Footnotes2Plato Podcast

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

The essays we discussed by Martinus include: * Time, Space, Eternity and Immortality* About Myself, My Mission, and Its SignificanceWe began by triangulating Martinus’ spiritual science with Whitehead’s and Bergson’s speculative philosophies. I sketched Whitehead’s dipolar process theology: a primordial, valuative, mental pole and a consequent, relational, physical pole, each arising from the maximally generic, ultimate category of Creativity. This can be loosely mapped to Martinus’s trinitarian X-structure (X1 the eternal I, X2 the creative power, X3 the created/experienced). Karsten Jensen noted both Martinus and Whitehead articulate an organismic rather than mechanistic cosmology, and envision a Godhead who both creates and undergoes experience in mutual dependence with creatures.From there Pedro Brea introduced Bergson’s approach, emphasizing the evolution from instinct and intelligence toward intuition, which is not anti-intellectual, but intelligence refined into conscious participation in life’s flow. This was then framed by Karsten in terms of Martinus’ vertical/horizontal “cross”: vertically, spiritual scientific intuition discloses the unmanifest source; horizontally, natural science traces the living hierarchies from micro- to macrocosm. Karsten added Martinus’ “cosmic faculty psychology” (instinct, gravity, feeling, intelligence, intuition, memory) and the claim that intuition ripens through a harmonization of feeling and intelligence, what Martinus calls “intellectualized feeling,” i.e., universal love.We then discussed the ethical stakes. Love as the cosmos’ basic tone; suffering as the hard teacher of compassion; reason, at its best, as imaginative insight (Wordsworth) rather than mere calculative understanding. I connected this with Plotinus’ account of the Platonic ascent/descent (myth and dialectic), and Karsten brought in Whitehead’s Function of Reason: speculative method, internal/external coherence, and a cosmology testable against experience. Karsten stressed Martinus’ openness to critique and his call to bring spiritual science into public dialogue.Finally, Karsten touched on the erotic/creative polarity (Martinus’ “sexual principle”) and his “eternal world picture.” He also acknowledged the live tension between Martinus’ seemingly cyclical schemata and Whitehead’s insistence on genuine novelty at all levels, natural and divine, which may be an area where process thought can fruitfully pressure-test Martinus. We closed with a discussion of Simone Weil’s “decreation,” Bergson’s universalizing love, and Whitehead’s “initial aim” present in every moment: the kingdom is at hand if we can clear away our identification with a false, separate self enough to consent to it. I left grateful for a conversation that didn’t collapse scholarship into critical skepticism nor relate to mystical clairvoyance with blind credulity, but let both ways of knowing mutually refine one another. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

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Below is my talk at the “Revitalizing Biophilosophy” conference I co-hosted earlier this week. It is based on a long paper I am working on both for this conference and for “Cognizing Life,” another conference that I’ll present at next week in Tübingen, Germany (there is a free livestream option if you’d like to tune in).Here’s the working abstract of the paper I am still polishing titled “Romanticizing Evolution: Recuperating Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism as Examples of a Participatory Approach to the Life Sciences”:This essay argues that mechanistic biology, despite its technical successes, fundamentally misunderstands life by reducing organisms to externally related parts governed solely by efficient causation. Drawing on a philosophical lineage from Kant through Goethe, Novalis, Schelling, Peirce, and Whitehead, I develop an alternative participatory approach that recognizes self-organization and purposiveness as constitutive features of nature rather than mere projections of human judgment. The argument proceeds by first demonstrating the inherent limitations of mechanistic explanation: Kant showed that organisms exhibit a self-causing purposiveness irreducible to mechanism, while Darwin’s theory presupposes rather than explains the creative variations it filters. In response, I recuperate Romantic Naturphilosophie and process philosophy to show how living beings exist as “subject-superjects”—simultaneously cause and effect of themselves within a double stream of time where past and future converge in present becoming. This participatory framework, exemplified in Goethe’s intuitive science, Peirce’s abductive reasoning, and Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric phenomenology, reveals evolution not as random variation under differential selection but as purposive metamorphosis guided by what Whitehead terms an immanent divine “initial aim.” The essay concludes that revitalizing the life sciences requires not just new models but a transformation of scientific consciousness itself: from detached observation to co-creative participation, recognizing that in studying life's evolution we study our own creative potential as nature’s self-conscious expression. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

The conversation above occurred earlier today at the end of a two-day conference I cohosted with Spyridon Koutroufinis focused on the revitalization of biophilosophy. You can learn more about it at the Center for Process Studies website. You can find a YouTube playlist of all the talks at this link. Two days of phenomenal presentations of ideas that push at the paradigmatic edges of the life sciences left me feeling nourished. But there were also a few conceptual tensions that I felt called for our collective attention. Having listened to talks ranging from biosemiotics to process metaphysics, from computational biology to philosophical anthropology, I began with two particular pressure points that stood out to me.The first tension emerged most directly in the contrasting visions of Terrence Deacon and Michael Levin. While Mike extends cognition down to thermostats and up to Platonic forms, Terry insists on fundamental differences between computation and biological morphogenesis. I don’t think this is merely semantic. It decides how we understand the relationship between matter, life, and mind.The second tension concerned the perennial problem of individuality versus relationality. Throughout the conference, we’d wrestled with the ethics of viral pandemics, von Uexküll’s enclosed umwelt, autopoietic operational closure, Canguilhem’s vitalism, Simondon’s transductive relations, Aristotle’s entelechy, Bergson’s virtual, and more. Can we maintain individual autonomy while acknowledging the profound ways organisms interpenetrate and shape each other? Autopoiesis or sympoiesis? Who decides? Another question that quickly rose to the surface was how to think about generative AI technologies. The distinction between simulation and realization of conscious intelligence isn’t merely an academic issue. It has immediate implications for cultural life, and how we relate to increasingly sophisticated designed-for-profit generative models.People are already beginning to attribute not just artificial intelligence but conscious sentience and personhood to their instance of ChatGPT. If we follow one interpretation of Mike Levin’s position—potentially canceling the simulation/realization distinction—might we invite people to relate to their machines as individual souls, persons deserving of rights? Is the genie already out of the lantern? This is concerning...I offered a Platonic perspective on LLMs, suggesting that we should approach these technologies the way Plato approached alphabetic writing: critical yet participatory. Yes, they’re dangerous tools. Yes, they can have distorting effects. But we can also use them skillfully, so long as we remain aware of how they are shaping us.LLMs mark another major shift in the long coevolution of humans and our media technologies, following on the heals of speech, writing, and alphabets. Extending Terry Deacon’s work on how language has rewired the human brain, I noted that these tools are already reshaping our cognition and social imaginaries in ways we are only just beginning to grasp. We’re focused on how LLMs hallucinate, but maybe we should pay more attention to the ways we are being encouraged to hallucinate about them. The idea of “artificial general intelligence” or “conscious machines” is more an advertising strategy than a near term engineering reality. I do appreciate and agree with Mike’s point that there are minds all around us that we’re failing to notice. And that this deficit lies in our own lack of sensitivity, not in theirs. But for precisely this reason, how we decide in any given case may not just be a matter of empirical tests but of our own psychological dispositions. As a process-relational panexperientialist, I see both mind and aim as existing on a continuum, from the least action principles governing physical processes all the way up through human creativity and moral intuition, perhaps even extending into higher forms of intelligence (artificial, alien, or angelic) that our egocentric, humanistic biases prevent us from acknowledging.This came up in our afternoon conversation when I mentioned Whitehead’s distinction between the “subjective aims” of all actual entities—stretching all the way down into the quantum structure of the physical world (and it’s worth noting here that quantum reality isn’t just “small” or “large,” but rather something profoundly nonlocal and prespatial)—and the biological agency that emerges at the level of what he calls “living societies” or organized historical routes of actual entities.There are two levels here. On one level, we have the actual entity with its subjective aim: this is a metaphysical category in Whitehead’s scheme. On another level, we have societies, or patterns of enduring organization, whether physical or biological: this is a cosmological category. What this means is that particular forms of agency or functionality that arise amidst the enduring structures of the physical world must be seen as contingent, historically emergent patterns. Even stars and atoms are products of cosmic evolution. Not even physics can escape the acid of evolutionary thinking.Biological agency, then, isn’t something wholly separate from the rest of physical nature. It emerges later in the evolutionary process as a new threshold of autonomy—a novel “bid for freedom” (Whitehead’s phrase) relative to the spatial and temporal environment. “The problem to be solved is that of a certain originality in the response of a cell to external stimulus. The theory of an enduring entity with its inherited mentality gives us a reason why this mentality should be swayed by its own past. We ask for something original at the moment, and we are provided with a reason for limiting originality. Life is a bid for freedom: an enduring entity binds any one of its occasions to the line of its ancestry. The doctrine of the enduring soul with its permanent characteristics is exactly the irrelevant answer to the problem which life presents. That problem is, How can there be originality? And the answer explains how the soul need be no more original than a stone. … What has to be explained is originality of response to stimulus. This amounts to the doc­trine that an organism is ‘alive’ when in some measure its reactions are inexplicable by any tradition of pure physical inheritance.Explanation by ‘tradition’ is merely another phraseology for explana­tion by ‘efficient cause.’ We require explanation by ‘final cause.’ Thus a single occasion is alive when the subjective aim which determines its pro­cess of concrescence has introduced a novelty of definiteness not to be found in the inherited data of its primary phase. The novelty is introduced conceptually and disturbs the inherited ‘responsive’ adjustment of subjec­tive forms. It alters the ‘values,’ in the artist’s sense of that term. … The characteristic of life is reaction adapted to the capture of in­tensity, under a large variety of circumstances. But the reaction is dictated by the present and not by the past. It is the clutch at vivid immediacy.” (Process and Reality, 104-105)But we need to be very cautious in how we try to distinguish an organism from its environment. Is there really any rational or scientific way to draw that line cleanly? If some form of special agency emerges with living cells, the question becomes: emerges from what? Was there ever really such a thing as “dead” matter? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems more likely that what we now call “dead” matter—much of the mineral content around the Earth’s surface—isn’t some primordial substrate that life arose from, but is actually an excretion of life itself.Whatever agency is, it is not simply a property of isolated bodies. It’s a relational achievement involving the whole of cosmogenesis. Whitehead affirms that there is a more basic form of aim that precedes the conscious agency of animals, a form of being and becoming as a subject-superject, enjoying one’s existence and aiming to enhance it. Vibrating energy is not just mechanical motion through empty space. Nor is evolution merely random variation and natural selection. Variation is never entirely mindless. Long before humans mathematically decoded its waveforms, electromagnetic vibration was already an aesthetic phenomenon, a natural expression of harmonic rhythm. Energy is the transmission of pulses of emotion. Agency, we could say, is what happens when energy turns itself inside out. But energy could never give rise to living organisms unless it was already aiming at aesthetic enhancement from “the beginning” (“beginning” here really signals eternity rather than an origin point in linear time; and eternity is not somewhere else out there but only ever right here and now). Throughout the discussion, I tried to identify connections and resonances between different perspectives. When Tim Feiten explored the ethics of closed versus open umwelts, I immediately thought of Katherine Peil Kauffman’s presentation on emotion as the bridge enabling genuine intersubjective resonance. This isn’t just metaphorical: if cells equalize their voltages when they touch (as Mike Levin showed), perhaps emotional resonance literally opens our otherwise private experiential worlds to each other.We had an extended discussion about Peirce’s categories—firstness, secondness, and thirdness—leading us into fundamental questions about explanation and origin. Is there an irreducible co-extensiveness of all three categories, such that thirdness is always already present “at the beginning” (another way of saying, with Whitehead, that aim or minimal mentality is cosmic in extent and not just emergent with biological organisms); or do we need to think genesis to its limit by acknowledging the ordinality implicit in any developmental scheme, with the firstness of variation being given its due?My own position is that variation is already be telically tilted, not randomly dispersed. This doesn’t require an external designer but just acknowledges that Creativity has an inherent tendency to condition itself. My question for the group was whether the existence of biological agency requires a cosmic Eros or can emerge from truly undirected variation under brute natural selection.I share Timothy Jackson’s resistance to making any particular thirdness primordial. This just serves to block inquiry with unexplained explainers. Yet I still myself drawn to Whitehead’s notion that what is metaphysically contingent (God as the first accident of Creativity) can also be categorically necessary. Whitehead intends his God concept to function as a maximally generic potential for organization without determining the specific forms that organizational potency takes.By the end of this conversation, I felt we had not resolved but intensified these fundamental tensions. The discussion revealed biophilosophy as a form of transdisciplinary research operating at the molten intersections of empirical science and philosophical speculation, technical precision and ethical concern. I invited participants to continue the shared inquiry at the International Whitehead Conference next summer in Carbondale, Illinois, where we’ll have another biophilosophy session.The path forward isn’t to resolve the tensions but to think with and through them, maintaining conceptual precision while embracing experimental openness (including experiments on language itself). The life of thought lurks in these very tensions!As hosts of life ourselves, we’re not external observers but examples of the very processes we are seeking to understand. This onto-epistemic participatory situation is precisely what I sought to address in my conference talk yesterday. More on that soon! This closing conversation reminded me why biophilosophy matters: it’s where our deepest questions about the nature of life meet our most pressing concerns about the future we’re creating together on this fragile planet. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

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Marc Gafni, a philosopher and spiritual teacher known for his Unique Self theory, and Zak Stein, an educational theorist examining consciousness and culture, dive into the relevance of philosophy in today's crisis. They discuss how shared values are crucial in a world of conflict and explore the transformative nature of love and narrative in shaping our understanding of existence. The conversation highlights the interconnectedness of personal identity and divine qualities, emphasizing a new narrative that transcends traditional paradigms and values intimacy and self-awareness.

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The podcast dives into the intersection of data science and Neoplatonism, exploring the biases embedded in AI and advocating for a cultural counter-practice in data science. It critiques algorithmic discrimination and examines the profound implications of technology on human flourishing. Discussions on the importance of materiality, the ritualistic aspects of science, and the philosophical implications of conscious machines further enrich the dialogue. Ultimately, it emphasizes the need for a nuanced understanding of knowledge, blending historical insights with modern challenges.

Friends, fellow process thinkers, activists, and those concerned with the course of our civilization: thank you for your attention, and thank you also to Tripp Fuller and Aaron Simmons for inviting me to contribute a lecture to this summer summit focused on democracy—Democracy in Tension. I've been invited to tease out how I understand the relationship between democracy and religion.In the United States at the moment, a certain form of Christian nationalism appears to be ascendant, though the men involved in actually running the government seem to display virtues and vices that bear little resemblance to my understanding of the teachings of the gospels. We find ourselves in a situation today not unlike 1920s and maybe even 1930s Germany, when there was a populist uprising driven by economic inequalities. It was an inter-war period then, and we certainly are increasingly at war today. The wars already underway are threatening to spiral out of control towards what has twice now been referred to as a world war. The last having been ended by nuclear weapons, the next will be started and presumably ended quite quickly with nuclear weapons.So we find ourselves in quite a crisis moment. Of course, as we've all grown tired of hearing, crisis also signals opportunity. There is an opening occurring, and I think the invitation is one that I feel is really about asking us to speak into this opening, this potential. The kairos is offering us a variety of ways forward, and we have to decide which we want to take.This may in fact be a lost cause. But as Josiah Royce pointed out, to be loyal to a lost cause is not to be deceived. It is to insist that the meaning of life lies not in what we win, but in what we serve.I'm going to share some thoughts about political power and political theology. I'm going to talk about Carl Schmitt and Bruno Latour and Alfred North Whitehead and others about the situation we find ourselves in and the ways forward. What I share with you today is really a summary of a longer chapter in a volume called From Force to Persuasion: Process Relational Perspectives on Power and the God of Love (Wipf and Stock, 2024).Reimagining CivilizationThose of us wrestling possibility from the ruins of industrial civilization must confront an uncomfortable truth: every civilization before ours has been built on empire—on the exploitation of human beings through slavery and economic oppression, and on the extractive plundering of Earth's living systems. We have harvested minerals and burned fossilized sunlight to fuel this fleeting petroleum interval, this momentary flare in geological time.These finite resources approach exhaustion, yet we persist in the delusion that our economy operates as perpetual motion, somehow exempt from thermodynamic law—as if it required no fresh energy from the biosphere, as if it produced no entropy. The economy is, obviously, a subsystem of Earth's ecology, yet our actions betray a profound forgetting of this elementary fact.Civilization requires not merely reform but metamorphosis—a ground-up reimagining rooted quite literally in the ground itself. We must reconceive human society within the context of a living Earth, with Gaia as primary presence, as Latour argues in his Gifford lectures Facing Gaia (watch my lectures on Latour’s book: part 1, part 2). To cross the threshold into this new geological epoch—whether we name it the Anthropocene following the Holocene, or mark it as an entirely new era succeeding the Cenozoic—we must become earthlings in the fullest sense. This demands a new natural theology, new rituals of attunement to the wider reality that modernity has systematically obscured.Wrestling with Carl SchmittWe must grapple with Carl Schmitt, that paradoxical figure who combined razor-sharp critique of liberalism with service as crown jurist to the Nazi regime. His diagnosis of liberal democracy's contradictions demands serious engagement, even as we reject his fascist prescriptions. He illuminates genuine vulnerabilities in constitutional democracy while bending those insights toward authoritarian ends.My project here follows Schmitt's analytical arc while bending it in a Whiteheadian direction—away from dictatorship and toward a pluralistic, cosmopolitical democracy. By cosmopolitics, I mean not Kantian cosmopolitanism but Latour's Gaian natural theology, where the integration of cosmos and polis dissolves the modern liberal fantasy of sealed borders between human society and nature. Modernity imagined humanity could achieve limitless freedom through technological mastery over a separate natural realm. This bifurcated worldview has become untenable—the planet itself refuses it. We are compelled toward a cosmopolitical ground that dissolves the reified boundary between human and more-than-human worlds.Can process-relational metaphysics offer passage to an ecological civilization that transcends the imperial and exploitative patterns of its predecessors? Can it preserve democracy against the rising tide of authoritarianism while enabling just habitation of Earth?Schmitt's Five NeutralizationsSchmitt famously surveys five what he calls neutralizations in the modern period. It begins with the theological neutralization in the 16th century and then moves through the metaphysical, moral, economic, and finally the technological neutralization. For Schmitt in the early 20th century, technology had become the new anti-religion that pretends to be neutral, to be above all value. Schmitt already saw in 1929 and earlier how mass media could turn war into peace, oppression into freedom, just through the sheer power of suggestion.Print technology enabled mass mind control. Radio—Hitler would ensure every German household possessed a Volksempfänger, that "people's receiver" through which der Führer could whisper directly into every living room—inaugurated the age of manufactured consciousness at industrial scale. Before Orwell coined "Newspeak," Schmitt heard its static crackling through the Volksempfänger.His diagnosis cuts deeper in our age of algorithmic feeds that train us, through engineered addiction, to mistake tribal signal-boosting for truth-seeking. Truth is not a zero-sum competition for clicks and shares, yet our social media ecosystems reward precisely such behavior, proliferating half-truths and outright deceptions.These technologies constitute what Schmitt called the technological anti-religion. They call into question liberalism's foundational premise: that education and a free press could sustain rational public discourse. If media technologies—whether broadcast or algorithmic—function as sophisticated instruments of consciousness manipulation rather than enlightenment, then liberalism's epistemic foundations crumble.Sovereignty and the ExceptionAgainst liberal normativism, Schmitt declares: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." Liberal jurisprudence masks this irreducible need for decision behind supposedly neutral procedures. Yet when catastrophe strikes, someone must suspend the rules and act. Abstract systems cannot map the unthinkable; flowcharts cannot compute responses to the genuinely unprecedented. Only a person—a sovereign—can decide.Schmitt's crypto-monarchism (perhaps not so crypto, given his Catholicism) accepts democracy as modernity's fate while insisting it requires a demagogue to shape mass consciousness through technological manipulation.Whitehead's Alternative VisionWhitehead might agree that secular political categories are secularized theology, but he reverses the flow of influence. When Christendom submitted to Caesar, imperial lawyers edited God into an emperor. Against this, Process and Realityoffers a God who "dwells upon the tender elements of the world," whose power operates through persuasion rather than coercion.How can Schmitt, a Catholic, ground politics in the friend-enemy distinction when the Gospel commands "love your enemies"? Force ultimately defeats itself. As Whitehead recognizes, organisms require an ecology of mutual support to flourish.Whitehead's process theology secularizes God's function in the world, revealing each creaturely moment as a miniature miracle—an imago Dei. "The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself," he writes in Religion in the Making. Every actual occasion constitutes a locus of irreducible value, inheriting the entire past universe while contributing its unique perspective to the cosmic adventure.Each occasion—each creaturely miracle—demands recognition and reciprocity rather than domination. No creature exists in isolation; creatures are made of other creatures in an ontology of radical communion.Process thought thus converges with philosophical personalism—Mounier, Buber, Levinas—in grounding rights not in social contracts or market exchanges but in the irreducible dignity of persons. Rights possess a spiritual foundation deeper than positive law.Beyond Liberal ParalysisLiberals often retreat from acknowledging these metaphysical roots, yet even Rawls ultimately concedes that natural rights must precede legislative construction.Mary Parker Follett's application of process philosophy to governance offers a way forward. She replaces majoritarian tyranny with "relational integration," where interests evolve through encounter until creative synthesis emerges.Had Follett's insights reached Weimar's embattled liberals in the 1920s, they might have developed participatory forms that dissolved Schmitt's stark dichotomy between anarchy and authority. Her method transforms democracy from zero-sum competition into a creative process where interests discover their higher integration through relationship.Gaia and Political ChoiceThe shift toward Gaian civilization must acknowledge that freedom's ultimate enemy is not other humans but what Whitehead called "the massive habits of physical nature"—birth, death, famine, earthquake. Reconciliation with nature promises no return to Eden. Nature itself is as much a construct as the society we imagine separate from it.Latour's Gaia is not the unified system of mechanistic science but something more chthonic—animate, unruly, exceeding both conceptual grasp and technological control. Process philosophy embraces nature's Heraclitean wildness, what William Connolly calls its Dionysian rather than Apollonian character. Even if we achieve political-economic justice and ecological balance, we remain vulnerable to hurricane and asteroid.Process thought interprets catastrophe not as cause for despair but as summons to deeper solidarity. Despite potential loss, we acknowledge the lure toward creative advance and the preserving love that allows nothing to perish from divine memory.Unlike inert nature, Gaia responds. Gaia grows impatient. Gaia forces political choice, asking: "What people are you forming, and on what territory?"Climate disruption exposes the fictions of neutral economics and universal humanity. Latour marshals Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction but redraws the line: it now cuts through every boardroom and voting booth, dividing those who serve Mammon from those who serve life's community. The choice crystallizes: profit or planet.A Democracy of Fellow CreaturesWhitehead's "democracy of fellow creatures" suggests what Latour envisions: a new constitution expanding representation beyond the human, with chambers speaking for rivers, forests, mountains. Until we can represent Gaia to ourselves politically, we remain deaf to what Pope Francis called "the cry of the earth."This expanded democracy requires metaphysical candor about rights' spiritual foundation—whether conceived as imago Dei, Buddha nature, or Gaia's reciprocity. We might say: not I, but Gaia in me.Formal liberty rings hollow without economic justice—freedom from hunger and precarity. And in the Anthropocene, political projects must transcend anthropocentrism or accept extinction.Neoliberal capitalism idolizes money while centralized communism stifles freedom and devastates environments. Process-relational cosmopolitics rejects both extremes.Beyond False DichotomiesSchmitt, following Donoso Cortés, admits only two options: omnipotent God or nihilistic abyss. Process thought dissolves such forced dichotomies through creative contrast.Whitehead offers a third way: the divine as cosmic eros, as lure operating within all becoming. This dissolves Schmitt's false choice between liberal paralysis and fascist decision. Decision remains necessary—Gaian emergencies brook no endless deliberation—but it can be participatory rather than monarchical, ecological rather than imperial.What would processual sovereignty entail? Not a single decider but distributed intelligence—a mycelial network of citizens embedded in ecosystems, co-deliberating toward ongoing integration rather than sovereign exception.Weaving Democracy Back TogetherSchmitt exposed liberalism's frayed edges; Whitehead shows how to reweave the fabric—not the old pattern of atomized individuals but a democracy of fellow creatures rooted in place and history.This requires reimagining our theology: releasing the imperial god mirrored by the imperial state, embracing instead the divine as persuasive logos whose liberating rhythm pulses through law, economy, and culture toward civilization's greening.The task may be impossible—a lost cause. How do we become earthlings, citizens of Gaia? Whitehead invites every decision to resonate with the world's tender elements.We cannot await post-revolutionary utopia. The kingdom of heaven already moves among us, calling us into ecological solidarity enriched by spiritual plurality, bringing the world's wisdom traditions together in common cause: the care of creation.This is process theology's promise: to hold democracy's tensions without succumbing to final solutions, to discover mediating contrasts that preserve what is best in liberalism, socialism, and the world's spiritual traditions as we learn to inhabit our place—our only place.Human beings are not accidentally Earthlings. We are Earth becoming conscious of itself. To recognize this fully—not merely as belief but as embodied ritual, as legislative reality, as scientific understanding—constitutes our task at this hinge point in planetary history.Thank you for your attention. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe