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Below is my lecture on German Idealism and Romanticism given yesterday (Sept. 30) for MA students enrolled in an Introduction to Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness course at CIIS.
Category Archives: Schelling
The Ecology of Ideas: Enacting Worlds Worth Living In
"Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized."
-Alfred North Whitehead
Over at Knowledge-Ecology, Adam Robbert has thrown a few fantastic posts up unpacking his vision of the ecology of ideas. Concepts are capacities skillfully enacted in ecological contexts. There is no self or mental substance that "has" concepts–this is not the sort of "capacity" Adam is talking about. Rather, when "I" learn or unlearn a particular species of concept, "I" become other than I was. "No thinker thinks twice," as Whitehead put it in Process and Reality. Concepts are everywhere swarming through our environments, infecting us like viruses, altering not only the content but the structure of our embodied minds.
In the comments beneath his post, a fascinating exchange continues to unfold between Adam and a few proponents of eliminativism, including the inventor of "Blind Brain Theory" R. Scott Bakker. As I posted there, the eliminativist's attempt to erase 1st person experience is self-refuting–a performative contradiction!–since the scientific epistemology that is supposed to grant knowledge of 3rd person Nature out there already presupposes a Mind capable of knowing it.
Bakker responded by dismissing Mind and intentionality and experience, etc., as transcendental a prioris because ultimately their existence depends entirely on our willingness to believe in them. In other words, Bakker argues that my defense of 1st person experience amounts to just another religious faith, while his eliminativism is the result of "hard" scientific empiricism. Bakker's way of demarcating science from religion is a telling one, since it highlights what is perhaps our core point of philosophical divergence. Like Adam, I see meaning as an intrinsic feature of our evolutionary context. All organisms enact worlds and are always already structurally coupled with their environments. They survive, when they do, because they have managed to communicate with their environments in a more or less coherent way. (As will become clearer below, it is important to remember here that "environment" means "other organisms"). The human organism is just one species of meaning-maker among many here on earth. Our form of meaning-making often goes under the name of "religion." I'm not sure if Adam totally follows me here, but I'd argue that religious fabulation is in this sense inescapable. Adam prefers to speak in the secular terms of "cosmopolitics" instead of religion, but in the context of Bruno Latour's Gaian natural theology, I think it becomes more clear that the "secular" is already a highly charged religious concept (and it becomes a fetish if we're not careful). Adam writes that "philosophy must aim for self-care and not just self-knowledge; we must create a livable system of ideas in addition to pursuing critical denouncements of dogmatism." Human beings have a biological need to create such a livable system of ideas. So, in this sense, religion (or cosmopolitics) has as much ontological significance as science; each is always already implicated in the other's attempt to justify itself (as Whitney Bauman argues in his new book Religion and Ecology). This, to my mind, is the only way to meet the real challenge of post-Darwinian epistemology: to think truth in an evolutionary context is to give up our belief in the "true world" and to accept the apparent world as the real world (=aesthetics as first philosophy). This was Nietzsche's challenge to the traditional consensus of Enlightenment philosophers.
I actually agree with Bakker that the transcendental and phenomenological approaches to defending experience are misguided. As I've discussed with Evan Thompson in the past, I think his enactivist extension of phenomenology to biology goes a long way toward the sort of experiential realism I'm after. But in the end, it still falls short and remains ontologically underdetermined in my opinion. Taking cues from Whitehead and Schelling, I think life (or a radically deanthropocized "experience" if you prefer) is the more general category than matter. (To be fair, Thompson also draws approvingly on Robert Rosen, who makes a similar argument regarding the generality of life.) Another way of putting this would be to say that ecology should replace physics as the most foundational science. Physical space and time would then not only be relativized, but pluralized: brought forth as various scales by enduring relations between organisms. The universal "space-time" known to physicists is not the pre-given, eternally imposed geometrical background within which the energetic transactions of actual entities takes place, but is itself brought forth by the energetic transactions of the most encompassing society actual entities (the electromagnetic and gravitronic societies?). Space-time is enacted ecologically, brought forth by the creative intra-action of a cosmic community of actual occasions. (I go into this Whiteheadian conception of space-time in more depth in my essay Physics of the World-Soul).
In sum, I think it is important in a conversation like this to acknowledge off the bat that we are doing speculative metaphysics either way (whether we are eliminativists or panexperientialists). Bakker's blind brain theory is science fiction, not science fact. But it is no less compelling for this! I appreciate the challenge he is raising, since it is clear to me that the only viable ontological options at this point in the history of philosophy are eliminativism or panexperientialism (as Steven Shaviro continues to argue).
Our philosophical options here are not simply the Scientific Facts of neuroscience versus the deluded fairy tales of metaphysics. Neuroscientific findings can and should inform our speculative grasp of the universe and its processes, but to my mind it is a regressive and forgetful maneuver to pretend neuroscience somehow "purifies" human understanding of metaphysics. This notion that positive science might somehow secure epistemological freedom from speculative imagination so as to deal only with the self-evident facts of physical reality, or whatever, is the worst kind of metaphysics because it is unconscious metaphysics.
My dissertation as a Detective Novel and a work of Science Fiction
Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy: Towards a Physics of the World-Soul/an Ontology of Organism
My dissertation examines the cognitive role of imagination in modern philosophies of nature since Descartes, focusing in particular on the nature philosophies of Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead. I argue that the cognitive organ of etheric imagination grants the nature philosopher epistemic access to a process ontology of organism. Once this etheric organ of perception has flowered, the physical world of isolated objects in empty space apprehended by the reflective intellect is recognized to be merely the outer layer or final fruit (Natura naturata) of a living process that creatively forms itself again and again from the inside out (Natura naturans).
I will follow Deleuze in construing the work of philosophical writing as part detective novel, part science fiction (Difference and Repetition, xx):
"By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where…they operate in relation to 'dramas' and by means of a certain 'cruelty.' They must have a coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come form themselves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere. This is the secret of empiricism. Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as object of an encounter…Only an empiricist could say concepts are indeed things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond 'anthropological predicates.'"
The detective novel part of my dissertation pursues an empirical encounter with what seems to be the most profoundly mysterious concept to have emerged in the history of philosophy: imagination. Its pro-fundity, or groundlessness, has repeatedly unsettled the major conceptual personas of philosophical history. Though there are notable exceptions (e.g., Schelling, Steiner, Whitehead), modern philosophers have tended to restrain the otherwise unruly force of imagination so as to prevent it from clouding their measured pursuit of clear and distinct truth. My dissertation treats the history of modern philosophy as a crime scene. In effect, modern philosophy since Descartes has committed "imagicide" by severing the erotic arteries assuring the rhythmic circulation between spirit and matter. The philosophical murder of imagination left modern philosophy in an impossible situation: if mind is entirely distinct and separate from nature, soul separate from corpse, I from not-I, etc., how can philosophers pretend to love Wisdom? If no synthesis can be woven between the ideal web of concepts "in here" and our percepts of real things "out there"—if the blood clot preventing the concrescence of thought and sense cannot be dissolved—then there is no love and no Wisdom to be had. Without the subtle mediations of imagination there is only confusion, which takes the form either of an exaggerated idealism (where nature becomes a mere shadow to be sublated) or a mistaken materialism (a materialism in name only that does not recognize itself as an idealistic dualism). These confusions are a result of the bifurcation of nature Whitehead's adventure in cosmology sought to alleviate between the world of inner experience ("the dream") and the world of physical theory ("the conjecture").
I aim to philosophically encounter the force of imagination not by unduly restraining it, but on the contrary, by amplifying its cognitive potentials. I do so by taking methodological and theoretical cues from Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead.
The science fiction part involves an investigation into the ontological significance of the etheric dimension of nature. Framing my investigation are Steiner's esoteric ether of formative forces, Schelling's polarized ether of universal organization, and Whitehead's mathematical ether of creative events. These ether theories are not "scientific" in the standard sense of being rooted in some experimental protocol. Fortunately, making concepts scientifically operational is not the philosopher's role. And anyway, the ether theories articulated by Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead were not meant to compete with scientific evidence, but to philosophically interpret it. The concept of an etheric dimension of nature is not a hypothesis concerning a supposedly mind-independent reality that might be experimentally falsified; it is, rather, the empirico-transcendental condition for any scientific knowledge of nature at all (a condition of real, not possible experience, following Deleuze [Difference and Repetition, 285]). The major philosophical goal of my research on imagination and the etheric dimension of nature that it reveals is to assemble the evidences of the special sciences into a "likely story" or mythospeculative cosmology supportive of a non-modern ecological civilization.
Distilling my dissertation topic—>Etheric Imagination in an Ontology of Organism: Towards a Planetary Philosophy
First, a few orientating quotations from the thinkers I will be boiling together in the alchemical vessel of my dissertation.
