would be our inner sense. And it's in Kant's treatment of space and time, right, as our outer and inner intuitions of the world around us, that he says we don't, you know, we don't learn about space and time empirically, as if by coming into contact with a bunch of extended objects in space that endure through time,

that we gradually just kind of come to abstract these ideas of space and time. He says, you know, that they're pre-installed, right, which is to say they're transcendental, that are not empirical. Transcendental here is another way of referring to what, how our experience is structured prior to any particular experience that we have, right? So it's not space and time for Khan or not something we learn about through experience. There's something that we bring to experience that we always already are shaping our experience through. And it's constriction. of space and time that I really tried to dive into in this book to expand some of the insights

that Kant is able to articulate in his sort of phenomenological inquiry into space and time. And the problem is that in the critique of pure reason, Kant has this relatively short section in a very long book. It's like 20 pages, which he calls the transcendental aesthetic, which is where he looks at our experience of space and time, or rather the way that space and time structure our experience, to put it more precisely. And Whitehead says in process and reality that Kant really should have spent most of the book,

the critique of pure reason, on this particular issue, right, our intuitions of space and time. Because it seems to me, and I'm following in the footsteps of geniuses, like Whitehead and Shelling here, it seems to me that in our spatial and temporal intuition, there's something far more what cosmic going on than what Kant believed. For Kant, right, space and time or something provided by the subject.

And what I want to do in this book is say, no, space and time or something achieved by a community of subjects. Right. And so one way of understanding how Whitehead takes up Kant's philosophy and expands it and in some ways cosmologizes it is what Kant thought was only true of human subjects. Whitehead says is true of subjects in a much more general sense. So, you know, people who have listened to our prior conversations might recall that Whitehead is a pan experientialist, which is to say he's, thinks that experience in some form, to some degree, goes all the way down. And to exist is to experience. So whether we're talking about electromagnetic radiation or stars and galaxies or single cells, plants, animals, and human beings, there's some form of experience that is just part of what it means to exist as an entity. And so what Whitehead basically says is subjects of various sorts with different forms of experience are cooperating with one another and relating with one another so as to bring

forth what physicists know and can measure in various ways as space and time. and that what we experience just in our everyday, you know, attempt to navigate the world as space and time is similarly this achievement by a whole cosmic community of subjectivities, right? And so it's breaking us out of what I think is ultimately a solipsistic or kind of ego enclosed perspective that Kant leaves us with, breaking out of that to to step into a more cosmocentric orientation, right, to put the human being, as you were saying, back in touch seamlessly with the natural world out of which we come. Yeah, incredibly fascinating stuff.

To talk about Kantian's sort of idealism, if you will, or Kant's idea that what the human subject brings to the natural world. world like when we look out at the natural world or any any object outside of ourselves is that you know cont is saying and you can correct me if i'm wrong here that there's like we we we come fully equipped with a sort of cognitive apparatus or you know layers of lenses that we cannot remove that are that are you know essential to our basic functioning that shape the objective world or shape how we um interpret and understand the outside world the sort of pre-institutional install the categories that we have. So when we look out at the world, you know, we, we sort of,

without even knowing it, impose a certain interpretation onto the world as it actually is, which is why he says things like you can't know things in and of themselves, right? You can only know your sort of interpretation of them. And that kind of culminates into this idea of transcendental idealism, I believe. Even I'm a little shaky on some of this. So can you correct anything I said wrong there and kind of maybe help us flesh out again what transcendental idealism means in this context? Yeah, no, I think you've articulated that very well. And yes, so what, what Kant does with his transcendental idealism is reimagine what natural science is. Natural scientists tend to be, Kant would say, kind of naive realists and they think that they're discovering things

about a mind independent world, laws of physics and so on. And Kant's point is that, and his prime exemplar for this was Isaac Newton, that when Newton is articulating using mathematics, his laws of motion and universal gravitation and so on, he's not actually discovering something that exists out there and kind of just describing it, rather, he's using mathematics. medical reasoning, he's actually uncovering the structure of his own mind. And so the natural scientist in Kant's view is trying to find application for certain categories of understanding, right? And yeah, scientists use experiment and observation and so on. But in a kind of almost

quasi-platinist way, like Plato would talk about knowledge as remembrance or recollection of something that we already knew that the soul already had sort of implanted in it eternally. Kant's suggesting something not too far from that, that when we engage in natural scientific study, we're really trying to remember and uncover these not laws of nature so much as laws of our own understanding, right? And what nature becomes, in Kant's view, is a highly structured appearance, right? And so you could caricature cond and say, oh, he's reducing knowledge to just your appearance and that there's no necessity and universality to it.

And he's like, no, actually, because our mind has these universal and necessary categories, right, that are shaped by mathematics and logic. Like, they're really, this is secure, like, knowledge, like, and there are logical principles at play here that are not just merely apparent, right? this is what's structuring our knowledge of the appearances of nature. And so Kant would say, despite the fact that this is all in one way or another subjective, science can still claim universal and necessary knowledge of the apparent world because we're using math to describe it.

Now, this, of course, as you mentioned, leaves us with a kind of dualism, If not a dualism of two different kinds of stuff as we had, like in Descartes, right, mental stuff and material or extended stuff, that's kind of an ontological dualism, two different kinds of being that exist in the world is what Descartes leaves us with. And Kant doesn't leave us with that kind of dualism. It's more of an epistemological dualism, a dualism in how we understand knowledge and what we're capable of knowing. So Kant said that all knowledge is really merely phenomenal, meaning it has to do with phenomena or appearances. And there's this limit to our knowledge, the other side of which is, you could say, numinal would be his word. But he also talks about the realm of things in themselves, right? And what can we say about those things in themselves?

