Footnotes2Plato Podcast

I’ll be presenting some ideas about Rudolf Steiner‘s spiritual science at Harvard Divinity School next week.It marks roughly a hundred years since his death this past spring, and Harvard is hosting this gathering to bring scholars, philosophers, and anthroposophists together to discuss Steiner’s work—its enduring relevance and its many challenges. I’m genuinely looking forward to it. It’s somewhat surprising to see a full conference on Steiner at Harvard Divinity School, because his work presents significant difficulties for academic researchers and philosophers. This isn’t only because he challenges scientific materialism—many of us do that—but because he also offers an extraordinarily detailed alternative, both theoretically and practically. He helped initiate Waldorf education, which has become the largest independent school movement in the world, as well as biodynamic agriculture and other initiatives that continue to bear fruit for individuals and communities today. At the same time, his view of the cosmos and the human place within it is quite foreign and even shocking to the refined intellectual sensibility common in contemporary academia. Even those who question materialism often hold far vaguer spiritual views. Steiner, by contrast, is very specific about the nature of the spiritual world and the activities of spiritual beings.Much of what he says rests upon and emerges from his claimed clairvoyant capacities. Very few of us would claim such capacities ourselves, and many are deeply skeptical that they could be real at all. Steiner did, however, develop and systematize various methods for cultivating these powers of perception. Some of these practices he derived from his own insight; others he inherited from the broader history of esoteric and spiritual disciplines. Among them are meditative techniques like the nightly review, undertaken before sleep as a preparation for the life review that, he says—and many other esoteric and religious traditions affirm—will occur after death. The exercise is simple in form but demanding in practice: just before going to sleep, one relives the day backwards, attempting to recall in as much detail as possible everything that occurred. The idea is that, as incarnate beings, our consciousness is wound into time by the daily rotation of the Earth, the monthly cycles of the Moon, and the yearly orbit around the Sun. We become dizzy and forgetful as a result of these astronomical rhythms. By quietly rewinding our day each night, we begin to cultivate memory as an organ of perception, preparing ourselves for the more intense reversal that will come after death, when, as Steiner and many esoteric traditions hold, we relive our lives from the standpoint of those with whom we interacted. In that tableau, our biography becomes a heaven, a hell, or something in between, depending on how we treated others. We re-experience our actions from the perspectives of those we affected. The nightly review is thus a kind of rehearsal for death, training a form of memory that is not merely autobiographical in the narrow sense, but attuned to our embeddedness in multiple cycles of life and repeated incarnations.The idea of reincarnation has a long pedigree across both Eastern and Western traditions—in the West from Pythagoras and Greek philosophy to strands of Jewish mysticism and early Christian thinkers like Origen, who entertained some form of transmigration of souls. Today, however, reincarnation is often regarded by contemporary intellectuals as, at best, “woo-woo,” if not outright embarrassing—despite serious research programs like the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, where Ed Kelly and colleagues continue the work of Ian Stevenson, taking evidence for reincarnation very seriously. Steiner’s work more or less blows the lid off our modern materialist imagination, asking us to take such ideas seriously and to situate human existence within a far broader temporal and spiritual horizon than the secular West is used to considering.Harvard Divinity School is, of course, a natural place to raise questions about meaning, ultimate significance, and the spiritual dimensions of existence. But Steiner is not simply doing theology or speculative metaphysics; he is trying to cultivate experiential modalities that would allow us to intensify our consciousness so as to come to know reality beyond the limits of the sense-bound, abstraction prone intellect. There is a lot of contemporary talk about the “expansion” of consciousness, yet, as Owen Barfield argues in his account of the evolution of consciousness, what we now call modern, secular, more or less materialist ego-consciousness is itself a contraction from a more porous, participatory mode of experience characteristic of primal peoples. Our current form of consciousness emerges through a process of differentiation and inwardization that has won a strong sense of individual selfhood and freedom, but at the cost of alienation—from nature, from one another, and even from ourselves.From an anthroposophical standpoint, the further evolution of consciousness is not simply a matter of expansion in the vague, New Age sense. It is better described as an intensification and recollection: recovering what has been lost—our participatory attunement to a living cosmos—while preserving the hard-won achievement of individual freedom and clear self-awareness. Barfield, an anthroposophist and close friend of Tolkien, Lewis, and the other Inklings, speaks of “original” and “final” participation. Original participation is a kind of unconscious participatory union with the surrounding world, lacking a strong sense of individual autonomy. Modernity has gained autonomy but largely severed participation. Final participation, as Barfield envisions it, would reunite us with the world as conscious co-creators—what Tolkien calls “sub-creators”—without dissolving our distinct spiritual individuality back into a undifferentiated world-soul. In Steiner’s view, evolution aims precisely at deeper individuation: a more free and self-conscious participation in the spiritual life of the cosmos.In my presentation at Harvard Divinity School, I’ll be exploring how Whitehead’s cosmology and metaphysics can help build a bridge between contemporary scientific and philosophical discourse, on the one hand, and some of Steiner’s more esoteric claims, on the other. Whitehead offers an academically rigorous way of overcoming the bifurcation of nature and reintegrating value, purpose, and experience into our understanding of the universe, which can, I think, make Steiner’s project more intelligible to those formed within modern scientific culture. The conference will be live-streamed for anyone who would like to tune in (I link to the conference site above). If you happen to be in the Boston area, I’d encourage you to attend in person. And after the event, I’ll share a recording of my remarks. 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This is my contribution to Michael Levin and Hananel Hazan’s Symposium on Platonic Space. It builds on several years of engagement and conversation with Levin. Here’s Levin’s Introduction to the Symposium: You can watch the other symposium talks in this playlist, which is being updated as the sessions occur. Below is a list of my prior writings about and dialogues with Michael Levin: * Michael Levin’s Latent Space of Biological Form — On where biological form “resides,” critiquing attempts to locate morphospace in Newtonian space and drawing on Eastman’s logoi framework and Peircean/Whiteheadian notions of potentiae.* Some Philosophical Implications of Michael Levin’s New Paradigm Biology — A process-philosophical response to Johannes Jaeger, arguing for an evolutionized Platonism (res potentiae, eternal objects) adequate to developmental and evolutionary data.* The Return of Form in Biology: Thinking Through Platonic Morphospace — A sustained treatment of “Platonic morphospace,” critiquing both reductive materialism and rigid Platonism and reinterpreting forms as non-agential potentiae that ingress into actual occasions.* Patterns Are Not Puppeteers: The Return and Reformation of Platonic Form in Biology — Follow-up on the “return of Platonism” in biology (Pop-Up School talk with Bonnitta Roy), critiquing the idea of patterns as agents and arguing for a reformed, process-relational Platonism where organisms are the locus of decision.* Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment – Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology — A close reading of Levin’s “Ingressing Minds” preprint, using Whitehead’s categories to distinguish forms as non-agential patterns from actual occasions as true agents.* Minds in the Making: Bringing Formal and Final Causes Back into Evolutionary Science (with Michael Levin) — Substack essay plus dialogue, framing Levin’s work as recovering formal and final causes in evolutionary science and reading his “Platonic morphospace” through Whitehead’s eternal objects and primordial valuation.* Goals Go All the Way Down: Responding to the Deacon–Levin Dialogue — On Terrence Deacon’s “normative chemistry” and Levin’s “goals all the way down,” arguing that both require a deeper ontology of possibility and value (Whitehead, Bergson) to make sense of purposiveness in nature.* The Invariance of Variation: Or Why Metaphysics Must Become Ungrounded (Dialogue with Tim Jackson) — Video + transcript engaging in ongoing dialogue with Tim Jackson about Creativity, invariance, and whether evolution can be understood without something like a realm of forms or eternal objects; includes extended discussion of Levin’s Platonic research program.Dialogues and media featuring Levin & Platonic form* Minds All Around Us: Dialoguing with Michael Levin — my reflection post on a Meaning Code conversation with Levin and Clive Thompson, situating his multi-scale cognition framework and Platonic morphospace within a broader “mind everywhere” arc.* Music, Memory, and the Song of Life (dialogue with Karen Wong) — Near-transcript and reflections on a Meaning Code dialogue where I connect Levin’s developmental morphospace and bioelectric patterning with themes of rhythm, memory, and the musicality of morphogenesis.* Platonizing Biology: A Dialogue with Michael Levin — Early public dialogue explicitly thematizing the “Platonizing” turn in biology and probing how Levin’s morphospace relates to Plato and Whitehead.* Taming the Technological Dragon, with Michael Levin — Conversation on “Technological Approaches to Mind Everywhere,” exploring the metaphysical stakes of placing organisms and machines on a continuum and the risk of sliding back into a mechanistic view of form. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

