Thanks, Matt, for taking the time to write this thoughtful and sympathetic review. A few comments:
1. We deliberately chose not to engage with Whitehead’s cosmology in his later writings. To do so would have required diving into his difficult and original concepts and terminology and would have taken us well beyond the critical scope of our project. We set our task to be a critique of the Blind Spot and not to be an evaluation of or argument for alternative metaphysical frameworks. For the same reason, we did not go into the details of Bergson’s, Husserl’s, or Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysics or cosmologies.
That said, I see Whitehead (along with David Bohm) as arguably the most significant thinker for creating a new way of understanding nature and the cosmos beyond the Blind Spot dichotomies of matter and mind, and subject and object.
Adam, Marcelo, and I are planning a new book devoted to sketching a positive vision of a post-Blind-Spot understanding of nature. I expect we’ll talk about Whitehead’s cosmology explicitly in that book.
2. Regarding panpsychism: as you know, Whitehead never used this term to describe his philosophy. (I don’t recall him using the term “panexperientialism” either.) As you say, he can’t be placed in the framework of panpsychism as that view is currently understood by the panpsychist thinkers we criticize, precisely because they still move within the confines of the Blind Spot whereas Whitehead does not. This is the reason we do not discuss him when we discuss panpsychism.
3. Although I appreciate Steiner’s exposition of Goethe, and even more Goethe’s writings on colour and plant morphology, I have never found Steiner himself particularly useful for a bunch of reasons I won’t go into here. (This despite my having been taught history of science by Arthur Zajonc, a physicist and anthroposophical thinker, and my dad’s having been influenced by Steiner.)
4. You accuse us of “model-centrism” because we say the Earth “really” rotates on its axis and goes round the sun, contrary to the Aristotelian view that the skies rotate around the Earth. Here I think you go too far. To say that the Earth and Sun are both moving relative to each other does not entail that a model in which the Earth goes round the sun maps the solar system as well as one in which the sun goes round the Earth. Our point in using the word “really” is that, given the superiority of the heliocentric model, we can say (relative to that superior model), the Earth really turns on its axis and really goes round the sun. This doesn’t logically imply a static Sun-centred system that neglects the larger context of the complexity of planetary movements.
5. A related point: you say that nature at the astronomical scale is non-computable, just as we argue for life and cognition. This may be true, but it doesn’t follow just from the stability of the solar system involving chaotic dynamics, which are classically deterministic, unless we rethink chaos in a post-Blind-Spot way (as we suggest on pages 70-71, 77-78).
6. Lastly, a small point: we don’t argue that all living organisms have a horizon of conscious experience (though I’m sympathetic to that view and elsewhere have made a case for taking it seriously); we just argue that they all are sense-making agents. How to relate sense-making to sentience (or to feeling and prehension in Whitehead’s sense) goes beyond what we discuss in the book.
I hope you find these comments worthwhile and I look forward to continuing the conversation. Thanks again for your attention to the book!
Oops, the sentence in (4) should read: To say that the Earth and Sun are both moving relative to each other does not entail that a model in which the sun goes round the Earth maps the solar system as well as one in which the Earth goes round the sun.
1. I should have been clearer perhaps that the lack of evaluative/alternative cosmologizing is not a criticism of your book, but a personal disappointment : ) The critical work you three did was precision aimed at model-centrism and significantly advances the conversation about time, life, thought, and the constitutive status of consciousness. I hope in future projects to see embodied phenomenology venture more into the question of its own cosmological preconditions. I am very excited to hear that you are Marcelo are planning a follow-up!
2. You are perfectly right that Whitehead never uses the terms "panpsychism" or "panexperientialism." But he does say things like:
-"The whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects...Apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." (PR 166-7).
-"The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of 'really real' things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe. The first step in the argument must be to form some concept of what life can mean. Also, we require that the deficiencies in our concept of physical nature should be supplied by its fusion with life. And we require that on the other hand the notion of life should involve the notion of physical nature" (MT, 139).
So, I find it difficult not to think of his philosophy of organism as a species of panpsychism. It certainly isn't materialism, dualism, or idealism. The major difference between his panpsychism and most of the contemporary analytic renderings is his rejection of a substance-property in favor of a process-relational ontology. That really does make all the difference.
3. Steiner is interesting to me as an exemplar of what a science that took its human embodiment seriously would look like. Yes it gets weird very quickly, and the religion that has built up around his claims creates an unhelpful distraction from the phenomenological and practice methods he developed. What happens when psychospiritual life is no longer considered an extraneous and epiphenomenal addition to mechanically explained causal nature, but becomes fully consonant and coextensive with physical process itself? I cannot even begin to evaluate most of Steiner's specific claims about the evolutionary history of humanity and the universe; but I have a sneaking suspicion that post-bifurcation science is inevitably going to seem very weird while we're still waking up from a centuries-long dream and have yet to rub the Cartesian crust from our eyes.