Not much. I wanted to posit that there is something out there, but we can't say anything about it because the categories of our understanding really only determine the phenomenal world. So we're left in this dualistic situation, right? And one way, again, of talking about the threshold I'm trying to cross in the course of this book, is this phenomenal numinal threshold. I'm trying to reconfigure our experiential. situation so that that boundary does not arise.

Yeah, really interesting. And yeah, so there's so much to say there. I guess just for like people listening especially, I think we've even done this in our last episode when Marxists hear phrases like idealism and materialism, it's kind of worth just kind of pointing that out. The idealism of transcendental idealism within Kant's philosophy is this idea that this subjective cognitive apparatus we bring to the objective world. structures how we understand the objective world and in some sense we can't strip away that scaffolding

that cognitive scaffolding that we're born with and see the cosmos in and of itself as it truly is beyond any human interpretation of it and so that's that that's the idealism right is that there's something inherent in subjectivity that structures the way we understand the objective world and thus the mind plays a crucial role in our understanding of external phenomena, correct? That's right. That's right. Yeah. And just to clarify quickly, like, there's so much that's true in that, right? And you can, you can see the various ways that Kant's philosophy has been carried forward in the contemporary world. I mean, so much of cognitive neuroscience and psychology takes this sort of point of view, even if they're not as strict to

about the underlying philosophical principles, the idea that the mind plays a constructive role in our perception of the world is impossible to just dismiss. And so, but what I, what I'm trying to do is, as Whitehead would put it, transcend and include what Kant is suggesting. And so what I call descendental realism or descendental philosophy is,

not the antithesis of transcendental idealism. It's, I would hope, more of a synthesis that's allowing us to restore, you know, a kind of what you might call a naive realism that preceded Kant to, if that's the thesis. And Kant's critical idealism or transcendental idealism is the antithesis, then descendental philosophy, I hope, is a kind of synthesis. A more mature realism, as it were. Yeah, interesting. And we'll get to that a little bit later because I want you to sort of retread that specific idea and the concept surrounding it in a bit here. But you state, quote, the pages that follow do not lay out a linear argument attempting

to prove the existence of a world's soul or the possibility of super sensory knowledge. Rather, they invite the reader into a series of self-amplifying metaphysical experiments seeking to produce intensified experience in the etheric intuition, end quote. Can you kind of discuss what this means specifically regarding the idea of experiments seeking to produce an experience in the reader? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm trying to head off at the past, as it were, early in the book. You know, the expectations that especially analytic philosophers might have about how a philosophical text

is supposed to engage the reader as a kind of, you know, logical argument, right? And, you know, so you set out your premises and then try to deduce consequences. But often, you know, philosophers will just have to end up saying that their premises are self-evident or what have you. And they spend the bulk of their time on the deductions. and Whitehead's method of philosophy, and I'm a whiteheadian, right? Like, I don't think he's right about everything, but I think in terms of the best we can do integrating the history of philosophy

and all of contemporary science and human aspirations, whether, you know, we think of those as spiritual aspirations or political aspirations, social aspirations. I think Whitehead is just, you know, for me, gets me the furthest in these inquiries. And so his method is of philosophizing is not narrowly analytic, right? He's not trying to prove anything. He's rather trying to assemble a scheme of ideas.

And what he means by ideas is not something abstract, but a kind of lens that we can wear to see the world differently. Right. And so when he is engaging in philosophical assemblage, he's offering us different metaphysical equipment. You know, scientists use telescopes and microscopes and particle colliders and so on as their experimental equipment. The metaphysician uses language. Language is the instrument that we're experimenting on here. and language isn't just, you know, abstract collections of definitions and so on. Language is a poetic activity, right?

It's something that's very much intimately interwoven with our perception of the world. You know, when we can see by studying different cultures, the words they have for different colors, for example, or different aspects of their local environments. You know, like it's often said Eskimos have like 100 words for snow. I don't know if it's quite that many, but you get the idea that language is, you know, part of human behavior, obviously, but it's like it's intimately interwoven with our neurophysiology, if you want to think about it in material terms. but also with the very structure of our consciousness, right? And so by metaphysical experiments that intensify experience,

I'm talking about, you know, different ways of poetically rendering into language, our encounter with reality, whether it's the inner reality of our psychological soul life or the outer reality of the surrounding cosmos, I'm trying to experiment with different ways of talking about what this existence is really like. And so it's an invitation into a novel way of speaking. And so I don't want people to think that I will, at the end of this book, have proven a particular ism or whatever, but rather I hope that I will have painted a picture

that people appreciate enough to consider not just as a possibility, but as something to try to actualize. Yeah, beautiful. Is there anything just out of curiosity, because I know how philosophy departments sort of operate in their heavy analytic bias. Is there anything to be said about the analytic continent? animal divide here as far as your approach? And is there any weirdness in its reception given that it's sort of flying in the face of more, I guess, mainstream analytic philosophy texts

and how analytic philosophers go about doing philosophy? Well, I mean, I don't want to disparage an entire school of thought, right? I think there's so much of value in analytic philosophy. And in so many ways, Whitehead is one of the inaugurators of that method. You know, he and Bertrand Russell who began as his student and became his collaborator on the Principia Mathematica kind of developed the idea that we can think with a symbolic logic and that this is really the ideal for clear and accurate thinking is to use analytic methods like this. And Whitehead took logic very seriously, logical analysis.

But he didn't think that it was the proper. method for philosophizing because language while it can do really creative and imaginative things to alter our perception as I was saying when we limit it to symbolic logic we run the risk of falling prey to what he called the fallacy of the perfect dictionary which is to say that we already have all the ideas and concepts we need to understand the world and so it's just a matter of lining up those concepts correctly and whitehead thinks that um you know language is always uh intimately interrelated with experience but that there's something about experience which is um open-ended and creatively advancing in such a way that we're never going to be finished with the dictionary um we need to

invent new words and new phrasing um and and remember that no verbal statement no even logical or mathematical proposition can ever finally render the world in its complete form simply because the world itself is incomplete in Whitehead's view, right, as a process philosopher and in Schelling's view. There's a kind of incompleteness that is intrinsic to nature because nature is a creative advance. And so, you know, analytic philosophy is important, but I think we need to go further. Continental philosophy in that, it is typically phenomenological, you know, it's trying to look at human experience. I think it also can't be ignored. It adds something to the merely analytic approach

that would otherwise kind of get forgotten and erased, which is human experience and history and the role of interpretation and harmonetics and all these things that are kind of just backgrounded or ignored by the analytic approach. But then the problem, at least more historically with continental philosophy, this has changed in light of what's called the ontological turn or the non-human turn. But phenomenology historically was pretty anthropocentric. The focus was human experience. And because initially most of these were European dudes, it was, you know, he was.

experience was was mostly construed in more of a white male kind of a way. But, you know, nowadays this has definitely been an issue that's been and continues to be dealt with in productive ways so that its phenomenology can be less anthropocentric and less Eurocentric. And that's a very positive development. But I think there are ways in which the process relational perspective on all these things that you know it's one way of talking about whitehead's philosophy um it's it's able to draw on analytic and continental uh approaches while also um going further in in some some crucial ways um and you know a lot of the changes that have occurred in more recent continental philosophy and phenomenology um you know to

break out of anthropocentrism are a consequence of encountering Whitehead's philosophy, right? So he's played a role in these positive developments. But yeah, I think ultimately I would want us to overcome this analytic continental divide and a process relational approach is a good way to do that, again, to seek a kind of synthesis between the two. Yeah, really, really interesting. Thank you for that. So as I've said earlier, we've had you on previous episodes to talk.

at length about Whitehead and Shelling, but let's revisit the relevant aspects of their philosophies for this work, starting with Shelling. So how was Shelling an organic process philosopher and what aspects of his philosophy do you take up, interpret, and work with in this book in particular? Yeah, so Shelling's often thought of as an idealist, and there's good reason for that, but he also developed a philosophy of nature in the late 1700s, in the wake of Kant's revolution and philosophy really. So, I mean, the first major German philosopher to inherit Kant's, the spirit of Kant's philosophy was Johann Gottlieb Ficta. And, you know, Ficta was the philosopher of the I, the capital I, first person pronoun, the ego as, you know,

Kant would have it as sort of freely creating its world rather than passively receiving a separately existing world. And Schelling studied Fictus philosophy very closely through the mid-1790s and began to come into his own as a philosopher by defending the Fictian point of view. But Schelling more and more came to realize, that nature was being given short shrift in this whole approach to say that all of reality all of the universe is the result of the constructive activity of the ego to shelling seemed somewhat one-sided and it led him to a closer study of Spinoza for one thing but also you know shelling always had this mystical pieting

the sort of the form of Christianity of Protestantism in his part of Germany at this time. He had this mystical sense of nature as a kind of incarnate divinity and as a nature as a kind of dynamic process that the incarnation isn't something that just happens all at once. It's rather this dynamic evolutionary process

that moves through a series of stages. And so always in the background for Shelling, even when he was much aligned with Ficta's approach as a young, really, T, he was in his late teens at this point when he started publishing works of philosophy and journals. He was always trying to hold this perspective in balance to keep the ego and nature more in balance with each other, but he didn't publicize this until around 1797,

his first, he started lecturing on philosophy of nature, and he publishes a book called Ideas for Philosophy of Nature in 1797. And, you know, in this book, what he's basically doing is picking up on some of Kant's ideas about organisms and their internal purposiveness or their form of teleology, that Kant described, which is just teleology's the sort of study of ends or purposes, that organisms display a kind of purposive activity that's not found in the material, in the inorganic world, where a different kind of sort of linear causality reigns.

In organisms, Kant said, there's this circular causality, where an organism in being composed of parts which produce one another for the sake of a whole, that there's not just the mechanical or efficient causality one sees in the inorganic world, there's this formal causality and final causality, which is to say there's this self-organizing end-directed activity in living organism. So shelling picks up on this idea and really applies it to cosmology, applies it to metaphysics, in ways that Kant was not comfortable with because, you know, Kant was still putting the subject at the center of philosophy, right, where rather than, as I said earlier, saying that the subject must conform to the objects around it in order to know them, Kant had said that, no, the objects must conform to the subject, to the structure of the subject's way of knowing them.

Shelling, again, inverts this, right? So there's a kind of double inversion moving from dogmatic through Kantian to Schoenian philosophy, where instead of asking, what must the mind be such that nature can appear to us in the way that it does, as Kant had asked, Shelling asks, what must nature be such that mind could have emerged from it, such that our consciousness is capable of knowing it, could have, could itself be a higher potency of the very natural world that we would. attempting to know. So shelling allows us to remain critical and not dogmatic in the way that, you know, Kant was so focused on establishing. But shelling allows us to break out of the Kantian shell, as it were, which would keep us locked within a realm of appearances unable to

touch the real world. Because shelling is saying that the natural world, far from being mere appearance is the source of our mind that nature has a soul in other words nature has an interior and we know that because we are that interior and recognizing that um it doesn't only have implications for how we do science i mean there's a deep kind of spirituality in that as well um not necessarily a spinosis pantheism sort of compatible with that but it's a slightly more complex point of view because, you know, in Spinoza, there's, there's no room really for human freedom to say that where the mind and nature are one thing in Spinoza is to say that mind is determined by natural laws. Whereas in Shelling and in Whitehead, natural laws are

more like habits. They're things that are established through social relations, whether through human social relations where we make laws in democratic societies, hopefully, or in relations between non-human entities that develop into these sort of statistical patterns or habits, right? And so the laws of physics in a Schengen or what Hedian point of view would be more like the social habits of electrons and protons that have been collected. established over billions of years of evolution, right? So I think Schelling adds this, the possibility of a kind of creative freedom.

