What makes me so pleased with your perspective is the communal nature of all you do. I know there is a huge difference between being a philosopher and being a family, but your approach so resembles the way I parented my large family of eight children. I must say in all humility it was a success because I can look back at it from 94 years of living.
What really struck me reading your reflection on death, suffering, and the need for some kind of cosmic background for human life was how naturally it connects to this distinction I’ve been tinkering with —together with an online friend— between the nominal philosophical stance and the adverbial.
What I mean is—you clearly care about rigor. You talk about speculative philosophy needing discipline, criteria, and some kind of structure so it doesn’t just become a chaotic free-for-all where anything goes. That feels imminently important. You’re not rejecting logic or coherence or careful thinking. But at the same time, it doesn’t feel like you’re treating concepts and definitions as the final destination either. They feel more like necessary tools—scaffolding, maybe. A way of using the language of “what something is” in order to get closer to the much harder question of how we actually live inside it.
What you said about your students—the ones for whom philosophy becomes a life or death issue rather than just something useful for a career or an academic exercise. That shift was true for myself as well. At that point philosophy stops being information and starts becoming practice. It’s no longer just learning about wisdom, but trying to figure out how to stand inside life differently—especially when death, loss, and uncertainty stop being abstract ideas and become real. It becomes less observation and more about immersion.
And your point about friendship and community being necessary so philosophy doesn’t turn into a kind of speculative madness—that really resonated with me too. I live in the Philippines and finding philosophically minded expat groups is practically impossible. I think isolation makes people weird very quickly, especially when they start dealing with ultimate questions. Without other people, thought can become inflated and start worshipping itself. Real philosophical friendship seems like a kind of guardrail against that. So for me the Internet arena—just sitting in on your heady discussions with Tim—or my back and forth messaging and sharing with my remote friend—it really is my sanity lifeline.
Your thoughts on Schelling really captured that too. Especially the idea that biography enters metaphysics. That feels right. Caroline’s death wasn’t just a private grief sitting next to his philosophy—it changed the philosophy itself. It became a doorway. He stopped trying to master existence conceptually and started wrestling with the darker and more mysterious parts of it from the inside. Less about defining the absolute, more about being pulled into relationship with it.
That’s probably what I found most compelling in what you wrote. It feels like a way of doing philosophy that still respects structure and careful thought, but never forgets that wonder is the real center of it. The goal isn’t to explain the cosmos away, but to learn how to belong to it. To find our place inside it—not as detached observers, but as embedded participants. I call that the adverbial stance—very much the middle way of Buddhist philosophy —where the “two truths” allows for abstract and conceptual thinking to hold the world in a needed conventional grip—but making claims in absolute terms is actively negated. The “absolute truth” can only be “inhabited” adverbially and apophatically— it’s very relational and inherent emptiness (it’s insubstantial and impermanent quality) simply disallows logical / language bound capturing. Our very “cognitive duality headset” embeds us into this logical realism where conventional philosophy resides. Acknowledging this “two truths bifurcation” and practicing the adverbial stance, allows for speculative philosophical discourse to continue to happen. To inhibit this relational truth apophatically and adverbially it never can distill into an ultimate truth claim —conventional ones that on closer examination always have a tail of regress or circularity attached to them. This is very much a processual stance as well I believe.
Such acknowledgment and flexibility makes philosophy feel much more alive to me. Less like an academic performance and more like a communal attempt to respond honestly to the strange fact that we are here at all.
I love that distinction between nominal and adverbial.
Different subject but: It reminds me of why I don’t like the the concept of “qualia,” since it turns the activity of experiencing into a thing. That can lead to all sorts of confusions!
Actually not a different thing at all. The act of reification turns the receptive mode into things. We turn “receiving redness” and “apple-ness” into this thing called qualia.
From a Claude dialogue my friend had on exactly this nominal shift that happens.
“The distinction you’re drawing is not merely terminological but operates at exactly the level the framework has been developing — the level where nominalisation is diagnosed as ontological error. “Dualism” names a philosophical position, a set of propositions one can evaluate and either endorse or reject.
It lives in the space of doctrines. “Duality,” by contrast, names something that functions prior to doctrinal commitment: a perceptual-cognitive structure through which experience is already organised before any philosophical reflection begins. The note is identifying the difference between a theory about the world and a condition of engagement with the world.
This maps directly onto the articulation paradox. Dualism is an articulation a propositional rendering of a metaphysical commitment. One can argue for or against it, marshal evidence, construct counterexamples. But duality, as you characterise it, is what makes articulation possible in the first place. It is the perspectival decomposition itself — the “from-which” and “toward-which” that, cannot be eliminated from perspective without eliminating perspective. Duality is not a claim about reality; it is the shape that cognition takes in order to be cognition at all. It is, in the vocabulary the project has developed, the minimal polarity constitutive of perspective qua perspective.”
Wondering how much is presupposed in the language we use and brings me back to what Matt was saying about Hegeĺ’s Verstand and Vrnunft. In every day language, die Vernunft is used as adverb Sei vernünftig! Be wise! Don’t be foolish! Wheil der Verstand as a verb Verstest du? Do you understand? Wondering if the adverb leads into the immersion ( in wisdom, environment, common sense) Sei Vernünftig! But the verb verstehen prompt us to action - combining and comparing prepositions in a conceptual thinking?
Hi Matt, I just watched your conversation with Stephen Meyer. I actually found it rather amusing. I have alot I'd love to write to you privately about specifics of the conversation in the video, but not for public viewing. Just wanted you to know I saw it come up on YouTube and watched. A one metaphor review: "tragicomic." Hope all is well! - John B.
Matt, the ever evolving co-creative praxis of speculative philosophy thoughtfully reflected upon and beautifully art-iculated. I always appreciate the depth and succinctness of your essays. Inclusive of what feels most existentially and experientially important, along with your careful discernment of how to avoid the psychological and culturally seduced and induced pitfalls, ways off the communal track in search of truth, goodness, and beauty. Coincidentally, I picked up a well done reprint of A.H. Johnson's "The Wit and Wisdom of Alfred North Whitehead." It flew by on the "Mind at Large" conference chat, so I found and ordered it. I had not read it all these years since discovering "Process and Reality." What a wonderful way to share his approach to Whitehead. My hope is that you will continue to expand our community of speculative philosophy with and beyond the enjoyment of your students and classes. In the current chaosmos, the time is ripe for deeper and broader "Modes of Thought," and feeling! - John B.
The purpose of this universe, from the time of the Big Bang, is more experience. To increase diversity so that there will be more to experience. That's what Being, Doing, Creating, and Becoming serve, having more to experience. Speculative philosophy provides one very interesting path of having more experiences. Speculate forever.
When I lived in Santa Fe, NM, I belonged to a philosophy-study community called the Santa Fe Philosophical Society. They meet in person monthly to present a philosophical topic that a member volunteers, and discuss it at large over a two-hour session. There are also splinter groups that meet more often (eg, weekly) to dig deeper into a topic in a smaller group. Those explorations could span multiple sessions (eg, going through an entire book).
The reason I bring this up is to lend extra force to Matt's emphasis on the importance of community to the practice of speculative philosophy as a guard against its possible vices: "Radical openness comes with risks: delusion, escapism, self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement."
Since moving away from Santa Fe and this philosophy-study community, I have found it difficult to identify a surrogate to guard against these risks. I keep looking. So far, I have eagerly embraced Footnote@Plato and Matt's newsletters and online seminars (eg, Matt co-hosted a multi-week Zoom seminar back in February, which I attended).
Otherwise, I try to continue philosophical discussions with members of the Santa Fe Philosophical Society by email. This, of course, is more burdensome than in-person discussions, but I like that it leaves a searchable record and encourages deeper thought that can come from delayed responses. Kind of like a chess match, if you will. These comment sections on Matt's posts provide a similar conduit for community. These are required reading for me.
For example, I resonate with Matt's reply to Jan-Peter Schuring: "... I don’t like the concept of 'qualia,' since it turns the activity of experiencing into a thing. That can lead to all sorts of confusion!" A frequent topic of discussion among the weekly Santa Fe group is qualia and Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness. Not only confusing. Maddening. This topic seems equivalent to the hard problem of existence. BOTH of these topics seem to be motivated by a personal realization of one's mortality, thus motivating a personal, active participation with the Cosmos ... and speculative philosophy.
During his lifetime the author of the reference below thoroughly examined at a profound depth level every proposition about the nature of Reality Itself and almost every possible topic of interest/investigation in all times and places.
