Session five is about moving beyond materialism, consequentially it encapsulates two core parts; a conversation with Ed Kelly (University of Virginia) in relation to Perceptual Studies, particularly centered around phenomena like Psi, and a video lecture by Matt covering Schelling and his contemporaries.

While the ordering was as presented, it seems in keeping with the spirit of the lecture to reverse it and discuss the recording first before the conversation with Ed Kelly. By this I’m gesturing towards the key theme of Schelling inverting Kant or Fichte’s perspectives to arrive at his own counterpoint.

To get to Schelling or Whitehead, Matt takes us on a historical excursion with regard to Panentheistic thinking - which is somewhat the idea of god interpenetrating the universe, yet also transcending it or being greater than it - because he perceives Schelling to be amongst the first Evolutionary Panentheists. The idea of an evolutionary process or time developmental universe beginning around this period with Schelling, Herder and Lessing.

But to understand Schelling, and what was creative about his thinking or even Whitehead’s, Matt claims that you need to understand Kant’s Copernican revolution - despite Whitehead’s claims to being a recursion to pre-Kantian modes of thought, who he references none the less, and ends up inverting in an interesting way, possibly prefigured by Schelling.

It’s made clear that Whitehead probably wasn’t reading a whole bunch of Schelling, but he is cited a number of times in the concept of nature. It’s also suggested that Whitehead possibly got German Idealism wrong or misunderstood it, as he claims it was out of touch with modern science. You might say this about some but not Goethe and Schelling who actually contributed to scientific development, later influencing Oersted and Faraday, who developed theories of electromagnetism and were influenced by Schelling’s understanding of polarities in the natural world.

Kant

Going back to Kant, in his critique of pure reason, he is known to have said that “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”; in other words that to know true reality one has to put aside materialistic science. However, Matt suggests that there is this ‘Kantian moment’ (or perhaps occasion), where Kant realizes that, despite his interest in evaluating Swedenborg’s Clairvoyance, Precognition, and other immaterial Psi phenomena, that such claims of disembodied entities persisting in space and time, required him to articulate a new approach towards understanding natural phenomena - one that would rule out and exclude what Newtonian Physics couldn’t account for.

This is possibly the issue that Whitehead had with Kantian thought, or where he thought it “took a wrong turn” as Matt puts it. In my opinion it’s not so much that it’s wrong to distinguish between the phenomenal and noumenal realms, but seen as disjoint and separate there are clearly going to be issues with an excluded middle. This is perhaps why Matt feels this moment to be so influential; the disjunction enabling and perhaps even leading scientific thought to over optimize on the materialistic or phenomenological world view, while relegating the noumenal realms to second class citizens. It may be my interpretation of the lecture, but if it is Hume that woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, it seems pretty odd that he would then double down on such a “Spiritual Disjunction”…

In an attempt to clarify this, I put out a message to Matt here:

So within the Critique of Pure Reason, he’s asking the question of what our mind must be like or how must our cognition to be structured for nature to appear to us in a lawfully ordered way? As a student of Newton’s physics, and having done some astronomy himself while developing a “Universal Theory of the Heavens” in which the “Kant/Laplace Nebular Hypothesis” is developed, they imagine how our solar system might be formed through gravitation alone. The Newtonian background perhaps illustrates the assumptions behind the question, which implies a separation that doesn’t so much hold water in today’s sciences. Despite being enamoured with Newtonian physics, he realized that if they were true of all of nature and the human being, at least in our embodied physical form as a part of nature, then there was no room left for freedom, just mechanistic causal force.

Since Kant wanted to be able to justify this “efficient” causal understanding, while leaving room for human freedom, he ends up in a compromised position. Matt apparently calls this the human interval because of its instability, where we are asked to live in two worlds; the moral world, and the material. The reasoning provided is that for human life, morality, civilization etc. to be meaningful - we have to assume we are free. Meanwhile the this moral world is completely invisible to the world of first order science, as it can’t be observed or measured. Kant apparently allows these to hang together by saying that natural science studies the apparent world and religion deals with the world of noumena which we can’t know anything about but are justified in believing that it exists; “I had to limit knowledge to leave room for faith”.

While this is a useful distinction, based on the given explanation, I don’t understand how these worlds ‘hang together’ in this way. It seems as though Kant has made two neat piles and like Aristotle and excluded the middle where never the twain shall meet. I’m not sure if this is actually his position, so following up with Matt about this, he suggests that “our capacity for reason depends on our freedom”. This may or may not be Kant’s view, but it aligns well with Bennett’s cosmology where Hazard permits Freedom through choice (reason) in the face of uncertainty - which in turn gives rise to morality. If this is Kant’s perspective, it would explain why he was satisfied with his position and why absolutely nobody understood it when he originally published the Critique.

According to Matt, it took about a generation before he became all the rage and wrote two more critiques; the critique of practical reason, where he takes freedom as a postulate and unpacks his moral theory, and the critique of judgement which deals with aesthetics, our perception of beauty and also deals with organisms while exploring teleological judgement around purpositiveness.

Apparently, Kant would say that there is a form of teleology in artistic expression because the artist has an end in mind, which they try to express in their artwork. He saw this teleology in the living world, and realized that there is a crack in the disjunction between the firewall he had erected between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world, which was the organism. The laws which apply to sub-animate existence do not apply to organism, which is where he coins the term “self organization” due to their cause and effect being circular, rather than the “efficient cause” of Newtonian Physics.

In other words, he was seeing organisms are purposive - as if Kant had said that even when we look at even a mere blade of grass, the freedom and self organization of our own rational capacities, our own autonomy as free beings, are reflected back to us as if in a mirror. He was seeing reason, which is supposed to be only in the human mind, in the living world operating in this looping form of causality. Where Kant goes with this realization is to say that biology can’t be a science because it’s not mechanistic, and when we see self-organization in the living world what we are doing is projecting our own rational capacities and freedom on to that. Resultantly, Kant believed that biology could only ever be a descriptive science, unlike physics which is explanatory.

Hearing Matt’s account of Kant, I’m grateful for the summary of his thinking process and the historical overview. However, it does very much remind me of the Gurdjieff aphorism that ‘Man is third force blind’ because it seems there is quite a lot of polar thinking and laborious amounts of thinking required to transcend it; namely things like the recognition that life/organism unites the material/phenomenal and the spiritual/noumenal elements of existence. These essentially say the same thing:

What is interesting here is that this seems like the schismogenesis of a kind of Spiritual Disjuncture in the sciences, when perhaps what’s really needed is a real transcendental philosophy or more adequately science that deals with the hypernomic/noumenal realm? Spiritual, or maybe second order science, dealing with transcendental wholes, somewhat along the lines of Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields?

Fichte (Post Kantian philosophy)

Moving beyond Kant, Matt outlines that in the wake of Kant’s critiques - in his so called transcendental philosophy - there were a number of responses, with the first coming from Johann Gottlieb Fichte who wanted to further radicalize Kant’s work. Initially he quite liked what Fichte was doing, but for Fichte, it there was a residue of dogmatism in Kant’s philosophy. This is illustrated by saying there’s a point in the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant says “I’m not a kind of darkly idealist who thinks there’s not a real world out there”. In other words that noumenal word which he buried and marks with an X, definitely exists and we can think about it, we just can’t know anything about it, yet he goes as far as to say that it is the cause of our sensations, sensitive experience and so on.

I’m not entirely sure how this is dogmatic, it seems quite open minded to hold place for the noumenal, while also dealing with the phenomenal. It may be that the dogmatism was Kant saying that we can’t know the noumenal when such a world is really “closer than your jugular vein”. To me this hinges on what is meant by, or specifically the methodology of knowing, which may be defined in several ways but is typically understood as what Bennett termed as “discriminatory knowledge” - which would be utterly inadequate for a second order - or noumenal - science that requires observer participation. Based on my interaction with Matt, it sounds like Kant implies this distinction in his way of knowing (or at least Matt does) but he doesn’t seem to articulate precisely enough to be correctly understood unlike Bennett.

However there is a big problem with the Noumenal; Kant has already spent hundreds of pages elaborating that causation is a category of our own understanding, only to now contradict this by saying that the world beyond our experience is causing experience. In other words what was previously an immanent metaphysics (where cause is just a category of our understanding), was now becoming a transcendental metaphysics (where cause comes from a place beyond our knowledge), Fichte sees this and radicalizes the perspective by creating an omniscient metaphysics where phenomenal and noumenal worlds are brought forth by our own minds and thinking activity.

Matt suggests that this may sound like solipsism, but feels it an unfair characterization of Fichte, who when talking about the “I” - the a first person pronoun - he is talking about something that’s present beyond each of us, that our empirical ego or everyday consciousness presupposes. An “I” that neither you nor me possess, an “I” that transcends us from which the whole universe pours out of, that is apparently not that different from an Advaita position, which he would have been influenced by through the Schlegel brothers who were part of his circle of friends in Jena, who were translating the Sanskrit epics Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana. Matt suggests this influence of Asian philosophy and spirituality makes it unsurprising that Fichte would go in this direction.

Based on Matt’s explanations, it’s possible I’m misinterpreting the stance of these philosophers as I’ve not read their words directly, and from the descriptions it sounds like there is a mixture of influences present such that transcendental philosophy is not ‘pure transcendence’, in the same way the Fichte’s more omniscient philosophy has elements of transcendence in it, namely that while essentially sounding like a philosophy of mind, he is still attempting to make claims about ‘the absolute’ or ‘all’ which is a transcendental move. It would probably be quite hard for any philosophy to be purely immanent, omniscient or transcendental, because there is bound to be a degree of epistemic trespassing unless very tightly scoped to the appropriate domain, but instead it’s interesting to note the dynamic interplays between these domains which give rise to a particular brew. For example Fichte’s work appears to be a 2-1-3 “Concentration” pattern in the language of Cosmic Ecology, where “A receptive impulse (omniscient) moderated by a an affirmative state (transcendental) focuses the scope of reconciliation (immanent) increasing concentrative power.” where the essence of German idealism was refined. This is however admittedly a somewhat speculative take from 30,000ft using analytical tools beyond the time in question.

Schelling

Schelling appears on the scene in the late 1790s, initially as a student of Fichte’s publishing articles in response to his work aged nineteen, initially impressed by Fichte’s efforts to radicalize Kant, making Kant even more ‘transcendental’ than even Kant realized (Matt’s word choice, not mine this is possibly better framed as ‘omniscient’). This they called the spirit of Kant, though the letter was more conservative, and the claim somewhat debatable - especially as Kant apparently lived to see what they were doing and got uncomfortable with it (though admittedly his own perspectives seemed to change over time).

Schelling, having grown up in the context of Swabian Pietism, was relatively at home with mysticism that made connections between nature and the spiritual with heartfelt faith, but Fichte was so intensely emphasizing the mind pole (omniscient) that Schelling too became uncomfortable, feeling that nature was not being done justice towards in Fichte’s approach in which nature was just the “not-I”. From Fichte’s perspective, nature is something posited by the “I” through its activity, so that the I can reflect upon itself and meet some resistance in order to become self conscious. In this sense it would seem that nature is naught but a mirror with no autonomous independent reality of its own, so a mere appearance and even more than Kant had it in his ‘transcendental’ philosophy (again it sounds like it’s more of an omniscient philosophy, that births a space for the transcendental by ‘negating the negative’ as Hegel would say)

Schelling does not like Fichte’s result, because in his view it is the wrong conclusion - nature is autonomous and has its own independent reality - not a mere appearance or mirage, and realizes that he can invert Kant’s logic to justify it as the body of the divine and a revelation of the deity. This is an interesting move because it perhaps indicates the kind of scientist Schelling was; from a first order perspective this might be considered analogous to fiddling with an experiment to change the results, but from a second order or relational perspective he’s making use of the relational dynamics inherent in the triad. At this point it’s interesting because by inverting the logic, he’s actually elaborating the transcendental aspects of Kant’s work that he said we can think about, but claimed unknowable.

In other words Schelling appropriated Kant’s basic question of what must the mind be so that nature can appear to it in the way it does?, and said no, it is not mind and its categories and forms of intuition that are a priori (omniscient), it’s nature that is a priori, changing the frame to what must nature be such that mind can emerge out of it?. This is what the author Robert Pirsig would call a “Copernican Inversion”, the moment that nothing changed but everything changed as Copernicus says the earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth.

This inversion of Kant’s core question is what leads Schelling into becoming one of the first evolutionary Panentheists; he’s not an emergentist that thinks nature is subjective from the start, but develops mind out of this long evolutionary process that leads to the human being, in this way he’s quite anthropocentric. This is in contrast to the likes of Bennett, Margulis, Lovelock or Watts - who all see ‘nature’ as beyond human intelligence. Watts describes this eloquently as a planet that peoples in the same way that apple trees apple. Bennett would go one meta on all three of these and go to stars, galaxies and the unfathomable totality, but let’s stick to Schelling for now.

For him, rather than mind being a priori for the conditions of our experience, Schelling says nature is a priori and develops an evolutionary account that nature goes through to arrive at mind. Apparently he famously said that nature is visible spirit, and that mind or our consciousness is invisible nature. So his philosophy of ‘transcendental realism’ where humans, nature and perhaps the universe becomes ever more conscious of themselves was quite radical for its time. It’s not that nature lacks spirit, it’s that nature is unaware of its latent spiritual capacities and gradually becomes more aware of itself through ever more complex entities where humans are almost transitional state. It’s interesting how semantics of the word nature is interpreted by these authors, as it would seem that for Schelling it translates as an emergent or perhaps even transcendental whole in which we are encapsulated as a unified totality, while for the other authors mentioned the word nature seems to means a collection of stuff ‘out there’ lacking unification.

So Schelling’s innovation is this question of “what must nature be such that mind can emerge out of it?”, where he begins without pretense that nature can be understood outside of his own conscious experience, which is still nature, just at a later stage of development. Paradoxically this means he starts at the tail end of the question, beginning with mind (like Kant), to answer a question with a different set of assumptions. Boiling our own self conscious experience to its most basic potencies he apparently suggests that nature begins with this basic form of subjectivity, which for him actually needs to be polarized. Without a comparative touch point or schema, ‘this basic subjectivity’ is seems rather ephemeral to grasp, though I interpret this as through Bennett’s energetic lens, with ‘dispersive’ or ‘zero point’ energy getting polarized into ‘directed/patterning’ energy.

My own interpretations aside, according to Matt he begins with gravity and light, where light is an expansive force that wants to expand into infinity and gravity is a contracting force that wants to hide away and shrink into nothing. This is probably the polarized state, with positive and negative poles. And apparently these forces never exist apart from each other, but are in constant struggle with each other, so he describes how these two infinite forces try to meet and defeat each other, and arrive at a series of temporary equilibria that continue to spill over and become more complex.

“So he describes a movement from light and gravity, through magnetism and electricity, through chemistry to biology and on to human consciousness and self consciousness. Where evolution proceeds, searching for equilibrium that it can never find, and he thinks that by moving up this series of stages there’s an approximation to equilibrium reached, in say chemistry that wasn’t there in electricity and magnetism, and then in organism there is this kind equilibrium where there’s a sort of circular causality, where an organism has to maintain itself far from equilibrium but none the less maintain its form. So there’s a kind of temporary stability that’s preceded by this homeostasis, homeorrhesis is probably a better account to keep things in motion.”

In this evolutionary account there is a process of complexification that is not a random accident but a self revelation of god, which becomes evolutionary panentheism. In other words it’s an embodied spirituality, where the realm of possibility or potency constantly interpenetrates with the world of materiality; they are not separate, but one unified modality - in other words an Immanent becoming where god’s purpose unfolds. From this perspective the tangible spatiotemporal world is not illusory but the divine seeking to become more perfect and complete through a process of incarnation.

Schelling’s Publications

At this point in the lecture Matt suggests a tour of Schelling’s publications saying he began in the 1790s with a few early essays that were responding to Fichte and very much in line with Fichte thought, doing “transcendental philosophy” beginning with the I and its activity and then trying to show how the whole world could unfold just from the activity of the I. So then in the late 1790s around age 24 or 25 he wrote a series of books on the philosophy of nature. Beginning with “ideas for a philosophy of nature” in 1797 and then the first outline for a theory of a philosophy of nature in 1799. Then in 1800 he wrote a text called “on the world soul, a hypothesis of higher physics for the explanation of the universal organism”, which got Goethe’s attention and Goethe who told the university of Jena to hire Schelling, who at that point as an unpaid professor age 25, became the most popular philosopher in Germany. It took a while for word to travel but in the 30s he was all the rage amongst the American transcendentalists, they were translating his work and publishing it “The Dial” and so on. So, in the late 1790s and early 1800s he really had this turn towards nature where he’s trying to say that nature is a priori as a dynamically evolving system, and human self consciousness is an elaboration upon a potency of potentiality that was always latent in nature.

In the early 1800s he has a Neoplatonic turn where he realizes that he has a Fichtean approach where everything spills out of the I, and that he has a natural philosophical approach where the I spills out of the natural world, and then asks ‘how do I coordinate the two?’. He’s realizing that he has two contradictory modalities between the transcendental and omniscient approaches and realizes there must be an indifference point between them where there is an absolute beyond either subject or object. He realizes that these two approaches he’s elaborating - the subjective transcendental approach and the objective natural philosophy approach (omniscient and transcendental) - are just two ways of coordinating our approach to the absolute and neither gets there fully.

He apparently tended to privilege the natural philosophy approach but wanted this to be a coordinate way for getting at something beyond finite rational thought (Immanent modality), because the absolute is the unthinkable and so the unthinkable. And so he was working this out for a few years from 1806, and while doing so, Hegel finishes the “Phenomenology of spirit”, gets the proof sent off to the printer just as Napoleon’s army is invading Vienna - though the proofs survived - in which Hegel criticizes Schelling (or is perceived to have) by implying Schelling and his followers think of the absolute “as a night in which all cows are black”, meaning nothing can be distinguished and it’s just a soup. Schelling, was upset by this and in a letter to Hegel requests him to ‘specify that you’re not talking about me when you make that criticism’ to which Hegel responds ‘I thought it was obvious that I was talking about some of the lesser lights amongst your followers and not you’. This apparently makes sense because when they were both co-editing a journal together some years earlier, Schelling used the same metaphor, critically, to dismiss idea by saying ‘the absolute is NOT a night in which all cows are black’. So despite the perceived spat, Hegel’s actually borrowing Schelling’s own metaphor, which led to confusion about this in the reception of the history.

Hegel only became famous many years later, but from that point forward, Schelling realized there’s a major problem with this whole approach of philosophy trying to develop the system which would allow us to relate everything to the absolute (transcendental philosophy). At the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel claims to have arrived at absolute knowledge, which Schelling was very uncomfortable with, yet possibly required Hegel to articulate in such brilliance to refute, because Schelling at this point started to say that the absolute or godhead was not a system but life; god is alive, god is freedom, and our own freedom is a reflection of that divine ground, and so the idea that that freedom could be curtailed and neatly wrapped up in a reified system, was horrendous from Schelling’s point of view. And so it’s not that Schelling gave up on systems, it’s that he basically said that each one of us needs to develop our own system - which may seem like a contradiction, so Schelling started to refer to it as his, while others needed their own so that it would feel coherent and internally consistent to them, as we all have this unique once occurrent perspective on the mystery of reality. The divine in a process of becoming if you will.

Later Charles Sanders Peirce, wrote in a letter to William James, about how much he admired Schelling - because it’s not just that we each need our own systems, it’s that tomorrow me may need a newer system the one we had yesterday - so Schelling in Peirce’s view, was a very scientific thinker because he was starting again, over and over again from new points of view, trying to develop a system, but never being attached to a particular system. Peirce really admired this and so his evolutionary cosmology and panentheism, is inheriting some of Schelling’s insights while updating and reformulating the science, as Whitehead would also do. Beyond this we eventually meet John Godolphin Bennett, who once again updates the system and reformulates the best of what has come before, offering tools for making sense of this evolutionary search space while tidying up and integrating the work of those who came before!

Introduction - Ed Kelly

Yes, like Schelling I’m inverting this session so that the discussion with Ed Kelly comes second in the sequence, because the talk on Psi and such is more sensible when following this discussion about the noumenal world. Kant said we could talk of it but not know it, which to me sounds like the dogmatism he should have been called out on if it wasn’t Fichte’s criticism. In other words I believe it is accessible through altered states and mystic experience, what Bennett possibly meant by ‘revealed knowledge’ - 5MEO DMT is said to be quite an effective way to meet god, which I don’t doubt.

Ed Kelly is from the University of Virginia’s department of perceptual studies, so is likely to have studied such experiences. The discussion however focuses on non-local, immaterial or ‘Psi’ Phenomena like telepathy, remote viewing and so forth. Honestly this seems better documented in “The Telepathy Tapes” which is definitely an area of interest, but the conversation was a bit odd and felt like pompous wise-acring without really offering much at all in the way of content.

In terms of Whitehead they cover most of the ground already covered about actual entities having a physical and mental dipole that’s held together through the force of prehension. More dyads, but I suppose when you get into non-locality and Psi, that prehension is a pretty good term with relation to anticipatory systems. The most salient aspect of the discussion was the distinction between ‘eternal objects’ and ‘potentia’, the former being along the lines of Platonic forms and the latter being less symmetrically structured, so more along the lines of Wolfram’s hypergraphs.

Still, this is all functional reification in my books, we can talk about Platonic forms but actually seeing the flows of our social graph and experiencing Psi phenomena is another thing, this is what I believe is the really interesting element of systematics - the non-theoretical application of Platonic forms towards a real practice of an immanent process philosophy. I probably seem arrogant saying this, as I have barely scratched the surface of the significance of Bennett’s work, which is more than just a functional reification of reality, but also exactly that; a sign trying to signify and gesture towards a Psience of the Noumenal by pointing a finger at the moon.

Anyway, I may have been in a mood while watching Ed as I didn’t get much from it, but will go back and re-watch the discussion to give him a second chance. It’s possible he brought energy to the table rather than information and due to watching these videos in another timezone, I would only be receiving the information. We’ll see, but my initial impression is that it’s too fragmented to report on and there was little of salience that you won’t find in the Telepathy tapes so I’m gonna leave things here for now and possibly update at some point if the situation warrants it.