It's like, yes, the world is structured by these social habits, but they're also, these habits are habits because the world continues to evolve. And there's some creative impulse that in the natural world leads to unexpected emergence. You know, photons and electrons and protons eventually, you know, become organized so as to bring forth elemental atoms and then stars and galaxies. And from a, you know, Schengian point of view or a whiteheadian point of view, even if there were scientists around at that early stage in cosmogenesis or the evolution of the universe when it was just like protons and electrons and stuff, like the plasma stage, they never,

even if they had a complete knowledge of the universe at that stage, they never would have seen even like a helium atom, much less a star or a galaxy, as being possible in the future, right? And so there's creative emergence that allows us to describe a universe not just as the kind of closed necessary order that you have in Spinoza, but more as this open-ended adventure. And one implication of that is, of course, when we create as human beings, art, philosophy, science, religion, civilization, that we are sort of a microcosmic version of the whole creative power intrinsic to the universe. And our creativity emerges out of, you know, the cosmos just as much as it merges out of us because, as you said, we are the interiority of the cosmos. you know other ways of putting that is we are the we are nature becoming conscious of itself or you know i've even put it in terms of like environmental activism against the degradation of

of the natural world that we're currently living through is like the earth literally fighting for itself through us like we are the earth becoming conscious and that is a smaller version of the cosmos itself becoming conscious of course not just through human beings but through all conscious creatures all experiential creatures and i'm sure you know higher level levels of alien intelligence that are out there as well are just as much the interiority of the cosmos experiencing itself from a seemingly infinite amount of point of views. So like this idea in Kant that there's a certain unique causality within organism shelling takes and applies to the cosmos itself and one of those implications being that

our consciousness is literally how is a creative emergence of the entire cosmos and literally how the cosmos comes into a form of its own self-awareness and self-consciousness? Very well put. I love that. Yeah. I think you've got it. You know, and it, it, it, it, I think I really want to emphasize the extent to which, yeah, we are the universe become conscious of itself, which I mean, in some circles is almost a cliche at this point. And like, what does that, what does that really mean? Well, I love the way you connected that to, you know, these, um, fights to protect Gaia to protect the community of life on earth because it yeah it has intrinsic value but also because that's us that's that's what we are and what are we protecting it from well

there's this split that has occurred in in the human being which I think you know whether we could point to Descartes or Kant as expressions of how this split plays out but it's a split between a sense of our consciousness as continuous with the interiority of the rest of the cosmos and what you could call just this sort of disembedded alienated intellect which is the fictian ego it's the it's the contian subject that thinks that it's cut off from the world by this screen of sense perception that produces appearances which we know according to our own sort of internal organization, that sense of an alienated disconnected intellect is what's driving techno-industrial, techno-capitalist civilization, right? And the urgency of the kind of

perspective I'm trying to articulate here is I'm really trying to talk to that intellect and say, hey, you're not actually disconnected from the world. And I just, want to get that alienated ego, and maybe people know of Ian McGilchrist's work. I'm obviously talking about the left hemisphere maniacal attempt to master the world that typifies that sort of left hemisphere way of thinking. That is that Kantian ego, that Kantian intellect is obsessed with trying to master nature according to these deterministic rules that it's reducing. And I just want to get that ego to kind of like slow down and look down to remember that it has a body and that it's only possible for it to do all of its thinking in the context of that body and that that

body is inseparable from the ecosystems around it from the soil from the the plants and animals that it has to eat in order to survive. I mean, some would say it doesn't have to eat animals but that nonetheless we are embedded in this whole community of life and i think it would actually be a tremendous relief if this ego would just look down and that's what descendental in a sense is pointing to as the method i'm articulating in this book i'm just i'm saying we need to look look down and in and recognize that uh at the that in the depths of our own conscious, egoic experience, there is this portal to, into this cosmic creativity. And so, you know, etheric imagination is in the title. It's, what I'm trying to point to is this

cosmic creativity that's at the depths of our own thinking activity, of our own imaginative capacity. And I think thinking, feeling, willing, these different, what used to be called faculties or powers of our cognition. These are all different ways of talking about the imagination. And I'm trying to speak to this Kantian intellect, yeah, to get it to just remember what's always been there at the edge of its experience, because that's the portal back into communion with the cosmos. So, yeah, and what comes out of this is like, you know, this philosophy that we're doing, although it can seem sort of abstract and speculative and kind of hard to grapple with has real life consequences in the real world and is really behind so much of the troubles that we're dealing with in society whether it's the eco crisis whether it's war nationalism

various forms of hate fascism etc and it's it's not a coincidence that you know science is kind of catching up to this with concepts like the flow state but that we're at our most creative and we feel the most alive precisely when we are not incessantly referring back to ourself and thinking about ourselves but when we lose our self lose our felt sense of a separate self up here somewhere in the head commenting on everything that's happening we can actually you know let ourselves fall into the thing that we're doing and this is called the flow state and there's all these you know cognitive scientists working on this and what it means and how to get into it etc but that creativity of the cosmos comes out most when our ego is the least active which is an interesting thing and

and also i just wanted to say that this delusion of separateness that is fueling, you know, just crises after crises. I mean, it's behind everything from colonialism. Those people over there are subhuman. We can go take their land. Slavery, again, you know, they're not us. There's something outside of us. They're actually more objective outside nature than they are subjects.

Like us, white men in Europe are subjects, right? And so this delusion of separateness is at the root of so much. And in each one of us, it's a felt sense of separate. And we truly, if you can look at yourself and how you think about your own life, think about your own death, and feel yourself to be moment to moment, you know, assuming you don't do extensive spiritual practices like Buddhist meditation or experiment heavily with psychedelics or whatever is if you're honest with yourself and you really pay attention, you feel this too. You feel as if, you know, my consciousness is inside my skull fundamentally separate from everybody and everything else. I was placed into the universe, and one day I'll be ripped out of it. And that is, you know, it's not often articulated. It operates often subconsciously in most people.