"…if we had the choice between empiricism and the all-oppressing necessity of thought of a rationalism which had been driven to the highest point, no free spirit would be able to object to deciding in favor of empiricism. Empiricism itself, then, allows a higher way of looking at things, or can be grasped from a higher perspective than the received, or, at least since Kant, the usual concept grasps it, which expels everything intelligible not only beyond the concepts of the understanding, but originally and first of all beyond all experience. Hence the now usual explanation that empiricism denies everything supernatural, but this is not the case. Because it is empiricism, it does not necessarily for that reason deny the supernatural, neither does it assume the legal and moral laws and the content of religion as something merely contingent, namely in the sense that it reduces everything to mere feelings, which themselves would only be the product of education and habit, as Hume admittedly did, who, by the way, asserted the same thing in relation to the sort of necessity with which we link cause and effect in our thoughts. There is even a higher and a lower concept of empiricism. For if the highest goal, which philosophy can, by general consent even of those who up to now think differently, certainly reach, is precisely to grasp the world as freely produced and created, then philosophy, with regard to the main thing it can achieve, or precisely by reaching its highest goal, would be a science of experience; I do not mean in the formal sense, but I do mean in the material sense, that what is highest for it would itself be something experiential in nature. If up to now, then, that national difference with regard to philosophy really exists, then this rift initially only shows that the philosophy in which humankind could recognize itself, the truly universal philosophy, does not yet exist. The truly universal philosophy cannot possibly be the property of a single nation, and as long as any philosophy does not go beyond the borders of a single people one can be safe in assuming that it is not yet the true philosophy, even if it is perhaps on the way to it…It would be wrong, really wrong, then, to want to call back those other [French and English speaking] nations from the doctrine of empiricism which they pursue to such great advantage in other areas; for them this would indeed be a retrograde movement. It is not up to them, it is up to us Germans, who, since the existence of Naturphilosophie, have emerged from the sad alternative of a metaphysics which floats in the air, lacking any foundation (that they rightly make fun of) and an infertile, arid psychology–it is up to us, I say, to develop the system, which we may hope to grasp and to reach, the positive system whose principle, precisely because of its absolute positivity cannot itself be knowable a priori any more, but only a posteriori, to the point where it will flow together with that empiricism which has been expanded and purified to the same extent" -F. W. J. Schelling, last lines from On the History of Modern Philosophy (~1833).
"A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions." -A. N. Whitehead, from Science and the Modern World, p. 201.
"Our bodily experience is the basis of existence. How is it to be characterized? In the first place, it is not primarily an experience of sense data, in the clear and distinct sense of that term. The internal functioning of a healthy body provides singularly few sense data, primarily associated with itself. When such sense data appear, we send fro a doctor. They are mostly aches and pains. And yet our feeling of bodily unity is a primary experience. It is an experience so habitual and so completely a matter of course that we rarely mention it. No one ever says, Here am I, and I have brought my body with me. In what does this intimacy of relationship consist? The body is the basis of our emotional and purposive experience. It determines the way in which we react to the clear sensa. It determines the fact that we enjoy sensa. But the eye strain in sight is not the eye sight. We see with our eyes; we do not see our eyes. The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience cooperates. There is an inflow and outflow of factors between the bodily actuality and the human experience, so that each shares in the existence of the other. The human body provides our closest experience of the interplay of actualities in nature…So long as nature was conceived in terms of the passive, instantaneous existence of bits of matter, according to Newton or Democritus, a difficulty arises. For there is an essential distinction between matter at an instant and the agitations of experience. But this conception of matter has not been swept away. Analogous notions of activity, and of forms of transition, apply to human experience and to the human body. Thus bodily activities and forms of experience can be construed in terms of each other. Also the body is part of nature. Thus we finally construe the world in terms of the type of activities disclosed in our intimate experience. This conclusion must not be distorted. The fallacious notion of passive matter has by a reaction led to a distorted account of human experience. Human nature has been described in terms of its vivid accidents, and not its existential essence. The description of its essence must apply to the unborn child, to the baby in its cradle, to the state of sleep, and to that vast background of feeling hardly touched by consciousness. Clear, conscious discrimination is an accident of human existence. It makes us human. But it does not make us exist. It is of the essence of our humanity. But it is an accident of our existence. What is our primary experience which lies below and gives its meaning to our conscious analysis of qualitative detail? In our analysis of detail we are presupposing a background which supplies a meaning. These vivid accidents accentuate something which is already there. We require to describe that factor in our experience which, being a matter of course, does not enter prominently into conversation. There is no need to mention it. For this reason language is very ineffective for the exposition of metaphysics. Our enjoyment of actuality is a realization of worth, good or bad. It is a value experience. Its basic expression is–Have a care, here is something that matters! Yes–that is the best phrase–the primary glimmering of consciousness reveals, something that matters. This experience provokes attention, dim and, all but, subconscious. Attention yields a three-fold character in the "Something that matters." "Totality," "Externality," and "Internality" are the primary characterizations of "that which matters." They are not to be conceived as clear, analytic concepts. Experience awakes with these dim presuppositions to guide its rising clarity of detailed analysis. They are presuppositions in the sense of expressing the sort of obviousness which experience exhibits. There is the totality of actual fact; there is the externality of many facts; there is the internality of this experiencing which lies within the totality. These three divisions are on a level. No one in any sense precedes the other. There is the whole fact containing within itself my fact and the other facts. Also the dim meaning of fact–or actuality–is intrinsic importance for itself, for the others, and for the whole. Of course all our terms of speech are too special, and refer too explicitly to higher stages of experience. For this reason, philosophy is analogous to imaginative art. It suggests meaning beyond its mere statements. On the whole, elaborate phrases enshrine the more primitive meanings." -A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 114-118
"What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.
Another way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against is to bifurcate nature into two divisions,
namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent." -A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, ch. 2.
"Our earth today has a quite particular configuration and form. Let us go back in the evolution of the earth. It once had a completely different form. Let us immerse ourselves…still further back: we come there to ever higher temperatures, in which metals were able to flow all around as water runs along today. All the metals have become these veins in the earth because they first flowed along in streams. Just as lead is hard today and quicksilver is fluid, so lead was at one time fluid and quicksilver will one day become a solid metal. Thus the earth is changeable, but man has always participated in these various evolutions. In the ages of which we have spoken, physical man as yet was not in existence. But the etheric body and astral body were there; they could live in the higher temperatures of that time. The sheaths gradually began to form with the cooling process, enveloping man. While something new was always being formed in man during the earth's evolution, something correspondingly new had also been formed outside in nature. The rudiments of the human eye had first arisen in the Sun evolution. First the etheric body formed itself and this again formed the human physical eye. As a piece of ice freezes out of water, so are the physical organs formed out of the finer etheric body. The physical organs were formed within man while outside the earth became solid. In every age the formation of a human organ took place parallel with the formation of a particular configuration outside in nature…One only understands man when one can recognize the connections between the human being and the forces of nature. " -Rudolf Steiner
My aim in this dissertation is to draw indications from each of these thinkers in an attempt to articulate an alternative ontology unhampered by the bifurcation of nature plaguing modern thought. Modernity need not be rejected; rather, an alternative form of modernity is possible, rooted not in Kantian skepticism or Hegelian idealism, but in Schellingian naturalism and Whiteheadian radical empiricism. Drawing on Steiner and the Western esoteric tradition, I will argue that the Kantian limits placed on human understanding and experience can be overcome through the cultivation of new organs of perception. The ontological insights of a process-relational ontology of organism are achieved through the higher speculative empiricism of the etheric imagination. Etheric imagination grants the process philosopher perceptual access to the formative forces unfolding organized beings from the inside out. Etheric imagination is in this sense not in the business of fantasy or make believe, but is an organ of genuine conceptual and perceptual import in tune with natural processes that unfold below the level of ordinary rational waking consciousness. The mechanical ontology underlying scientific materialism stems from misplaced concreteness, whereby abstract models of physical activity are made to fill in for the experienced reality of said activity. Such a scientific materialism, though it claims to be empirical, is really a confused idealism, in that it dismisses experiential reality as a mere dream, replacing it with an explanation based on the conjectured mechanical processes lying beneath experience that somehow cause it.
Along with Schelling, Steiner, and Whitehead, I plan to draw on several other thinkers, including Gilles Deleuze , John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Michael Marder.
Rough breakdown of dissertation
1. Historical Outline on emergence of bifurcated image of nature in modern philosophy beginning with Descartes (through Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Locke, Kant, Fichte, Hegel). Argue for alternative modernity building on Bruno, Cusa, and other esoteric thinkers discussed by Steiner in Mystics After Modernism.