In this disputation I was defending the thesis that contemporary natural philosophy needs a new process-relational theory of forms, and that Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects can play that role. Adam and Jacob structured the session as a kind of updated medieval disputatio: I offered a thesis and initial exposition; Jacob replied with critical questions; I responded; then Adam entered with his own objections and developments; and we ended with a more free-form exchange.Reforming Platonism in the Context of the Evolution of ConsciousnessI began by situating the realism/nominalism debate in an evolution of consciousness, drawing on Rudolf Steiner. I did not want the conversation to be a purely scholastic wrangle about universals; I wanted to frame nominalism and realism as historically and developmentally appropriate stages in how human beings relate to ideas.In the ancient Greek origins of Western philosophy (ie, the physiologoi, and still residually in Plato and Aristotle), I suggested that ideas were experienced almost as perceived in the world, as though the intelligible structure of the cosmos shone through phenomena. With Christianity and the long interiorization of thought, ideas came to be experienced more as inner constructs. The medieval nominalists arise in part to protect divine omnipotence (God cannot be constrained by eternal structures), but on Steiner’s reading they also express the growing autonomy of the human “I”: ideas are now felt as something we make rather than something we receive. This trend intensifies in Kant, where categories are explicitly the mind’s contributions to a phenomenal world, while the “things in themselves” recede beyond our reach.From this, I argued that nominalism has been developmentally necessary—it fostered modern science and the modern sense of self—but has become spiritually and conceptually constraining. We need a post-nominalist realism about form that does not regress to pre-modern essentialism. That is where I positioned Whitehead’s eternal objects.I formulated my core thesis along these lines:I am defending a reformed process-relational Platonism that entails the reality of an eternally evolving field of universal forms irreducible to but not ontologically independent of the historical accumulation of particular facts.Then I sketched Whitehead’s account, wherein eternal objects provide a metaphysical condition for recognition of invariants and thus for scientific knowledge. Drawing on Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), I emphasized Whitehead’s claim that “objects enter into experience by recognition.” Science presupposes that “the same object is recognized as related to diverse events.” This recurrence is what makes invariant laws, measurements, and rational prediction possible. Eternal objects are not the same as laws of physics; laws and physical structures are historically emergent. Eternal objects are more basic: they express a structure of possibility that gives order to what has not yet been actualized.Whitehead’s metaphysics constitutes an inversion of classical Platonism. Unlike the caricatured “two-world” Platonism (where Ideas are more real than appearances), Whitehead grants ontological priority to actual occasions of experience. Forms are real, but “deficient in actuality.” Forms do not act as efficient causes; they do not push the world around and are not stamped onto passive matter. Agency belongs to actual occasions and societies (enduring organisms, human minds, etc.), which select and ingress possibilities. So rather than the world being a pale copy of a higher realm, we have a world of concrete experiential events that draw from a field of potential form. It is a kind of inverted or reformed Platonism.I also introduced my dialogue with Michael Levin: Levin’s “platonic morphospace” in developmental biology seems to require a genuine, non-reducible field of form guiding morphogenesis, especially via bioelectric patterning that can’t be reduced to genes alone. Levin tends to give morphospace itself the agency, turning organisms into puppets of the form-field. I’ve been pushing back with Whitehead: forms are real but not agents; organisms and occasions are the agents. I want to affirm Levin’s reintroduction of formal and final causality into biology while adjusting the metaphysics so we do not slip back into an over-strong, two-world Platonism.Finally, I gestured toward Whitehead’s God: God gives a primordial valuation and ordering of eternal objects—a vector toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—but does not determine what is actualized. God’s consequent nature receives and integrates all finite decisions, leading to an “evolving eternity”: actual facts “cast the shadow of truth back upon the eternal.”Jacob’s response: suspicion of forms and “eternal objects”Jacob began by articulating some strong reservations about my view, especially around the notion of eternal objects.From my perspective, his main points were:* Theological unease and God-of-the-gaps worry* He worried that eternal objects are more a theological than a philosophical posit. Whitehead, in his view, might be “too much of a theologian.”* He raised the classic concern: are eternal objects and God filling explanatory gaps that could be handled by a more modest, empiricist account of abstraction?* Analogy with the fallacy of misplaced concreteness* Jacob wondered if eternal objects are in danger of reifying abstractions—exactly what Whitehead warns us against.* He was unconvinced that invoking eternal objects avoids this fallacy rather than committing a more subtle version of it.* Transcendence, normativity, and the danger of stifling novelty* He associated Platonic form-talk with appeals to transcendence that smuggle in normative standards in ways that can stifle experiment and novelty (socially, ethically, politically).* He acknowledged that Whitehead often seems to say something Platonist and then something apparently opposed in the same breath, which made it hard for him to see what exactly is being claimed.* Two key questions: “eternal” and “objects”* Why “eternal”? If the field of possibility is evolving, why use a term that classically implies immutability? Why not speak of “transient abstract structures” on a much larger timescale?* Why “objects”? Given that eternal objects have no independent efficacy and reveal nothing without the world-process, in what sense are they “objects” at all?* Why not just mind-based abstraction?* Jacob asked why we need anything beyond the idea that abstraction is an emergent capacity of finite minds.* For him, it is not clear why that is insufficient: we can imagine forms as patterns abstracted from experience without positing a separate category of “eternal objects.”Overall, Jacob pressed me to explain:* what problem eternal objects solve that a lean account of abstraction does not,* and why their “eternal” and “object-like” status is warranted.My response to Jacob: cosmologizing the transcendentalIn responding to Jacob, I tried to clarify:* Philosophical, not devotional, role of God* I stressed that Whitehead invokes God as a metaphysical requirement to account for the transition from indefinite possibility to definite actuality, analogous (but not identical) to Aristotle’s metaphysical need for an unmoved mover.* Historically, science itself, I argued, presupposes some faith in the commensurability of mind and nature. Whitehead believes this calls for metaphysical articulation, not just tacit acceptance.* Eternal objects and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness* Eternal objects are explicitly not concrete; they are pure potentialities. The fallacy, for Whitehead, is treating abstractions as if they were concrete. He is not denying the reality of abstraction.* As Isabelle Stengers emphasizes, for Whitehead abstraction is part of nature—not an invention of language. Sense organs, nervous systems, all sorts of organisms already “abstract” by filtering and selecting relevant aspects of their environment.* Why “eternal” and “object”?* Eternal objects are “eternal” because they are not in space-time. Space-time, for Whitehead, is itself an abstraction—a network of metrical relations among occasions of experience. To treat space-time as concrete is itself a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.* “Object,” in Whitehead’s technical vocabulary, simply means a potential that can be prehended, what can be taken as a potential ingredient in an occasion’s experience. “Actual subjects” (occasions) prehend “objects” (potentials). So “object” here names their role in experience, not a thing-like substance.* Radical empiricism and the insufficiency of pure nominalism* I appealed to the Peirce–James–Whitehead lineage: James’s nominalist pragmatism is, in Peirce and Whitehead’s view, not mathematically literate enough to support the precision and invariance required for science.* From that perspective, a robust realism about form is a condition for making sense of scientific practice itself. Eternal objects are Whitehead’s way of giving that realism a processual, non-substantialist formulation.In short, I tried to show that eternal objects are not ad hoc metaphysical luxuries but an attempt to “cosmologize the transcendental”: to give a cosmological account of the conditions of possibility for recurrence, measurement, and rational discourse itself.Adam’s intervention: eternity, transcendental structure, and the Good beyond beingAdam then entered with three major themes:* Why eternity matters for form* He granted that one can imagine a more “bootstrapped” view of form: forms as emergent, contingent patterns that arise from the historical interplay of events, perhaps in the way Deleuze ontologizes Humean associationism.* But he argued that this remains too contingent. Besides the contingency of particular forms, there is a deeper level: the conditions of possibility for the emergence and recombination of forms at all.* Here Adam drew an analogy with Kant: Hume’s associationism explains our actual habits of thought; Kant’s transcendental arguments reveal the a priori structure needed for there to be experience and knowledge in the first place.* Transposed to metaphysics: Whitehead’s eternal objects can be seen as a kind of cosmic a priori, the invariant patterning of possibility that makes the emergence of forms and their evolution intelligible.He suggested that the “eternal” in eternal objects names exactly this: the definiteness and constraint structure of possibility, which does not itself change, even though the actual configurations and forms do.* Questioning my strong process view of the knower* Adam quoted a passage from my paper on eternal objects about how “no thinker thinks twice” because the self is a streaming society of actual occasions.* He questioned whether this goes too far: is there not a genuine continuity and repetition in human knowing, grounded in memory, that is necessary for thought at all?* In other words, he wondered if my process account might be overstating discontinuity at the expense of the coherence of the knowing subject.* Creativity, the Good beyond being, and Whitehead’s God* Adam brought in Plato’s “Good beyond being” and Nishitani’s śūnyatā (emptiness) as a luminous, pre-intelligible condition, nearer to us than anything else.* He asked whether Whitehead has anything like this: is creativity analogous to the Good beyond being or śūnyatā?* He worried that in Whitehead, God may lack the full transcendence of classical theism (the Augustinian God who is “closer to me than I am to myself” yet beyond all beings), and wondered whether Whitehead’s emphasis on process and concreteness risks losing this dimension.Adam’s intervention helped sharpen the thought that eternal objects and Whitehead’s God can be read as metaphysical attempts to say something like: there is a non-contingent, non-spatiotemporal, value-laden condition for the emergence of novelty and form—akin to a processual version of Plato’s Good or Nishitani’s luminous emptiness.My further clarifications: creativity, God, and evolving eternityIn replying to Adam, I emphasized that, at the level of cosmic epochs, I endorsed full anti-essentialism: laws of physics, elements, biological species, etc. are all historico-contingent “societies” (enduring patterns). At the metaphysical level, however, there must be some invariants if rational discourse and metaphysics are going to be possible at all. Eternal objects and actual occasions are those invariant categories.Creativity is the ultimate, in Whitehead’s terms; God is “the first accident of creativity,” a creature of creativity. Yet how God exists—primordial valuation of possibility and consequent reception of actual history—is categorically necessary for any world in which experience and value occur. This allows a process version of something like the Good beyond being: the good beyond space-time, ordering possibilities without determining outcomes.I reiterated that Whitehead’s “evolving eternity” need not be a contradiction if we distinguish the primordial nature of God (the ordered field of possibility, analogous to Nishitani’s illuminating emptiness) and the consequent nature, in which the achieved values of history are preserved. Eternity, on this view, is enriched by the passage of time, without undermining the non-spatiotemporal character of the field of possibility itself.Regarding the knowing self, I stood by Whitehead’s notion that the finite subject is “occasional,” but acknowledged that the stream of occasions forming my personal ego-history does provide real continuity and memory—so the process view does not deny coherence, it relocates it.Later discussion: Deleuze, the syntheses of time, and Nietzsche’s inverted PlatonismIn the final part of the conversation, Jacob and Adam pushed further into Deleuze and Nietzsche. Jacob explored whether eternal objects might be best understood as transcendental structures akin to Deleuze’s virtual or to the “third synthesis of time” (the pure and empty form of time). He distinguished between the intensive field and processes of synthesis (contraction) that generate continuity, and the moment where synthesis breaks and a selection is made—a site where eternal objects might enter as the structured horizon of possible paths.Adam brought in Nietzsche as another “inverter” of Platonism: For Nietzsche, we are trapped in the cave of intelligibility, trying to get back to the free air of sense. The ideal world is the fiction of a more primordial play of appearances. Deleuze inherits this: the intelligible is sculpted from the play of sense, not the other way around. We asked how Whitehead’s “inversion” differs: rather than simply reversing the hierarchy, he offers a dipolarity between concrete events and abstract potentials.I suggested that Whitehead’s move preserves Nietzsche’s insight about the primacy of becoming and aesthetic evaluation, but insists that the very possibility of coherent discourse about becoming presupposes some real structure of possibility—what I am calling a reformed process-relational account of Platonic forms.Outcome: agreement on the need for a new theory of formsAt the end, Adam and Jacob both assented to my thesis as formulated:Contemporary natural philosophy needs a new theory of forms.They did so without committing themselves to my preferred Whiteheadian solution in every detail, but they agreed on the central point: we cannot make sense of science, biology, and experience purely in terms of already-actual particulars and mind-invented names. Some kind of real field of form—however named (eg, as an immanent plane of viritual multiplicity or as a realm of eternal objects, etc)—must be acknowledged.For my part, I tried to show that Whitehead’s eternal objects are not a relapse into “two-world” Platonism but a process-relational theory of form; that this theory can illuminate contemporary scientific work like Levin’s morphospace; and that it fits into a broader evolution-of-consciousness narrative where nominalism did necessary work, but now requires a higher synthesis.The closing joke I offered captures the spirit of my position: nominalism can rename forms into oblivion, but the very capacity to coin and adjudicate the suitability of “mere names” already presupposes a shared space of meaning or semantic network that outruns any particular utterance. Whatever we decide in disputation, form is already at work in every act of judgement. In that sense, eternal objects—under one name or another—remain undefeated. 😊Links to other essays mentioned in our disputation: * “Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects” By Matthew David Segall in Whitehead at Harvard, 1925-1927 ed. by Joseph Petek and Brian Henning (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).* “Whitehead’s Transcendental Cosmology: The Speculative Transformation of the Concept of Logical Construction” By James Bradley in Archives de Philosophie 56, 1993, 3-28.* “Whitehead’s Niezsche: An Introduction to, and Presentation of A.N. Whitehead’s Marked Copy of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power” By Peter Sjöstedt-H in philosopher.eu (3: 2016). Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Timothy Jackson and I went deep into descendental philosophy and aesthetic ontology, core concepts developed in my last book Crossing the Threshold (2023).I try to argue against both scientistic neutrality and dogmatic theology. I believe that any attempt at thinking the most general conditions of reality inevitably touches the spiritual. If it did not then natural science would suffice and metaphysics would be superfluous. One of the premises of descendental philosophy is that our imagination is irreducibly cosmotheanthropomorphic. Our task as metaphysicians and as scientists is not to purge but to discipline and these anthropomorphisms, keeping mythopoetic language in play without letting it legislate. Process-relational ontology (a.k.a. ontology as an account of ontogenesis) implies ontological pluralism: all philosophizing begins amid a buzzing democracy of fellow co-creators, with no Sky Daddy beyond experience that we might crib to impose fixed Universals or Laws upon the living flux. Metaphysics after the confrontation with nihilism is the search for shared sources of vital intelligibility that invite us into novel forms of togetherness without ever pretending to subsume otherness once and for all. Metaphysics must become synonymous with continual life reform, enabling a process of ongoing (trans)personal individuation as an antidote to politico-theological capture.Ultimately Tim and I are asking a surprisingly practical question that sits underneath arguments about science, spirituality, and politics: how do we make sense of a world that is constantly changing without pretending we can stand outside it? In other words, what can metaphysics still do for living, learning, and acting together?First, we both agree there is no “view from nowhere.” Every claim about reality is made from somewhere by embodied persons with histories, needs, and hopes. Second, facts and values aren’t cleanly separable: what we notice as “fact” is already shaped by what we care about. Third, the right scale for moral and political life begins with persons in relationship, not with ready-made universal formulas. This is where Sloterdijk’s idea of “life-reform” helps: before we reach for grand revolutions or party platforms, we need practices that change how we live, perceive, and relate, habits that contribute to the always ongoing work of natural and cultural renewal.In affirming an “aesthetic ontology” I’m saying that reality only shows up through appearances, images, and felt meanings. Imagination isn’t make-believe but how worlds get made. To say the world is made of images is to say it is made of value-facts or fact-values. “Firstness” (Peirce) points to sheer, unfiltered presence before we fit it into reasons; Tim thinks staying close to this kind of particularity, especially in contact with nonhuman life, keeps philosophy honest.Rather than treating a unitary physics as the one true bottom layer, we explore how biology’s feel for differentiation, adaptation, and historical genesis can teach physics something about time and the production of novelty. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

We just wrapped the “Forever Jung” conference co-hosted by CIIS and the San Francisco Jung Institute. Tim couldn’t be with us in person, but I enjoyed his Zoom presentation on Jung and Simondon (video of his talk should be online soon; you can listen to mine here). Below are some scattered thoughts the draw together some of my comments in the dialogue with Tim. The parallels between Jung and Simondon aren’t accidental; there’s a real line of influence. Simondon’s very choice of the term “individuation” likely owes something to Jung. At minimum they are circling the same problem from different angles. What matters, though, are the structural connections: both think individuation as an ongoing process grounded in a pre-individual field (akin to Jung’s pleroma) that is never entirely exhausted by any formed individual.…Simondon distinguishes phases or domains of individuation:the physical, the vital, the psychic, and the transindividual (or collective). It’s tempting to treat physical individuation as a “once-and-done” affair: a crystal forms, and there you have it. But that picture is too tidy. Even the crystal, in practice and in principle, remains open to energetic, structural, and relational potentials that are latent in its milieu. Alchemy is a useful counterexample to the “finished crystal” myth: it keeps reminding us that materiality can be potentiated such that the vital and the psychic spill out of it without any need for an ontological gap. Ontogenesis (=individuation as a non-axiomatizable, ongoing genesis) runs through all the domains. The pre-individual is not a stage that gets left behind but a depth that remains available.This is where neoteny becomes philosophically illuminating. Biologically, humans maintain juvenile plasticity far longer than other primates. That extended openness supports learning, culture, and symbolic transformation. Vital, psychi, and collective individuation depend on a kind of ontological neoteny: a maintained conduit to the pre-individual reservoir of potentials. Jung’s (or a Jungian’s) diagram of the psyche as a cone threaded by a lava tube that reaches down to a “central fire” captures this beautifully. The individual sits atop various accreted layers—family, clan, nation, civilization, ancestral animality—but the tube remains open to the source. The pre-individual (Jung’s pleroma) continues to feed individuation; sedimentation never seals the passage.…Bringing this into conversation with contemporary physics helps clarify the stakes. Simondon’s pre-individual field resonates with possibilist approaches in quantum physics (eg, Epperson and Kastner’s res potentiae, and Stuart Kauffman’s insistence on “unprestatable” futures). In Laplacian determinism, unpredictability is merely epistemic. On the possibilist view, the openness is ontological: the space of future possibilities is not derivable even in principle—not by us, and not by any hypothetical divine intellect. That claim is relevant not only in biology but also in physics, where the same ontogenetic depth that Simondon and Jung articulate at vital and psychic phases is already at work. Possibility, properly ontologized, is like the lava that has not yet hardened into rock.Our psyches typically repressed the originary surges for good reason. Open the lava tube too widely and you don’t get sages, you get messiah complexes and psychosis. Individuation requires modulating our commerce with the depths, not submerging ourselves in them.…I don’t want to collapse Simondon into Plotinus, but there’s a family resemblance worth mapping. Plotinus’s One is “beyond being,” not a member of the class of ones, not a countable unity. It overflows; it is fecund. Simondon and Deleuze rearticulate this pre-categorical source as metastable, pre-individual difference—less a supreme principle than a field of tensions and potentials out of which individuations precipitate. The point of contact is not doctrinal but functional: both accounts deny that formed being is self-explanatory and both require a more primordial, generative depth.Seen genealogically, Western philosophy keeps wrestling with a paradox inherited from Parmenides: “Being is.” Zeno then breaks motion on the wheel of abstraction. Experience of the arrow hitting its target contradicts the geometrical deduction that it never can (it can only halve the distance infinitely), leaving a split between lived becoming and intellectual necessity. One recurring fix has been to postulate a mediating Logos. But we should handle the term carefully. Logos is polysemic and, in the oldest Heraclitean sense, names the very possibility of signification—the mediating, coordinating work that makes sense-making possible at all. In that mercurial register, Logos looks a lot like Simondon’s account of thought: not a prior blueprint but the operational relay across domains via analogical operations. Read this way, Logos is not a static principle pre-forming all outcomes but the active mediation through which new cosmoi emerge. This reading also underwrites Jung’s revisionary Christology in Answer to Job and Aion: Logos signifies the demand that even the divine undergo transformation in history—divinity and world, creator and creature, must co-individuate.…This all dovetails nicely with Whitehead. Creativity is ultimate; it is what allows each concrescence to be self-creating by recapitulating the original surge of becoming. God, in Whitehead’s speculative scheme, is not the metaphysical ground but an “accident of Creativity”—the most generic accident, whose primordial valuation of possibilities is then inherited by all subsequent actualities. Read in a Simondonian way, the primordial nature of God functions like a limiting ideal that structures a field of potentials without deductively fixing outcomes. The consequent nature (ie, God’s historical-relational pole) prevents any slide back into static perfection. Eternity here is not fixity; it is inexhaustible life.All of this lets us recast a persistent theological temptation: the confusion of completeness with perfection. Jung is explicit that the drive to cosmic perfection produces shadow—an Antichristic backlash that wrecks the entire project of cosmogenesis. Historically, Augustinian predestination installs a theological determinism that gets secularized as Laplacian physics.…Jung, Simondon, and Whitehead both affirm continuity across domains: psyche is not a different substance from physics or biology. It is an operational difference, a distinctive regime by which occasions inherit, transform, and reintegrate potentials. There is no ontological gap. So: Simondon’s pre-individual, Jung’s pleroma, Plotinus’s overflowing One, Whitehead’s Creativity, Schelling’s ground/existence polarity, Spinoza’s infinite substance (understood dynamically), and the quantum possibilists’ res potentiae all converge, not on a single doctrine, but on a shared refusal of onto-epistemic closure. Individuation is the ongoing mediation of the intensive depth of the preindividual tension with once-occurrent processes of formation, of possibility and actualization, part and whole. Any adequate account of evolutionary ontogenesis must allow the lava to flow, honoring the central fire without being consumed by it. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Below is ChatGPT’s summary of the transcript: Matt Segall opens by situating his talk at CIIS—an institution he frames as striving for a richly textured “planetary culture” that honors particular traditions rather than flattening them into a global consumer monoculture. Within that horizon he chooses Christianity, not to survey its whole archetypal breadth, but to probe one urgent facet: its treatment of evil. In a moment of social “descent,” he warns, we’re tempted to project evil onto others; Jung’s great service, he says, is to recall the shadow in each of us and to insist on individuation—an inner reconciliation work without which societies devour themselves.He then locates himself autobiographically: raised within Judaism and evangelical Christianity, first repelled by the latter’s public face and drawn toward science and skepticism, he was later turned by Jung’s psychology of religion—and a formative psilocybin experience—toward the unavoidable psychic reality of the “Christ archetype.” That personal arc becomes his template for a collective task: those shaped by the West cannot simply repress Christianity; if we do, its energies will be co-opted by destructive and idolatrous forces.From here he lays out Jung’s method: bracket metaphysics, take the psyche as real, and treat religious figures—God, Christ, Satan, angels—as experientially effective complexes. He quotes Jung to underscore individuated agency and the danger of a culture that believes only in “physical facts,” forgetting the psychic conditions under which technologies (and catastrophes) are born. Individuation, in this key, is the ego’s descent into relation with other archetypal powers, not a flight into solipsism.Segall’s Jungian reading of Christianity hinges on Answer to Job and Aion. In Job, Jung sees the creator shamed into moral growth by the creature: Job’s fidelity reveals Yahweh’s shadow (with Satan as a “doubting thought” in the Godhead) and necessitates the incarnation—God must become human to attain moral balance. Yet, Segall stresses, in Aion Jung argues that the Christ event didn’t finish the work: the portrayal of Christ as pure and perfect light constellates a compensatory Antichrist. Jung collapses this shadow into “Lucifer,” and it is here that Segall introduces Rudolf Steiner to deepen the picture.Steiner differentiates evil into two poles: the Luciferic (inflated spirituality, aesthetic rapture, prideful escape from matter) and the Ahrimanic (cold materialism, technocratic reduction, hard intellect without heart). For Steiner, evil is not a privation (as in Augustine or Aquinas) but has positive being and pedagogical purpose; the task is not avoidance but balance. Segall quotes Steiner to the effect that personality develops “through resistance,” in the rhythmic to-and-fro between these poles. He pairs this with Jung’s demolition of the “privation” theory of evil in Aion, arguing that the will to purify ourselves by projecting evil onto others is itself the evil we should fear.To render the balance imaginally, Segall turns to Steiner’s monumental carving The Representative of Humanity. Christ stands mediating between the descending Lucifer and the chthonic Ahriman, receiving both “in love.” Lucifer cannot bear that love and tumbles wing-broken; Ahriman cannot bear it and is bound by the earth’s gold veins. Steiner doubles each figure—the supersensible Lucifer above Christ’s left and the subsensible Ahriman below Christ’s right, and their earthly images—suggesting, in Jung’s vocabulary, the distinction between archetypes themselves in their numinous reality, and our more manageable archetypal images of them. At the top left of the composition, Steiner places “cosmic humor,” which Segall links to Jung’s “missing fourth” (matter, the feminine, the shadow/evil) needed to complete the over-spiritual Trinity; humor keeps the drama from curdling into sentimental grandiosity and returns us to proportion.Segall then widens the historical lens. Drawing on Jung’s zodiacal meditation in Aion, he reads Christianity’s entrance in the age of Pisces: the early, vertical “upward” fish (transcendence) gives way after the Renaissance to the horizontal fish (worldly attention)—Ficino’s Plato translations, nascent natural science, exploration, capitalism, and intensified inwardness. Steiner dates a similar shift into what he calls the age of the consciousness soul. What looks “anti-Christian” often manifests Christianity’s other face: a monotheistic obsession mutating from the Good to the One Truth of natural science. Jung remains agnostic about metaphysics; Steiner insists these beings are real and exist within a spiritual angelic hierarchy. Segall suggests we can fruitfully read each through the other.The talk’s contemporary bite comes in his application to politics and technology. Rather than fetishizing a singular Antichrist, he sees today’s Ahrimanic signature in the deification of technology and AI, and in the easy capture of “spiritual but not religious” impulses by consumer capitalism—Lucifer and Ahriman colluding. The remedy is not purgation by scapegoat but conscious symbol-work and ethical practice: remembering what we’ve repressed in Christianity and redeeming it for planetary purposes.He closes by returning to individuation’s dignity and burden. Following Steiner (and resonating with Teilhard), he suggests the human is not merely another animal species but a new kingdom of life, which means each person is, in effect, their own species. No universal prescription for reconciling spirit and matter will do: each of us must individuate in the unique way that only we can. If we refuse that inner work, the collective expresses our disowned conflicts as fate—fragmentation, mass-mindedness, and moral projection. Jung’s insights, Segall argues, are not only relevant; they are urgent.In the Q&A, three threads deepen the thesis. First, an audience member urges Segall to make the Jung–Steiner conversation a book and celebrates “cosmic humor” as a multivalent “fourth” alongside matter, the feminine, and evil; comedy functions as a cultural immune system against tyrannical seriousness. Second, on Goethe as connective tissue, Segall shows how Jung maps the four psychological functions through Faust, and how Steiner’s Lucifer/Ahriman can be read as lopsided pairs (intuition–feeling vs sensing–thinking); he also links Böhme’s Ungrund and Plato’s chōra in the Timaeus as figures of the ever-missing fourth. Third, responding to whether we can “make up” new symbols, he underscores Jung’s active imagination as a disciplined poiesis-meets-discovery practice that lets adequate symbols emerge rather than be engineered. Finally, asked to name Christ’s sayings that cut against our splitting impulse, he highlights “Let the one without sin cast the first stone,” the Sermon on the Mount, and the refusal of judgment as the radical heart of the tradition: evil feeds on our attempt to annihilate it; meeting it with love allows it to consume itself.The through-line is consistent: hold the tension of opposites without denial or nihilism; cultivate humor as the missing fourth; renew our moral and symbolic intelligence so that Christianity’s repressed depths serve a planetary culture rather than a fascist politics. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

For more information about this conference, visit the Center for Process Studies website. My remarks were based on this essay: Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

This was recorded on Saturday, September 13, 2025 as part of the Frontiers of Knowledge event in Aspen, CO. UPDATE: the full video including Bruce Damer’s talk is now available: Below is a lightly edited transcript of my remarks. Good morning, everyone. I want to begin by thanking you all for allowing your curiosity to draw you here. We are engaged in a project of mythic proportion, as Bruce was just alluding to. We are trying to usher in a new story of what it means to be human and to find our place in this universe. That is a collaborative effort. Dr. Bruce Damer and I began collaborating about six years ago, when we were invited by a benefactor of a group of artists to inspire them with some big-picture ideas about the origin of life and process philosophy.This was back in what I call the BC era—Before COVID—in 2019. And I think the pandemic is a vivid illustration of the dangers of a certain kind of anthropocentrism. A microbe, a tiny little virus, shut down the entire machinery of our civilization for a time, and in the aftermath triggered immense social and political discord. So while it’s true that human beings—especially in our industrial form of presence on this Earth—have become a geological force, we are also quite fragile, as individuals and as a civilization. COVID made that fragility unmistakably clear.What I want to share with you builds on many of the threads we’ve already heard this morning from Brian Swimme, Jude Currivan, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, concerning the role of the human being. The task is to avoid both extremes: on the one hand, crude anthropocentrism, and on the other, a crude anthropomorphism. One way beyond the anthropocentric view—which assumes that all meaning, value, and consciousness are locked up inside human skulls—is to reinhabit an animist universe. Every pre-scientific culture on every continent had an animistic understanding of nature: that consciousness is not confined to humans, but pervades the sun and stars, the plants, the rocks, the animals.Modern science, in a rather conceited way, taught us to dismiss this view. We were told the sun is just a ball of gas, rocks are just crystals of atoms, and the world is, at bottom, dead. But instead of projecting this mechanistic image onto the cosmos, I think we can recover a kind of animism. The story of cosmogenesis that we heard this morning, and Bruce’s account of biogenesis, invite us to imagine matter not as dead stuff but as alive with potential. Of course, the risk of recovering animism is that we might veer into anthropomorphism. But the balance is worth seeking, and in fact our survival—and that of many other species—may depend on our capacity to hold that tension.Bruce has been describing a paradigm shift within a special science, within biology, even within the subdiscipline of abiogenesis, the study of life’s origins. It has been momentous to watch this happen in real time. When Bruce and I first started talking six years ago, he was just beginning to publish disruptive papers, stirring controversy among scientists. Now, six years later, it seems clear the paradigm shift is well underway. As a scientist and a philosopher, we’ve reflected together on how paradigm shifts open space for deeper collaboration between the two disciplines. Read our co-authored chapter “The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life” here.I am especially drawn to metaphysics—not the Barnes & Noble kind of metaphysics about crystals, incense, or tarot cards, but metaphysics in its original sense: the inquiry into what conditions make science itself possible. What kind of universe must this be, such that conscious agents concerned with truth could emerge? That’s the metaphysical question.This is why Bruce’s work caught my attention: it carries cosmological implications. Cosmology is not only the study of the large-scale structure and dynamics of the universe; it is also the study of how humans tell stories and make meaning to orient ourselves in that cosmic context. Modern science, for good reasons, once severed value, subjectivity, and mind from fact, matter, and measurement. That severance gave us brilliant discoveries. It also oversaw tremendous devastation. Now the task is to bring them back together. Science and myth, science and religion in the broad sense, are not opposites. Science emerges from myth, presupposes myth, and is sustained by cultural values like the love of truth. Where does that love come from? From a long cultural lineage that preceded science.The invitation here, again, is to hold the tension between the fear of anthropomorphism and the risks of anthropocentrism, so that we can tell a story—rooted in scientific evidence—that replants civilization in the living Earth out of which we emerged. As a civilization, we’ve lost the plot. Our social, political, and cultural disputes are important, but they unfold within a larger cosmic context that we’ve largely forgotten. A renewed cosmological orientation could help us resolve those disputes more wisely.The paradigm shift in biology and abiogenesis may be an indicator of something larger: a cosmological revolution akin to what Copernicus set in motion. By recovering ancient heliocentric ideas, Copernicus catalyzed a new worldview and a new kind of civilization. Before him, the Earth was imagined as the still center of a tiny universe, encased by crystalline spheres and surrounded by the divine. Copernicus’s heliocentrism—motivated partly by spiritual concerns—elevated the human intellect. To imagine the solar system from the sun’s point of view required imagination, mathematics, and a leap beyond immediate experience.Today, as we live through a paradigm shift in the life sciences, we are also living through a cosmological revolution in how we understand our place in the universe. The cosmos has always been alive, but we forgot. We grew distracted, and now the challenge is to remember.Before we can explain how life originated, we need to define what life is. That is no trivial matter. Philosophers of biology debate it endlessly. Is a virus alive? It requires a living cell to reproduce, but outside that context it just sits inert. Bruce’s work on wet-dry cycling and the formation of polymers suggests that the line between “nonliving” chemistry and living organisms is not a hard break but a gradient. Life is continuous with the chemical creativity of matter itself. There is no absolute gap.This reframing implies that life did not emerge from dead matter banging around randomly. Rather, there is a spectrum of vitality reaching all the way back to the Big Bang. Perhaps “life” should be reserved for biology, but we can say the cosmos is pervaded by creativity. Alfred North Whitehead used that term to name the cosmic capacity for novelty. Creativity is not just a human trait—it is the fundamental character of the universe itself.This means that when we ask about the origin of life, we are also asking about the origin of matter, and behind that, about the origin of mind. Charles Darwin himself half-joked that asking about life’s origin was as difficult as asking about the origin of matter. Yet as philosophers, we must push further: What is it in the nature of things that makes science itself possible? Why is there a universe that generates beings like us, who can reflect upon its origins and imagine its futures?We find ourselves in a strange loop: the universe gives rise to minds, and those minds reflect back on the universe. Matter, life, and mind are not separate compartments bridged by miraculous leaps. They are stages of one creative process. Human beings are not anomalies in the cosmos; we are exemplifications of its creativity. The universe is trying to understand itself through us.A concrete example of what it would mean to live in such a cosmos is love. Even in our secular civilization, love remains enchanting. We seek romantic love, love our families, our friends, our pets, and, for many of us here, the natural world. Yet over the past centuries, influenced by science, we have become embarrassed by love. We shrink it down into a mere private emotion. But if we step into this new worldview, we can recognize love as a cosmic principle, inherited from billions of years of evolution. Our capacity to love is not something we invent; it is something we inherit.As heirs of this evolutionary achievement, we have a responsibility to carry it forward. Values like truth, beauty, and goodness are not projections of ours onto a meaningless universe. They are the fruit of cosmic creativity, billions of years in the making.And so, as much as everything I’ve said is grounded in science, it is also a new way of relating to science. Stephen Weinberg once said, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” Richard Feynman, another brilliant physicist, told us, “Nature is absurd. Don’t try to understand it. Just find something you love to do.” Their humility was real, but their imagination of science’s meaning was too small.Why are we curious? Why do we hunger for truth? Because curiosity itself is cosmic. The quest for truth, for beauty, and for goodness springs from the creative core of the universe. Discoveries are not just facts; they are beautiful, enlivening, and transformative. They give purpose. We need a new adventure to replace the old myth of capitalist technological progress.That new adventure is the collaborative work of re-storying our civilization. What you’ve heard this morning and what you’ll continue to hear today are invitations, lures, and sparks meant to inspire you to carry this story forward—into your families, your communities, your lives—so that we might live into a new worldview together.Thank you.Q&AQ: How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a philosopher and to do that for a living?A: I didn’t even know the word until high school, when I had an influential teacher who inspired me to become a teacher myself. But before I had the language for it, I had the experience. When I was seven, I suddenly realized one day that my perfectly healthy mother—she’s still alive and well—was going to die. That realization threw me into an existential turmoil that lasted for weeks. What got me through it was realizing that I myself would also die, and that my own consciousness had come into being and would eventually transform into something else. That awareness opened a window on my existence that I’ve never stopped looking through. At this point, I think I’ve climbed out the window.Q: How do you account for the truth, beauty, and goodness that seem to be at the base of everything? A: It isn’t something accountable in the ordinary sense. Each of us has feelings—many feelings—that shape our sense of purpose and meaning. You can explain some of these through anthropology or evolutionary biology. Certain attractions or aversions, feelings of disgust, emerged at certain stages in primate or animal evolution. But if you keep pushing the question further back, you reach a point where even the first cell had something like hunger. Where did that come from?Brian described the formation of stars in organic terms: stars are hungry for energy, they have life cycles, they are born, they live, and they die. Values like truth, beauty, and goodness are admittedly human articulations, but I believe they describe a texture of value that goes all the way down. Traditionally, human beings have related to the source of these values—the cosmic attractors drawing us toward truth, beauty, and goodness—as spirit. In modernity, we’ve leaned into dualism, dividing nature from spirit. This fueled confusion: religion started treating scripture as science, while science imagined it could explain everything with facts alone. Both sides lost sight of the larger whole.Just as many of us are embarrassed to think of love as anything more than a private emotion, we are also embarrassed to speak of spirit. For some today, “spirituality” has become a vague sense that “something is out there,” a mystery we can’t quite explain. Sociologists call this the “spiritual but not religious” crowd. It’s a positive sign of openness, but it can easily be co-opted by consumerism. Spirituality becomes a shopping mall: a little Buddhism here, a little Taoism there, maybe some cosmic Christ—eclectic but noncommittal. Traditionally, religion formed character, often through assent to dogmas—community-tested ideas with transformative power. I don’t think we can return to traditional religion as it was, but I do think we need to be less noncommittal about spirituality. We need to recover ideas like spirit and the divine without imagining they conflict with science.So when asked where truth, beauty, and goodness come from, why the universe seems so finely tuned for life and consciousness, my best answer is that there is some spiritual ground to existence. That may be satisfying to some of you, and unsatisfying to others, but as a philosopher, I have to admit it’s the best I can do.Q: I’m glad you spoke about spirit. How do you see its connection to the soul, which is both individual and universal, and to intuition?A: Meister Eckhart, the German mystic, offers a profound insight here. He saw the soul as a womb. Through our devotion and love—not only for the divine but for one another and for all creation—we are giving birth to a new type of spirituality. He even said we are giving birth to God within our souls.In our individualistic, psychological culture, much emphasis is on therapy and overcoming our complexes. That is important work. But if we reconnect to spirit, we see that this inner work is not just for ourselves or for our loved ones. The whole universe needs human beings to give birth to a new spirit. Spirit is not only the origin of our existence; it is also our destiny. It isn’t guaranteed we will realize it, but perhaps humanity is not yet fully human. Maybe what it truly means to be human involves wisdom and compassion, and we are still striving toward that. The soul is the womb where that new form of wise and compassionate consciousness can be born, and that is what spirit is.Q: The universe seems very interested in complexity. Is there a moral element to that, or is the universe just trying out anything and everything, like a jazz improviser?A: All traditional religions have wrestled with this in the form of theodicy: if God is all-good, why is there so much evil and suffering? Science has shown us that cataclysm, destruction, and death are not accidental but essential to evolution. Death is intrinsic to life.So is the universe morally driven? I would say no, not in the sense of morality we usually project. Morality evolves across human societies. It would be anthropomorphic to project a particular moral code onto the cosmos. What we can say is that the universe appears to have an aesthetic aim: the pursuit of intensity of experience. Complexity heightens that intensity.As matter and energy complexify—from atoms to stars, from single cells to fungi, plants, animals, and human beings—experience deepens. That means both greater capacity for suffering and greater capacity for beauty. If evolution were only about survival, we wouldn’t expect increasing complexity, since greater complexity often means greater fragility. Human beings, for example, are quite fragile. But our sensitivity to aesthetic intensity is unmatched.So if the universe has an aim, I would say it is not moral or immoral but aesthetic. It seeks the deepening of beauty and intensity of experience. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

In Whitehead’s process theology, God begins as unconscious—the primordial non-temporal accident of Creativity—yearning for relationship. At the outset, God is alone, holding the solitary envisagement of all possibilities, longing for their realization.But the whole history of cosmic evolution is required before matter and energy can organize themselves into a species capable of conscious self-reflection: the human being. On this planet, there have been a few particular humans—Jesus being a primary example—who arise in the right conditions to become aware of that primordial yearning which gave rise to the entire cosmic process. This awakening discloses what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God, God as “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.” In Jesus, God’s consequent nature is not only consciously recognized but embodied in the flesh, becoming self-luminous in a creaturely life.Jesus is that breakthrough, the first organism on earth to awaken fully to the divine longing at the heart of cosmogenesis. Maybe this incarnational awakening has happened elsewhere, on other planets (as Giordano Bruno was the first to speculate). Jesus’ realization carries consequences for the further evolution of humanity. He sees that the true aim of the whole process is not a shallow happiness but unconditional love, love born of separative strife and healed through the free deed that overcomes it. Love presupposes distance and builds a bridge across that distance.Jesus’s life and embodiment of the Christ becomes the glimmer of this healing, radiating outward. His vision of God’s consequent nature is of love’s consummation, not yet achieved by the human community but recognized as the goal, the Omega of evolution. Around this vision, a religion forms. Yet the insight, the evolutionary breakthrough, is not exclusive to Christianity—Buddha, Krishna, and others have glimpsed it, too.As Christianity institutionalized, this all becomes encoded in mythic and increasingly legalistic language: Jesus as sacrificial lamb, dying for our sins. But the real point, often elided and made to seem blasphemous by official church doctrines, is that He is an example, not an exception. Jesus is not a metaphysical anomaly, but a living exemplification of God’s consequent nature. He shows the path we are to follow: not to dissolve our individuality into divine oneness, but to affirm it freely, offering ourselves in service.The “Body of Christ” is not a formless blob, nor a collective mind like the Borg, but a union of distinct persons, each freely contributing to a greater harmony. Whitehead’s vision of ultimate beauty is increasing complexity and diversity held together in unity: “Peace is a Harmony of Harmonies… the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling due to the clash of individual purposes.”So Jesus the Christ is the exemplar of this process. Rather than holding Him up as uniquely divine, the challenge is to bear the cross ourselves, to see that individuality exists for the sake of living service. That is what the divine has always longed for, and we are only now becoming conscious of it.It isn’t guaranteed we will fulfill this arc of evolution: we must choose it freely. Failure is possible. Yet the human life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as Christ expresses the truth that even the most tragic event—the death of God—can be woven into higher harmony.For Whitehead, God does not cancel and cannot prevent suffering but enfolds it into the divine life. The “objective immortality” of each moment is preserved within God’s consequent nature. Thus resurrection is not reversal, not undoing the crucifixion, but transfiguration: the cross becomes part of a wider harmony in which love conquers the estrangement implied by death. Whitehead’s language of Peace captures this:The Peace that is here meant is not the negative con­ception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty. It is a sense that fineness of achievement is as it were a key unlocking treasures that the narrow nature of things would keep remote. There is thus involved a grasp of infinitude, an appeal beyond boundaries. Its emotional effect is the subsidence of turbu­lence which inhibits. More accurately, it preserves the springs of energy, and at the same time masters them for the avoidance of paralyzing distractions. The trust in the self-justification of Beauty introduces faith, where reason fails to reveal the details. (Adventures of Ideas, 285)Peace is resurrection without mythology, the transformation of suffering into beauty within the growing body of God. Jesus Christ reveals that this transformation is not a distant abstraction but a living possibility. His resurrection story is the symbol of what Whitehead articulates as a metaphysical truth: that the God-World relation advances through tragedy, and that tragedy itself can be woven into a higher order of beauty. Humanity is only beginning to awaken to this message. The resurrection of Christ is less a past event than an ongoing call to trust that even our failures and sorrows can be transfigured into beauty if we align ourselves with the divine aim of love. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