But that is a felt sense of separateness that is what we're talking about here. And it can be overcome through obviously various methods. But, you know, if you can look inside and see that that sense of separateness is there, you can agree with us that that's fundamentally an illusion that's not backed up by science, you can start working in the direction of seeing beyond that illusion and the interesting things that can happen and the reimagining and the different relationship you have with your own existence when you can see through that ego delusion that you are somehow separate from everything and everyone else around you yeah yeah beautifully put and i i think you know again as i

as i said at the start like this there's something about the egotistical um perspective that is necessary to go through. Like, we need that critical stance to, like, grow up out of a childish point of view where it's, like, almost primitive narcissism, right? And so this isn't just a sort of, like, naive return to the womb, oceanic feeling that psychoanalytic Freudian critiques would want to resist. This is, I really want to go through the Kantian point of view, right? And to acknowledge that in order to connect with the universe,

we first have to have experienced the possibility of separation. Yes. And only once we have tasted alienation, can we truly, freely, as an act of love, remember our, our connection with with with with the cosmos and with each other so um i think so important like you know what we're saying that we have to reconnect but it's it's also important you know to to honor the um that part of the struggle of of waking up and becoming conscious as as free and loving human beings is experiencing this possibility of of separation we couldn't be

free unless we experience that possibility Yeah, I think that's incredibly important. There's a fundamental difference between the infant and the Buddha, and that fundamental difference is the only way out is through. It's not some regression to some past state. It is you have to develop this, you know, through the delusion of separateness. You have to develop this sort of what we would consider in a functioning society, a healthy ego, and then be able to transcend it to not develop that. And we've seen, like, you know, the feral children, children that aren't raised in social contexts, that they don't come out as. as, you know, Buddhas, they're deformed and they're prevented from their full blossoming.

So, yes, I really think that that's an incredibly important point to make. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move forward. And let's talk a little bit about Whitehead. Of course, we have an entire episode. People interested can go dive deeper into that. But just sort of what we did for Shelling to do for Whitehead here.

How was he a process philosopher? Maybe how he differs from Shelling and just the aspects of his philosophy that you're really emphasizing in this work in particular. Yeah, so, you know, and so much of my work, not just in this book, I'm trying to put Whitehead in lineage with Schelling as process philosophers. And so what Schelling does for the new paradigm sciences of his day, sort of in the late 18th, early 19th century, when geology was discovering deep time and, you know, chemistry was advancing. and electricity and magnetism were being experimented with and theorized about. And, you know, the early stages of a kind of evolutionary theory were being worked out in biology. And so Schelling was absorbing all of these new paradigm sciences in his day. Well, Whitehead does the same thing in the early 20th century when science goes through another round of major paradigm shifts.

And, I mean, you could even call the early 20th century. the second scientific revolution in the sense that the old Newtonian mechanistic view was demolished. You know, Whitehead recounts he was at Cambridge studying and then teaching mathematics and mathematical physics. He studied with the, his teacher was the student of Clerk Maxwell who developed electromagnetic theory. And so, you know, Whitehead understood mathematics and the application of mathematics to electromagnetism very deeply. And at the end of, you know, in the last couple of decades of the 19th century, you know, Whitehead says that Newtonian physics was considered to be almost complete. There were just a few little, you know, mysteries around the edges of this complete knowledge that would soon be worked out. And nobody expected that, you know, with Max Planck's ideas in the last few years of the 19th century.

And then, of course, 1905, Einstein's miracle year, I think they call it. He publishes these several papers that establish relativity theory, the special theory, and the photoelectric effect and all these things. And then a few years later with the general theory, almost a decade later, it was clear that, physicists had to reimagine the nature of nature, right? And Whitehead was uniquely equipped to do this kind of work. He was one of the few physicists at the time who could really understand what Einstein was proposing. And so he's inheriting all of these changes in science, but he's also very aware of the damage done to human, social life and to the natural environment by a kind of materialistic metaphysics.

He called it scientific materialism, which, you know, he understood as rooted in what he called a bifurcation, the bifurcation of nature, as he refers to it in his 1920 book, the concept of nature and bifurcation means that scientific materialism has split the world into on one side would be you know the the world as we experience it with its qualities it's its colors and its sounds like the melody of a robin or the feel of the velvet is an example what it gives That's all the stuff that's on one side of this bifurcation, which we would call the subjective or the psychological side. And then the other side would be all the stuff that's measured and quantified by physics, maths and motion and whatnot. Whitehead points out that, you know, we never actually experience any of that stuff.

We conjecture it and, you know, we come up with instruments and mathematical formalisms to describe it. But we never actually experience it. What we experience are the colors and the sounds and the tastes and the feel of the velvet and so on. And Whitehead's whole philosophy in a way is it begins in pointing out the incoherence of this bifurcated point of view, that scientific materialism is asking us to believe that the world is nothing at all like what we experience, that all of our subjective experience of feelings and values and aesthetic beauty, and so on, is purely ephemeral, like the smoke, or the whistle on a train, as T.H. Huxley once put it, what's really real are these conjectured systems of particles and forces and so on,

that, again, what it says, we never experience. And so to overcome this bifurcation and to provide a scientifically grounded alternative to materialism, which he thinks early 20th century physics not only relativity but quantum theory itself refutes right so in other words whitehead begins this attempt to revise Newtonian mechanistic metaphysics by saying science itself has disproven materialism and the operative metaphor for whitehead rather than the machine becomes the organism so he says his philosophy is a philosophy of organism he also calls it organic realism. And as Schelling did in his own day, Whitehead takes this image or this

idea of the organism and applies it to cosmology and applies it to physics and says, for example, that the entities studied by physics are just smaller organisms, which, you know, you could see self-organization as sort of synonymous or what's implied by organism. And hydrogen atom is just as much a self-organizing system or process as is a bacterium or any other living organism. And so Whitehead's process philosophy is exploring the implications of this organic view of nature. And I think allowing us to not only bring all the special sciences, physics, biology, sociology, psychology, psychology, into our, with one another, but he's allowing us to bring our scientific picture of nature into alignment with our sense of human values and ethics and aesthetic judgments.

And, you know, he wants us, he wants to be able to describe the universe such that we don't need to say that, you know, human freedom and, you know, human freedom and, law and political order and all these things are somehow reducible to the laws of physics as if, you know, physicists nowadays like Sean Carroll will say, you know, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have our values and our morals and whatever as human beings and that we shouldn't act as if we're free and so on. I'm just saying that in reality, that's all bullshit. Really, it's just laws of physics playing out. And so let's do the best we can to get along, knowing it's all fake. I think. that's a recipe for disaster. Like you can't live with that kind of bifurcated philosophy. And Whitehead's trying to say, as a mathematical physicist, hey, we don't need to do that. We can actually see these, the human values are consistent with what we know about the natural world. Yeah, an incredibly important sort of development.

And yeah, that hardcore scientific materialist reductionism is still obviously very much alive and well as you just alluded to. I know in philosophy of mind, there's, you know, also ideas like limitivism, which just sort of like takes off the table, this idea that consciousness is really anything that's special or interesting or worth investigating really at all. And it's more like a delusion than it is a real feature of the cosmos. And I think that's a direct outgrowth of this scientific materialist reductionism. Would you agree with me there? Yeah. And, you know, I almost think eliminative materialism is more consistent. in a way than, um, like it's biting the bullet, whereas the bifurcated view like,

like Sean Carroll's is just sort of, um, half-assed, like not really taking seriously the, uh, um, the ontological situation that he's describing. Because like the eliminated is willing to say, yeah, look, it's all just a laws of physics. We talk about consciousness, but it's just a word. You're not actually conscious. I'm not actually conscious. We're just a bunch of zombies in an illusion that think they're conscious and that sort of philosophy I think is what's or worldview of illuminativism is kind of what's guiding all the hype right now about chat GPT and like the AI has woken up and you know is if not already soon to become conscious in a way and distinguishable from human beings like that whole fantasy that whole science

fiction narrative that we are mistaking for a reality is rooted in the eliminativeist assumption that it's not so much that AI is becoming conscious. It's that if one argues that AI is conscious then what I would want to believe

consciousness would be in human beings is not actually worth anything. I mean, it's actually mistaking intellect or this sort of disembodied rationality that, you know, Kant was trying to root all of our knowledge of nature within. It's mistaking that kind of disembodied intellect for consciousness. And I have no doubt

that AI is very intelligent, but it's definitely not conscious and never would be, at least if it remains computer circuitry, what might happen when we begin to integrate these circuits into human brains. I mean, who knows? It could be dealing with a kind of speciation event, actually, but that's a whole other topic. But yeah, I think Eliminativism in so many ways is like the default worldview among educated and especially highly educated people in the West. You begin to imagine the universe such that consciousness can't really exist within it, right? Or you reduce consciousness to this mere intellectual capacity, which is why we think, where some people think AI is conscious.

So, yeah, I think I wanted to drop that in there. Very, very interesting, the AI discussion. And in a lot of ways, this scientific materialism and often the reductionism that it comes with is sort of, it grew up under industrial and post-industrial capitalism. And it seems that it's premises and its basic assumptions about who we are and, you know, our place in the cosmos is underwriting this increasingly dystopic, techno-dispopic future that is sort of emerging. over the horizon that it seems that we're headed towards. I mean, these ideas of transhumanism, you know, and what you're saying about AI. Like, you can see where this is going. And I think that also entails the need, the necessity of finding deeper and, you know,

go through scientific materialism as you're, you know, as you're talking about and trying to transcend it and get to a place beyond it. And this organic process philosophy, organic relational philosophy in general, in the Marxist terminology, we would call it something like dialectics, you know, this way of apprehending the world, you know, all these different thinkers coming together and creating this new way of understanding the world can kind of perhaps transcend the scientific materialism and reduction that is present and then open up, you know, new possibilities for the direction of humanity going forward or more precisely is a parallel process as we wrestle with the implications

and the way these ideas actually cash out and we rebel against it. it. We also are developing at the same time new ways of envisioning ourselves in the universe that is more in line with sort of what comes next as opposed to tripling down on what currently is and driving off the cliff with that as our engine. Does that make sense? Is that aligned with what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't have said it better. Cool. All right. Well, yeah, another well, actually, let me ask you this question really, of course, as a sort of aside. Where is Whitehead's place in philosophy right now like in academic philosophy departments and you know people that do history of philosophy um whitehead doesn't seem to figure overly overly prominently um in this in this realm

what what is his sort of status in philosophy you know mainstream philosophy as far as you can tell well it's it's getting better um but he was ignored for a long time um perhaps i mean there of different reasons for that. But, you know, he's, he was entering into metaphysics and philosophical cosmology in the mid-1920s, just at the time that philosophy, both analytic and continental philosophy, were rejecting metaphysics, right? So in analytic, you have Wittgenstein saying that philosophers should just focus on clarifying language and that ultimately truth could only ever be, you know, these sort of sentential sentences indicating states of affairs in the world as revealed to us by the senses. And in continental philosophy, you have