4. I realize this is a controversial claim. I appreciate your willingness to indulge me on it. I guess I don't know what the criteria might be allowing us to determine that the heliocentric model is superior to the geocentric. Superior in what respects? In terms of predicting the location of the planets, Ptolemy’s geocentric model remained more accurate than Copernicus’ heliocentric model until Kepler and Newton updated his math. Modern planetarium projectors (invented in the 1920s by a company in Jena, Germany) continue to reproduce Ptolemy’s deferents and epicycles with their internal gears and motors. No doubt Ptolemy's model couldn't have helped us take a single step into outer space to land men on the Moon or rovers on Mars. But some future physics might make our quaint modified Newtonian and relativistic conceptions of mass, space, and motion seem just as silly as Ptolemy's circus of circles. The point is there are various criteria we might apply here. My concern is really just that truly getting over the blind spot would entail taking very seriously Husserl's admittedly back of the envelope claim that "earth, the original ark, does not move." No embodied phenomenological sense can be made of the image of the solar system most people with textbook understandings of astronomy have in their minds. That's a problem if we hope to feel more at home down here as earthlings.
Nice review, Matt. I thought the book was good, but not great for some of the important reasons you mentioned. Scant attention to Whitehead, among others. Alas: bring back the anthropocosmic. Human existence as the key to the cosmos. How to properly unravel all of the layers behind our existence as a natural fact? Berdyaev: anthropology precedes cosmology and metaphysics: Gnothi seauton, tat tvam asi, imago dei.
Steiner has made it very simple in 400 volumes of Spiritual Science. Turn yourself into the instrument of spiritual truth-finding. Then, the "proof is in the pudding". In other words, a pure thought world really exists. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin rediscovered it in the 20th century, while in China for the Jesuits, and called it by the name, Noosphere. It means that everything that has ever happened is recorded there. Aristotle taught Alexander out of it, after explaining how it came into being in the first place. Steiner used it often in order to bolster his support of spiritual evidence. He said: "Even if I weren't clairvoyant, these are the facts". The imperishable deserves to exist if it tells a vitally important story. And what is that? Organized, systematic and functional spiritual evolution. We are on to it.
Thanks, Matt, for taking the time to write this thoughtful and sympathetic review. A few comments:
1. We deliberately chose not to engage with Whitehead’s cosmology in his later writings. To do so would have required diving into his difficult and original concepts and terminology and would have taken us well beyond the critical scope of our project. We set our task to be a critique of the Blind Spot and not to be an evaluation of or argument for alternative metaphysical frameworks. For the same reason, we did not go into the details of Bergson’s, Husserl’s, or Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysics or cosmologies.
That said, I see Whitehead (along with David Bohm) as arguably the most significant thinker for creating a new way of understanding nature and the cosmos beyond the Blind Spot dichotomies of matter and mind, and subject and object.
Adam, Marcelo, and I are planning a new book devoted to sketching a positive vision of a post-Blind-Spot understanding of nature. I expect we’ll talk about Whitehead’s cosmology explicitly in that book.
2. Regarding panpsychism: as you know, Whitehead never used this term to describe his philosophy. (I don’t recall him using the term “panexperientialism” either.) As you say, he can’t be placed in the framework of panpsychism as that view is currently understood by the panpsychist thinkers we criticize, precisely because they still move within the confines of the Blind Spot whereas Whitehead does not. This is the reason we do not discuss him when we discuss panpsychism.
3. Although I appreciate Steiner’s exposition of Goethe, and even more Goethe’s writings on colour and plant morphology, I have never found Steiner himself particularly useful for a bunch of reasons I won’t go into here. (This despite my having been taught history of science by Arthur Zajonc, a physicist and anthroposophical thinker, and my dad’s having been influenced by Steiner.)
4. You accuse us of “model-centrism” because we say the Earth “really” rotates on its axis and goes round the sun, contrary to the Aristotelian view that the skies rotate around the Earth. Here I think you go too far. To say that the Earth and Sun are both moving relative to each other does not entail that a model in which the Earth goes round the sun maps the solar system as well as one in which the sun goes round the Earth. Our point in using the word “really” is that, given the superiority of the heliocentric model, we can say (relative to that superior model), the Earth really turns on its axis and really goes round the sun. This doesn’t logically imply a static Sun-centred system that neglects the larger context of the complexity of planetary movements.
5. A related point: you say that nature at the astronomical scale is non-computable, just as we argue for life and cognition. This may be true, but it doesn’t follow just from the stability of the solar system involving chaotic dynamics, which are classically deterministic, unless we rethink chaos in a post-Blind-Spot way (as we suggest on pages 70-71, 77-78).
6. Lastly, a small point: we don’t argue that all living organisms have a horizon of conscious experience (though I’m sympathetic to that view and elsewhere have made a case for taking it seriously); we just argue that they all are sense-making agents. How to relate sense-making to sentience (or to feeling and prehension in Whitehead’s sense) goes beyond what we discuss in the book.
I hope you find these comments worthwhile and I look forward to continuing the conversation. Thanks again for your attention to the book!
Oops, the sentence in (4) should read: To say that the Earth and Sun are both moving relative to each other does not entail that a model in which the sun goes round the Earth maps the solar system as well as one in which the Earth goes round the sun.
Thanks for stopping by, Evan!
1. I should have been clearer perhaps that the lack of evaluative/alternative cosmologizing is not a criticism of your book, but a personal disappointment : ) The critical work you three did was precision aimed at model-centrism and significantly advances the conversation about time, life, thought, and the constitutive status of consciousness. I hope in future projects to see embodied phenomenology venture more into the question of its own cosmological preconditions. I am very excited to hear that you are Marcelo are planning a follow-up!
2. You are perfectly right that Whitehead never uses the terms "panpsychism" or "panexperientialism." But he does say things like:
-"The whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects...Apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." (PR 166-7).
-"The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of 'really real' things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe. The first step in the argument must be to form some concept of what life can mean. Also, we require that the deficiencies in our concept of physical nature should be supplied by its fusion with life. And we require that on the other hand the notion of life should involve the notion of physical nature" (MT, 139).
So, I find it difficult not to think of his philosophy of organism as a species of panpsychism. It certainly isn't materialism, dualism, or idealism. The major difference between his panpsychism and most of the contemporary analytic renderings is his rejection of a substance-property in favor of a process-relational ontology. That really does make all the difference.
3. Steiner is interesting to me as an exemplar of what a science that took its human embodiment seriously would look like. Yes it gets weird very quickly, and the religion that has built up around his claims creates an unhelpful distraction from the phenomenological and practice methods he developed. What happens when psychospiritual life is no longer considered an extraneous and epiphenomenal addition to mechanically explained causal nature, but becomes fully consonant and coextensive with physical process itself? I cannot even begin to evaluate most of Steiner's specific claims about the evolutionary history of humanity and the universe; but I have a sneaking suspicion that post-bifurcation science is inevitably going to seem very weird while we're still waking up from a centuries-long dream and have yet to rub the Cartesian crust from our eyes.
4. I realize this is a controversial claim. I appreciate your willingness to indulge me on it. I guess I don't know what the criteria might be allowing us to determine that the heliocentric model is superior to the geocentric. Superior in what respects? In terms of predicting the location of the planets, Ptolemy’s geocentric model remained more accurate than Copernicus’ heliocentric model until Kepler and Newton updated his math. Modern planetarium projectors (invented in the 1920s by a company in Jena, Germany) continue to reproduce Ptolemy’s deferents and epicycles with their internal gears and motors. No doubt Ptolemy's model couldn't have helped us take a single step into outer space to land men on the Moon or rovers on Mars. But some future physics might make our quaint modified Newtonian and relativistic conceptions of mass, space, and motion seem just as silly as Ptolemy's circus of circles. The point is there are various criteria we might apply here. My concern is really just that truly getting over the blind spot would entail taking very seriously Husserl's admittedly back of the envelope claim that "earth, the original ark, does not move." No embodied phenomenological sense can be made of the image of the solar system most people with textbook understandings of astronomy have in their minds. That's a problem if we hope to feel more at home down here as earthlings.
5. I agree with your reformulation : )
6. Thanks for that clarification.
Nice review, Matt. I thought the book was good, but not great for some of the important reasons you mentioned. Scant attention to Whitehead, among others. Alas: bring back the anthropocosmic. Human existence as the key to the cosmos. How to properly unravel all of the layers behind our existence as a natural fact? Berdyaev: anthropology precedes cosmology and metaphysics: Gnothi seauton, tat tvam asi, imago dei.
Steiner has made it very simple in 400 volumes of Spiritual Science. Turn yourself into the instrument of spiritual truth-finding. Then, the "proof is in the pudding". In other words, a pure thought world really exists. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin rediscovered it in the 20th century, while in China for the Jesuits, and called it by the name, Noosphere. It means that everything that has ever happened is recorded there. Aristotle taught Alexander out of it, after explaining how it came into being in the first place. Steiner used it often in order to bolster his support of spiritual evidence. He said: "Even if I weren't clairvoyant, these are the facts". The imperishable deserves to exist if it tells a vitally important story. And what is that? Organized, systematic and functional spiritual evolution. We are on to it.