Footnotes2Plato Podcast

A few days ago, I sat down with my friend Jared Morningstar to ask him some questions about Islam. It was a follow-up to my earlier conversation with Jacob Kishere seeking ways for Christianity to grow “beyond itself”—not by rejecting the Christ impulse but by trusting it to guide us into more open and pluralistic forms of love and life. Mario Spassov posted a series of critical responses to my dialogue with Jared, which you can watch below:Mario polemically refers to Jared and me as atheists. If “theism” is defined narrowly as scriptural literalism or assent to a single tribally authorized picture of God and the afterlife, etc., then sure. I grant that plenty of fundamentalists will refer to anyone who steps an inch outside their narrow dogmatic frame an “atheist.” But Mario knows better, so I feel that his use of the label is neither accurate nor helpful. There is a long, culturally generative lineage of mystical and philosophical theisms (apophatic and cataphatic) running through Catholic and Orthodox sources, through Protestant mystics, and well beyond Christianity into the wider delta of perennial grammars of Spirit. My own theological orientation belongs to that family far more than it resembles either modern secular atheism or modern supernaturalist fundamentalism. Mario insists I have more in common with people like Sam Harris and Yuval Harari than I do with most theists. But I am not sure about that. Unlike Harris and Harari, I do not think meaning and value are useful fictions in an uncaring universe, nor do I see ideals like human rights as reducible to social constructions. I have explicitly criticized Harari’s nihilism. Value-experience is woven into the fabric of cosmogenesis, not tacked onto it as a late, optional human story.When I said that a dialogue like the one I had with Jared may only be interesting and accessible to something like 10% of the population, that wasn’t a gesture of exclusion but an admission of the limits of effective communication. No one can speak to everyone at once, and not every conversation can carry the whole public at the same time. Our aim was diplomatic: to model how an anarchic Christian and a progressive Muslim can speak theologically without collapsing into culture-war reactivity or reducing politics to the friend/enemy division. I’m open to dialogue with anyone, including people with whom I have profound political and religious disagreements, and I have engaged figures on the hard-right directly. For example, these posts on Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes:I’ve even spoken directly with white nationalists like Eric Orwoll (who visited me in Berkeley back in 2015 to discuss our shared interest in Plato) and Keith Woods (who apparently appreciated my work on Whitehead), admittedly initially agreeing to do so before I knew much about their politics. I had to pull back from further engagement when it became clear that their online followers (particularly Woods’) could not stomach good faith disagreement with someone of Jewish descent. While I’m obviously not politically conservative, I do not recognize in myself the generic liberal atheist progressive that Mario takes himself to be criticizing. But my purpose in seeking dialogue across difference isn’t memetic murder. I refuse to join Mario in the zero-sum social warfare frame that he’s apparently embedded himself within. Politics is not just war by other means but a laying down of weapons to attempt the difficult work of composing common worlds together using words. None of this means I refuse to take a principled stand or withhold criticisms of those I disagree with, but I try not to demonize anyone (though I admit it is difficult when they rush to demonize me, eg, in the way Woods’ followers did by reducing my cosmopolitical ideals to my Jewishness). I try to read reactionary political actors as symptoms of a diseased social organism. If liberal progressivism has a shadow, it’s not merely that it’s unconsciously tribal. It’s that it often pretends its sacred ideals—cultural freedom, political equality, economic solidarity—can withstand the winds of social change without being rooted in transcendent ideals of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. These ideals can endure only when they’re lived as more than institutional procedures, when they’re grounded, pluralistically but genuinely, in Logos, in Spirit, in the imago dei depth dimension of our shared human beingness. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

In my recent conversation with Jacob Kishere as part of his “Christianity beyond itself” series, we attempted to navigate the ways the “Christ impulse” can so easily get hijacked by culture-war crusader energy. Spiritual renewal thereby risks being conflated with civilizational chauvinism.Midway through our dialogue, Islam came up. I felt how ill-equipped I am for that encounter, and how quickly a conversation that should be healing can instead further inflame civilizational divisions that have been raging for a millennium, more recently under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction. I’m committed to religious pluralism, to the sense that the Word speaks every tongue available to human beings, and that no single institution or language can contain the divine. But that commitment doesn’t exempt me from blind spots. If anything, it increases my responsibility to slow down, learn more about what remain foreign cultural grammars, and to be careful with the metaphors I inherit and repeat.That’s why I invited Jared Morningstar into a follow-up conversation. Jared is in a rare position: a scholar-practitioner with deep philosophical training, a Westerner and a modern subject who is also a practicing Muslim, trying to hold together fidelity to the tradition’s depth, breadth, and richness with a critical, non-defensive honesty about real internal tensions.We began with the word Islam itself, which is often translated as “submission.” Jared showed how, in Arabic, that translation sits inside a wider semantic field rooted in the same consonants as salam: peace, tranquility, rest. The connotation is less “conformity to an imposed order” and, for him, more like the Taoist wu wei: a harmony in which the active/passive dualism melts.From there, the conversation opens out into a variety of intersections: the Qur’anic reverence for Jesus as Word of God (without an incarnational Christology), Sufi Neoplatonic currents like the Nur Muhammadiyah, and the shared Hellenic grammar that makes “Athens and Jerusalem” a more accurate origin story than the usual “foreign other” framing. Jared also complicated the usual modern western frame of “church and state” by describing Sunni Islam’s decentralized institutional ecology—legal pluralism, multiple schools of jurisprudence and theology, and the crucial point that Sharia is not akin to positive law in the modern Western sense, but a transcendent ideal approached through interpretive jurisprudence. Modern Islamic nation-states have become theocratic, but Jared’s reminders about recent history helped unveil possible colonial distortions, ie, the pathological fusion produced by the Western imperial importation of the nation-state form into a very different civilizational context.I sought out this dialogue with Jared primarily because I needed it. I needed a friend who could both correct my shortcuts and deepen my sense of what’s alive inside Islamic spirituality beyond the noxious Western media environment that profits from narratives of clash and incommensurability. If Christianity is going to move beyond itself and avoid being captured by yet another instantiation of the civilizational crusade complex, then Christians (and post-Christians, and seekers circling the Christ) have to become more fluent in the other tongues in which the divine has been praised, feared, wrestled with, and loved. My hope is that this conversation contributes in some small way to that fluency. I offer it to your ears as a peace-full attempt to tune the heart to a cosmic music grand enough to include not only the more than half of humanity identified with the Abrahamic faiths, but all of humanity. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Why do we do all the things that we do?Why do we fear to die?Free to be elsewhere,Love holds us here,Fear of the dark encircling. Why do we do all the things that we do?Why do we die?Why do we sin when the Sun is in sight?Why do we lie under the Moon? The answer is in the rising of the tideAnd the shift of the seasonsAs much as in the beatsOf a human heart. Worlds upon worlds whirl round us,While we toil in division down below,So forgetful of where our shared soil flares from. Sleep seats the soul in eternal bliss:We breathe ourselves intoA rhythm old as time;It turns the mind off,Empties it of self,So that God may enter. Mind wakes the soul to the light of day,Where letters and spellsAnd all the markings of human hands and mouths abound,But it neglects the light in the soul behind itself,The secret source it is ashamed of,For it seeks to possess it as its own.Spinning round aboutWith stars overhead,Day after day,Night after night,Dazzled by nature’s beauty,And the swiftness of her scythe,We grow dizzy,We lose our heads.We forget whatin sleep remembers us. Into our bodies we fallfor the hunger in our belly,and the lust in our groin,until our bones our ground to duston their date of due return to dirt. But Earth is no prison cell, For out of cells we are grown. Sunlight, too, falls to EarthBut does not petrify.Its warmth a gift and not a warning.Even rocks receive it willingly.Earth is the secret source of the Sun and the Moon,Of all the stars and galaxies,and plants and animalsWho coinhabit our planetary humanity.Every soul in this worldis bound as one inThat which Thou Art. Earth has become the home of the Christ.It is no tomb, but Life. Earthbound, we learn to walk.Attuned to Logos, we talk.We understand one another,We converse together with the universe.Together, each one becomes All,We join in celestial chorusIn praise of an immanently transcendent divine,An aesthetic and moral revelationOf a once impossibly hidden,Yet now utterly naked,And undeniably present fact.Christ is not a supernatural powerRuling from heaven.Christ is present as the love in our heartsAnd the action it inspires,Or Christ is not present. Singing the song of the Lord,Our mortal mouths shape truth,And in that resonance we may joinIn celebration of creation. The way and the truth and the lightAre not opposed to the dark and stupid.Sleep and death are not apart from life;Intelligence is a learning processNot an eternal stock of knowledge.For on this terrific turning EarthEach day and night completesAnother wobbly circle of time,Albeit imperfect,Inscribing itself in the sphere of eternity.And eternity is so in love with the productions of time.Without the imperfections of time,Eternity would know nothing of death,And so nothing ofHow Love overcomes it. Holy we areWhole:awake in dream and sleep,always held,always borne. The hand of the Lord,and the heart of the Lord,and the head of the Lordare your hands and my hands,your heart, my heart,our heads put together. The Lord does not restrain usbut is our soul's release into wonder,our love of neighbor, of robin and redwood,our worship of water’s flow from stream to sea, tracking a mystery wider than the sky.   The Oort Cloud cannot contain us,The angels are raining their tears upon us;May we host their grace with honor,Collecting their sacrifice in the vessels they have forged for us,But that only we can ignite. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

I was joined by my friends Pedro Brea and Karsten Jensen for another dialogue, this time about the Platonist philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil. We discussed her essay, written in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of France, “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation.” I quote it at length below. Weil’s philosophy emerges from a tight connection between her thinking and mode of being in the world, as she worked in factories to understand what Marx couldn’t grasp about the soul-destroying forces in modern work practices, participated in the Spanish Civil War as a pacifist, and eventually had mystical experiences that led to her conversion to Christianity. Her framework operates with a sharp Platonist contrast between the world of necessity dominated by impersonal dehumanizing forces and a divine realm of absolute goodness that exists beyond normal human grasp but can be approached through spiritual practice. Attention stands at the heart of this practice as the key intermediary, ultimately becoming prayer itself, a waiting for grace to enter the void created through self-emptying when one is fully attentive to something rather than using fantasy to fill that void and block oneself from the possibility of grace pouring in.Our conversation explored how Weil grounds human rights not in hollow secular agreements but in the sacredness of every human being without exception, based on a transcendent divine reality outside the world and the corresponding longing for absolute Good at the center of every human heart. Human beings are unequal in capacities, but what makes them equal is this longing for absolute Good that every heart contains, a spiritual ideal only graspable by directing attention beyond the world rather than something perceivable in the sensory realm. The divine or the Good cannot be known as an object through conceptual knowledge but only as subject, through a kind of intra-subjective communion where there is identification with the divine while maintaining distinction, and this mystical understanding establishes continuity across Eastern philosophies, Platonism, and Christianity that all point toward this non-conceptual form of knowing.Violence dehumanizes not only victims but aggressors who become deaf and dumb both to reason and to human compassion, turning them into monsters even as they remain persons, and this degradation extends to modern education when it becomes merely instrumental rather than recognizing that education is the essence of human existence itself, how we become more fully human through lifelong learning directed toward something infinite like the Good. The soul is composed of what it believes to be true, we become what we attend to, and those attentive to absolute Goodness become attentive to all the basic needs of other beings, which forms the telos of politics as addressing the needs of souls rather than defaulting to might makes right. Democratic participation requires this spiritual basis because real power comes from consent rather than violence. God desperately needs consent from human beings since the Good is only real in this world insofar as it is exercised through human beings who serve as channels through which the divine can pass into earthly relationships. Weil’s Essay:There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.Another terrestrial manifestation of this reality lies in the absurd and insoluble contradictions which are always the terminus of human thought when it moves exclusively in this world.Just as the reality of this world is the sole foundation of facts, so that other reality is the sole foundation of good.That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behaviour that is mindful of obligations.“At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.”Those minds whose attention and love are turned towards that reality are the sole intermediary through which good can descend from there and come among men.Although it is beyond the reach of any human faculties, man has the power of turning his attention and love towards it.Nothing can ever justify the assumption that any man, whoever he may be, has been deprived of this power.It is a power which is only real in this world in so far as it is exercised. The sole condition for exercising it is consent.This act of consent may be expressed, or it may not be, even tacitly; it may not be clearly conscious, although it has really taken place in the soul. Very often it is verbally expressed although it has not in fact taken place. But whether expressed or not, the one condition suffices: that it shall in fact have taken place.To anyone who does actually consent to directing his attention and love beyond the world, towards the reality that exists outside the reach of all human faculties, it is given to succeed in doing so. In that case, sooner or later, there descends upon him a part of the good, which shines through him upon all that surrounds him.The combination of these two facts — the longing in the depth of the heart for absolute good, and the power, though only latent, of directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and of receiving good from it — constitutes a link which attaches every man without exception to that other reality.Whoever recognizes that reality recognizes also that link. Because of it, he holds every human being without any exception as something sacred to which he is bound to show respect.This is the only possible motive for universal respect towards all human beings. Whatever formulation of belief or disbelief a man may choose to make, if his heart inclines him to feel this respect, then he in fact also recognizes a reality other than this world’s reality. Whoever in fact does not feel this respect is alien to that other reality also.The reality of the world we live in is composed of variety. Unequal objects unequally solicit our attention. Certain people personally attract our attention, either through the hazard of circumstances or some chance affinity. For the lack of such circumstance or affinity other people remain unidentified. They escape our attention or, at the most, it only sees them as items of a collectivity.If our attention is entirely confined to this world it is entirely subject to the effect of these inequalities, which it is all the less able to resist because it is unaware of it.It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world.All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.Only by really directing the attention beyond the world can there be real contact with this central and essential fact of human nature. Only an attention thus directed possesses the faculty, always identical in all cases, of irradiating with light any human being whatsoever.If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not.The link which attaches the human being to the reality outside the world is, like the reality itself, beyond the reach of human faculties. The respect that it makes us feel as soon as it is recognized cannot be shown to us by evidence or testimony.This respect cannot, in this world, find any form of direct expression. But unless it is expressed it has no existence. There is a possibility of indirect expression for it.The respect inspired by the link between man and the reality alien to this world can make itself evident to that part of man which belongs to the reality of this world.The reality of this world is necessity. The part of man which is in this world is the part which is in bondage to necessity and subject to the misery of need.The one possibility of indirect expression of respect for the human being is offered by men’s needs, the needs of the soul and of the body, in this world.It is based upon the connection in human nature between the desire for good, which is the essence of man, and his sensibility. There is never any justification for doubting the existence in any man of this connection.Because of it, when a man’s life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men’s actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration towards the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.On the other hand, there are cases where it is only a man’s sensibility that is affected; for example, where his wound or privation is solely the result of the blind working of natural forces, or where he recognizes that the people who seem to be making him suffer are far from bearing him any ill will, but are acting solely in obedience to a necessity which he also acknowledges.The possibility of indirect expression of respect for the human being is the basis of obligation. Obligation is concerned with the needs in this world of the souls and bodies of human beings, whoever they may be. For each need there is a corresponding obligation; for each obligation a corresponding need. There is no other kind of obligation, so far as human affairs are concerned.If there seem to be others, they are either false or else it is only by error that they have not been classed among the obligations mentioned.Anyone whose attention and love are really directed towards the reality outside the world recognizes at the same time that he is bound, both in public and private life, by the single and permanent obligation to remedy, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, all the privations of soul and body which are liable to destroy or damage the earthly life of any human being whatsoever.This obligation cannot legitimately be held to be limited by the insufficiency of power or the nature of the responsibilities until everything possible has been done to explain the necessity of the limitation to those who will suffer by it; the explanation must be completely truthful and must be such as to make it possible for them to acknowledge the necessity.No combination of circumstances ever cancels this obligation. If there are circumstances which seem to cancel it as regards a certain man or category of men, they impose it in fact all the more imperatively.The thought of this obligation is present to all men, but in very different forms and in very varying degrees of clarity. Some men are more and some are less inclined to accept — or to refuse — it as their rule of conduct.Its acceptance is usually mixed with self-deception, and even when it is quite sincere it is not consistently acted upon. To refuse it is to become criminal.The proportions of good and evil in any society depend partly upon the proportion of consent to that of refusal and partly upon the distribution of power between those who consent and those who refuse.If any power of any kind is in the hands of a man who has not given total, sincere, and enlightened consent to this obligation such power is misplaced.If a man has willfully refused to consent, then it is in itself a criminal activity for him to exercise any function, major or minor, public or private, which gives him control over people’s lives. All those who, with knowledge of his mind, have acquiesced in his exercise of the function are accessories to the crime.Any State whose whole official doctrine constitutes an incitement to this crime is itself wholly criminal. It can retain no trace of legitimacy.Any State whose official doctrine is not primarily directed against this crime in all its forms is lacking in full legitimacy.Any legal system which contains no provisions against this crime is without the essence of legality. Any legal system which provides against some forms of this crime but not others is without the full character of legality.Any government whose members commit this crime, or authorize it in their subordinates, has betrayed its function.Any collectivity, institution, or form of collective life whatsoever whose normal functioning implies or induces the practice of this crime is convicted ipso facto of illegitimacy and should be reformed or abolished.Any man who has any degree of influence, however small, upon public opinion becomes an accessory to this crime if he refrains from denouncing it whenever it comes to his knowledge, or if he purposely avoids knowledge of it in order not to have to denounce it.A country is not innocent of this crime if public opinion, being free to express itself, does not denounce any current examples of it, or if, freedom of expression being forbidden, the crime is not denounced clandestinely.It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation.Law is the quality of the permanent provisions for making this aim effective.To understand the obligation involves two things: understanding the principle and understanding its application.Since it is with human needs in this world that the application is concerned, it is for the intelligence to conceive the idea of need and to discern, discriminate, and enumerate, with all the accuracy of which it is capable, the earthly needs of the soul and of the body.This is a study which is permanently open to revision.Statement Of ObligationsA concrete conception of obligation towards human beings and a subdivision of it into a number of obligations is obtained by conceiving the earthly needs of the body and of the human soul. Each need entails a corresponding obligation.The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention.The fundamental obligation towards human beings is subdivided into a number of concrete obligations by the enumeration of the essential needs of the human being. Each need is related to an obligation, and each obligation to a need.The needs in question are earthly needs, for those are the only ones that man can satisfy. They are needs of the soul as well as of the body; for the soul has needs whose non-satisfaction leaves it in a state analogous to that of a starved or mutilated body.The principal needs of the human body are food, warmth, sleep, health, rest, exercise, fresh air.The needs of the soul can for the most part be listed in pairs of opposites which balance and complete one another.The human soul has need of equality and of hierarchy.Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings. Hierarchy is the scale of responsibilities. Since attention is inclined to direct itself upwards and remain fixed, special provisions are necessary to ensure the effective compatibility of equality and hierarchy.The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty.Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d’etat nor to an economic power based upon money.Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.The human soul has need of truth and of freedom of expression.The need for truth requires that intellectual culture should be universally accessible, and that it should be able to be acquired in an environment neither physically remote nor psychologically alien. It requires that in the domain of thought there should never be any physical or moral pressure exerted for any purpose other than an exclusive concern for truth; which implies an absolute ban on all propaganda without exception. It calls for protection against error and lies; which means that every avoidable material falsehood publicly asserted becomes a punishable offence. It calls for public health measures against poisons in the domain of thought.But, in order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes.The human soul has need of some solitude and privacy and also of some social life.The human soul has need of both personal property and collective property.Personal property never consists in the possession of a sum of money, but in the ownership of concrete objects like a house, a field, furniture, tools, which seem to the soul to be an extension of itself and of the body. Justice requires that personal property, in this sense, should be, like liberty, inalienable.Collective property is not defined by a legal title but by the feeling among members of a human milieu that certain objects are like an extension or development of the milieu. This feeling is only possible in certain objective conditions.The existence of a social class defined by the lack of personal and collective property is as shameful as slavery.The human soul has need of punishment and of honour.Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just. This reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognized as honourable to the same extent as anyone else.The human soul has need of disciplined participation in a common task of public value, and it has need of personal initiative within this participation.The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

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