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)

Last week, I was honoured to take part in a speaking event with two brilliant guys: art historian Graham Larkin and musicologist Phil Ford. Among the subjects we discussed was the idea of the “Real" that I sketch out in the course of my book. I’d like to expand a bit upon it here in light of our conversation. 

The metaphysics that undergirds Reclaiming Art is a form of weird realism. By “the Real,” I don’t mean the consensus world that can be analyzed by social scientists, measured by scientists, or delineated by idealist philosophers. Nor is it the “real world” worried parents and school counselors refer to when they give career advice to reckless teenagers. That world is an idea in our heads, a partial picture framed by reason and the notion of causality: “Everything has a cause, and whoever knows the cause can predict the effect.”

It was the Scottish philosopher David Hume who argued that, contrary to common belief, causality has no logical necessity. The real reason we expect a coin to fall to the ground when we toss it in the air isn’t that it logically must do so but that we have made a habit of believing that what goes up must come down. In truth, there is no reason whatsoever why specific effects must follow from specific causes. After all, it is perfectly possible to imagine a world where tossed coins simply float up into the ether, never to return. The fact that they haven’t in the past does little but explain our habit (mere habit!) of expecting things to keep going the way they have been until now.

So in reality, the outcome of every coin toss is unpredictable: maybe it will come down, maybe it won’t. (NOTE: I realize I'm being flippant here, but bear with me.) The Real inheres in this unpredictability, this maybe. It points a strange, unknowable order that hides behind our preconceptions, habits, and judgements. In fact our habits— all the armature of culture — form a kind of veil to protect us against it. The Real is the interzone where anything could happen, all things are possible and no amount of expert knowledge can enable us to predict what might come next, or even what is actually going on in a given situation. In the book I qualify it with the term “radical mystery” — radical because it goes right to the root of things. “The dream hath no bottom.” This mystery isn’t a problem that has yet to be solved; it is naked reality itself, as experienced when the veil falls away.

The Real is the excess that makes every Weltanschauung we super-apes construct necessarily limited and ultimately inadequate. We never get to the bottom of things. We never arrive at the final truth. There is always something that eludes us. The concept of the Real is predicated on the notion that reality exceeds the capacities of human reason — absolutely. 

Compare the way people conceived the cosmos in the Middle Ages with the way we conceive it today. Here are some pretty incommensurable differences. Some might argue that the medievals were dead wrong about the world and that we today are right. But then, medieval people laughed at the naivety of the pagans who dwelt in metaphysical ignorance before the birth of Christ. Nor is it very difficult to imagine that people living three or four hundred years from today will laugh at us for our current beliefs. As Richard Grossinger puts it in Dark Pool of Light, “the universe is overdetermined.” It is too rich, too complex, too deep, too alien for the human mind to grasp in its totality. The gap between what goes on in our cogitations and what actually is is unbridgeable, even as it moves, shifts, expands, and contracts. That gap is the Real.

Picture the following scene, a cartoon cliché. You’re standing on a darkened street corner at night. Suddenly an immense form appears on the brick wall ahead, a terrible, monstrous shadow cast by something coming around the corner. When the creature casting the shadow finally appears, it turns out to be an inoffensive kitten. The whole thing was a trick of the light. 

Now, according to our conventional way of seeing things, the part of the scene where “truth" is revealed is the moment when the kitten shows itself. It’s at that point that you realize that the monstrous shadow was an illusion, that what was actually coming towards you was in fact the most mundane, benign, and knowable of God’s creatures. Yet if we entertain the concept of the Real I’ve just outlined, things change. The moment you were closest to “truth” — the moment you were most in touch with the Real — was in the interval during which you did not know what you were looking at. For then the monstrous shadow pointed you to a zone of potentiality with which you are not familiar, an open space between the little world you think you know and the big, real, unknowable world. What I mean to say here is that it is in moments of uncertainty, when we don’t know what we’re looking at, that we are epistemologically aligned with the true nature of existence.

"But to think -- really to think -- surely this means a relinquishing of logic. It means living a new life. It means a permanent sacrifice of the dearest habits, tastes, attachments, without even the assurance hat the sacrifice will bring any compensation."

"Philosophy must have nothing in common with logic; philosophy is an art which aims at breaking the logical continuity of argument and bringing man out on the shoreless sea of imagination, the fantastic tides of everything that is equally possible and impossible."

Lev Shestov (1866-1938)

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.