2. Epistemology of etheric imagination as an esoteric organ of perception. Build on phenomenology, enactivism, and participatory theory as epistemic first steps toward an ecological ontology, or ontology of organism.
3. Ontology of organism reveals the plant-like (or etheric) texture of experiential reality. Build on Marder's vegetal metaphysics, Whitehead's panexperientialism, and Sallis' elemental phenomenology of earth and sky.
4. Cosmological significance of etheric forces underlying physical phenomena. Unpack Schelling's, Steiner's, and Whitehead's ether theories.
Letters on Cosmology and Theodicy
Below, I've copied an email thread with Dan Dettloff, who blogs at Re(-)petitions. I thought some of our other readers might want to chime in. Actually, I'd really like to hear other people's responses to Dan's question. I've not arrived at a satisfying answer to it, but I do think getting past "the problem of evil" will require a far more radical re-conceptualization of God's nature than that offered by any ontotheology. On the other hand, there is more to religion than concepts. If, as the religious believe, God actually exists, then God is not simply an idea. God is real. After Kant–for whom God became merely a regulative idea necessary "for us" as rational thinkers but for all that not necessary for being "in itself"–the problem of evil became more acute, since it was re-located from the transcendent to the transcendental, from the universal to the individual: what had been an abstract problem for God to work out before the creation of the universe became a concrete problem for each human person to work out before theorizing about or acting within the world. Theology was no longer ontologically relevant, was not a science of divinity, but nonetheless remained crucially important for phenomenological knowledge and practical affairs, for free and responsible action among others. Without the regulative idea of God, or the Kingdom of Ends, human freedom would spin free of its gravitational center and unwind into blind willing. We would be incapable of good or evil action, incapable of loving. We would be as nothing.
Dean has been busy trying to think Christianity in the context of Speculative Realism and the "New Story" of evolutionary cosmology. Some of my own thoughts on these topoi were collected in this essay "Towards a Christological Realism."
I'll be brief, as I'm sure you're busy, and I to you with what may turn out to be a bit of a heady question. I have followed your blog from time to time, and I admire your ability to bring various strands of thinking together. In fact, your writing prompted me to take a course on eco-theology with Dennis O'Hara in Toronto. I come from continental philosophy and identify as a Christian with the usual string of philosophical qualifiers. Convicted by Speculative Realism and a general growing interest in science, I have been hard at work trying to bring together the theological visions, which have ontological ramifications, of religious traditions (most specifically Christianity). Perhaps a year or so ago, Levi Bryant made a post at larval subjects calling out folks like Caputo for reducing religion to a sort of poetic overlay on the world, suggesting this cuts its legitimate, if (on Bryant's view) misguided, ontological claims.
I share Bryant's criticism, but, naturally, not his atheism, and as such have been exploring just what those ontological claims of Christianity might be, especially given the new cosmology. I've read The Universe Story by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry and Berry's The Great Work, along with a myriad of articles (and I have some formal theological training, most specifically with Moltmann). While I'm not novice to theology, I recognize that this is a new arena for me, or at least I'm coming to it with new sets of questions.
Let me cut to the chase. I'm having trouble finding a satisfactory answer to the problems of creative destruction in the universe story, especially as it pertains to the kind of vision of a God of love present in most religious traditions. The argument is likely not foreign to you, but so we're on the same page it goes something like: if God is so loving, as revealed in figures like, for example, Jesus Christ (though one could obviously choose others, but perhaps staying Christocentric will give us a little bit of a particular ground to work with), and God reveals that humans are called to enact radical love, forgiveness, and peace in the world, why would God create a universe which can only seem to create itself via loads of natural evil? In other words, when God incarnates into the person of Christ, God essentially becomes not just a human but inherits the sacrifice of millions of suffering creatures who, as part of the universe story, have given rise to this particular conscious being we call Jesus. Jesus then explores an ethic of love which runs precisely counter to the pre-human logic of cosmogenesis (or at least biogenesis).
Solutions to this issue usually take the form of some kind of libertarian notion of freedom for creation. God steps back and allows creation to realize itself. But this, too, is at odds with plenty of religious definitions of freedom, and, of course, autonomy is hardly synonymous with freedom. So what gives? Are we forced to affirm some kind of strange, perverse religious ontology which suggests God creates a universe which creates itself, only to tell the universe it was messing up the whole time? Do you know of any ways out of this predicament?Thanks in advance, Matthew. I hope all is well, and thank you, again, for your work. I've personally benefited quite a bit from it and look forward to reading more.
Hi Dean,
Thanks for your email. You've raised a question that has been on my mind lately, actually. I just finished a book by Matthew Stewart called The Courtier and the Heretic: Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. It goes into the different theological positions of Spinoza and Leibniz.
For Spinoza (a pantheist), there is no such thing as good and evil from God's all-inclusive perspective. Further, God has no freedom, since God is identical to the natural world, which was conceived by Spinoza along Newtonian lines as deterministic and law-abiding.
For Spinoza, the problem of evil is really just an illusion resulting from our limited perspective on things. Things are the way they are because they couldn't have been any other way. God had no choice in the matter.
Leibniz was deeply influenced by Spinoza, but fought against his conclusions. Leibniz wanted to defend a conception of God as both apart from and internal to the universe, as both free and as necessary. In his Theodicy, he asked "why is there something, rather than nothing?" He imagined God deliberating with Himself prior to creating the universe: "Is such an endeavor worth it?," Leibniz imagines God asking Himself. Leibniz then distinguishes between the divine understanding (God's mind, if you will) and the divine will (God's heart). The divine understanding, in creating a universe, must obey the logical principles of identity and non-contradiction. The divine will, given these restrictions, desires to create the best of all possible worlds. So the finite created world we know, according to Leibniz, contains the least amount of evil that it possibly could contain. God did His best, in other words. He decided it was worth creating the world for the good that would result, even if this good was won at the cost of some degree of evil and suffering.
My own response to the problem of evil comes largely out of Whitehead's process theology. Whitehead (dis)solves the problem in a way that may be unacceptable to some orthodox Christians, in that he denies God's omnipotence. Leibniz also limited God's power in some sense (in that he required God to obey logic–Descartes is an example of someone who conceived of God as so powerful that He could even make 2+2=5 if He wanted). But Whitehead's denial is more radical. God is no longer an all-powerful dictator who created out of nothing a finite and contingent universe. Rather, God is a creature of Creativity, part of cosmogenesis like you and I, not a distant unmoved mover but"a fellow sufferer who understands." His only power derives from "the worship He inspires." He is not capable of coercing creation to obey his commands, but works gently by way of erotic, moral, and aesthetic persuasion.
I presented a paper recently that further fleshes out Whitehead's psychocosmotheology called "Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: Steps Toward an Incarnational Philosophy" that further develops his process theology.
In short, for Whitehead, evil is not God's fault, but is a side effect of creative process/evolutionary becoming. Evil is "creativity in the wrong season," as he puts it.I'm also influenced by Schelling's treatment of these issues… He would probably invert the Whiteheadianism that "evil is not God's fault." For Schelling, evil is precisely the fault or fissure in God between hiddenness and revelation, between wrathful withdrawal and radiant love.
Hope that clarifies some things for you somewhat… I welcome further dialogue about all this. Would you mind if I post your question and my response on my blog? I think others would enjoy thinking alongside us.
Thanks so much for your timely and thorough response. You're welcome to post it on your blog, and feel free to edit whatever you'd like. I'm not much a stickler on those sorts of things.
Your presentation of Whitehead is a useful way of cutting through Spinoza and Leibniz. I wonder, though, if this response moves the problem around rather than solving it (I recognize that "theodicy" may very well be an impossible thing to "solve," but it remains the nagging problem of the universe story and, I fear, threatens it as a viable interpretive option). While I would happily deny God's classical omnipotence, the question remains as to how God could not have created a universe which creates itself without all the violence. The Judeo-Christian writings get out of the problem by basically affirming that God creates a universe which is open to further development under a primordial goodness, and evil/suffering end up having a radically anthropocentric cause. This older cosmological mythos doesn't explain suffering, of course, but it gets God off the hook. With the new cosmology, I, like you, find it necessary to deny a strong Providence, but we end up running into the usual problems of process theism, namely that it seems to encourage us to modify the concept of God so significantly that the God who comes out on the other side seems totally alien to the impulses of most world religions. God ends up sort of being shoe-horned into a certain cosmological model rather than setting the terms of the discourse, and thus process theology runs the risk of re-establishing another God of the philosophers and committing the sin of ontotheology.
Bringing this back to the problem of evil, the process paradigm, while still (I think) a God of the philosophers, is an improvement on the classical paradigm, but it fails to name the origin of evil other than to say it is structurally present in the very processes of the universe. It would be hard, I think, to hold that God creates the universe out of love as a result. We would need to posit the usual Boehme-Hegel-Moltmann-zimzum models, which come loaded with their own structural instabilities just as the classical models do.
But perhaps I've missed something somewhere along the way. I've sort of assumed a lot of things about these models in a slow disclosure of how I feel about them, and I certainly don't want to pin anything on you that you don't wish to be saying. My apologies for any presumptions or errors.
Thanks again for your time, Matt.
I suppose it comes down to whether or not we are persons of faith, for whom God's nature and existence are attested by way of spiritual revelation. If we cannot simply affirm this or that sort of God by way of an inner faith or an acceptance of outer religious authority, then we are forced to consider the physico-cosmological revelation instead by asking: What can God be like, given what we know of the physical universe? This question seems absurd, even abhorrent, for evangelical Christians, since what we've learned about biological evolution (which marches forward mostly by way of the satanic Great Selectors: sex and death) suggests we'd do better not ask the question at all, since if such a universe of continual carnage does have a Creator, its not the sort of God that would be worth loving. Better to be an atheist than to admit the existence of a deity who thought billions of years of rape and slaughter were worth the effort of creation…
I think process theism, whether we're talking about Whitehead's version, or Schelling's Böhmean version, forces us to consider the darkness, the wrath, and the unconsciousness of God, as much as we may prefer only to look at His conscious light and love. If the life of God is an eternal process of incarnation, then the classical sort of religion that would have provided its adherents with hope for some sort of escape hatch to a better world beyond this one must be regarded as nothing more than the illusion of a death fearing primate struggling desperately to cope. God is here with us, part of us, living and dying with us. God isn't trying to escape this world, but to become more and more mixed up with it. Creation wasn't something God undertook by choice, as far as I can tell.
"God," said Whitehead to Lucien Price, "is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts…In so far as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death…to…irrelevancy. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur."
I came across this article in The Atlantic penned by Whitehead in 1925 called "Science and Religion." Much of it seems to be excerpted from his lecture published as Religion in the Making. Thought it might be relevant to quote at length:
"Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something which gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. The immediate reaction of human nature to the religious vision is worship. Religion has emerged into human experience mixed with the crudest fancies of barbaric imagination. Gradually, slowly, steadily, the vision recurs in history under nobler form and with clearer expression. It is the one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend. It fades and then recurs. But when it renews its force it recurs with an added richness and purity of content. The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
The vision claims nothing but worship; and worship is a surrender to the claim for assimilation, urged with the motive force of mutual love. The vision never overrules. It is always there, and it has the power of love presenting the one purpose whose fulfillment is eternal harmony. Such order as we find in nature is never force — it presents itself as the one harmonious adjustment of complex detail. Evil is the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision. Evil is overruling, retarding, hurting. The power of God is the worship He inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure."
Brian Swimme on "The New Story" in cosmology:
Update: By chance, I noticed this opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times: "A Rationalist's Mystical Moment" by Barbara Ehrenreich. Her discussion of Rudolf Otto's psychology of religion is certainly relevant.
Online course this Fall: "Mind and Nature in German Idealism"
Below is the introductory lecture of a 10-week undergraduate course called "Mind and Nature in German Idealism" that I'm hoping will run this coming Fall (2014) for the University of Philosophical Research. If you're an undergrad looking for an independent study, let me know.
Schelling & Whitehead inheriting Spinoza & Leibniz: God and the Modern World
I've just finished Matthew Stewart's popular book The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (2006). I was hoping to fill out my own understanding of the historical context surrounding these two thinkers. I was not disappointed on this front. Stewart combed the archives and stitched together an entertaining story about the important influence (even if negative) that Spinoza had on Leibniz. After Leibniz had caught wind of Spinoza's heretical writings through a mutual friend, he initiated a short correspondence before eventually meeting with Spinoza at the latter's apartment in The Hague in November of 1676.
Stewart's presentation of the ideas, as well as the personal character, of these two world-historical thinkers is tilted rather sharply in Spinoza's favor. Stewart is certainly entitled to his perspective, but I was put off by his hatchet job on Leibniz. Spinoza, clearly his hero, is made to seem like an anti-mystical modern liberal materialist, while Leibniz is painted as a greedy, socially needy medieval throwback and a pathological liar whose best ideas were cribbed from Spinoza. Leibniz's character flaws, as well as his philosophy, are psychoanalytically reduced by Stewart to the loss of his doting father at the tender age of 6.
Leibniz was well-traveled and well-connected man whose collected works and correspondence with other learned members of the European upper classes totals more than 150,000 pages. As a result, historians know far more about his biography than Spinoza's, who was forced into seclusion after being excommunicated from the Sephardic Jewish community in Amsterdam when he was 24. Leibniz's flaws, as well as his brilliance, are far more on display than Spinoza's, whose life remains shrouded in mystery. This makes it easy for Stewart to elevate Spinoza to the stuff of legend, the exemplar of all virtue and modesty. Stewart claims him as the heroic forerunner of everything he finds great about modernity: the religiously tolerant and democratic state, the ethos of self-interest, the mechanistic understanding of nature, etc.
Stewart laments the "anti-modern" influence of Leibniz in the centuries following his death, suggesting that "the reactive form of modernity that began with [him] has in fact become the dominant form of modern philosophy" (310). He goes on:
"Anxious over the apparent purposelessness of the world revealed by modern science; bitter about the threatened demotion of humankind from its special place in nature; alienated from a society that seems to recognize no transcendent goals; and unwilling to assume personal responsibility for happiness–a needy humankind has reinvented the Leibnizian philosophy with abandon over the past three centuries" (311).
Stewart lists Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger as each expressing what amounts to the same sort of reactionary philosophy that Leibniz first articulated in response to his encounter with Spinoza's system. All these anti-modern thinkers, according to Stewart, failed to face the darker mundane truths about human and cosmic nature revealed by the scientific method and by the bloody course of political history. Contra Leibniz, it would seem that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.
There is certainly something profound in both Spinoza's pantheism and Leibniz's monadology. My own philosophical heroes, Schelling and Whitehead, learned a great deal from each of them. Schelling, who argued his entire life on behalf of freedom (for humanity, for God, and for nature), nonethteless lavishes great praise upon Spinoza (this despite the latter's thoroughgoing deterministic world-picture). In his 1833 lectures published as On the History of Modern Philosophy, Schelling writes:
"It is unquestionably the peacefulness and calm of the Spinozist system which particularly produces the idea of its depth, and which, with hidden but irresistible charm, has attracted so many minds. The Spinozist system will also always remain in a certain sense a model. A system of freedom–but with just as great contours, with the same simplicity, as a perfect counter-image of the Spinozist system–this would really be the highest system. This is why Spinozism, despite the many attacks on it, and the many supposed refutations, has never really become something truly past, never been really overcome up to now, and no one can hope to progress to the true and the complete in philosophy who has not at least once in his life lost himself in the abyss of Spinozism" (66).
Schelling was stimulated to move beyond his early allegiance to Fichte's subjective idealism by Spinoza. But the latter's system was no resting place for Schelling, it was rather a springboard towards deeper speculations on the relationship between the creative life of God and on God's participation in the becoming of nature. For Spinoza, God was inseparable from and so identical with nature. Though infinite, Spinoza's God was also an immovable and so dead substance, incapable, says Schelling, of going out of itself in order to create. And as far as Schelling was concerned, despite the genius of his system, Spinoza left us with no explanation for how the transition to even just the appearance of finite things could ever have taken place. "We are compelled," writes Schelling, "to go back into infinity with the explanation of everything."
As for Leibniz, Schelling agrees with Stewart that his monadology was largely a reaction to Spinoza's system, "a hypothesis which [Leibniz] thought up, perhaps only to oppose something different for a time to Spinozism, in order, so to speak, to divert the world with it" (78). Schelling goes on to say (in further agreement with Stewart) that "we can primarily regard Leibnizianism only as a stunted Spinozism." Schelling sees Leibniz not so much as an opponent, but as an interpreter or mediator of Spinoza's ideas. As Stewart points out, Spinoza's doctrine of mind-matter parallelism became Leibniz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony of monads.
Schelling does praise Leibniz for his insight into the stages of nature's coming to consciousness of itself as spirit. The material world Leibniz called a "sleeping monad-world"; the vitality of plants and animals he referred to as the "dreaming monad"; and the rational soul of intelligent creatures like human beings he referred to as the "waking monad." Schelling was also inspired to build on Leibniz's early attempt to delve into the mind of God prior to the creation of the world. In Schelling's hands, this exercise became the attempt to articulate a sort of "temporal eternity," a past that was never present, a divine time prior to cosmic time in which God deliberated with Itself. Schelling's Ages of the World project remained unfinished at his death. It proved too difficult in the end for Schelling to overcome the subject-predict mode of expression while at the same time remaining logically comprehensible at the same time. Though perhaps he came close in his drafts:
"The doctrine that God created the world in time is a pillar of genuine faith. The labor of this present work [Ages of the World] would be adequately rewarded had it only made this thought comprehensible and intelligible. For since there is no time in God itself, how should God create the world in time if there is not a time outside of God? Or how would a determination of this time be possible if there is not already, before creation, a movement outside of God, according to whose repetition time is measured? God, in accordance with His highest Self, is not manifest. God manifests Himself. He is not actual. He becomes actual. It is precisely by this that God may appear as the most supremely free being. Hence, something else emerges between the free eternity and the deed, something that has a root that is independent from eternity, and is something commencing (finite), albeit eternally so. Thereby, there may eternally be something through which God could draw nigh to creatures and communicate Himself to them. Thereby, pure eternity may always remain free with respect to Being. And Being may never appear as an emanation from the eternal capacity-to-be and hence, there may be a distinction between God and his Being. In science, as in life, people everywhere are governed more by words than by clear concepts. Hence, on the one hand, they explain God in an indeterminate fashion as a necessary being and, on the other hand, they get worked up over a nature being ascribed to God. They would thereby like to give the appearance that they are saving God's freedom. How little they understand, or, moreover, how they understand nothing of this whatsoever, is illuminated by the preceding. For without a nature, the freedom in God could not be separated from the deed, and hence would not be actual freedom. Hence, they quash, as is proper, the system of universal necessity and yet they appear just as eager to quash any succession in God, although, if there is no succession, only a single system remains, namely that everything is simultaneous with and necessary to the divine being. In this way, as one notices that they also do in life, they reject, like the blind, precisely that which they most eagerly seek (without understanding it) and are drawn exactly to that which they really wanted to flee" (80-81).
In the end, Schelling faults Leibniz as much as Spinoza for denying freedom and life to God. Spinoza's denial was more forthright: God's only "freedom" is to be what God is. God is substance–simple, unified, unchanging being. End of story. Leibniz attempted to retain God's freedom, but only through a logical device. He distinguished between the divine will and the divine understanding, whereby the metaphysical necessity of God's understanding was said not to hamper the moral freedom of God's will. But Leibniz goes on to claim that God's goodness could only have led him to chose the best world (even while His understanding forced him to accept only the best of all possible worlds, given the necessities that come along with bringing a finite world into existence). This logical maneuver is but a diplomatic pretense, just "the last resort of rationalism," according to Schelling (83). Leibniz says God is free, but by arguing that God's nature is to be good, Leibniz has actually limited God to an essence, that is, God has been equated with necessary existence, which in fact is no existence at all (where to ex-ist means to stand out from oneself, to be free of oneself, but also free to become oneself). Here it is clear how Leibniz, though he consciously strove to escape Spinoza, could in the end only collide with him. As Stewart writes in his endnotes:
"The truth is that, before he knew anything about Spinoza, Leibniz was against Spinoza; and yet, at the same time, he also had a Spinozistic side. The encounter with Spinoza was crucial to his philosophical development because it forced him to confront this division within his own thought. Spinoza presented him with a problem he devoted his philosophical labors to solving, namely, how to suppress the dangerous Spinozist within himself. Absent the dalliance with Spinoza, Leibniz would have remained a conservative thinker; but he would not have been an essentially modern one, and his philosophy would not have originated the reactive form of modernity" (331).
Neither Leibniz nor Spinoza had a way to account for the transition from the infinity of their ideas to the finitude of actual experience. Pure reason alone offers no such path. Leibniz's many monads and their a priori harmonies; Spinoza's one Substance with Its attributes and modes: both speculative systems fail the test of experience.
Experimenting on experience is described by Whitehead in the opening pages of Process and Reality as "the true method of discovery." Like an airplane, the testing of experience:
"starts on the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation" (5).
Whitehead certainly owed a lot to both Spinoza and Leibniz. His speculative system is a re-assemblage of many of their most insightful concepts. But in re-assembling them, Whitehead also drastically alters their meaning. Leibniz's monads are turned into process-relational actual occasions; they are, unlike Leibniz's ultimate entities, almost all window. Spinoza's simple substance is turned into creative process, neither finally describable as one or as many, but only as a transitional inter-relationship whereby "the many become one and are increased by one"–an eternal repetition of creative differentiation forever and again until the crack of doom. As for God, It becomes a creature of Creativity (but an important one, in that God is Whitehead's principle of limitation, that Eros for which and by which there is anything definite at all in the first place… Without Desire, nothing could become. Creativity/the Absolute would remain unmanifest, unrevealed, mere potential, unable to ex-ist, to free itself from itself.
So Spinoza and Leibniz (since Kant, usually classified as rationalists) couldn't account for the transition between the infinite and the finite, and so couldn't coherently bring God and the World into positive relation… Are Schelling and Whitehead's answers any better? Is Desire or Divine Eros a convincing reason for this transition? Could there be any other reason? Whatever you may think, Whitehead wagered on this particular solution because he felt it was the most empirically adequate account of the ontological question ("why something rather than nothing?"). Existence has value, else it would not and could not exist. Schelling similarly advocated for a metaphysically empirical account of the ultimate act/fact of creation in his late philosophy of revelation.
Are Schelling and Whitehead "anti-modern" thinkers because of the religious dimension of their thought? I suspect Stewart would think so. They seem to fit right into his schema of "anxious," "bitter," "alienated," and "needy" inheritors of Leibniz who felt the need to protect their human dignity by inventing a divine Father-figure capable of redeeming the chaos and suffering that has thus far dominated human history. I think Stewart rightly warns us to avoid the sort of ontology of consolation he describes. Perhaps Leibniz did fall victim to such a quasi-philosophical strategy in some of his lazier moments. I think Schelling and Whitehead must be understood, not as anti-modern, but as alter-modern. Their philosophies are incarnational, focused more on the Son and the Spirit than the Father, to continue to develop the theological analogy. In this sense they are fully secular, concerned with this world, and not the next.
Thinking Through Atheism in a Religious Cosmos (response to professoranton)
"In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty."
"Picking Holes in the Concept of Natural Selection" by Evan Thompson
The philosopher Evan Thompson (author of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind) recently reviewed two books on the philosophy of biology: Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong and Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. Check it out HERE.
Thompson expresses doubts about these authors' argumentative strategies and laments their neglect of the latest literature in theoretical biology (much of which points to natural selection being just one in a number of other causal factors in evolution). But he seems to agree with them that an adequate evolutionary theory must include some account of natural or immanent teleology if it hopes to explain the emergence of life and consciousness from physical processes. In other words, Thompson agrees with these thinkers that reductive materialistic accounts of life and consciousness fall short of explanatory adequacy.
Thompson writes:
A number of theorists have argued that certain types of self-organizing systems exhibit a kind of natural teleology in the sense of a directedness arising from being self-producing and self-maintaining (Juarrero 1999, Thompson E 2007, Deacon 2012). This kind of directedness does not involve teleological laws beyond or outside of the laws of physics, unlike the natural teleology that Nagel proposes but does not develop fully. Moreover, such self-producing and self-maintaining systems arguably exhibit protomental characteristics and thereby provide a bridge from the physical order to the orders of life and the mind.
Here is my earlier review of Nagel's book, in particular his mentions of Schelling and Whitehead.
Alexander Bard on Network Metaphysics
I really dig Alexander Bard's "network-dynamic persepective." Geometrogenesis is also extremely relevant to my research on Whitehead's and Rudolf Steiner's ether theories (the former articulated an alternative to Einstein's theory of relativity based on an "ether of events"; the later spoke of an etheric dimension of nature mediating between the material and spiritual dimensions). The idea is that space-time is not ultimate, but an emergent product of quantum events (what Whitehead called "actual occasions"). Thanks to Prof. Corey Anton for pointing me to Bard's lecture.
After a little searching, I've turned up this blog post by Bard wherein he makes reference to Whitehead as one of the few philosophers who can survive Nietzsche's deconstructive hammer. But he seems to distance himself from Whitehead's process metaphysics because he feels it lacks a proper phenomenological account of the real. Conrta Bard, Whitehead does in fact situate his cosmology in the context of America's own breed of phenomenology coming out of William James' radical empiricism.
Bard also discusses Burning Man, syntheism, Silk Road, Simon Critchley's "faithless faith," and the "chemical liberation" set off in the 60s by the California counterculture's use of psychedelics. He finishes with the provocative question: "What if the internet is God?" (the title of his recent Ted Talk).
"Nature is a priori" -Schelling
Thanks to milliern for his commentary on and reflections about an exchange Professor Corey Anton, myself, and others have been having on YouTube. I'm reposting my comment to him below:
I wanted to offer a few clarifications of my own position. I don't normally think of myself as a "Heideggerian," though I suppose most people who take the time to really read Heidegger are irrevocably transformed in some way. I'm one of those who has spent considerable time with his texts and ideas. While he has changed the way I think, I've nonetheless come to differ with him (as I understand him) in important ways. I'm not at all convinced that 'human' being, or Dasein, is the only significant mode of being. Nature, too, is significant. In fact, like Schelling, I would say the significance of human being could only be derived from that of Nature's original being. Nature is a priori, not mind. Nature generated mind; mind is but a higher potency of Nature's subjectivity. So I'm more Schellingian than Hedeggerian. If Heidegger spoke of a "groundless ground," it's because he was a close reader of Schelling, who more than a century earlier had recorded his encounter with das unvordenkliche ("the unprethinkable"). I don't think this "groundless ground" should be identified with the Kantian transcendental ego or ding an sich. The groundless ground, the abyss or abgrund (a term Schelling borrowed from the esotericist Böhme), is the mother of both phenomena and noumena. Das Unvordenkliche is not born of the phenomenal-instrumental nature known to physicists and biologist. Nor is it born of the Ego, as in the Fichtean interpretation of Kant. Rather, like Spinoza before him, and Whitehead after him, Schelling distinguished between Natura naturans and Natura naturata. The former is Nature 'naturing,' the latter Nature 'natured.' The former is process, the latter is product. The former is alive, the latter is dead. Schelling's Nature is not the external/extended material world of law-abiding physical particles that is supposed to exist by mathematical physicists. His Nature is not a ground, but a creative abyss. To know such a world, you must not march off to explain and control it as though it were entirely made up of plainly visible bodies,–as modern techno-scientific materialism has–, you must humbly seek to understand and communicate with its mostly invisible sensitivities (i.e., with its soul).
Unlike Kant's mechanized Newtonian universe, Schelling perceived the earth and her creatures, the sun, planets, and other stars–yes as mathematically ordered–, but also as animate gods, as living beings creative of beautiful worlds. Where scientific materialism sees only dead nature (that is, nature natured), organic realism (what I refer to Schelling and Whitehead's philosophies of nature as) perceives nature naturing. What is unprethinkable about ourselves and about the world is this ongoing creative process–call it "cosmogenesis," call it "Creativity," call it "the One and All," or God, if you want. Whatever "It" is, it's before subject and object. It is before mind and matter. Schelling is usually lumped in with the idealists, but it was Heidegger himself (in his lectures on Schelling's 1809 book on human freedom) who first suggested that Schelling's Naturphilosophie in fact subverted the entire German Idealist project from the inside out. I'd argue he has more in common with the radical empiricist James than with any idealist, and especially with James' philosophical inheritor at Harvard, the mathematical adept turned cosmologist Alfred North Whitehead.
Speaking of which, I noticed you are interested in Einstein, ether, space-time, etc…. I wonder if you've run across Whitehead's alternative ether theory (the "ether of events" or "extensive continuum")? I've written about it HERE. I'd be curious to know your take on his organic cosmological scheme.
Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophy from Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead
I've just submitted my dissertation proposal for review. Click on the title below for the PDF.
Etheric Imagination in Process Philosophiy From Schelling and Steiner to Whitehead
I welcome suggestions, critiques, sources, and/or extensions.
Basically, I'm doing a comparative study of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, the esotericist Rudolf Steiner, and the mathematician and cosmologist Alfred North Whitehead. In particular, I want to interpret their respective "etheric" ontologies (Schelling's "world-soul/universal organizing principle," Steiner's "etheric formative forces," and Whitehead's "evental ether/Creativity") as typical of the process-relational imagination.
The plate above, a painting of the Philosopher's Tree, is from Splendor Solis, an alchemical treatise published by Solomon Trismosin in 1582.
The Difference Between Kant's and Schelling's Philosophies of Nature
A lecture I gave earlier this week in a class at CIIS on Spirit and Nature.
Reflections on Bruno Latour's "An Inquiry into Modes of Existence," Ch. 4: Learning to Make Room
I'm participating in a reading group with about 40 other scholars focusing on Bruno Latour's recently published book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2013). This week it is my turn to comment on Ch. 4, which is titled "Learning to Make Room." I'm going to cross-post my comments here, as well as on the blog we've set up for the reading group (aimegroup.wordpress.com). If you want to respond to anything I've said here, please do so on the AIME group blog so that all the comments will be assembled in the same place.
Introducing the Beings of Reproduction,
Instituting 'A Whole New Diplomacy'
by Matthew David Segall
In chapter 4 of his inquiry into modes of existence, Latour begins the difficult task of appropriately enunciating how it came to be that the Moderns, despite having conquered the whole world, still lack the room to deploy the values––legal, moral, fictional, political, economical, spiritual, psychological––that they so cherish. Even the values of physical science became impossible to localize and equip after the entire earth and sky were submerged in an abstract space-time filled by the mathematical motion of matter-energy. Where, it must be asked, is the Mind that measures, calculates, and understands the infinite system of the Universe standing? On whose authority was this Mind granted access to the Ideas at work in Nature? Latour's inquiry into the modes of existence cannot even begin until after the Cartesian Constitution leading us to repeat such poorly posed questions has been torn to shreds.
There is hope for the values of the Moderns, if only they are willing to give up all the bad habits and confused composites that come along with the "institution of matter" (118). Ecologizing Modernity will require instituting "a whole new diplomacy" (103) adequate to a pluriverse in which neither Nature nor the Mind can be said to exist. The alternative non-Naturalist, non-Idealist Constitution that Latour is trying to enunciate has summoned many modes of existence to the negotiating table. In chapter 4, Latour introduces us in particular to the beings of reproduction [REP]. He also attempts to disamalgamate the poorly formed composite causing a confusion of the beings of reproduction with the immutable mobiles of reference [REP ~ REF]. This confusion is the "double category mistake" through which "the notion of 'matter' emerges" (110). Poor Descartes gets blamed for more than his fair share of philosophical damage (we might at least admire his genius before we shame him for his mistakes), but Latour cannot avoid dating the emergence of the idea of matter to his (in)famous meditations. After Descartes, the Modern world "[begins] to believe that the thought of matter describes real things, whereas it is only the way the res cogitans–itself dreamed up–is going to start imagining matter" (110).
Imagine instead that the nascent, still scattered people of Gaia are waking up from Descartes' dream. Imagine that the flood of Materialism has receded, and that all the faux battles waged by "spiritualists" against "reductionists" have grown quiet for lack of interest. Imagine you are an Earthling once again, returned from outer space to re-inhabit the solid ground of common sense experience. The interlacing ecological complexity of our common sense world of earth and sky, of plants, animals, and persons, makes the mathematizable quantum and relativistic realms of science look like "child's play" in comparison (120). The world of common sense experience is more unfathomable, more mysterious, than the micro- and macroscopic worlds described by physicists, since, as Latour reminds his readers, the former "has been infinitely less explored than the other!" Latour wants to re-introduce Moderns––a people so obsessed with their theories of matter that they've entirely neglected the material practices that make these theories possible––to the beings of reproduction [REP] that, for several centuries now, have been so rudely silenced by the bizarre institution of matter. One of these beings, Gaia––no longer content to remain the unacknowledged background of human history––is now intruding to return the favor by rudely ignoring the Modern pretension to a risk free, double-click Science that might grant total control over a 3+1 dimensional world, as if this world were made of pure "knowability" (112, 121). Such a world would leave no room for life. Luckily, Gaia is no homogeneous substance or geometrical form, but a proliferating ecology of expressive, inventive, and active beings, each of whom, like us, is at risk from moment to moment of disappearing forever should they fail to be articulate, original, or insistent enough to subsist as themselves in an environs swarming with differences (99-101). Latour introduces us to the beings of reproduction [REP] so that the "matter" of materialism, "the most idealist of the products of the mind," can be de-idealized (106).
Even the so-called "inert" entities of the inorganic world forcefully insist and express themselves. The concept of "force" that has proven so irreplaceable to physicists in their study of microscopic particles and far away galaxies is, we should remember, a concept that emerges from and gains its meaning only by continual reference to experience, to our feelings of attraction or repulsion, of being forced, in one way or another, by the insistent presence of an other. As Schelling, speaking to the Newtonian scientist, wrote in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1803),
"you can in no way make intelligible what a force might be independent of you. For force as such makes itself known only to your feeling. Yet feeling alone gives you no objective concepts. At the same time you make objective use of those forces. For you explain the movement of celestial bodies–universal gravitation–by forces of attraction and maintain that in this…you have [a physical ground of explanation for] these phenomena" (transl. by Harris and Heath, CUP, 1988, p. 18).
In point of fact, experience can grant us no such physical principles, if by "physical" it is meant that which exists "outside" experience, in the so-called "external world" of mute matter in motion. All our scientific knowledge of distant quasars and black holes hits its mark, not because the Mind has correctly represented the formal essences of Nature, but because our organism (equipped with its world-wide network of geometrical notations, telescopes, satellites, computers, and well-trained peers) has succeeding in translating the lines of force at work outside itself into the feelings of life at work within itself. All our knowledge, no matter how abstract, must make its final appeal in the courtroom of experience, since the court of Reason, having disavowed the the facts of feeling involved in all its acts of knowing, has as a result been cut off from its only means of concrete relation to reality. If everything were submerged in abstract "space-time/matter-energy," science could never follow the threads of experience, could never arrive at the immanence of a truly de-idealized material (106).
It is not entirely clear at this point if Latour is willing to follow Schelling and Whitehead all the way to a full-blown panexperiential ontology. But what is obvious is that the beings of reproduction [REP], whether physical "lines of force" or biological "lineages," do not mutely persist like undead zombies: to keep on existing as material existents, they must loudly insist that their values matter. Else they risk extinction. There is no "blind necessity" maintaining the substance of these beings. They can never rest inertly in a simultaneous sameness, nor can they succeed at succession through mere inertial momentum. The beings of reproduction must continually re-produce themselves by passing into and through others, taking little leaps to cross the hiatuses punctuating this world at every twist and turn of its becoming. These tiny transcendences force beings to risk passing through each other in order to remain in existence as themselves: "To obtain being, otherness is required. Sameness is purchased, as it were, at the price of alterations" (110).
When Science forgets the beings of reproduction [REP] by confusing them with its own mode of existence [REF], the formal knowledge produced and employed by it begins to seem as though it dropped into the minds of scientists from heaven. Luckily, the careful practice of scientific abstraction can easily be shown to be a concrete job at every step (110). The material universe referenced [REF] by Modern Science is not made up of objective facts that might speak for themselves and so put an end to every human debate (119). Rather, scientific knowledge "is the labor of a whole chain of proof workers, from those whose hands are black with dirt to those whose hands are white with chalk" (110). Science is a local practice, after all. Its knowledge [REF] is relative to the subsistence [REP] of its networks. Scientists––including their "languages, bodies, ideas, and institutions" (102)––are beings of reproduction [REP] contingently composed and recomposed from moment to moment by the same lineages and lines of force they pretend to study as "matter" whenever it appears "outside" themselves. We need not fear the eternal silence of infinite space, nor the mute mindlessness of inert matter. No, we have never been Modern, we have never lived in a geometrical space, and "this whole matter of matter has to have remained just a simple mind game" (117). We can imagine another, more coherent world: a world that leaves us room not only to think, but to breathe, to live. If we grow sensitive again to the multitude of earthly existents within and around us–to the swarming differences articulating the face of Gaia–maybe we can annunciate an ecological alternative to Modernity before it is too late, before the "grave events" (122) already expected of the coming century ramify so severely that the adventure of civilization has its unacknowledged ground pulled out from beneath its feet. Perhaps Hegel was partially right: after several thousand years of self-negation, human history has reached its end. But it has ended only so the Moderns (or the people who come after them) might reawaken to the multi-billion year geostory they have been sleepwalking through.
So, can we follow Latour's diagnosis of the "sort of coherent madness" (115) motivating Modernity's mistaken amalgamations and bifurcations? Are we ready to give up the Mind of Science, with its universal Knowledge and its obedient Nature, in exchange for the far messier pluriversal practices of the well-equipped sciences? Are we willing to welcome the lively beings of reproduction back to the negotiating table, or must we continue to drown out their multiplex voices in a Flood of res extensa-cogitans (112)? Are we ready yet to grasp the modes of existence, not as different representations of the same underlying reality (that discovered and described by Science), but as uniquely enacted realities, each in their own right?
Related articles
- Schellingian Reflections on Latour's 2nd Gifford Lecture – "A Shift in Agency, With Apologies to Hume" (footnotes2plato.com)
- Bruno Latour's 1st Gifford Lecture – "Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm" (footnotes2plato.com)
- Latour's 4th Gifford – "The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe" (footnotes2plato.com)
- Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology (footnotes2plato.com)


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The next step in setting up our course is to edit the header block. The top block of every course is often referred to as the header block. If you click the Edit icon at the top of this block, you brought into the basic HTML editor from Moodle. Inside of this block, let's add a header to our course. To do this simply type in a message, such as Welcome to Coral Reef Ecology, hit Return. And now, if you have access to the Exercise Files, go ahead and open up the course Syllabus from the Chapter 2 Exercise Files and copy the objective for the course. You can do this by selecting the Objective and hitting Command+C or Ctrl+C on your keyboard.
Next, jump back into Moodle and hit Command+V or Ctrl+V to paste the description in. Let's go ahead and format the Welcome to Coral Reef Ecology by selecting it and clicking the third dropdown menu and telling it it's Heading 1. This will apply formatting to that block of text. We'll go ahead and hit Save Changes and now we have a nice welcome that shows up at the top of our course and then the description as to what a student is going to learn inside of the course. You can add anything you want into the top of this heading. You simply type in the information into the Web Editor.
We'll go into more detail in later movies, as to how to use the Web Editor. This same heading section is available in all of the other content blocks throughout the course. Simply look for the Edit Summary icon and you can edit the summary for that area. The next step in setting up our course is to post the course syllabi, and we'll do that in the next movie.
Access exercise files from a button right under the course name.
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subset: commoncrawl


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What do you mean yo-yoing isn't a sport?? If youтАЩd rather not be punched in the face, you'd better not say that kind of thing around Saki. At the tender age of 16, this young Asian Lady is already triple world champion in artistic yo-yoing and continues to astound the judges with mind-boggling tricks such as "The Supreme Koroshikon " or "The Ultimate AyakumiтАЭ also known as тАЬThe nose-breaking sequence".
At level 1: min 20 333 Clintz At level 2: min 22 283 Clintz At level 3: min 20 332 Clintz |


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Crafted in warm 14K Gold, this delicate satin-finish cross is etched with a polished candle symbolic of the loss of a loved one. Inscribed on the back of cross: "Until we meet again." Pendant is suspended on a 20" rope chain. Cross is 1" long and 11/16" wide.
Item ships in 2-3 days.


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Common English Bible (CEB) | New International Version (NIV) |
10 Then the devil, who had deceived them, was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet also were. There painful suffering will be inflicted upon them day and night, forever and always. | 10 And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. |
Copyright © 2011 Common English Bible (Common English Bible) | Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NIV) are from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica. All rights reserved worldwide. (New International Version Bible Online) |


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by Gerry Mak in New Photography on Wednesday 1 December 2010
Getting his start documenting the civil war in his home country, Serbian photographer Boogie, now based in Brooklyn, continues to document the grit, grime, and violence of cities around the world.
Share your favourite cultural finds with the Lost At E Minor community and become famous in the process. Well, kinda.
by Nicole Hughes
by Low Lai Chow
by Inigo del Castillo
Don't show this again - I already like Lost At E Minor


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(Updates second paragraph with three more arrests.)
Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Police arrested four protesters after a few hundred people gathered outside the U.S. Capitol building for an "Occupy Congress" demonstration today.
One man was arrested on a charge of assaulting a police officer and three were being processed on charges of crossing a police line, said U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman Kim Schneider.
The demonstration was timed to coincide with the House's return to Washington today from its holiday recess. The Senate reconvenes next week.
Protesters, affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement, carried signs with such slogans as "Don't Give Up This Ship" and "Face It, Liberals, the Dems Sold Us Out."
--Editors: Laurie Asseo, Steven Komarow
To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle Jamrisko in Washington at firstname.lastname@example.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jodi Schneider at email@example.com


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College graduates with bachelor's degrees are increasingly either unemployed or underemployed.
Many are opting for lower paying service industry jobs, jobs that previously would have required little or no education. There is a demand for workers in the fields of science, health care and education. These fields are somewhat limited as not everyone wants to or can complete the rigorous academic requirements of becoming an engineer, a scientist or a nurse.
According to a government data analysis, most future job openings will be in the lower skilled and lower paying areas of the economy. Many jobs such as home health aides or nurse's aides are very demanding with relatively low pay will be needed as the U.S. population ages.
Many students entering college as a freshman assumed that they were enhancing their job prospects by going to college and while that is still true, it is somewhat less true than years ago. New labor and management technologies have eliminated or reduced a large number of jobs over time.
These new realities do not seem to have made their way into the considerations that young people calculate upon applying to college. It may be necessary now for students to consider the amount of debt that they will accumulate against their projected ability to get a job and one that will allow them to reasonably pay off college loans.
As growing college loan indebtedness has just recently surpassed one trillion dollars, students with an uncertain college path may want to work for a time until they have arrived at a career path that seems reasonable to them.
Unfortunately, some academic disciplines may suffer as a result such as the Arts or other creative academic pursuits. I have known several managers that held degrees in the fine arts and were wonderful people managers. Their soft skills or people management abilities were strong and the presence of people like them in management would be missed.
Reach the writer at: email@example.com
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Why it's a winner: If you have a chip craving, these babies will satisfy your need to munch and crunch. Brown rice, quinoa, flaxseed, and stone ground yellow corn combine to add fiber to this snack, but what keeps you coming back for more is the light, crispy texture with the perfect hint of salt. Healthy highlights: 140 calories, 6 g fat, 2 g fiber, 80 mg sodium Try it: With our lighter guacamole recipe or crumble to make our Tortilla-Crusted Chicken recipe.
Published November 2011, Prevention


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Date is not valid!
Istrie, Blauw Istrië, Vrsar
Vrsta plaže: Sandy, pebble and rocky
Koversada beach is a well-known beach and a camping location that is visited by naturists from all parts of the world for years now. It is located at the entrance to the Lime canal, near Vrsar. The entire Koversada is a genuine little naturist town, linked to a little island reserved for tents. The Koversada beach is 5km long, with pebble, rocky, and sandy parts. One part of the beach is organized so that it has access for people with special needs.
The beach has been awarded a Blue Flag, an international certificate for high bathing water quality and environmental standards. The Koversada beach is ideal for families, singles, romantic couples, fun, sports and adventure. Those in search of recreate can enjoy pedal boats and countless other sports activities. On the Koversada beach you can find a few restaurants, shops and coffee bars. On the beach you can rent beach-chairs, beach umbrellas, as well as buy different water sports requisites.
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* prijzen op juni 2015 voor een minimum verblijf van 7 dagen


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Sesame Street | Grover and the Butterfly | PBS
Grover watches a butterfly in the forest. For more fun games and videos for your preschooler in a safe, child-friendly environment, visit us at www.sesamestreet.orgSesame Street is a production of... 01:47
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Mon, May 12, 14 at 11:13
Hi, I live in Georgia, Atlanta area. We have a small backyard, established lawn. I do not know the type of grass we have. We live on a golf course which slopes towards our house. The area of lawn in question comes in very good at the beginning of spring, and after the first couple of cuts it just starts To die. My husband fertilized the recommended amount for his spreader. He never takes off more than 1/3 of the height when cutting. We haven't done a soil test yet. |
Follow-Up Postings:
I think it might be related to the shade. In early spring, the trees have not filled out yet. Then as the spring and summer progress, that spot gets more and more shade. Stepping on it, mowing it down, etc then makes it more susceptible to not recovering in that particular spot. But that will depend on the grass type. Do you have more close-up pictures of the grass ? |
Bingo! As the summer continues and the shade gets worse, so does the Bermuda. I have a few areas like that too. Not even TifGrand survives. |
- Posted by dchall_san_antonio 8 San Antonio (My Page) on Mon, May 12, 14 at 14:31
Exactly what I was thinking. In that shade you might be able to grow fescue or St Augustine. Otherwise you're looking at a different kind of ground cover than grass. |
- Posted by lou_midlothian_tx z8 DFW, Tx (My Page) on Mon, May 12, 14 at 19:15
Looks like shade problem. Seeing that you live by the golf course, bermuda is often the grass they grow. I work for golf course turf maintenance and see that problem very often. St augustine is usually what they use under the trees for the houses but zoysia grass like Palisades, etc can be used in moderate shade condition. I've seen zoysia being grown there around the clubhouses,etc and it looks nice. |
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Our backyard is rather small, about 80' wide and 20' deep in the center 35' or so we plan to have patio for outdoor dining and entertaining, on one side about 30' we plan to have some plant. And on the other side about 15' x 20', right outside of the kitchen window, we plan to make it a small play area for our toddler. What would be a good idea and what kind of surface would be kid and wallet friendly and low maintenance? mulch, shredded rubber, artificial grass, grass...? thanks for your suggestions |
Follow-Up Postings:
- Posted by louisianagal z7bMS (My Page) on Sat, Feb 15, 14 at 12:18
I would probably put grass. Your toddler's needs and size will change quite rapidly. Here is just an example I googled and I bet you could find something like this used on ebay or at a yard sale. http://climbersforkids.net/little-tikes-hide-slide-climber-review/ I like this one because the kid can make a house underneath. Kids are happy even with a big cardboard box! A little play lawnmower or baby stroller, a basketball goal or just a rubber ball. You could still have a small raised sand container, as long as it has a lid to keep the cats out. Your toddler could shovel it around or hide little toys in the sand. Of course in warm weather there is also the little toddler pools and give him/her some plastic dishes and spoons. That is hours of fun! Don't forget the sunscreen! Grass would work for all of this. Have fun! |
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A Mother's Lament: Johnny's Gone for a Soldier
12:48 pm in Uncategorized by wendydavis
(I've taken a little poetic license with this story, as did Peter, Paul and Mary with their version of the original Irish song.)
Oh my dear Johnny, my dear son,
Of course your mind was made up by the time you told us this news. You're signing the National Guard enlistment papers when you and your family go back home after Christmas (oh, how can I possibly stand listening to this?). And then you'll be off to boot camp, then officer training school, if the recruiter you so foolishly trust is right in his bogus promises and assurances. All those military words that I can scarcely type, much less utter…they are that foreign to me, belonging to a language I never intended to learn.
Of course you wouldn't have wanted to hear the questions we asked ahead of time, the myths we tried to bust; nor would you want to hear our agonizingly expressed concerns for your very soul, my dear Johnny. Were you even able to let any of our considerations and warnings in? Was your wife, she who sold her flax and sold her wheel for you? She who believed that the Guard stays in the US? Can you really be that unaware of National Guard units having served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan? How many other illusions are you laboring under? Too many, too many, from what you report as gospel according to Corporal Recruiter.
When I asked you plaintively which person targeted by our 'wars' you might consider enemy enough to kill…you said nothing, even when I pressed it. When we spoke to you of wars of choice for Profit and Empire, you stayed silent; when we called the recruiter a liar for telling you that with your college degree, and once you were an officer, that you would be able to turn down assignments, did you hear that? Or had our voices taken on the wohn, wonh qualities of the adults in a Peanuts cartoon? When we spoke to you of the alarming increase in suicides among troops and veterans, and of rampant PTSD and moral trauma…did you deflect it somehow as inconsequential…or unlikely?


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Thread: Redirecting 401 errors
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Redirecting 401 errors
I am new to .htaccess, and I have been following the advice in the .htaccess guides here. Unfortunately I have been unable to get this particular error page redirect to work.
I have a directory that is password protected via a local .htaccess file. I want to have my own 401 error page appear when a password is incorrect. I have tried putting "ErrorDocument 401 <myURL>/error_401.html" in my top-level .htaccess file but it does not work, instead I still get the default Authorization Required page. This happens whether I use a virtual or a full URL to my error page. My other error redirect commands (404 etc) work correctly.
I could be wrong, but it appears that the 401 redirect is failing because I am calling the error page from within the protected directory and the error page itself is being treated as protected despite it being physically elsewhere. No password, no error page.
I am obviously missing something simple here, so can someone please tell me how to get this to work?
Thank you.
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One more try...
Okay, I will have one more try at this in the hope that someone can see where I am going wrong. It isn't a show-stopper, but it is untidy and therefore annoying!
I want to redirect password failure errors (401) to my own error page, but my own page never appears, I just get the standard Authentication Required page. My other error pages work (404 etc) but not 401.
This is my basic set-up:
|_ error
| |______ error_401.html
| |______ error_404.html (etc)
|_ members
| |______ (private pages .html)
| |______ .htaccess (password authentication)
|_ .htaccess (error page redirect commands for 401, 404 etc. using full URL)
|_ (other pages .html)
My error redirect lines are in the form
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.mywebsite.com/error/error_401.html
Incidentally I have tried using /www/m/mywebsite/htdocs/error/... addresses but then it doesn't find any of my error pages.
So, I call up a page in the members directory and am asked for my password. I fail to enter it and should get my own error_401.html page. Instead, I get the standard Authentication Required page. This seems to work for other people, so what am I doing wrong?
Any ideas anyone?
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Thanks anyway, I got the answer on another forum...
"ErrorDocument 401 /error/error_401.html" is the one that works.