Living Cosmos Panpsychism

Toward an ecological civilization

The About page and Introduction should serve to give an overview of our project exploring living in a sentient world. This week I dive into some of the ideas that lie behind the project with an outline of living cosmos panpsychism as articulated by philosopher Freya Mathews, which is one of the key perspectives that has informed our work. For living cosmos panpsychism in Freya’s most recently articulation, please see The Deep Law of the Living Cosmos, and and Ontopoetics Part I and Part II.

Panpsychism has a long, and partly repressed, history in the West.^{[1, 2]} It is currently regaining some prominence in connection with the field of consciousness studies.^[3] Freya Mathews’ living cosmos panpsychism is motivated not so much to explain the origin of consciousness as to understand the nature of the world at large and the place of the human within it.^{[4:55, 5]} Her work is more a contribution to ecological philosophy than consciousness studies.^[6-12]

Mathews points out that ‘the presuppositions and beliefs we bring to our encounter with the world act as a kind of invocation – they call up reality under a particular aspect or aspects, so that this is the aspect that reality will reveal to us in the course of the encounter’.^[13:3] In similar vein, Richard Tarnas asks us to imagine ourselves as the cosmos. Not the mechanical cosmos of conventional modern cosmology, but rather ‘a deep souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence’. Would we be more likely to reveal ourselves to those who treat us as a lifeless object, plundering our secrets; or to those who treat us respectfully as a living presence?^[14:39]

Mathews adopts a radical starting point which draws strongly on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and on Australian Aboriginal wisdom. She begins, not by assuming a world of inanimate ‘stuff’ and then wondering where ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ might come from. She starts from the position that some kind of innerness – mind, sentience, subjectivity, the will to self-realization – is a fundamental aspect of matter, just as matter is a fundamental aspect of mind: all the way up, and all the way down. Mathews asks us to consider that the cosmos as One, a coherent field of mind-matter, constituting a self-realizing, meaning-making system with an interest in its own self-existence and indeed self-increase. In pursuit of its evolution and self-expression, the One self-differentiates to form a dynamic manifold of ever-changing, finite 'modes', which can be imagined as ripples and folds in the field-like fabric of the One. Viewed from the outside, these modes appear as the empirical particulars described by physics; viewed from the inside, they are aspects of the cosmos’ ever-unfolding subjective presence and experience.

Among these modes are some that have their own capacity for conativity: they are (relatively) self-organizing, self-realizing, self-individuating, with interest in their own existence and increase.  They can be seen as selves – with a small ‘s’ to differentiate from the Self that is the cosmos – and include organisms, ecosystems, and Gaia herself, all glorious yet temporary centres of meaning and action, all of whom return in time back to the One from which they arose. Simple clumps or clusters of matter, from lumps of clay to mountains, as well as human artifacts, can be understood as ‘modes’ but not as ‘selves’: their boundaries are indistinct, and they are not self-organizing. Many panpsychists make a similar distinction, ^{[see e.g. 15]} which is different from some animist perspectives that understand stones and mountains as in some sense animate.^[16]

Thus all things, including the Earth, are integral to the fabric of the living cosmos, all of the same sentient cloth. We humans are part of a world that has depth as well as structure. And a communicative order, an order of meaning, unfolds alongside the causal, material order. The Many, as a community of subjects, reach out to each other in mutual contact and communication, co-creating a ‘poetic ecology’: the fundamental erotics of being touched by the world and touching it in return.

Poetics is not only a way of speaking about the world, it is also a communicative engagement with the world, a practice Mathews calls ‘ontopoetics’ ^{[4, 13]}. For the expression of meaning does not emanate only from the human side: the world is capable of – actively seeks – engagement with us, opening the possibility of a ‘communicative encounter, of reciprocal presence, presence that answers back when our questions send out tentacles of attention in search of it’.^[17:5] To speak of ontopoetics is to imply not only that the world is psycho-active, as panpsychism implies, but also that it is responsive to us, that we bring to it – or can bring to it, if we choose – an attention that calls it forth on a new expressive plane, a plane of meaning and not merely of causation.

This means that when we invoke the world as sentient presence, we may be graced with a response. Of course, this doesn’t take place in human language: it is necessarily a poetic order, conveying meaning in image and metaphor, taking place not in words or concepts, but through material form in a symbolic language of things – animals and birds appear; the breeze ruffles the trees, cloud formations change, all in ways that are apposite and synchronous with our invocation. This world is a place of enchantment – literally meaning ‘wrapped in chant or song or incantation’,^[18:18] its subjectivity rendered responsive by human invocation. Through the poetic we may ‘bring forth’ a world that refuses to be reduced to objects but is laden with meaning. And while Mathews holds that global features like mountains are not in themselves responsive selves, they nevertheless, as part of the fabric of the living cosmos… may provide a localized, poetic frame for addressing and invoking the cosmos. Of course, as carnal beings with limited perception and interest, we see the world through our own senses, focussed by cultural and personal constructs. But we don’t just construct our world. It is not passive but rather responds to our invocation with creative patterns of its own.

Modern humans are perceptually alienated from this poetic order: we are socialized to conceive the world as brute object, so that is what is revealed. But if we invoke a living presence then we may receive a meaningful response – if we are open to it.

To experience for ourselves the intimately apposite poetic responsiveness of place or landscape to our communicative overtures… is to be shifted on our metaphysical moorings. It is to feel graced, even loved, by world, and flooded with a gratitude, a loyalty, that rearranges in us the deepest well-springs of desire.^[4:68]

All this leads to a profoundly significant re-understanding of ethics and morality. In the Western worldview we only have ethical responsibility to other sentient beings – which means humans and at a stretch some ‘higher’ animals. Mathews’ vision suggests that, since there is an informing intelligence in the way things are, we should seek to align ourselves with this intelligence and act in accordance with it. There is, in other words, ‘an ‘ought’ at the core of the living cosmos of which we, as finite selves, need to be mindful’ ^[5:34]– not just intellectually but existentially in the way we live. That ‘ought’ lies in the fundamental mutuality within the ecology as a whole that ensures the ongoing regeneration of life. Mathews refers to this as a ‘more ontologically reverent and cosmocentric way of inhabiting the world.’

But again, the point is not just to understand but to encounter the world and rejoice in that experience. The challenge for a philosopher is not how to think about the world, but to offer perspectives that enable us to live in the world: to know the world ‘we have to walk the land’.^[19]  This leads directly to the establishment of a series of co-operative inquiries, which will be the subject of a future post.

To learn more about living cosmos panpsychism, visit Freya Mathews website; or read her latest book The Dao of Civilization.

Next week, in Learning how Land Speaks I will post Cracked Open with Love, a narrative draws from my experiences in this inquiry process

Notes

1.         Skrbina, D., Panpsychism in history: An overview, in Mind That Abides: Panpyschism in the New Millenium, D. Skrbina, Editor. 2009, John Benjamins: Amsterdam.

2.         Skrbina, D., Panpsychism in the West. 2005, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

3.         Goff, P., Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a new science of consciousness. 2019, London: Rider.

4.         Mathews, F., Panpsychism, in Interreligious Philosophical Dialogues: Volume 1 G. Oppy and N. Trakakis, Editors. 2017, Routledge. p. 45-71.

5.         Mathews, F., The Dao of Civilization: A Letter to China. 2023, London and New York: Anthem Press.

6.         Naess, A., Ecology Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an ecosophy. 1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7.         Plumwood, V., Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. 1993, London: Routledge.

8.         White, L.J., The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. Science, 1967. 155(3767): p. 1203-1207.

9.         Bateson, G., Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 1972, San Francisco: Chandler.

10.       Bortoft, H., The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way of Science. 1996, Edinburgh and New York: Floris Books and Lindisfarne Press.

11.       Rose, D.B., Nourishing terrains : Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness 1996, Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission.

12.       Hinton, D., Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our place in the Sixth Extinction. 2022, Boulder, CO: Shambhala.

13.       Mathews, F., Invitation to Ontopoetics. PAN Philosophy Activism Nature, 2009. 6: p. 1-7.

14.       Tarnas, R., Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. 2006, New York: Viking.

15.       de Quincey, C., Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter. 2002: Invisible Cities Press.

16.       Harvey, G., Animism: Respecting the living world. Second ed. 2017, London: Hurst and Company.

17.       Mathews, F., “Come with Old Khayyam and Leave the Wise to Talk”. Worldviews: Global Regions, Culture, Ecology, 2017. 21(3): p. 218-234.

18.       Mathews, F., For Love of Matter: A contemporary panpsychism. 2003, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

19.       Mathews, F., Conservation needs to include a ‘story about feeling’. Biological Conservation, 2022. 272(109668).