Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Commentary - Matthew Segall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commentary - Matthew Segall. Show all posts

Friday, November 17, 2023

Matt Segall: Process Philosophical Perspectives on Biology








...TO VIEW VIDEO PLEASE SUBMIT A DONATION OF SOME AMOUNT.
THIS WILL PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE 2023 YEAR OF ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE
WHICH IS A LOT AND WELL WORTH THE EXPENDITURE...


RR: Cobb & Friends Gathering:
Matt Segall and Spyridon Koutroufinis
 Cobb Institute  |  5:54 Intro  / 2:01:50 Discussion w/ Q&A


To View Video - Sign up at Cobb Institute: Here is the Video Link -


Request: To those who will watch this video please help in recording & transcribing 
it then forwarding a link to me in the comment section that it may be published along
with all Q&A discussion and Chat Notes. Many Thanks. - re slater




Friday, June 23, 2023

Process Philosophy and the Science of Fungi - Segall & Sheldrake


*Image credit: Aimee Cornwell (Instagram: @peggyfarmandforage)*


Towards a Mycological Metaphysics

by Matthew David Segall

The mycologist Merlin Sheldrake recently published Entangled Life (2020). The book revels in the power of fungi to “make us question our categories,” thereby “[changing] the way we think and imagine” (14, 214). A few pages in, Merlin defines mycelium as a process, rather than a thing (6). I am inclined to agree. As a process philosopher, I could not help but ally myself with his project. He goes even further later in the book, insisting that all life-forms are relational processes inhabiting a natural world best understood as “an event that never stops” (53). He encourages us to wonder how our scientific image of nature would be transformed by the adoption of mycelial rather than mechanical metaphors. What would it mean to take seriously the many examples of “basal cognition” and “problem-solving behavior” evident in brainless fungi (15)? If even microscopic hyphae are capable of such feats as “decision,” “improvisation,” and “interpretation” (44), then perhaps conscious agency, or something akin to it, is not the exclusive property of human heads. In that case, “culturally treasured notions of identity, autonomy, and independence” would need to be revised (18). Perhaps fungi can inspire more humility in big-headed humanity?

Perhaps. A powerful word, especially for philosophers seeking to gain permission to peek beneath the measurable facts into the plenum of possibilities from out of which such facts precipitate. Despite the feelings of embarrassment that years of disciplinary training had instilled in him, Merlin, too, found it necessary to embrace the power of speculative imagination in order to make sense of what fungi were teaching him. 

“Thousands of my samples passed through expensive machines that whisked, irradiated, and blasted the contents of the tubes into strings of numbers. I spent whole months staring into a microscope, immersed in rootscapes filled with winding hyphae frozen in ambiguous acts of intercourse with plant cells. Still, the fungi I could see were dead, embalmed, and rendered in false colors. I felt like a clumsy sleuth. While I crouched for weeks scraping mud into small tubes, toucans croaked, howler monkeys roared, lianas tangled, and anteaters licked. Microbial lives, especially those buried in soil, were not accessible like the bristling charismatic aboveground world of the large. Really, to make my findings vivid, to allow them to build and contribute to a general understanding, imagination was required. There was no way around it” (19).

Most of us think of mushrooms when we hear the word “fungi”—but they are just the surface-dwelling fruiting bodies of much larger underground networks.  The task of the metaphysician, who is compelled to inquire into the hidden underbelly of reality, is not unlike that of the mycologist, since “[mycelial] relationships are conducted out of sight” (138). Given this similarity, Merlin and I are hoping that an “academic symbiosis” (215) will be possible between philosophy and mycology. This sort of transdisciplinary collaboration may help stitch the modern image of nature back together again. 

While reading Merlin’s book, the overlaps with Alfred North Whitehead’s “organic realism” were impossible to miss. Whitehead is best known as a mathematician and collaborator with Bertrand Russell on the Principia Mathematica. Lesser known is his later work in natural philosophy and metaphysical cosmology. His entrance into philosophy took the form of a critique of the modern “bifurcation of nature,” a thought-habit which insists that a strict separation be maintained between the objective causal factors thought to be “in nature” and the subjective feelings and perceptions imagined to be “in the mind.” On the one hand, there’s the conjectured system of molecules and electromagnetic radiation formulated by physicists, and on the other, the warmth and color of a sunrise celebrated by nature poets. Mocking the incoherence of this bifurcated image of nature, Whitehead writes: 

“Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves; the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly” (SMW, 56). 

Whitehead would go on to articulate a thoroughly unbifurcated vision of the cosmos as an evolving ecology of organisms. He understood processes of emergent evolution as unfolding at all scales in nature, such that something like Lynn Margulis’ endosymbiosis transpires not just in the biological realm as more complex cells arise by incorporating formerly free-living organisms, but also in the physical domain, as early in cosmic history independent protons, neutrons, and electrons forged enduring associations to bring forth the first hydrogen and helium atoms. This vision is not meant to conflict with natural science, but to support and enrich it: he criticized the classical ontology of inert particles governed by arbitrarily imposed mechanical laws as entirely unsuited to the new findings of relativity and quantum theories. In addition to constructing a new metaphysical background for these early 20th century revolutions in the scientific understanding of space, time, matter, and energy, Whitehead also sought to overcome what philosophers nowadays refer to as “the hard problem of consciousness”: in short, how could mind ever arise out of matter if the latter is defined a priori as purely extended and thus entirely devoid of interiority? This is not just a hard problem. According to a growing cadre of panpsychist philosophers, it is impossible. It cannot be solved as stated. It can only be dissolved by rethinking the materialist premises upon which it is based. Despite scientific anxieties about anthropomorphism, Whitehead urged us to come to see our capacity as knowers to be part of the universe we are trying to know. While some physicists lean on randomness in lieu of explanation by making anti-empirical postulates about an infinite supply of other universes without life or mind, the only universe we actually know about is quite obviously anthropogenetic. After all, here we are. Instead of insisting that mind and life are freak accidents in an otherwise well-behaved mechanical world, perhaps (there’s that word again) the emergence of mind and life reveal something about the nascent potentials of matter that classical physics missed? 

Maybe the real danger to proper scientific understanding is not anthropomorphism, but mechanomorphism. Mechanism implies a mechanic, an outside designer; in contrast, Whitehead’s organic cosmos is understood to be self-organizing. Laws of physics become more like widespread habits that evolve with the organisms composing the cosmos, rather than being imposed upon them from beyond, as deistic early modern scientists supposed. While Whitehead restricts conscious experience to highly complex organisms with nervous systems, he insists that the vast majority of experience comes in the form of non-conscious feeling and emotion. It is here that many skeptics like to throw rocks at Whitehead and other panpsychists: “So you’re saying stones can think?!” No, but contemporary physics tells us that rocks are in fact composed of complex societies of vibrating molecules. In Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, the vibratory frequencies of molecules, and of atoms composing molecules, express forms of aesthetic harmonization with attendant feelings of experiential satisfaction. Particles are no longer conceived of as point-like geometric abstractions, but vector-feelings whose local subsistence depends upon the reiteration of their vibratory patterns. Thus, what appear as wave-lengths and vibrations to infrared spectrometers, for the molecular occasions in question are felt as “pulses of emotion” (PR, 163; see also my Physics of the World-Soul [2021], 76). Some mineral societies vibrate into highly ordered crystals, while others are more haphazard. 

Sober-minded scientists may balk at such speculative renderings of physical processes. Merlin quotes Whitehead’s statement to Russell, which speaks to his scientifically unorthodox interpretation of the facts of nature:  “You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day. I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep” (112). Whitehead philosophizes at dawn, while dreams still halo consciousness and the separative outlines of objects remain blurred. In contrast, the speculatively-averse Russell preferred the clarity and distinction afforded by shadowless light. 

Mycological metaphors run even deeper into Whitehead’s metaphysics. “Mycelium is a living, growing, opportunistic investigation—speculation in bodily form,” in Merlin’s words (51). Their networks form “streams of embodiment” (55) that act as “ecological connective tissue” stitching the rest of the living world into relation (46). Do these networks form a single organism, or a plurality? A plurisingularity? According to Merlin,  “a hyphal tip would be the closest one could come to defining the unit of a mycelial swarm” (47). Relating the growth of hyphae to our human experience of becoming, Merlin writes:

“The growing tip is the present moment—your lived experience of now—which gnaws into the future as it advances. The history of your life is the rest of the hypha, the…lines that you’ve left in a tangled trail behind you. A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history” (53).

The equivalent of hyphal tips in Whitehead’s process-relational ontology are called “actual occasions.” Actual occasions are buds of experience that grow out of their relations to the past, achieve some novel aesthetic value in the subjective immediacy of the present, and perish into objective immortality so as to influence the future, contributing whatever value they’ve garnered to the ongoing creative advance of nature. Occasions tend to organize themselves into “societies”: swarm-like historical routes that sustain and amplify an enduring collective form by faithfully reiterating some shared pattern of potentiality.  

Merlin and I are beginning work on a longer paper to draw out the underground connections between process philosophy and the science of fungi. Our suspicion is that the findings of mycology serve as a special example of the more general categories articulated in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. More to come! 



* * * * * * *


Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake

The Man Who Turned the World on to the Genius of Fungi

A vast fungal web braids together life on Earth.
Merlin Sheldrake wants to help us see it.

by Jennifer Kahn
Published June 8, 2023
Updated June 16, 2023


One evening last winter, Merlin Sheldrake, the mycologist and author of the best-selling book “Entangled Life,” was headlining an event in London’s Soho. The night was billed as a “salon,” and the crowd, which included the novelist Edward St. Aubyn, was elegant and arty, with lots of leggy women in black tights and men in perfectly draped camel’s-hair coats. “Entangled Life” is a scientific study of all things fungal that reads like a fairy tale, and since the book’s publication in 2020, Sheldrake has become a coveted speaker.

At talks like these, Sheldrake is sometimes asked to answer a question he poses in the first chapter of his book: What is it like to be a fungus? The answer, at least according to Sheldrake, is at once alien and wondrous. “If you had no head, no heart, no center of operations,” he began. “If you could taste with your whole body. If you could take a fragment of your toe or your hair and it would grow into a new you — and hundreds of these new yous could fuse together into some impossibly large togetherness. And when you wanted to get around, you would produce spores, this little condensed part of you that could travel in the air.” There were nods. In the audience, the woman next to me gave a long, affirming hum.

“Entangled Life” has turned Sheldrake, who is 35, into a kind of human ambassador for the fungal kingdom: the face of fungi. He has flown to the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania to shoot an IMAX movie, narrated by Björk, that is screening this summer. Shortly after his London talk, he was scheduled to leave for Tierra del Fuego, where he would join a group sampling fungi on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), a conservation-and-advocacy organization founded by the ecologist Colin Averill and the biologist Toby Kiers. Sheldrake described the trip as part of the group’s effort to map the global diversity of mycorrhizae, which help plants and trees survive, and to establish protections for fungi. (In the United States, just two fungi, both lichens, are protected under the Endangered Species Act.)

A pied bleu (Lepista personata), also known as the field blewit.
Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times


Like many small organisms, fungi are often overlooked, but their planetary significance is outsize. Plants managed to leave water and grow on land only because of their collaboration with fungi, which acted as their root systems for millions of years. Even today, roughly 90 percent of plants and nearly all the world’s trees depend on fungi, which supply crucial minerals by breaking down rock and other substances. They can also be a scourge, eradicating forests — Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight are fungi — and killing humans. (Romans used to pray to Robigus, the god of mildew, to guard their crops against plagues.) At times, they even seem to think. When Japanese researchers released slime molds into mazes modeled on Tokyo’s streets, the molds found the most efficient route between the city’s urban hubs in a day, instinctively recreating a set of paths almost identical to the existing rail network. When put in a miniature floor map of Ikea, they quickly found the shortest route to the exit.

“Entangled Life” is full of these sorts of details, but it’s also deeply philosophical: a living argument for interdependence. Without fungi, matter wouldn’t decay; the planet would be buried under layers of dead and unrotted trees and vegetation. If we had a fungi-specific X-ray vision, we would see, Sheldrake writes, “sprawling interlaced webs” strung along coral reefs in the ocean and twining intimately within “plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, rubbish dumps, carpets, floorboards, old books in libraries, specks of house dust and in canvases of old master paintings hanging in museums.”

The idea of fungi as metaphor for life has lately entered the zeitgeist, seeded in part by the forest scientist Suzanne Simard, who discovered that trees are connected through a mycelial network, the “Wood-Wide Web.” There was also the surprise hit 2019 documentary “Fantastic Fungi,” an effusive tribute that felt a bit like being cornered at a party by the stoned guy who’s really, really into mushrooms. But where “Fantastic Fungi” fell decidedly into the old-school, ’shroom-head camp, Sheldrake’s book is more embracing and more optimistic. Sheldrake describes mycelium as “ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.” At a time when the planet seems to be falling apart — or, rather, is being actively dismembered — the idea that we are bound together by an infinite number of invisible threads is so beautiful it almost makes your teeth ache.

Sheldrake is adept at channeling this longing for connection. After reading “Entangled Life” in lockdown, the couture designer Iris Van Herpen was moved to create a collection inspired by fungi, featuring a dress pleated like a chanterelle and bodices made of snaking silk tendrils modeled on hyphae, the thin, mobile strands that fungi use to explore the world. Hermès, Adidas and Lululemon have all embraced animal-free “mycelial leather,” and designers have started selling biodegradable furniture made from the stuff. The HBO series “The Last of Us,” about a cordyceps fungus that turns humans into zombies (based on a real species that hijacks the brains and bodies of ants), drew around 32 million viewers per episode. Retail stores have followed the trend, too. This spring brought an explosion of toadstool-print clothes and décor — shirts, wallpaper, throw pillows, dinner plates — plus mushroom-shaped table lamps, poufs and bedside tables.

While many cultures and Indigenous groups have a long history with mushrooms — a SPUN video begins with a Mapuche elder in Chile singing to them — Sheldrake sees the current fungal moment as a product of converging trends. Along with the ecological crisis, there’s a renewed focus on psychedelics as a way to treat depression and PTSD, plus a surge of interest in our gut microbiome (which is mostly bacteria, not fungi, but falls into the same basket of things too small to see that live in and on us and turn out to be really important). In other words, it’s a belated and largely pragmatic awakening: fungi as medicine and material.

Sheldrake’s own quest is both dreamier and more ambitious — to make us see the world, and our place in it, differently. There’s a yearning that runs through “Entangled Life,” a desire to merge with these alien lives that explore the world with millions of tendrils, each of which functions, simultaneously, as an independent brain, mouth and sensory organ. We imagine ourselves to be individuals, Sheldrake observes, when we are in fact communities, our bodies so thoroughly inhabited by, and dependent on, microbes that the very concept of individuality begins to seem bizarre. Why do we think of a “self” when it’s more accurate to identify ourselves as a walking ecosystem?


An ambassador for the fungal kingdom, Sheldrake starred in an IMAX movie, consulted on a fashion show for Stella McCartney and is working on legal protections for fungi. Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times


Sheldrake often seems to have stepped out of a particular British template: the erudite, slightly eccentric naturalist of unusual literary skill. When I visited, in late February, he had recently moved from London to the English countryside, where he lives with his wife, the poet Erin Robinsong, in an old Methodist chapel. (His brother, Cosmo, a musician, lives a few miles away, with his wife, Flora Wallace, a ceramist and artist, also in an old Methodist chapel.) At the time, the building was in the process of being restored — new plaster, fresh paint — and the only access was via a narrow dirt path that led to a steeply raked backyard where Sheldrake had just planted a dozen kinds of fruit trees. He was also in the process of building a small fermentation lab to make various ciders, as well as Sheldrake & Sheldrake hot sauce, a popular side business that he and his brother started during lockdown.

Merlin and Cosmo are both in their 30s, with dark curly hair and similarly rangy builds, though Merlin’s face is more delicate, as though a distant ancestor might have been part elf or dryad. Each has a perpetual restless energy: cerebral and slightly awkward in Merlin’s case; gregarious and extroverted in Cosmo’s. They were raised without television or video games, and they remain unusually close; their worlds, like those of fungi, often interweave. Merlin, who plays piano and accordion, regularly performs with Cosmo; and Cosmo, who is interested in natural science, occasionally accompanies Merlin on research expeditions. When Stella McCartney staged a fungal-themed runway show in Paris in 2021, she enlisted Merlin as a consultant and hired Cosmo to create the soundtrack, which used a custom apparatus that turned the electrical signals generated within mycelium into notes. (Cosmo also recently made an album that incorporated the songs of endangered birds, and in April released another constructed around archival recordings of undersea creatures.)

Merlin and Cosmo grew up in London, in a five-story brick house on the edge of Hampstead Heath. The neighborhood is a wealthy one, with plaques to famous past residents like George Orwell and Sigmund Freud, and the house, when I visited, had a time-capsule feel, as if you’d taken the set from a Wes Anderson movie, doubled the amount of clutter and then let it molder gently for several decades. There are animal skulls on the mantel, old Persian rugs on wall-to-wall carpeting, red velvet sofas and vast shelves of books, plus alembics, dried pomegranates, ostrich eggs and a mobile Merlin made as a boy from a forked branch hung with amanita mushroom carvings, eggshells and lotus pods.



The kitchen of the London house where Merlin Sheldrake grew up. He and his brother were raised without television or video games. Their mother and father are both unconventional and see the world as deeply connected in mysterious ways.
Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times

Both of his parents are unconventional and see the world as deeply connected in mysterious ways. Merlin’s mother, Jill Purce, a skilled singer, has long embraced the power of chant as a way to heal emotional and physical wounds, and still leads workshops that incorporate both shamanistic and Mongolian overtone chanting. (During my visit, she noted that Merlin’s astrological reading at birth indicated that one of his strengths would be “revealing that which is underground.”) His father, Rupert, is more reserved, but easily delighted. He studied biology at Cambridge and the philosophy and history of science at Harvard and later worked in agricultural development but eventually became consumed by the idea that memories could be inherited and that intentions — planning to call a particular friend, say — could be transmitted telepathically, a phenomenon he attributed to “morphic fields.” These fields, he believed, accounted for both the prickling awareness of being stared at by another person and the uncanny ability of dogs to know when their owners are returning home. (He wrote books on the subject, including “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home” and “The Sense of Being Stared At.”)

When Merlin was a child, he and his father spent hours roaming the heath in all weathers, looking at plants and tracking each other through the forest. Merlin describes his father as incessantly curious: “He would always be pointing stuff out, like: ‘Boys, look at this! Do you know what this is? What do you think that does?’ Or we’d be staying with a friend, and he’d say: ‘Remember we planted this willow cutting when you were 3? Isn’t it amazing that willows can regenerate like that? It’s like taking one of your fingers and growing a new you from it.’”

Back home, they would do experiments in a lab that his father set up in a pocket kitchen on the second floor. One year, they decided to test the hypothesis that dog owners look like their dogs by going to the Crufts dog show (and later to the Luton rabbit show, Merlin recalled, to see if the same was true for them). Rupert also regularly recruited Merlin and Cosmo for his own experiments in telepathy. “We were the first guinea pigs,” Merlin said. “He would say: ‘Boys, I’ve got another experiment. Do you mind? Can we try this out? Please?’”

Merlin absorbed his father’s interest in the natural world and his sense of wonder. In “Entangled Life,” he fondly describes the way his father used to carry him “from flower to flower, like a bee,” though when we spoke, he described the experience less romantically: “ ‘Look! Look at the smell! Stick your face in the flower! Isn’t that nice? Here’s another one. And another one!’”

During the summer, the family would relocate to an island in British Columbia that was home to an Esalen-like retreat center, where the adults made music and art and discussed expanded consciousness. The children enjoyed a semi-feral existence, scavenging on the beach or investigating the nearby forest. As a teenager, Merlin began spending time with one of the island’s regulars, a self-taught “fungal evangelist” named Paul Stamets, who encouraged his interest in symbiosis: the way fungi, plants and other creatures could come together cooperatively. Not long after that, he read a book by Karl von Frisch, a biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for decoding the waggle dance in honeybees, called “Animal Architecture.” Among other things, von Frisch described how potter wasps make juglike nests that they stock with food, how another wasp species makes paper nests by chewing up wood and thinly layering the pulp and how humans may have learned these techniques from watching the insects.


The family at home in London, clockwise from top left:
Cosmo, Rupert and Merlin Sheldrake and Jill Purce.
Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times


Sheldrake found these ideas electrifying. When he left for Cambridge, at 18, he decided to study biology (he also considered classics) and went on to complete a Ph.D. For his dissertation, he spent several seasons at a research station in Panama studying Voyria, also known as ghostplants: tiny flowers that live off nutrients from underground fungal networks. Sheldrake loved studying fungi in the wild. In “Entangled Life,” he described spending hours snuffling in the dirt while trying to follow a single hairlike root to the point where it merged with subterranean mycelium: the millions of fungal strands that weave through the tropical soil, trading nutrients and, more mysteriously, information with the plants and trees above them. Unlike lab work, in which a researcher peers at an organism isolated in a sterile flask, field work felt messy and vital: “Like the flask is the world! And you’re inside it.”

Shortly before my visit, Sheldrake flew to California for a conference on the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead was what’s known as a process relational philosopher: He believed that reality is more about interactions than objects. He also believed that everything in the universe — people, cats, planets, atoms, electrons — can “experience” existence. “I have a lot of time for Whitehead’s views,” Sheldrake told me later. “He saw the whole universe as an organism, with organisms living within organisms living within organisms.” He recently began collaborating with the Whiteheadian philosopher Matt Segall to study “ways fungi might help us to think through different philosophical possibilities.”

In this spirit, Sheldrake also started working with the field researcher Giuliana Furci and César Rodriguez Garavito, a law professor at New York University, to create legal protections for fungi, part of a spate of animal rights and environmental-protection lawsuits that seek to give courtroom representation to living things that don’t happen to be human. Other projects are more whimsical but similarly mind-bending. After “Entangled Life” was published, he seeded a copy of the paperback with oyster mushroom spores, then filmed a time-lapse of the book’s pages being consumed until it became a swollen brick of white mycelium, sprouting mushrooms around the edges of the cover, which remained intact. Then he ate the mushrooms, the joke being that he was eating his words.


The book Sheldrake seeded with oyster-mushroom spores.
Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times


Though the video was essentially promotional — Sheldrake’s publisher had asked him to post something on social media — its ouroboros-ness (creation, decay, consumption) made it feel more like a fever dream or an ayahuasca vision. This wasn’t incidental. Sheldrake first experimented with psychedelics when he was 16, when magic mushrooms were briefly legalized in Britain. Being in an altered state started out as a curiosity — a group of friends trying psilocybin — but over time Sheldrake came to see these trips as essential because of the way they “defamiliarized the familiar.” He compared them to the classic psychedelic experience of “laughing at light switches”: seeing the hilarity and strangeness in how wiggling a tiny nub in the wall makes the world light or dark. You might be inclined to dismiss such moments as giggling stoner insights, but Sheldrake sees them as genuinely profound: a way to lose our jaded view of the world and be “startled into curiosity.”

Walking around Hampstead Heath with Sheldrake one morning, I mentioned a book by Emily Monosson titled “Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic,” coming out in July, of which I received an early copy. The book is like a shadow version of “Entangled Life”: a comprehensive look at the dark side of fungi and their ubiquity, including various fungal diseases that kill humans (Candida auris, which thrives in hospitals) and wipe out crops (the rice blast Magnaporthe oryzae, which destroys enough rice each year to feed around 60 million people). All of which are apparently on the rise because of globalization and climate change.

It was blisteringly cold, and the heath’s paths were full of people bundled up in coats walking dogs that were also bundled up in coats. Why, I wondered, had he chosen to present fungi as fascinating and near miraculous and leave out many of the ways they can destroy? The answer he gave — that the fungal kingdom is vast, and harmful species few — was true but also felt incomplete. Over several days of talking with Sheldrake, I was struck by how carefully he seemed to choose his words. This was partly a matter of intellect; Sheldrake is a rigorous and nuanced thinker. But it also seemed as though he was mentally reviewing his remarks, the better to anticipate how they would be received.

That may well have been the case. When Merlin was a boy, he remembers, his father got furious, sometimes vitriolic letters from scientists upset both by his parapsychology claims and by his public critique of conventional science. (He went on to write a book about the latter, titled “The Science Delusion.”) “It was something we were very aware of growing up,” Merlin told me. “That he had these enemies.” When I asked how that had affected him, he paused. “I’m sure in loads of ways,” he began, then stopped. “It’s so baked into who I am that I probably couldn’t name them all.”

Rupert was largely unaffected by the letters; he would cheerfully engage with even his most vocal critics. But when Merlin was in college, his father was stabbed and seriously injured while speaking at a conference on consciousness in Santa Fe, N.M. Though the attacker wasn’t a scientist and was clearly mentally ill — he insisted that Rupert was controlling his mind — Merlin described the assault as feeling like a culmination of all that institutional anger.

His father’s experience, he said, made him acutely aware of circumstances in which people “might become aggravated by certain types of thought or ideas that seem transgressive or beyond the pale.” When it came to his own work, he observed: “There are ways of framing things that are more or less confrontational. I tend to be less confrontational.”


Enoki (Flammulina filiformis), also known as golden needle mushrooms.
Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times


While doing his Ph.D., Sheldrake spent a year studying the history and philosophy of science, essentially taking an anthropological look at his own field. During one of our talks, he noted that Galileo revolutionized science in part by arguing that scientific experiments should focus on things that could be observed and measured, consistently and objectively — what he called reality’s “primary quantities.” Things like tastes or sensations, which were subjective and therefore hard to study empirically, were “secondary.” In the centuries since then, Sheldrake argues, science has become so focused on primary qualities that it has lost touch with all the squishy but profoundly vital things like emotion, friendship and consciousness that were, as he put it, “bracketed off.” This segregation, Sheldrake says, limits our ability to understand the world in all its complexity and may have exacerbated our current planetary catastrophe.

After finishing his Ph.D. in 2016, Sheldrake worked as an independent biologist and was until recently unaffiliated with a university. But he continued to collaborate with scientists and recently became a research associate at Vrije University in the Netherlands, where he works with Toby Kiers and a team at the Amolf Institute, who are using complex equipment to study how mycorrhizal networks coordinate their activity. Sheldrake’s path reflects a deeper division in his own work between the world of scientific respectability and his parents’ more mystical inclinations. Even now, Sheldrake told me, he will discuss experiments with his father, whom he describes as “a very holistic scientist,” one whose approach to the natural world “never took the magic out of things.” And while “Entangled Life” is rigorously researched, it also seems to strain against conventional scientific practice, with its focus on the objective and quantifiable over the dreamy and imaginative.

That day, as we finished our walk on the heath and took a small side trail back to the house, we passed a rotting log with a few desiccated, fan-shaped mushrooms next to some hard black knobs that looked vaguely fungal. Breaking off a piece of the mushroom, Sheldrake pointed out its pores and scaly top, then tentatively identified it as dryad saddle. The lumps, he added, were likely Daldinia concentrica, or coal fungus, which grows on ash tree logs, where it acts as a home for small insects and is also eaten by the caterpillar of the concealer moth.

While neither species was rare, the sighting still felt unexpectedly magical. Long after I flew home, that feeling lingered. Occasionally I caught myself daydreaming about a world in which fungi, not humans, had evolved to be the dominant species. What would such a world be like, so full of shared senses and experiences? Would a fungus look down on the disturbing isolation of mammalian life, where perceptions and thoughts were limited to a single small body and brain? It was a dizzying idea but also enticing. And when the daydream would fade, returning me to my solitary, disconnected body, I would sometimes find myself thinking: Wait. Please stay. Can I join you?


A king oyster (Pleurotus eryngii), also known as a king trumpet mushroom.
Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times

----

Jennifer Kahn is a contributing writer for the magazine and the narrative-program lead at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Alexander Coggin is an American maker of photographs, films and theater. He is based in London, Berlin and Michigan.

A correction was made on June 16, 2023:

An earlier version of this article misstated Merlin Sheldrake’s age. He is 35, not 36.


Friday, April 7, 2023

Matthew Segall - Introduction to Process Philosophy

 Introduction to Process Philosophy

Below is a lecture recorded for the online course PARP 6060 02 – Introduction to Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at CIIS.edu.

I first discuss the meaning of philosophy from a Whiteheadian perspective, then run through a brief history of philosophy as relevant to process thought (Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Kant and his immediate successors), and finish by offering a few key perspectives from Whitehead’s cosmological scheme.

Many streams of thought flow into and give shape to PCC’s perspective on the Universe and our human place within it. One of these streams is the process-relational tradition. This tradition is most often associated with the 20th century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), but many of Whitehead’s core insights can be traced back to the beginnings of Western philosophy in ancient Greece, and were carried forward and brilliantly developed by the German Idealists in the early 19th century. 

I hope my lecture helped give you some sense for the philosophical lineage that Whitehead drew upon and entered into dialogue with when he articulated his post-relativistic, post-quantum cosmological scheme in the 1920s and 30s. I have a feeling you agree, after reading the chapters I assigned from his book Modes of Thought (1938), that Whitehead is not an easy thinker to understand. But as someone who has been studying his work for almost a decade now, I can assure you it is well worth the effort to get to know the intimacies of his metaphysical scheme. Almost always it takes multiple readings to work out what he’s on about. All scientists employ instruments to aid them in their study. Philosophy’s instrument of inquiry, according to Whitehead, is language itself. Just like telescopes and microscopes, it takes a bit of practice to learn how to see with them. I encourage you to take Whitehead’s experiments in language seriously, even if they at first seem confusing. 

Whitehead boldly re-affirmed the grand tradition of speculative cosmology at a time when most academic philosophers were retreating from metaphysics into reductionistic materialism and logical positivism. Whitehead summed up the situation of his contemporaries: “…the science of nature stands opposed to the presuppositions of humanism. Where some conciliation is attempted, it often assumes some sort of mysticism. But in general there is no conciliation” (MoT 136). Modern science tells us we are matter in motion, while modern humanism insists we are free agents enjoying profound emotions. While the positivists busied themselves analyzing linguistic puzzles, pretending not to be metaphysical by ignoring the mind/matter dualism implicit in all their reasonings, Whitehead sought insight into creative depths as yet unspoken. Logical positivism attempted to reduce philosophy to the safety of settled science; Whitehead sought instead to engage philosophy as a poetic adventure in world-making. 

“In my view the creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done” (Aims of Education 164).

Whitehead’s cosmological vision is bold, but he may also deserve the title of humblest philosopher in history. “Philosophy begins in wonder,” he tells us. “And, at the end, when philosophy has done its best, the wonder remains” (MoT 168). “How shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things,” he tells us elsewhere. “In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly” (PR xiv). For Whitehead, philosophy’s aim is to purify emotion by eliciting some increase of understanding, to correct the initial excess of subjectivity in our consciousness so as to grant us a more cosmic perspective on reality. “Purifying” emotion doesn’t mean eliminating it by replacing it with logic; even knowledge, for Whitehead, is a complex form of feeling. The goal of “knowing” is not to explain the All once and for all (impossible in the open-ended, creative cosmos Whitehead imagines), but to elucidate our experience so as to bring more of the Great Mystery’s beauty into our awareness. 

Philosophy is akin to imaginative art, Whitehead tells us. It is the endeavor to creatively reframe naive experience so as to intensify our enjoyment of the meaning and potential of our existence. None of this is to say that Whitehead ignores the importance of science: “I assume as an axiom that science is not a fairy tale” (The Concept of Nature 40). Whitehead turned to philosophical cosmology late in his life (after a illustrious 30 year career as a Royal Society elected mathematician) precisely in order to save 20th century natural science from incoherence. He wanted to provide physics with a new and more adequate metaphysical foundation after quantum and relativity theories spelled the end of the Newtonian paradigm.

“In the present-day reconstruction of physics fragments of the Newtonian concepts are stubbornly retained. The result is to reduce modern physics to a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible Universe. This chant has the exact merits of the old magic ceremonies which flourished in ancient Mesopotamia and later in Europe. One of the earliest fragments of writing which has survived is a report from a Babylonian astrologer to the King, stating the favorable days to turn cattle into the fields, as deduced by his observations of the stars. This mystic relation of observation, theory, and practice, is exactly the present position of science in modern life, according to the prevalent scientific philosophy.

The notion of empty space, the mere vehicle of spatial interconnections, has been eliminated from recent science. The whole spatial universe is a field of force, or in other words, a field of incessant activity.

The mathematical formulae of physics express the mathematical relations realized in this activity. The unexpected result has been the elimination of bits of matter, as the self-identical supports for physical properties. At first, throughout the nineteenth century, the notion of matter was extended. The empty space was conceived as filled with ether…The more recent revolution which has culminated in the physics of the present day has only carried one step further this trend of nineteenth century science…Matter has been identified with energy, and energy is sheer activity; the passive substratum composed of self-identical enduring bits of matter has been abandoned, so far as concerns any fundamental description…The modern point of view is expressed in terms of energy, activity, and the vibratory differentiations of space-time. Any local agitation shakes the whole universe. The distant effects are minute, but they are there. The concept of matter presupposed simple location. Each bit of matter was self-contained, localized in a region with a passive, static network of spatial relations, entwined in a uniform relational system from infinity to infinity (space) and from eternity to eternity (time). But in the modern concept the group of agitations which we term matter is fused into its environment. There is no possibility of a detached, self-contained local existence. The [spacetime] environment enters into the nature of each thing [ontology]” (MoT 138). [brackets mine, re slater]

Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy is an attempt to integrate the latest scientific evidence with our moral, aesthetic, and spiritual intuitions regarding the ultimate nature of the Universe. Whitehead envisions the Universe as a creative becoming, a cosmogenesis. The creatures who inhabit his world are bound up together in an infinite web of evolving relations. Reason has often functioned to alienate humanity from its relations, but Whitehead offers another possibility. Whiteheadian rationality is guided by its commitment to relationality, whereby “there is an essence to the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself” (PR 4). To search for a “beyond” is to violate the rationality of cosmic relationality. Any truth philosophy may seek can only ever be found here among us. 


Monday, February 13, 2023

MetaModern Process Philosophy & Theology



Metamodern Spirituality & Process Theology

by Brendan Graham Dempsey
September 23, 2022


 

On this episode of Conversations in Process, Jay McDaniel and Jared Morningstar are joined by Brendan Graham Dempsey to discuss metamodern spirituality and possible connections with process theology. Brendan is a podcaster, author, community-builder, philosopher, and poet whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He has a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and an MA in Religion and the Arts from Yale University. Brendan lives in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, where he runs the holistic Sky Meadow retreat center and hosts metamodern gatherings.

In this conversation, Jay, Brendan, and Jared discuss metamodernism and its relationship to various other intellectual/philosophical modes—such as modernism and postmodernism—and also consider its relationship with process thinking and contemporary religiosity.

The discussion begins with Brendan’s own journey with metamodernism and how this was intricately intertwined with his own spiritual path of deconstructing and eventually reconstructing a religious worldview. Based on his work in his pseudonymously authored book BUILDING THE CATHEDRAL: ANSWERING THE MEANING CRISIS THROUGH PERSONAL MYTH, Brendan explains the centrality of narrativizing and personal myth-making in a metamodern spiritual project.

Jay builds on these ideas, introducing process ideas such as Whitehead’s “consequent nature of God,” showing how not only our own religious sensibilities are in process, but actually so is the Divine itself. However, there is still the question of communal and collective spirituality and myth-making, and Jay wonders if the collectivity involved here may even be beyond our merely human communities.

The conversation closes with a discussion of the relationship between metamodernism and the established religious traditions. Jay asks, “can a Methodist be metamodern?” and Brendan beautifully responds in the affirmative, stating that these traditions have the potential to be expressed and understood in a variety of different moods, from pre-modern to metamodern and everything in between. The goal of a metamodern standpoint, however, is to accept all of these different moods for what they are and the value they bring, and weave a coherent whole of this diversity, without losing the unique individuality of the various standpoints.

LINKS:
  • A conversation with Brendan, Layman Pascal, and John Vervaeke: “The Artful Scaling of the Religion that is not a Religion”: https://youtu.be/rAnLbaFHYWQ
  • Matt Segall on Brendan’s Metamodern Spirituality podcast: “Process Philosophy and the Metamodern Metanarrative”: https://youtu.be/j-EgCakXA9Y


* * * * * * *


Metamodern Spirituality
Process Philosophy and the Metamodern Metanarrative

w/ Matt Segall & Brendan Graham Dempsey
February 22, 2022


Topic
Matt Segall joins Brendan to talk about the relationship of process philosophy and the thinking of A. N. Whitehead to the formulation of an emerging metanarrative in metamodernity. In the context of our 13.7 billion years of emergent complexification, how does the story of consciousness evolution relate to issues such as dualism and the hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism, divine creativity, and mystical union?

Matt Segall's faculty bio

Matthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and process philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.


Sunday, September 4, 2022

Process Relational Ecological Civilizations Topics and Discussions




I wish to expand a bit on my last posting re i) "Whitehead's Contribution to Thinking Cosmologically in an Ecological civilization" and, ii) "How the integration of the sciences, humanity, and the universal (aka, spiritual) in Whiteheadian Process Thought."

Based on Matt Segall's book, "Physics of the World Soul," he will address in brief three main themes of conversation before the John Cobb forum panel in cross examination with John Eastman. Those three topics will concern i) the integration of evolution with ii) the quantum sciences and iii) Complexity theory utilizing the Whiteheadian process philosophy of cosmological metaphysics.

R.E. Slater
September 4, 2022


Thinking Cosmologically in an Ecological Civilization:
Whitehead's Contribution
October 21, 2020


Presenter: Matt Segall
Respondent: Timothy Eastman
Recording Date: September 15, 2020

*Unfortunately the Q&A was not included :(



https://cobb.institute/

What is ecological thinking?

One of the critical lessons that ecology is teaching us is that humans are not separate from nature, but are members of the web of life (Hes and Du Plessis 2014).

Ecoscenography 1.2

The first step to integrating ecological thinking into scenographic practice, involves grasping the fundamentals of ecology and living systems. Ecology demonstrates how eco-systems are not just a collection of species, but are also relational systems that connect humans, as organic systems, with animals and plants – It stimulates an increased understanding that the world is fundamentally interconnected and interdependent (Hes and Du Plessis 2014). From an ecological perspective, humans are not separate from nature but are deeply embedded in the ‘web of life’ (Capra 1994). As Naess (1989) suggests, “A human is not a thing…but a juncture in a relational system without determined boundaries in space and time” (1989: 79). Thus, humans are an integral part of the processes of co-creation and co-evolution that shape the living world (Hes and Du Plessis 2014).

Ecoscenography 1.3

Ecological thinking requires a broadening of identity in how we see ourselves in relationship to the world around us. Hes and Du Plessis explain that “as one’s identity expands, so does one’s view of the world. With these changed perceptions also come a change in values, behaviours and possible leverage points” (2014). Sean Esbjörn-Hargens (2010) describes this ‘widening of identity’ as a transition from ‘me’ (egocentric) to ‘my group ‘(ethnocentric) to ‘my country’ (sociocentric) to ‘all of us’ (worldcentric) to ‘all beings’ (planetcentric) to finally ‘all of reality’ (Kosmoscentric). In performance practice, this could be interpreted as a widening in identity from ‘me’ as the artist to considering how I might create work that actively engages with communities as well as the ‘living world’.

This notion of ‘creative expansion’ inspired by Esbjörn-Hargen’s ‘widening identity’, asks the performance maker and scenographer to engage with the work on multiple levels – it challenges the theatre artist to look beyond usual anthropocentric values (such as egocentric, ethnocentric, sociocentric and worldcentric perspectives) often adopted in the theatre practice to also incorporate planetcentric and kosmoscentric views.

The challenge of ecological thinking requires altering our assumptions, attitudes, to understand that we are participating in, and co-evolving with nature (Eisenberg and Reed, 2003: 3). In other words, in order to engage with the world from an ecological perspective, we need to see ourselves as part of (rather than above) nature – to engage with the ‘human’ aspects of our context in relationship to the [cosmo]biophysical context (Hes and Du Plessis 2014). This implies making a conscious effort to contemplate how our work as theatre practitioners might connect to broader communities and ‘living systems’.

Ecology incorporates principles of wholeness, interdependence, diversity, partnership, energy flows, flexibility, cycles and sustainability (DeKay 2011: 65). These themes of interconnection, relationship and co-existence underpin the value system of ecological thinking or what Dominique Hes and Chrisna du Plessis (2014) also describe as the ‘ecological worldview’. The ecological worldview presents a universe that consists of dynamic relationships and processes – It is a “globally integrated view, acknowledging and integrating diversity and previous levels of development, focusing on the long-term future of the world system” (Hes and Du Plessis 2014). In summary, the ecological worldview asks theatre artists and scenographers to think beyond the transient qualities of the theatre or site, to also understand how their work affects wider communities and living systems.

Ecological thinking is profoundly about understanding that ecology is not just about non-human things, it has to do with the way we imagine ourselves as part of nature (Morton 2010). Adopting an ecological perspective entails altering the lens through which we perceive the world and ourselves (Kegan 1982). At the core of this shift is a change in focus, a moving away from egocentric and anthropocentric thought (separateness) to include concepts of integration, awareness and holistic perception (interconnectedness). Mark DeKay explains that this is no easy cognitive task, but rather part of a transition in our developing capacity as humans (2011: 60). Despite this challenge, ecological thinking is crucial to designers of any discipline engaging with sustainability and offers a holistic approach to the possibilities of producing positive benefits as well as remediating past environmental damage (Zari and Jenkin 2010).



* * * * * * *


A Short Observation


This next section is a short review of a forum held at CIIS hosted by Matt Segall. It is of note that the term and practicum of cosmoecological civilization began in Communist Russia in the 1970s (although I would argue with native aboriginal tribal fellowships); was picked up and heightened by post-Maoist/Socialist China in the 1990s; and later, by the Western nations (Europe, America) in the 2000s.

Moreover, Process Thought (both in it's philosophy, theology, and touchstones in science et al.) speak across all socio-political economies and ethno-religious civilizations. It's why process thought works so well. Because it is so identifiable with the kind of reality we seem to live in and experience across all human studies and historical flow and event.

So don't let the word "Marxism" throw you off. I once took a class with the world renown French Maoist philosopher Alain Baidou who taught a class on Being and Event. One side of it approached process thought (my word, certainly not Alain's!) from Being and the other side approaches it from Event. In Whiteheadian terms we describe this process-like philosophy as "Being and Becoming."

Alain's work in this area is very like process thought but with important distinctions and if the Christian idea of the Gospel of Jesus had been inserted into Baidou's thought one couldn't have told the difference between the two. However, Alain is not a Christian, and was not teaching a Christian perspective. It is his own philosophy from a lifetime of experiencing and observing the cruelty of German Naziism and even crueler post-colonial French-Muslim class struggle in North Africa from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Though Alain sought a world of mutuality even so did Jesus in his time of Jewish-Roman unrest. Jesus called it "love." Today's ecologists might rethink these terms today when approaching new societal paradigms for integrative fellowships between-and-with all present relationships unfolding and enfolding into a future of present presences.

Enjoy,

R.E. Slater
September 4, 2020


Fifth annual conference of the World-
Ecology Research Network

“Planetary Utopias, Capitalist Dystopias: Justice, Nature,
and the Liberation of Life”

California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA
May 30-June 1, 2019


Whitehead and Marx:
A Cosmopolitical Approach to Ecological Civilization

May 31, 2019

Below is a recording of my talk (a video first, then audio only that includes the discussion afterwards). I’ve also included an extended draft of some notes I took to prepare my talk. Finally, I’ve included my notes taken while listening to Jason Moore during yesterday’s opening lecture.


A few words about the words in the title:

Cosmopolitics” is an effort on the part of thinkers like Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway to think beyond the modern human/nature and fact/value divides, or what Whitehead called the “bifurcation of nature.”

Civilization“?!? This phrase, “ecological civilization,” comes from China’s Communist Party. Achieving ecological civilization is one of their stated goals for the 21st century. In China there are now about 35 graduate programs and research centers devoted to Whitehead’s thought and process studies.

What does it mean, to Whitehead, to be “civilized”? He does not use the term in an exclusivist sense and is even willing to consider that some animals some of the time (e.g., squirrels) may be capable of it (see Modes of Thought). But usually not. It means a conscious recognition of and participation in the creative power of ideas–like freedom or love–to shape history.

“We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures.” -Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality).

Whitehead is not an idealist, however. Ideas only have power when the material and historical conditions are ripe, when a particular habitat can support their ingression.

Many moderns, Marx included, have too anthropocentric an idea of ideas. Ideas were already active in evolutionary processes long before conscious human beings emerged on the scene. Ideas are not just conjured up in human heads or scratched onto paper pages by human hands. Whitehead invites us to expand our conception so that we can sense that the idea of the Good generates the light and warmth of the Sun no less than the nuclear reactions and electromagnetic radiation known to physicists, that the idea of Beauty is at work in the evolution of peacocks and butterflies and roses and not just in Beethoven’s 9th or the Mona Lisa. Ideas don’t just shape history, they shape geohistory and indeed cosmic history.

“The basis of democracy is the common fact of value-experience, as constituting the essential nature of each pulsation of actuality. Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole.” -Alfred North Whitehead (Modes of Thought 151).

Every bacterium enriching the soil, every bumble bee making honey in the hive, every human being participating in society, every star spiraling in the galaxy has value for itself, for others, and for the whole. Nonhumans not only have value, they are agents of value creation.

Whitehead (in a conversation with his wife Evelyn and the journalist Lucien Price in 1944) was asked if the prior half-century or so had any political thinkers as daring as those who inaugurated the new relativistic and quantum physics, he answered “There is Marx, of course; though I cannot speak of him with any confidence.” But he goes on to describe Marx as “the prophet of proletarian revolt” and marks the singular relevance of the fact that the first practical effectuation of his ideas [Soviet Russia under Lenin] occurred in a society dominated by farmers. Here we see Whitehead was ahead of his time in recognizing the importance of food sovereignty. Any serious resistance to capitalism must begin with soil and seeds.

What is value? We can discuss the differences between use v. exchange value, objective v. subjective value, but ultimately Marx says value is a social relation determined by the amount of labor time it requires to produce a commodity. Humans create value by working on raw material or dead nature.

Is all value really produced by human labor alone? Is there nothing extrahuman that supplies value? In Whitehead’s cosmos there is no mere matter or dead nature, no inert or raw material to be appropriated by something called Man.

Whitehead: “We have no right to deface the value-experience which is the very essence of the universe” (Modes of Thought 111).

We can link value to agency. Moderns, whether Locke, or Marx, or Hayak, limit agency and thus value-creation to human beings.

According to Latour, the abstract, idealistic materialism of classical Marxism misses the activity/agency of the world.

Latour: “We have never been modern in the very simple sense that while we emancipated ourselves, each day we also more tightly entangled ourselves in the fabric of nature.”

Despite his recognition of metabolic rift, Marx was fully modern in his commitment to what Latour calls the “double task of emancipation and domination” (We Have Never Been Modern 10). The emancipatory task was political: to end exploitation of humans by humans. The task of domination was technoscientific: to become masters of nature.

“The fabric of our collectives has had to be radically transformed to absorb the citizen of the 18th century and the worker of the 19th century. We need a similar transformation now to make space for non-humans created by sciences and techniques.” -Latour (We Have Never Been Modern 185-6).

Latour’s Gifford lectures on Gaia invite us to transform our imagination of the earth as modern globe by turning it inside out, such that we come to see that we are in a crucial sense surrounded by the earth, we are enclosed within it, trapped, earthbound. We cannot escape to a beyond, Musk and Bezos’ extra-terrestrial utopianism notwithstanding.

How are we to think human freedom and human-earth relations after modernity? Humans are not as free and teleological as moderns have imagined; nor is nature as dumb and deterministic as moderns have imagined. Marx says that what distinguishes the worst human architect from the best honey bee is that the former designs his building ideally before constructing it materially. Man has a plan. Bees, apparently, are simply automatons obeying blind instinct. But is this really how human creativity works? Is this really how bee creativity works? Architect Christopher Alexander discusses how medieval cathedrals were generated over generations in a purposeful but not centrally planned way. This is akin to the way insects build their nests, following a simple organizational patterning language out of which emerges enduring forms of order and beauty. Buildings that are designed and built in the way Marx imagined tend to be dead structures meant for money-making rather than living. Consciousness of the power of ideas does not mean mastery over ideas. Ideas possess us, purpose us; we participate in their power, co-workers and not free inventors.

Donna Haraway: “in so far as the Capitalocene is told in the idiom of fundamentalist Marxism, with all its trappings of Modernity, Progress, and History, that term is subject to the same or fiercer criticisms. The stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly on the brink of becoming much Too Big. Marx did better than that, as did Darwin. We can inherit their bravery and capacity to tell big-enough stories without determinism, teleology, and plan” (Staying With the Trouble, 50).

What does Haraway propose we do instead? In place of deterministic teleology, she proposes process-relational creativity; and in place of a Big Plan from on high she proposes playful communal kin-making with the ecological beings we breath, kill, eat, love, and otherwise communicate with on the daily down here on planet Earth. She credits James Clifford (Return) with the notion of a “big enough” story, a story that remains “ontologically unfinished” and situated in zones of contact, struggle, and dialogue” (Return 85-86).

How do we become sensitive to the values of nonhumans? We need new practices of aestheticization, new stories, new rituals (or perhaps we need to recover “old” practices, stories, and rituals) to help us become sensitive to the values of nonhumans. Indigenous peoples can help us develop these. I think something like this is going on even in major documentary films like the new Attenborough film “Our Planet” (problematic as its title is, and as Attenborough’s ecological politics are): e.g., the images of a mass suicide of walruses in northeastern Russia.

Becoming sensitive to the values of nonhumans doesn’t mean we don’t still have a hierarchy of values that in many cases puts humans at the top. As Whitehead says, “life is robbery.” But, he continues, “the robber needs justification.” What is the human, anyway? Are we one species among many? In an obvious sense, of course we are; and we ignore our dependence upon and embeddedness within wider ecological networks to our own peril. In another sense, we are not just another species. We have become, for better or worse, a planetary presence, a geological force. How are we just justify our presence on Earth? What does ecological justice look like when the idea of justice is expanded beyond just human society?

There are a number of ongoing polemics among anti-capitalist scholars, particularly metabolic rift theorists and world-ecology researchers (e.g., John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore; incidentally, Foster seems to get Latour all wrong), regarding the proper way to understand the relation between human beings and the rest of the natural world. I would want to approach these disputes in a diplomatic manner. I am not here to choose sides, and anyway I don’t even know the whole story. But at this catastrophic moment in geohistory, those of us resisting the mitosis of capital might do well to focus less on widening abstract semantic divisions and more on imagining and materializing the shared future we hope we one day achieve on this Human-Earth.

Human history is a geophysical event. Whether we date the history of this event to the emergence of symbolic consciousness 200,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution 12,500 years ago, the capitalist revolution 500 years ago, the industrial revolution 250 years ago, the nuclear age 75 years ago, or the information age 20 years ago, it is clear that the Earth has by now at least entered a new phase of geohistorical development.

AP headline on May 6th, 2019 reads “UN report: Humanity accelerating extinction of other species.” The first line reads: “People are putting nature in more trouble now than at any other time in human history, with extinction looming over 1 million species of plants and animals, scientists said Monday.”

NY Magazine headline also on May 6th, 2019 by Eric Levitz: “Humanity is About to Kill 1 Million Species in a Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide.”

He concludes: “Earth’s ecosystems did not evolve to thrive amid the conditions that a global, advanced capitalist civilization of 7 billion humans has created. And that civilization did not evolve to thrive on a planet without coral reefs, wetlands, or wild bees — and with global temperatures exceeding preindustrial levels by 1.5 degrees. Bringing our civilization’s ambitions and modes of operation into better alignment with the environment’s demands no act of altruism. It merely requires recognizing our own collective long-term self-interest, and changing the way we grow food, produce energy, deal with climate change and dispose of waste, on a global level, through international cooperation.”

Whether we call it the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, the Chthulucene, the Entropocene, or the Ecozoic, diagnosing the metaphysical roots of the present ecological catastrophe is a necessary (though not sufficient) part of imagining and materializing a post-capitalist world.

Marx is not unaware of our dependence upon the natural world, writing that: “Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say, nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature . . . and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”

Marx also writes in Capital of labor as a process “by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature” (https://isreview.org/issue/109/marx-and-nature).

Marx is dialectical in his understanding of the human-earth relation, but he still treats nature as dead and awaiting the value-creating power of human consciousness.

With Whitehead, I have argued that value is not just a human social construct or free creation of human labor or desire (modern thinkers as diverse as Locke, Marx, and Hayek agree on this, as I noted above) but a cosmological or ecological power from which our human values, and our human power, derive.

Citations for the above:

  • Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead by Lucien Price, p. 220.

 * * * * * * *

Thursday, May 30th

Notes on Jason Moore’s opening talk

  • The planetary era began in 1492 (“the globe”) not in 1968 with earthrise photo
  • the end of the world has already happened, many times.
  • Man and Nature as “real abstractions” (non-European people and European women were considered part of nature); we must break down CP Snow’s two cultures, beyond “coupled systems” analysis, to a “flow fo flows” that integrates humans as earthlings
  • “civilization” as a dangerous, colonial word? What is this term meant to denote? The opposite of savagery and barbarism?
  • climate change as a “capitalogenic process” (what about Soviet and Chinese communist contributions?)
  • “Nature is a class struggle” – “Nature” is part of the capitalist project
  • we need more Marxist histories of climate change to avoid ceding the ground to neo-Malthusians
  • the Earth has always been a historical actor; the present ecological crisis is not novel in this respect (see William Connolly’s “Facing the Planetary” and “The Fragility of Things”)
  • climate is not exogenous to civilization and modes of production.
  • Marx on labor as metabolic mediation between man and nature (man transforms nature, nature transforms man).
  • from geology and history to geohistory
  • Capitalism emerged out of late 15th century geographic expansion; credit, conquest, and coerced labor were essential (“capitalism’s triple helix in formation”)
  • new world genocide led to regrowth of managed forests and CO2 dip, which led to little ice age; why didn’t this produce a terminal crisis in capitalism? Because of slavery frontier
  • why is cotton gin not considered as important as steam engine as impetus for industrial revolution?
  • “blue marble” photo of earth as “environmentalism of the rich”
  • Marx acknowledged that human labor is itself a force of nature (?)
  • alternative to collapse narrative (Jared Diamond)?


#WorldecologySF 2019 04
Jason Moore Climate of Crisis, 379 2019 a
May 31, 2019



#WorldecologySF 2019 04
Jason Moore Climate of Crisis, 379 2019 b
May 31, 2019