Matthew David Segall has written an interesting post on the limitations of entrenched positions when it comes to determining what “stuff” the world is made of. Specifically, he is talking about the two major positions that have largely defined ontological discourse in the modern West: materialism and idealism.

Materialism is the belief that the world is made up entirely of physical “matter,” and that this matter somehow gives rise to subjective minds when organized with sufficient complexity in the form of nervous systems. Idealism goes the opposite route, arguing that in fact there is only mind, and that matter exists only as a content of mind, that is to say, as a representation for a transcendent subject. For the true idealist, there is nothing to reality but subjective perceptions: the universe is "inside" consciousness and not the other way around, as materialists would have it.

Materialism has been dominant since the end of the nineteenth century. Today it remains something of a default view even though a growing number of people are dissatisfied with its insistence on a universe made up of dead stuff, not to mention its total failure to account for conscious experience. Idealism, for its part, is relatively unpopular among university types but extremely popular in the culture at large (e.g., so-called New Age thought).

I think Segall is right to say that both materialism and idealism “as polemical positions are themselves misunderstandings of or partial perspectives on a more complex truth.” The question, which Segall readily discerns, is whether this more complex truth is in any way knowable in rational terms.  At the end of his short but rich post, Segall challenges the mainstream association of mind with reason and logic, suggesting that there is “a certain madness at the core of the Intellect, something unruly, chaotic, creative...” As soon as we entertain the thought that mind is not fundamentally or primarily rational, new avenues open up to philosophical thought. Philosophy becomes less inquisitive (or at least less inquisitorial) and more creative, experimental. Its traditional concern with formulating truthful propositions can take a backseat to a revived interest in creating truth in a manner analogous to art. In other words, instead of mastering thought to rationalize (and thus absolutize) the human world, philosophy can follow thought into new, non-human territories, and potentially expand our world beyond its actual confines.

What ontology could support such a view of the intellect? Certainly not materialism or idealism, which both hinge upon an extreme form of rationalism. The most promising inroads, in my view, are being made under panpsychism, which David Skrbina defines as a meta-theory about the nature of matter and mind rather than a “polemical position” in itself.

Panpsychism holds that matter exists just as materialists say it does, but adds that matter includes psyche—that all matter is in some way alive, experiential, or sentient. Everything, all of nature, has an “interior,” an imaginal dimension. In the spirit of Pan, the wild horned god whom the name of this philosophical school evokes, Nature has two manifestations: there is an external nature that we perceive in the form of physical forces, and an internal nature that we perceive as image and psyche. Nature, in short, includes thought, emotion, imagination, soul.* Matter is not merely material but energetic as the physicists tell us and psychical as the depth psychologists hold.

What I like about panpsychism is that it is a totally immanent prospect: it does not require one to posit a conceptual substance that transcends the universe that plants and animals inhabit. Materialists and idealists require just such a transcendent substance—an absolute—that lies behind the phenomenal world, generating it. Under both philosophies, existence is necessarily relegated to the realm of illusion. For materialists, the universe is really a blind play of quantities, totally inaccessible to the mind which, for its part, merely apprehends these quantities under the guise of a qualitative mirage. Materialism offers us a world devoid of meanings, purposes, or values; psyche is epiphenomenal, a kind of fume on the surface of the mathematical marshes of pure quantitative relations in space-time. 

As for idealism, it admits of nothing but subjective representations. For idealists, the qualities we perceive in the universe are all that exist—there are no real things possessing those qualities. There are no objects, no events, only images that we as "naïve realists" take to be objects and events. Life is literally a dream, the theatre of which is either your own personal mind if you’re a solipsist (the most honest, as well as the most odious idealist position) or the mind of God if you’re willing to grant other people the privilege of also having a mind (for then you need to explain the existence of the common world in which these various minds interact). 

If, in total contrast to this, panpsychism shows promise, it is because it allows one to affirm that the world we experience is real, that it exists as it seems to and requires no transcendent substance in order to do so.** Experience is neither a dream nor a hallucination, but a direct engagement between living beings in a living cosmos. 