The following is a condensed transcript of my remarks at Edward Kelly’s Theory Meeting as part of the Department of Perceptual Studies at University of Virginia’s work to find an adequate cosmology to account for psi phenomena. The video is above.It is a pleasure to be invited to an event where for once I am not asked to talk about Whitehead—though I see Whitehead and Schelling as, in spirit, in league with one another. Schelling belongs to a modern process lineage that runs from the 1790s through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, with Whitehead updating—rather than displacing—many of Schelling’s natural-philosophical intuitions. In what follows, however, I unfold Schelling on his own terms before returning to resonances with process thought.I take Schelling to be among the earliest modern articulators of evolutionary panentheism. One can name pre-modern precursors to panentheism—Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme—but the thought that the divine becomes through cosmogenesis, that the life of God is historically entangled with nature’s unfolding, receives one of its first systematic modern statements in Schelling (with Herder and Lessing edging toward similar vistas). Panentheism precedes him; evolutionary panentheism finds one of its earliest, clearest modern exemplars in him.Kant’s Interval and Its CrackAgainst the backdrop of Kant’s Copernican Revolution we can appreciate Schelling’s originality. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously claims he must deny knowledge to make room for faith; he cleaves reality into a phenomenal realm lawfully ordered for science and a noumenal realm of freedom, God, and immortality, which we may think but cannot know. The price of securing both science and freedom is a brittle two-worlds compromise—a Kantian interval with no principled bridge.Kant’s Critique of Judgment exposes a crack in that firewall. There Kant treats the organism as something that must be judged as if purposive and self-organizing; he even quips that we should not expect “a Newton of a blade of grass.” Teleological judgment is, for him, regulative: a necessary heuristic for inquiry, not a constitutive insight into nature’s inner causality. Biology becomes descriptive where mechanics is explanatory; psychology and anything like parapsychology remain cordoned off beyond the limits of possible science. The interval holds, but it wobbles.From Fichte to Schelling: Inverting the QuestionFichte radicalizes Kant by dissolving the thing-in-itself into the activity of a transcendental I: nature (the “not-I”) is posited as the necessary resistance through which spirit recognizes itself. Whatever the merits of this move, nature’s autonomy is sacrificed.Schelling inverts the picture. He asks not, “What must mind be for nature to appear as it does?” but “What must nature be for mind to evolve out of it?” In this sense, nature is a priori: not a mute stage set but a dynamic, internally structured productivity from which consciousness gradually crystallizes. Schelling famously describes nature as visible spirit and spirit as invisible nature; the human becomes the locus where the universe turns reflective upon itself.Naturphilosophie: Polarity, Potency, EvolutionSchelling’s Naturphilosophie (1797–1800) offers a staged, potency-theoretic account of nature’s development. The cosmogony is polar from the outset: a dark, contractive tendency toward unity and concealment (gravity) is countered by an expansive, illuminating tendency toward differentiation and manifestation (light). These poles never exist in isolation; through their strife and mediation arise magnetism, electricity, and chemism—each a new equilibrium of tension—until at last life appears as a center that maintains itself far from equilibrium by circulating causes through itself.Here Schelling anticipates later talk of autopoiesis and homeostasis without mistaking organismic stability for stasis. Crucially, he insists that death and disease belong intrinsically to life. The very forces that sustain life also undo it; life is a passage whose equilibria can never be final. To do justice to organisms is to integrate finitude into our ontology of the living.This cosmology is evolutionary panentheism. Schelling articulates a robust Geistleiblichkeit—a spirit-bodiliness—where embodiment is not a fall into illusion but the very medium by which the divine seeks deeper relation with itself. Space-time actualization is serious business; possibility and actuality interpenetrate in one world of becoming. The physical is not a container beside a separate realm of forms; potencies are actively at work within nature’s processes and products.Schelling’s writings of this period—Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), On the World-Soul (1798), and First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799)—made waves in the Weimar-Jena milieu. Goethe read him attentively; the Romantic conversation between poets, philosophers, and experimentalists was thick. It is well documented that Oersted absorbed Naturphilosophie’s language of polarity en route to the discovery of electromagnetism; Faraday extended the experimental path he opened. Whatever may be said of Fichte or of a rationalist Hegel, Schelling and Goethe were not “out of touch” with the sciences of their time, as Whitehead, I think wrongly, implies in Science and the Modern World (1925).Identity, Freedom, and the Turn to NarrativeBy the early 1800s, Schelling’s so-called Identity Philosophy seeks an indifference-point beyond subject and object: an Absolute approachable via two coordinated routes, transcendental and natural-philosophical. He privileges the latter, but both are limited by finite reason. Hegel’s famous jibe about an Absolute that is a “night in which all cows are black” targets this phase; their friendship frays.The Freedom essay (1809) pushes further. Drawing deeply on Böhme, Schelling distinguishes in God between ground and existence: a pre-rational, dark potency and the luminous emergence of order. Freedom is not a consumer’s choice among options; it is a prior stance of character, a way the human participates in reconciling divine polarity. On this view, God is not complete outside history; God has a history.Soon after, Schelling writes Clara, or On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World—a luminous dialogue he never published (his son brought it to print decades later). Set on All Souls’ Day, the work stages a conversation among a priest (spirit), a physician (nature), and Clara (soul), with a clergyman voicing the Kantian position that the spiritual is real but epistemically sealed off from nature. Against this, the dialogue explores correspondences—hermetic, alchemical resonances—between the physical and the spiritual: as below, so above. Schelling insists on the persistence of individual personality beyond death. Whatever the biographical pathos of Caroline’s death, the philosophical point is larger: the desire for personal immortality is itself a datum within nature’s psychology, and experience—our own included—belongs to philosophy’s evidential base.Schelling’s unfinished Ages of the World drafts (1811–1815) attempt a mythic cosmogony rather than a deductive system. He comes to judge narrative, symbol, and myth as often more faithful than logic to the living Absolute. One might call his aim an auto-cosmology: a self-implicated story in which the teller is a product of the very cosmos being told.Positive Philosophy: Metaphysical EmpiricismIn Berlin (1841–1844), Schelling distinguishes negative from positive philosophy. Negative philosophy asks what—it articulates essences and conditions and aspires to a view from nowhere. Positive philosophy begins from that—that there is something rather than nothing; it starts in existence, historically given. Schelling calls this a kind of metaphysical empiricism: philosophy must take seriously the history of myth and revelation, the data of religious and extraordinary experience, not as irrational interruptions but as disclosures of being. The upshot is not a retreat from reason but an enlargement of its evidential field.The Timaeus Essay: Retrieving YinAt just 19 years old, Schelling wrote an essay on Plato's Timaeus, reading Plato through a Kantian lens. In the Timaeus, Plato presents an account of cosmology where the Demiurge (a divine craftsman) looks at the realm of Forms and molds the receptacle (chora) to create the actual world. Timothy Jackson and I discussed this early essay a few months ago:Typically, the receptacle is viewed as a passive feminine principle, while the Demiurge represents the active masculine principle. But Plato gives hints of a more balanced view, describing the receptacle or chora as already having structure and movement, capable of winnowing and filtering the elements through its vibratory activity. Plato calls it “the wet nurse of becoming,” attributing to it a selective agency that goes beyond mere passivity.Schelling recognizes how one could read the Timaeus in a Kantian way, with the Demiurge representing mind and the receptacle representing nature. But just as Plato attributes surprising activity to the receptacle, Schelling attributes activity and autonomy to nature, suggesting that the receptacle itself, through its vibratory movement and pre-existing tensions, could give rise to mind. This represents an early attempt to retrieve the missing “yin” principle in Western thought (which is emphasized by Ruth Kastner in her Possibilist Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics).Afterlives and ParallelsSchelling’s Naturphilosophie offers a powerful organic alternative to mechanistic science without lapsing into anti-empirical enthusiasm. Nineteenth-century science, for contingent and industrial reasons, largely pursued a mechanistic road; yet an organicism worth retrieving runs through Schelling, Goethe, and Humboldt. In this key, physics and biology are not alien orders but differently scaled studies of organism. Whitehead would later quip that biology studies the larger organisms while physics studies the smaller; more importantly, he too hears the “data of science crying out” for an organic interpretation. Schelling’s work remains relevant not only for an organicist biology but for a reconception of physics not as opposed to the living world but as a maybe more subdued form of life (“matter is effete mind,” as Charles Sanders Peirce put it).On such a view, parapsychology does not need to hover at the margins of inquiry. If we reconceive nature as living, purposive, and ensouled, then parapsychology is simply psychology writ large—not because we abandon rigor, but because we widen ontology to fit experience. In this sense, Schelling’s evolutionary panentheism is not a mere doctrine. It is a way of inhabiting a living world: death belonging to life; myth to reason; individuality to eternity; nature and spirit as one evolving life in which the divine comes to itself through us.Notes Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe