Footnotes2Plato Podcast

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

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

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

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

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.