Throughout his career, and more emphatically in the latter part of it, Gilles Deleuze said that our most pressing task today is that of finding a way "to believe again in this world." For several centuries now we have denied the world its reality; we have espoused an anthropocentric view in which humanity is the arbiter of all values, including the value of existence itself. The results of this world-denying attitude, whose two ontological faces are materialism and idealism, are now plain to see: we are in the midst of what could very well be the Last Days as far as humans (and countless other species) are concerned. And the catastrophe is entirely of our own making.

Finding a way to believe in this world is not a metaphysical problem but an ethical one. Yet it is an ethical problem that requires us to think metaphysically about the nature of the universe. If we are to deal with it, we need to abandon our anthropocentrism. For me, this means first and foremost breaking away from the Cult of Pure Reason.*** We must open ourselves to more imaginal avenues of thought and experience. The imaginal is unconcerned with rational truth. It is concerned rather with visions that affirm creation, existence, nature, life and death, joy and terror. Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Shestov, Whitehead, Bergson, Deleuze and Segall are just a few philosophers who have made it their task to affirm life and world rather than negate them with formulas such as “the world is mere X” or “life is nothing more than Y.” If we are to think our way through these troubling times, we could do worse than follow their lead. 

Notes

* Panpsyche ("all-soul") could be translated, mythopoeically, as  "Pan's Soul." For a beautiful exploration of Pan as personification of "nature within" and "nature without," see James Hillman's monograph Pan and the Nightmare.

** This does not imply that there is no God, only that God is not logically necessary—which, if you ask me, is how any self-respecting God would have it.

*** To quote Deleuze again, “It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.” (Anti-Oedipus, 1977, 122)

As an addendum to my response to Bernardo Kastrup, who dismissed my critique of his philosophy by saying that I hadn't understood a damn thing, I'm posting the following quote from the great psychologist William James. Matthew David Segall included it in his own response to Kastrup, and I found it to be a simple and straightforward argument for being wary of consoling claims that "all is one."

"The sum of it all is that the absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker to whom it does not come as an ‘immediate certainty’… is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an emotionally rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: reality MAY exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of eaches, just as it seems to—this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis. Prima facie there is this in favor of the eaches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously. The advocates of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are unable to assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute, and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the details of the finite and the immediately given."

Now, in his response to my critique, Bernardo Kastrup writes:

To which I respond: It's easy to be so doggedly committed to Truth when your conclusions happen to be the warmest and fuzziest imaginable. Kastrup has elsewhere said that the number one reason we should all buy into his monistic idealism* is that it assures us we will never die. I am in agreement with James here: from a strictly practical viewpoint, the oneness philosophy of Bernardo Kastrup and Deepak Chopra is probably the most "rational" choice for anyone looking for a belief system. It consoles, it comforts, it gives courage. The only problem with it, as James notes, is that life in the phenomenal world contradicts it at every turn.

If belief in the existence of a real external world is just an inference, as Kastrup insists, then it's a universal inference, an instinctive inference that every human being, even the most hardened idealist, has make to get by in reality. It's also very useful when it's time, say, to tell the difference between a real apple the thought of an apple.  It's true that a handicap in this regard would have been a comfort to the children in the above photograph, who died in the famine Stalin inflicted on the Ukraine in the name of another abstraction. They could have had their fill of mental apples. But they still would have starved.

I realize this last paragraph is a caricature of Kastrup's thought. My point is that certain philosophies are so abstract, so divorced from the realities of embodied and ensouled experience, that they are only purchased at a high price. Buyer beware.

* Meaning, the first in a list of "implications and practical applications" of monistic idealism, given in answer to the title-question: "Does it matter whether all is in consciousness?" 
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/09/does-it-matter-whether-all-is-in.html

In his comments on my post about his philosophy, Bernardo Kastrup argues that I have misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted and misrepresented him. Strange, since he himself admits near the end that he is commenting as he reads. Not that this isn’t apparent from the start: throughout his tirade, Kastrup is constantly accusing me of having overlooked passages and ideas which I discuss further on. In his bombastic conclusion, he qualifies my critique as “brash” while calling the moral invective that he correctly identifies as the source of this whole business merely “confrontational” (I wonder how he would describe his fevered reaction to my essay). Point being, I clearly hit a nerve, if only with my hopeless incapacity to make a “foray into formal ontology.”

So all I can do here is summarize my core argument, which remains implicit in my critique, as succinctly and as clearly as I can. I don’t expect Kastrup to change his views as a result, but maybe there are others who will be able to read me without presupposing the finality of their own conclusions and the superiority of their own intellects.

Here is the argument:

Consciousness as we know it presents itself as a subjective/objective phenomenon. We are conscious of ourselves, but experientially, we are only conscious of ourselves as subjective beings in an objective world. Discursive thinking splits this innately twofold phenomenon into completely separate and distinct conceptual entities: mind and matter. Materialists say that matter is “more real” than mind, and sometimes that only matter is real. Idealists say that mind is “more real” than matter, and sometimes that only mind is real. Both positions devalue or negate one aspect of a dyad without which consciousness would be inconceivable. Materialism and idealism are therefore equally "reductive." Each assumes an either-or situation when, in fact, experience presents us with a both-and situation that the human intellect cannot wrap itself around. In dismissing this puzzling situation as mere appearance and positing an underlying reality that is "really real," materialism and idealism inevitably concoct a transcendent order of being and slip it behind the phenomenal world of experience. That transcendent order is then tagged the one ontological reality while the phenomenal world is deemed "real" only in an epistemological sense. Anyone who is interested in knowing how this applies to Bernardo Kastrup’s philosophy is welcome to read or reread my original critique with the foregoing in mind.

I admit that I am no more of a metaphysical expert than Kastrup is. But I have studied metaphysics long enough to know that this discussion we’re having has been had many, many times in the past. Every conceivable idealist, dualist, and materialist argument has been adopted, and every position has been legitimately challenged. Time and time again. The reason, which modern physics makes amply clear, is that the real is innately paradoxical, weird, and unknowable from a human standpoint. This view is explicit in my book, where I argue that is is implicit in art. Art explores reality non-discursively, in such way as to preserve and bring to the fore its inherent and inexorable mystery. I could look for a passage to share here, but it so happens that Kastrup did the work for me in his response to my critique:

Yes, you might as well shut up and stop bothering with philosophy unless you realize that philosophy is not concerned with “truth” or "fact," and never has been. Philosophy is not a scientific endeavor. As Graham Harman and others have cogently put forward, philosophy shines when it becomes art, that is, a creative activity aimed at imagining new possibilities and creating new values. That last bit, "creating new values" comes from Nietzsche, whose philosophy is indistinguishable from great poetry. Nietzsche, incidentally, would observe that Kastrup’s belief that metaphysics will somehow get him to the truth tells us a lot about Kastrup and very little about the truth.

If I had to propose an alternative to Kastrup’s position, it would be something like, “There is no dreamer, there is only the dream.” I don't for a moment pretend that I could “prove” this discursively, since it specifically evokes a paradoxical, mysterious, weird world that no one will ever know intellectually. The mystery goes all the way down the dream. And to quote Shakespeare, who achieved greater heights (and depths) with poetry than any discursive thinker ever reached with propositional statements, the dream has no bottom.

In his books and essays, Bernardo Kastrup mounts a powerful assault against classical materialism. His work is full of brilliant insights, some of which I think resolve some of the more odious claims of traditional idealism. However, it remains in the end the exposition of a metaphysical system. As such, it supposes a capacity on the part of human intellect to penetrate the core of reality and explain it. I think this supposition is false. But then, just as Bernardo says he was able to overlook the mistakes he gleaned in my book, I'll gladly look past the glaring ones I sense in his writings in order to see his work as the elegant fiction that it is.

Recently, Bernardo Kastrup posted an essay on his blog entitled “The Threat of Panpsychism: A Warning.” In it, he dismisses the recent rise of panpsychism in the philosophical mainstream as an “escape route” intended to save materialism from its imminent downfall. According to Kastrup, the evidence on offer makes idealism the only viable philosophical position today. 

Matthew David Segall of Footnotes 2 Plato wrote a response to the essay, arguing that Kastrup was attacking only a caricature of panpsychism, ignoring other, more sophisticated models such as Whitehead’s metaphysics. Since that discussion is ongoing, I'm happy to leave any defence of panpsychism in Segall's more capable hands. While I do subscribe to the idea that “psyche” and “matter” constitute one “thing” that is reducible to neither of its "parts," I am not a systematic panpsychist. In fact I’m not a systematic anything. My basic belief is that the world is, ultimately, unknowable. The yin-yang oppositions that characterize the realm of experience, including the dualities of self and world, mind and matter, cannot, in my view, be reconciled by reason. Kierkegaard was right, I think, to say that no human-made rational system could ever do justice to the whole. The human intellect being by nature limited, it simply cannot access the limitless, i.e. ultimate reality or ultimate truth. 

So, in this post, I'll try to argue that monistic idealism, Kastrup’s position, is no less of an abstraction than the materialism it seeks to replace. I do this because I feel it is a problem when a philosopher describes a rival view as an “extremely dangerous cultural threat” as Kastrup does in his "warning" against panpsychism. If the mystery of the real has not been solved, if the mystery cannot be solved, then all philosophical positions ought to be welcome or at the very least tolerated, including panpsychism and (dare I say it?) hardcore materialism. 

In what follows, I will be discussing Kastrup’s essay “A more parsimonious, logical, non-materialist worldview,” from his book Brief Peeks Beyond [henceforth BPB]. I will also touch briefly on “The Linguistic Con Game of the Mind-Matter Duality,” an article published on Kastrup’s website as a response to a comment I made on his Facebook page. 

***

The entirety of Kastrup’s thought rests on an epistemological premise. He says that the only thing we can know for sure is our consciousness; everything else is inferred and not directly known. I can doubt the existence of the entities that present themselves to me, but I cannot doubt my own existence as a being who can doubt. It could be that the person standing before me is a figment of my imagination, a hologram or illusion. But as the percipient of such doubtful things, I must be real. Kastrup is here reiterating the Cartesian cogito. However, unlike Descartes, for whom the external world is real, Kastrup takes the fact that the world outside my consciousness may not exist to mean that any belief in an external reality is unnecessarily bulky. Since consciousness alone is knowable, the principle of parsimony demands that we begin with the assumption that consciousness is all there is, at least until something requires us to think otherwise.

Kastrup recognizes that his basic premise already raises questions,* because it goes against our standard definition of consciousness as “the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and of the world” (Oxford Dictionary; my italics). For if this standard definition is accurate, consciousness cannot exist without something external to it, since consciousness is precisely the awareness of something that is not it. If idealism is to triumph over materialism, it must be shown that mind is prior to matter, that subjectivity is prior to any objectively existing world. Consciousness, in other words, must be able to exist in and of itself. It must preexist any type of experience. Otherwise, it requires something to be conscious of and can't qualify as primordial.

For this reason, Kastrup affirms that there can be consciousness without experience. He admits that “it is extremely difficult—if not impossible” to conceive of such a thing, but nevertheless insists that the term must be defined in such a way as to allow for the existence of a non-experiential consciousness. He goes on:

Further on the same page, after a shift in context, Kastrup writes: “If something is fundamentally beyond all forms of experience, direct or indirect, it might as well not exist.” Nevertheless, he bring up “pure consciousness without experience" because his argument requires it. It "may as well not exist," but it has to exist.

Kastrup therefore posits two modes of consciousness. One mode is experiential: it is the consciousness we know and can talk about, the one that requires experience and that therefore implies, by its nature, that there is something objective to be conscious of which is not identical to it (whether “external” in the form of physical events or “internal” in the form of mental events). The second mode of consciousness is non-experiential. This is consciousness as it purportedly exists in the absence of any experience. It is consciousness without subjectivity: the Brahman of Indian spirituality. 

Kastrup’s technical definition of consciousness is the following: “Consciousness is that whose excitations are subjective experiences.” (BPB, 12). The definition implies the existence of consciousness without experience by conceiving of consciousness as a thing that can be “excited” and that therefore must also exist as “excitable” in the absence of any excitation. In order to be excitable, however, consciousness must fit into some kind of causal scheme. Because it can change, and because it continues to exist in a “pure” state in the absence of change, it must be temporal; it must exist in time. In other words, consciousness for Kastrup is extended: it is a thing, even if it is the only thing. This thing that is pure consciousness, however, defies rationalization; it is not a philosophical concept but a mystical notion. By Kastrup’s own admission, it is impossible to perceive or even imagine it. Yet it must exist as a transcendent object for his idealist system to cohere.

Kastrup says that the belief in a world outside consciousness (that is to say, an objective world) constitutes an unnecessary logical inference. Yet as we saw above, the conceivable mode of consciousness, the one that everyone can agree on under empiricism, is synonymous with the subjective experience of the objective. I experience the world instinctively as objective, yet monistic idealism demands that I use my intellect to negate its apparent objectivity. So, in truth, it’s the belief in non-experiential consciousness that constitutes an inference. And not only is it an inference, but it’s an inference whose result is empirically unfalsifiable.

The point is that Kastrup extrapolates from the consciousness we know, which is innately experiential, a form of consciousness that no one can “talk about or even make sense of.” He does this because he needs this other, unknowable mode of consciousness to grant Mind ontological primacy over an independently existing world that is not Mind. Yet the difference between the intrinsically experiential consciousness we know and the intrinsically non-experiential consciousness we cannot know implies an intrinsic, which is to say ontological, difference between the two. This will be important later on. For the moment, suffice it to say that experiential consciousness and non-experiential consciousness belong to different ontological categories. 

The phenomenologists remarked that there could be no consciousness without “intentionality.” I alluded to this earlier when I noted that consciousness as commonly understood is invariably the awareness by a being of something that is outside the consciousness of that being. This something-that-is-outside-consciousness may, of course, be conscious in its own right, or it may not. Empirically, I can only speak of my consciousness, not of consciousness in general. The existence of an external world is built into the very phenomenon of consciousness as we experience it. When I am conscious of an objective reality, I am conscious of it precisely as something located outside of my subjectivity. When I see a table, I immediately intuit that this table is not me, that it exists outside of me and would continue to do so if I closed my eyes. The table does not for a moment manifest as something synonymous with me, that is, with the I-ness that conditions my consciousness. Again, the objectivity of the table isn’t something I infer; it’s part and parcel of the conscious act itself. It’s what consciousness is, what mind cannot be “made sense of” without. 

The same can be argued for internal states such as thoughts, dreams, and visions. Zen Buddhism recognizes this when it distinguishes mental representations from consciousness, which is really a point of awareness without content. And if Jung and Freud insisted on the term “unconscious” to designate those parts of the psyche that are objective even though we are not aware of them, it’s because the evidence points to psyche being vaster than consciousness. Psychology has good reason to say that empirical consciousness, the type we have evidence for, is inseparable from ego. It is that part of me that encounters events beyond my subjectivity. If Kastrup claims that psychoanalysis misnamed the unconscious, it's only because he posits a supra-personal consciousness which, we have seen, is empirically inaccessible to us.

Kastrup recognizes that there is no way anyone interested in doing serious philosophy is going to accept that physical tables are nothing more than the mental constructs of an individual mind. Such a move would entail solipsism, the belief that only I exist and that the whole universe is a kind of hallucination . . . and solipsism is the end of philosophy. To avoid this trap, Kastrup posits the ur-subject of “mind-at-large” as the omniscient “ground” whose experience the seemingly external world constitutes (BPB, 14). After all, idealism dictates that the table I perceive cannot exist outside of mind because there is nothing outside of mind. However, given that the table does exist, there must be a monistic supermind that is experiencing the table in such a way that it appears external to me. And since the existence of such a supermind cannot depend on experience in order to exist (it would then require an objective world), this supermind must be something like mind-at-large, namely something that cannot be experienced yet must exist, if only to support a set of metaphysical beliefs.

One of the questions that monistic idealism has trouble with is how the One becomes the Many. Kastrup’s answer to this problem is that we are all “alters”—fragmented, amnesic parts—of mind-at-large. He takes the term “alter” from psychiatry, wherein it denotes the discrete identities of an individual with multiple personalities . “Essentially,” he writes, “mind-at-large suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder; and we are its alters.” The question is: How did this dissociation occur within mind-at-large? How did consciousness fall from wholeness to fragmentation (even if said fragmentation is only apparent)? Or to use Kastrup’s metaphor of disturbances in water to represent experience, how did the water start rippling all by itself? This is a problem that I don’t think Kastrup’s monistic idealism can solve logically. In fact it’s a nut I don’t think any form of monism can crack without betraying its own non-rational grounding.

In “The Linguistic Con Game of the Mind/Matter Duality,” Kastrup writes: “Mind is what we are. It refers to our identity, not to one of our abstractions. It’s the ‘medium’ of experience, not a type of experience.” This absolute transcendentalization of mind-at-large as non-experiential “medium” is the irrational jump that makes Kastrup’s rational system hold together. If he were to omit it, his philosophy would lead straight to solipsism. Why? Because if I limit myself to the knowable kind of consciousness, I can very well say, logically, that nothing exists but my mind; ergo, nothing exists but me. Kastrup brings in “mind-at-large” to avoid having to conclude that only Bernardo Kastrup exists, which would be absurd. But this move from finite, experiential consciousness to infinite, omniscient consciousness entails an ontological leap that makes his theory no more parsimonious than materialism, or any other systematic attempt to grasp the whole. On Kastrup’s terms, the only truly parsimonious position would be solipsism.

In qualifying his general metaphysical orientation, Kastrup writes:

I agree that the evidence for transpersonal states of consciousness is significant. However, such evidence does not necessarily imply an underlying unity of consciousness. It could very well point to a multiplicity of consciousnesses, a multiplicity which, as Niezsche, Deleuze and others have held, may be the only “oneness” there is. And regarding the second, ontological reason for endorsing monistic idealism, well, as we have seen, “inferring a whole new ontological category” is precisely what Kastrup does with his concept of mind-at-large. So, just as the materialist posits a new ontological category with his insistence on the absolute independence of matter, so the idealist posits a new ontological category with his insistence on an absolute consciousness that can exist without experience.

***

As mentioned at the outset, this post deals with an essay bearing the following title: “A More Parsimonious, Logical, Non-Materialist Worldview.” In light of what we've seen, I argue that none of the qualifiers in this title is warranted. Because of its dependence on an ontological category beyond that of experiential consciousness, the view presented in Kastrup’s essay is no more (nor less) parsimonious than the materialism it aims to disprove. Nor is this view any more (or less) logical than its rival; this, on account of its reliance on a transcendent notion without which the conclusions would not follow from the arguments. Further, the view is not non-materialist, since it posits the existence of a non-physical yet temporal and contingent consciousness which, in all aspects but detectability, shares the properties of "matter" as understood by modern physics. Finally, it is not a worldview, since it aims precisely at denying the existence of an external world.

Bernardo Kastrup’s system fails as a systematic, rational explanation of that whole supra-rational business we call reality. In this, it is neither better nor worse off than any other monistic system. This does not mean, of course, that Kastrup (or any other monistic thinker) is wrong. After all, it may well be the case that there is only mind-at-large, and that the things apparently in the world are thoughts in that primordial mind. Then again, it may not. Ultimately, it’s a matter of personal belief and of where one chooses to stop thinking and sit on a transcendent postulate.

If I’ve reacted so strongly to Kastrup’s characterization of panpsychism as a “an extremely dangerous cultural threat,” it’s because such a moral assertion implies that there exists an answer that ought to be enshrined as final truth, and that Kastrup’s monistic idealism is that answer. But until the mystery of being is solved—and it will never be solved—I find it a more honest attitude to remain open and amenable to a variety of possibilities. In the end, the only real threat in philosophy arises when imperfect theory hardens into unquestionable dogma.

* I'd originally written "begs questions" here. Wrong expression caused some confusion.