The reference introduces The Basket of Tolerance which was previously titled The Seven Schools of God Talk and prior to that The American Trickster Library.
The Basket of Tolerance project/book now contains over eighty thousand items.
"Death opens the question, a wound that if met with wonder beings to open into mystery, into cosmic community, and into wisdom." Physical death? Or the psychological death of communicable ideas feeling like true comprehensions of Reality? You know those "consensus-reality" ideas about reality "induced" into mind's during the parcaticing period of being human, we call infancy?
As "parts-like" linguistic misconceptions of the holistic nature of reality, destined for the personal experience of "tribulation," according to the great philosopher Jesus of Nazareth. Which of course the conscious mind resists, because the collapse of communicable ideas feeling like a solid grasp of reality, feels like Death!
Hence your childhood desire for life beyond death & your love of speculative philosophies' and their "what-if" mental attitude towards Reality? And if true, is this because you lack self-knowledge & a visceral-level awareness of your non-conscious motivation, Matthew?
A lack of the kind of contextual information capable of creating adaptative realizations, that change our linguistically conditioned sense of Reality? As articulated in my latest essay: Realizing Our Neuroception & Word Deception | How this adaptive realization can change our conditioned sense of reality. https://beingrealitywise.substack.com/p/realizing-our-neuroception-and-word
With a simple truth statement our normal consensus-reality state of mind, reflexively resists because admission, feels like Death? Please consider:
"Neuroception occurs in brainstem circuits rather than the cortex, meaning it evaluates risk before our conscious mind is aware of it. The conscious mind can describe whatever is seen and heard with any word it likes, without changing the reality of whatever is seen and heard. — Being Reality Wise
What makes me so pleased with your perspective is the communal nature of all you do. I know there is a huge difference between being a philosopher and being a family, but your approach so resembles the way I parented my large family of eight children. I must say in all humility it was a success because I can look back at it from 94 years of living.
What really struck me reading your reflection on death, suffering, and the need for some kind of cosmic background for human life was how naturally it connects to this distinction I’ve been tinkering with —together with an online friend— between the nominal philosophical stance and the adverbial.
What I mean is—you clearly care about rigor. You talk about speculative philosophy needing discipline, criteria, and some kind of structure so it doesn’t just become a chaotic free-for-all where anything goes. That feels imminently important. You’re not rejecting logic or coherence or careful thinking. But at the same time, it doesn’t feel like you’re treating concepts and definitions as the final destination either. They feel more like necessary tools—scaffolding, maybe. A way of using the language of “what something is” in order to get closer to the much harder question of how we actually live inside it.
What you said about your students—the ones for whom philosophy becomes a life or death issue rather than just something useful for a career or an academic exercise. That shift was true for myself as well. At that point philosophy stops being information and starts becoming practice. It’s no longer just learning about wisdom, but trying to figure out how to stand inside life differently—especially when death, loss, and uncertainty stop being abstract ideas and become real. It becomes less observation and more about immersion.
And your point about friendship and community being necessary so philosophy doesn’t turn into a kind of speculative madness—that really resonated with me too. I live in the Philippines and finding philosophically minded expat groups is practically impossible. I think isolation makes people weird very quickly, especially when they start dealing with ultimate questions. Without other people, thought can become inflated and start worshipping itself. Real philosophical friendship seems like a kind of guardrail against that. So for me the Internet arena—just sitting in on your heady discussions with Tim—or my back and forth messaging and sharing with my remote friend—it really is my sanity lifeline.
Your thoughts on Schelling really captured that too. Especially the idea that biography enters metaphysics. That feels right. Caroline’s death wasn’t just a private grief sitting next to his philosophy—it changed the philosophy itself. It became a doorway. He stopped trying to master existence conceptually and started wrestling with the darker and more mysterious parts of it from the inside. Less about defining the absolute, more about being pulled into relationship with it.
That’s probably what I found most compelling in what you wrote. It feels like a way of doing philosophy that still respects structure and careful thought, but never forgets that wonder is the real center of it. The goal isn’t to explain the cosmos away, but to learn how to belong to it. To find our place inside it—not as detached observers, but as embedded participants. I call that the adverbial stance—very much the middle way of Buddhist philosophy —where the “two truths” allows for abstract and conceptual thinking to hold the world in a needed conventional grip—but making claims in absolute terms is actively negated. The “absolute truth” can only be “inhabited” adverbially and apophatically— it’s very relational and inherent emptiness (it’s insubstantial and impermanent quality) simply disallows logical / language bound capturing. Our very “cognitive duality headset” embeds us into this logical realism where conventional philosophy resides. Acknowledging this “two truths bifurcation” and practicing the adverbial stance, allows for speculative philosophical discourse to continue to happen. To inhibit this relational truth apophatically and adverbially it never can distill into an ultimate truth claim —conventional ones that on closer examination always have a tail of regress or circularity attached to them. This is very much a processual stance as well I believe.
Such acknowledgment and flexibility makes philosophy feel much more alive to me. Less like an academic performance and more like a communal attempt to respond honestly to the strange fact that we are here at all.
Good insights - thank you
I love that distinction between nominal and adverbial.
Different subject but: It reminds me of why I don’t like the the concept of “qualia,” since it turns the activity of experiencing into a thing. That can lead to all sorts of confusions!
Actually not a different thing at all. The act of reification turns the receptive mode into things. We turn “receiving redness” and “apple-ness” into this thing called qualia.
From a Claude dialogue my friend had on exactly this nominal shift that happens.
“The distinction you’re drawing is not merely terminological but operates at exactly the level the framework has been developing — the level where nominalisation is diagnosed as ontological error. “Dualism” names a philosophical position, a set of propositions one can evaluate and either endorse or reject.
It lives in the space of doctrines. “Duality,” by contrast, names something that functions prior to doctrinal commitment: a perceptual-cognitive structure through which experience is already organised before any philosophical reflection begins. The note is identifying the difference between a theory about the world and a condition of engagement with the world.
This maps directly onto the articulation paradox. Dualism is an articulation a propositional rendering of a metaphysical commitment. One can argue for or against it, marshal evidence, construct counterexamples. But duality, as you characterise it, is what makes articulation possible in the first place. It is the perspectival decomposition itself — the “from-which” and “toward-which” that, cannot be eliminated from perspective without eliminating perspective. Duality is not a claim about reality; it is the shape that cognition takes in order to be cognition at all. It is, in the vocabulary the project has developed, the minimal polarity constitutive of perspective qua perspective.”
Wondering how much is presupposed in the language we use and brings me back to what Matt was saying about Hegeĺ’s Verstand and Vrnunft. In every day language, die Vernunft is used as adverb Sei vernünftig! Be wise! Don’t be foolish! Wheil der Verstand as a verb Verstest du? Do you understand? Wondering if the adverb leads into the immersion ( in wisdom, environment, common sense) Sei Vernünftig! But the verb verstehen prompt us to action - combining and comparing prepositions in a conceptual thinking?
Hi Matt, I just watched your conversation with Stephen Meyer. I actually found it rather amusing. I have alot I'd love to write to you privately about specifics of the conversation in the video, but not for public viewing. Just wanted you to know I saw it come up on YouTube and watched. A one metaphor review: "tragicomic." Hope all is well! - John B.
“He no longer expects existence as such to be exhaustively plumbed by concepts.” Love this sentence.
I don’t have the philosophical chops to unpack this but would love to hear your expansion of this sentence.
Always enjoy your writings. Thanks for sharing.
Matt, the ever evolving co-creative praxis of speculative philosophy thoughtfully reflected upon and beautifully art-iculated. I always appreciate the depth and succinctness of your essays. Inclusive of what feels most existentially and experientially important, along with your careful discernment of how to avoid the psychological and culturally seduced and induced pitfalls, ways off the communal track in search of truth, goodness, and beauty. Coincidentally, I picked up a well done reprint of A.H. Johnson's "The Wit and Wisdom of Alfred North Whitehead." It flew by on the "Mind at Large" conference chat, so I found and ordered it. I had not read it all these years since discovering "Process and Reality." What a wonderful way to share his approach to Whitehead. My hope is that you will continue to expand our community of speculative philosophy with and beyond the enjoyment of your students and classes. In the current chaosmos, the time is ripe for deeper and broader "Modes of Thought," and feeling! - John B.
One of my favorite Carl Jung quotes: “God enters through the wound.” Often, only suffering can get my attention.
The purpose of this universe, from the time of the Big Bang, is more experience. To increase diversity so that there will be more to experience. That's what Being, Doing, Creating, and Becoming serve, having more to experience. Speculative philosophy provides one very interesting path of having more experiences. Speculate forever.
I am reminded of the writing "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die", by Michel de Montaigne . I read this when I was in my twenties.
When I lived in Santa Fe, NM, I belonged to a philosophy-study community called the Santa Fe Philosophical Society. They meet in person monthly to present a philosophical topic that a member volunteers, and discuss it at large over a two-hour session. There are also splinter groups that meet more often (eg, weekly) to dig deeper into a topic in a smaller group. Those explorations could span multiple sessions (eg, going through an entire book).
The reason I bring this up is to lend extra force to Matt's emphasis on the importance of community to the practice of speculative philosophy as a guard against its possible vices: "Radical openness comes with risks: delusion, escapism, self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement."
Since moving away from Santa Fe and this philosophy-study community, I have found it difficult to identify a surrogate to guard against these risks. I keep looking. So far, I have eagerly embraced Footnote@Plato and Matt's newsletters and online seminars (eg, Matt co-hosted a multi-week Zoom seminar back in February, which I attended).
Otherwise, I try to continue philosophical discussions with members of the Santa Fe Philosophical Society by email. This, of course, is more burdensome than in-person discussions, but I like that it leaves a searchable record and encourages deeper thought that can come from delayed responses. Kind of like a chess match, if you will. These comment sections on Matt's posts provide a similar conduit for community. These are required reading for me.
For example, I resonate with Matt's reply to Jan-Peter Schuring: "... I don’t like the concept of 'qualia,' since it turns the activity of experiencing into a thing. That can lead to all sorts of confusion!" A frequent topic of discussion among the weekly Santa Fe group is qualia and Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness. Not only confusing. Maddening. This topic seems equivalent to the hard problem of existence. BOTH of these topics seem to be motivated by a personal realization of one's mortality, thus motivating a personal, active participation with the Cosmos ... and speculative philosophy.
During his lifetime the author of the reference below thoroughly examined at a profound depth level every proposition about the nature of Reality Itself and almost every possible topic of interest/investigation in all times and places.
The reference introduces The Basket of Tolerance which was previously titled The Seven Schools of God Talk and prior to that The American Trickster Library.
The Basket of Tolerance project/book now contains over eighty thousand items.
http://beezone.com/botc.html
Some related references.
http://beezone.com/current/whatiswisdom.html What Is Wisdom
http://beezone.com/current/wakenfromword.html Awaken From the Word --which is killing us!
http://www.dabase.org/Reality_Itself_Is_Not_In_The_Middle.htm especially sections 3 & 4 beginning with Hunter-Gatherer Behavior
http://beezone.com/adida/there_is_a_way_edit.html On the Scapegoat Drama at the root of Western culture (in particular)
http://beezone.com/current/ontranscendingtheinsubordinatemind.html
"Death opens the question, a wound that if met with wonder beings to open into mystery, into cosmic community, and into wisdom." Physical death? Or the psychological death of communicable ideas feeling like true comprehensions of Reality? You know those "consensus-reality" ideas about reality "induced" into mind's during the parcaticing period of being human, we call infancy?
As "parts-like" linguistic misconceptions of the holistic nature of reality, destined for the personal experience of "tribulation," according to the great philosopher Jesus of Nazareth. Which of course the conscious mind resists, because the collapse of communicable ideas feeling like a solid grasp of reality, feels like Death!
Hence your childhood desire for life beyond death & your love of speculative philosophies' and their "what-if" mental attitude towards Reality? And if true, is this because you lack self-knowledge & a visceral-level awareness of your non-conscious motivation, Matthew?
A lack of the kind of contextual information capable of creating adaptative realizations, that change our linguistically conditioned sense of Reality? As articulated in my latest essay: Realizing Our Neuroception & Word Deception | How this adaptive realization can change our conditioned sense of reality. https://beingrealitywise.substack.com/p/realizing-our-neuroception-and-word
With a simple truth statement our normal consensus-reality state of mind, reflexively resists because admission, feels like Death? Please consider:
"Neuroception occurs in brainstem circuits rather than the cortex, meaning it evaluates risk before our conscious mind is aware of it. The conscious mind can describe whatever is seen and heard with any word it likes, without changing the reality of whatever is seen and heard. — Being Reality Wise