Heidegger, who in a very different way is also rejecting metaphysics and saying we really shouldn't be engaged in that sort of a project. And so Whitehead's major philosophical works just kind of fell on deaf ears. And they were articulated in the wrong season, as it were. And it's taken a while. Luckily, these books have been kept in print, kind of in cold storage, as it were, for decades, by theologians who developed process theology

based on Whitehead's ideas about a kind of imminent, worldly divinity that is nonetheless not reducible to the already existing world in the way that Spinoza had it, right? And I got into that earlier, is that there's new possibilities and potencies for theologizing in a modern and postmodern context that in a way, I think, gave Protestant theologians in particular American Protestant theologians initially at the University of Chicago, especially Charles Hartsorn, and then later John Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin developed this process theological response in many ways to some of Nietzsche's concerns about the death of God and so on. And the amendments Whitehead makes to classical theology just, yeah,

they proved really fertile. And the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology for the last 50 years has been keeping Whitehead's work alive in its application to religion and theology. But I think over the last decade or decade and a half, there's just been a real resurgence of interest in Whitehead from across different disciplines in philosophy, but I think also people in like environmental ethics and thinking about the ecological crisis have been very interested

and in the natural sciences as well more and more physicists and biologists are recognizing that Whitehead

was quite ahead of his time and an early sort of you know he had some early

gestures towards what's what's nowadays called complex systems science and so on and so on

and so you know for all these in all these ways I think Whitehead is potentially going to be, as Brunel Hattor suggested, the philosopher of the 21st century in the way that people might say Heidegger or Wittgenstein was the philosopher of the 20th.

Wow. Yeah, I love that. That's really awesome. And I know you're doing your part as well to push things in that direction, which I applaud. Another philosopher, a couple actually, that you mention in the book that play a role is Duluth and you just mentioned Nietzsche. We have an episode actually coming out on Nietzsche fairly soon. Do you want to talk about both or one of those figures and sort of how they figure into this text? Yeah. So I think as I put it in the book, I kind of wanted to test both Whitehead and Schelling's ideas and the fires of postmodernism and the sort of skepticism of metaphysics, at least Nietzsche, skepticism of, um, at least Nietzsche's skepticism of sort of a platonic metaphysics.

Dulles, obviously, is a metaphysician who's, I mean, he says he's inverting Plato, which in some ways is exactly what whitehead is doing. But, you know, I thought that to really show the relevance of whiteheads and showings approaches, it would be important to respond to Nietzsche's resistance to, what, the idea of ideas, like his resistance to Platonism and his resistance to the idea that there might be some, you know, divine ground or divine ingredient. I guess, you know, Nietzsche, what I end up finding out in this close comparison of Nietzsche and Deleu's with Whitehead and Schelling is that there's already kind of divinity in Nietzsche's work. Dionysus maybe is the divinity.

most important to Nietzsche, but in so many ways, the ways that Whitehead amends traditional theism and theology brings it very close to this Nietzsche and Dionysian understanding of the universe. And, you know, Nietzsche also had lots of critiques of Kant and German idealism generally, and I felt that it was kind of unfair given that so many of the things that Schelling articulates our precursors to Nietzsche's own ideas. And Deleu's, in terms of bringing Whitehead and Shelling into conversation with Deleu's, it's way easier because Deleu's already did that. You know, the influence of Shelling and Whitehead is all over so many of his books.

But yeah, the idea here is to show that in thinking with Whitehead and Shelling, I'm not kind of regressing, certainly not to a Pre-Contian mode of thought, but I'm also not trying to regress to a pre-Nichian mode of thought. I'm trying to go through Nietzsche's encounter with nihilism, right? And as you put it earlier, come out the other side. And hopefully I've done that. I think there are certain amendments I make to Whitehead's speculative scheme in light of Nietzsche's criticisms of a kind of timeless divine order. And so I'm not just trying to white-headedize Nietzsche, as it were. I think things also move in the other direction on certain questions.

The only way out is through. And yeah, you're literally talking about that and then doing it. I like that a lot. So we're coming up on our time limit here. So I just have a couple more questions for you. One is around the ether, how you make use of it. Of course, the subtitle is etheric imagination. So can you kind of talk about ether theory, imaginal ether,

and sort of the role it plays in crossing the threshold? Particularly I found interesting in reimagining nature, as you put it, as a plant. I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah, so the ether and the atheric imagination plays a large role. Kind of hinted at it earlier. It's a way of understanding, like, the subterranean depths of our conscious egoic experience, right? and that there are methods for diving below that threshold, which Kant took to be kind of impossible to pierce.

And I'm not suggesting that we can pierce it so much as asking us to reframe our situation such that the mind shouldn't have been imagined as separated from the world by this veil of appearance to begin with. And just to touch back with, Nietzsche for a second, when he goes through how the true world became a fable sequence of the history of philosophy, if people are familiar with that, Google it you'll find it. It's where he ends up is, you know, he's saying there's not an ideal world out there of

platonic forms independent of appearances. Once we get rid of that ideal world, though, we're not then stuck in a world of appearance. the nature of appearance becomes transfigured. And so appearance becomes a portal into the real in some sense is what I think Nietzsche would be suggesting. And I call this an aesthetic ontology, right? Appearance as a portal back into the real is an aesthetic ontology in the sense that usually ontology is always presupposing a division between appearance and reality. And ontology is trying to get behind or beyond the appearance to the real.

But in an aesthetic ontology is saying, no, the real is the appearance. Reality is itself this infinite series of appearances. And what the atheric dimension of nature is an attempt to point towards is this aesthetic aspect of reality that it's not just, matter in motion, that if you really want to offer a concrete description of what nature is, what reality is, it's a field of feelings and pulses of emotion, vector feelings, as Whitehead says, as I said earlier. And so the reason I chose the ether to refer to this is because both Shelling and Whitehead, as well as Kant, actually, in some of his late posthum

published work, they all developed an ether theory, not as a kind of scientific hypothesis that one might experimentally prove or disprove, but rather as a metaphysical condition that would make our knowledge of nature possible, right, by providing this bridge between mind and nature, Right. And so if the ether as a bridge between mind and nature can be analogized to the plant realm in the sense that plant life is kind of between the mineral and animal dimensions of nature, right? It's plants are clearly alive, but they're not quite as mobile as as animals. And they don't seem to have as as rich a sort of in. emotional and imagistic and sensory life, but they're clearly capable of sensing and feeling, and they do move, especially when you look at time lapse photography, you see that at a different time scale, they move quite a bit. But they're also, plants are closer to the mineral, and you

begin to see how, you know, there are aspects of order already in the inorganic mineral world that are, you know, like crystals and the ways that chemistry can become self-organizing. And so, you know, by analogizing the ether to the plant realm, I'm trying to indicate that it's kind of this, this me, it plays this mediating role between mind and matter. And it's the in-between tension, as it were, that is a, that is a, that can become, for us a kind of organ of perception. Like I think we can cultivate a form of perception that would be capable of hanging out in this tension rather than snapping to one side or the other. We can hang out in this tension and really cultivate this organ of etheric imagination

as a new methodology in metaphysics. Yeah. I find that idea exhilarated, and I think a lot of what you're doing, of course, following in the footsteps of someone like Whitehead, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is tearing down these fences between these various dualities that we take for granted,

whether it's between subject and object, mind and matter, or whatever else, and where those fences were building bridges, building ways of connecting and synthesizing what we took to be, a binary two opposite things and actually showing how they bleed into one another and implicate one another. Is that a fair way of sort of framing it? Yeah, exactly. Beautiful. So I know you touched on this a little bit earlier and of course we've been touching on it throughout this conversation but maybe

as a great way to sort of come to the end of this conversation and summarize it. What vision of the cosmos and our place in it emerges from this work in your opinion? And I guess how might it impact different fields like philosophy, cosmology, anthropology, et cetera. Yeah, well, I think the best way to encapsulate that would be to say it's a participatory vision. And, you know, the idea of participation has, you know, connotations both in human social life and in terms of political participation, cultural participation. But I think think there's also this cosmological aspect to the form of, you know, participation that this approach to philosophy affords. It's to recognize that, you know, human beings are like

leaves on a tree, as Alan Watts would put in it. And, you know, or to extend the metaphor, Alan Watts would often say that, you know, the earth peoples like an apple tree, apples, you know, and so we are expressions of the cosmos. We're not aliens imported from elsewhere. We want parachuted onto this planet from somewhere else. We are natural expressions of it. And it's, we can participate if we're able to, you know, reconnect with the depths of our own being, We can participate in, you know, creating a more flourishing planet not only for ourselves, but for the rest of the community of life on this planet. And I think in so many ways, this participatory vision allows us to see how many of our social ills, social inequalities, are connected to the ecological crisis in the sense that our alienation. from nature is not, at the end of the day, different from our alienation from one another.

And you were speaking to this earlier, I thought, in a really clear and compelling way. And so, you know, developing this new approach to cosmology is just really an invitation to get us to participate in the world and participate in the construction of a better society. Yeah, beautiful. I really do see it as the sort of next step in our growing up as a species. Like I kind of envision ourselves now as this like adolescent stage of an intelligent species where we're still childish in so many ways. We still have so much growing up to do.

I mean, teenagers in this adolescent phase, they often will destroy their futures through short-sightedness and, you know, doing risky things and et cetera. And we're kind of in that phase. but there's this promise of being able to grow out beyond it, to develop as a species in the direction that will allow us to become what we want to be, to fulfill our potential as a species, not eliminate ourselves through the creation of AI or eliminate ourselves through our own short-sightedness, things like nuclear war, whatever, if we can get past those threats and we can embrace a philosophy in a way of envisioning ourselves in relation to everything and everyone else, and the way that you're promoting, I really do think it represents sort of the next big evolutionary jump of our species and would be equivalent of us coming out of our adolescence into mature adulthood

and open up the possibilities of what could come next for our species. And so I really enjoy it and I think it's really important work. And I deeply appreciate everything you do, Matt. And thank you so much for coming on the show as well. Before I let you go, though, any last words you want to say and also where people can find you and your work online. Yeah, thanks so much, Brett. It's really, it's been a lovely conversation.

And, you know, the last thing I'd say is just to emphasize what you were just sharing. I think of this phrase growing down, rather than growing up, as we would think of what it means to become an adult to mature out of this adolescent phase. We need to grow down. I'm not sure if it was James Hillman or another psychologist. Lots of people talk about this idea nowadays, but it's part of what I mean by decendental philosophy, right? Let's get rooted on this planet. Stop trying to, you know, let's stop being fixated on the idea of escaping this planet. It's really not going to happen.

It's just way too hard to live on Mars. I don't know if you've actually, Elon's actually thought it through, but we've got to save this planet and grow down and just, you know, accept. humbly our place as as human beings on the planet earth and um i know i know your uh your podcast and all the ideas that you're trying to amplify here are all contributing to that so it's really really great to join the chorus thank you my friend i deeply appreciate that all right where can listeners find you and your work online oh right yes so uh best place would be my my blog uh it's footnotes to plato dot com number two and um Yeah, they can find the book at various booksellers, not just Amazon if you want to, it is

available elsewhere on the publisher's website, Revelore is the publisher. So, yeah. Okay, cool. And I will link to all of that in the show notes. Keep up the great work, my friend, and you always have a home here at RevLeft. I look forward to talking to you next time. Thanks so much, Brett. I look forward to it.

This is no exaggeration, we're living in a death machine. No, it's not just your imagination. You've been living in a death machine. Some of us are passengers, some of us are driving, and almost everybody's getting fled to death to keep the motor running. I'm not being hyperbolic, this place is a death machine. really and symbolic in the belly of the death machine. Doesn't matter who is steering.

It's just gonna keep on killing. I know we find a way to finally break the routine. But you might as well face the music. You're living in a death machine. This ain't no call or action. in no satisfaction not even sure what I was trying to sing but at least until it stops existing this fucking time bomb keeps ticking shit man

goddamn that's just obscene living in a death machine in the belly of the death machine everybody do the death machine Living in a death machine.