It was my intention that the last piece should be the penultimate in a series I have pursued this summer with more intention than this dispatch typically sees. It began with my piece on “Divine Animality,” and continued with the entries on the Holy Spirit as “The Wild God,” my interview with Mary-Jane Rubenstein on her wide-ranging work, “Life and Wisdom,” “Why Humanity?”, and then the recent elemental pieces on water (“Yardna”), land (“Aretz”), fire (“Agni”), air (“Vayu”), and the heavens (“Aither”). My goal was that the piece which followed “Aither” should conclude the matter by saying something summative about spiritual ecology, or a reenchanted cosmology, the common theme of these pieces considered from different angles. But the last article has clarified for me that there are still some hanging threads to address in a more sustained fashion: namely, why the natural world qualifies as a topic of theological or spiritual concern at all, which is also to offer something of a more sustained argument for panpsychism as the appropriate description of the natural world, formally speaking.
From the modern standpoint the idea that a would-be theologian should have anything to say about natural phenomena or that religious traditions at large would have any such investment in things that can be studied under the purview of natural and social sciences may well seem strange. We are habituated to think of science and religion as different domains, overseeing, in the late Stephen Jay Gould’s words, “non-overlapping magisteria” at best, and hence not acting as competitors for describing reality. And that might be true at least at the level of method: science and theology do not propose to study anything in exactly the same way. Insofar as both rely on some form of empiricism and investigative method, they do not employ the same standards, typically, for what counts as data; insofar as both rely on some form of abstract causal thinking to extrapolate logically from data to conclusive inferences they do not accept the same limits of scope in reflection. Minimally, any understanding of the relationship between religion and science which does not either polarize them, as does the Conflict Thesis, or collapse them, as do fundamentalisms of all kinds, is to be welcomed over these alternatives. But one may justly question whether non-overlapping magisteria is really a successful model for describing science’s own assessments of religion—as a human biocultural and evolutionary phenomenon, with precedents and parallels in the animal world, and certain neurological and psychological effects, and as a social phenomenon, with various theoretical and disciplinary approaches we now call “religious studies,” inclusive of things like “biblical studies,” and overlapping with other relevant disciplines, like classics or Asian studies—or religion’s assessment of science, as a favorite posture of Lady Philosophy, the ancilla theologiae, or of the natural phenomena that the sciences study. It may well surprise some scientists and aspirants that religious believers are frequently inclined towards the sciences. It may well surprise some religious people to know that members of their congregations are sometimes well-trained scientists or otherwise scientifically informed (though I rather think that scientific education has been on the rise in many congregations). Each of these surprises are consequences of the poor education many contemporary people, religious or not, STEM-oriented or not, receive in the humanities. But both the more scientifically and the more religiously inclined, as well as those drawn to both, are only just stirring in response to the latest developments in that intermediary where they have always entwined: philosophy, and especially the philosophy of mind. It is here—on the threshold of the question of what that principle is that allows us both to perceive and to intellectually comprehend the world around us, formally, mechanically, materially, and finally—that the religious quest and the scientific quest both originate and rejoin.
It can be very difficult for a bad idea to die, and exorcising a demon often requires knowing something about its name and history, so it is worth briefly revisiting the means by which materialist naturalism and emergentism became the dominant ontology and explanation for consciousness of the West. For most of human history, something like animism, and occasionally like Platonic idealism, has held sway in cultural consciousness: the sense of self that humans possess is ubiquitously shared with other humans and nonhuman things.1 From this point of view, mind is the principle of both existence and intelligibility, and the reciprocity between the two is that interval where something like consciousness beyond the self is experienced. Indwelling powers, gods, spirits, souls, and minds were all about for ancient people, including Early Jews and Christians. Insofar as the sense of interiority that we frequently think of as selfhood or personhood reflects something like an essence or substance, a what-it-is-to-be and therefore a “what-it-is-like-to-be,” one might reasonably then conclude that other entities have the same qualities: not all in the same way, perhaps, nor all to the same degrees, but minimally in potency, and with no maximum achieved in the human being, beyond which there existed many spiritual beings of superior rank and quality for premodern thinkers. Modernity, and the European Enlightenment, made this worldview gradually less accessible to the West: by first embracing a dualistic, “supernaturalist” theory of mind (to use Paul Tyson’s designation), Western thinkers like Descartes posited the nonexistence of mind beyond the immaterial human soul, created by special divine intervention of God, otherwise the cosmic mechanist; and second, by realizing that a God who intervened to create human consciousness as an anomaly in an otherwise mindless world was in fact as much a superfluity as the mind he supposedly ignited, particularly in a world so transparent to explication by rational means with respect to its mechanical and material causalities.2 The denial of life, mind, and hypostatic existence to both the nonhuman and the human worlds, through the reduction of mind to material process and the judgment of nonhuman (and non-Western) entities as thereby materially inferior, was the great intellectual justification for post-Enlightenment imperialism, colonization, slave-trading, subjugation of foreign peoples, unchecked industrial growth, and rampant destruction of the natural world. It is not hard to see why. From the perspective of post-Enlightenment Europeans, a dead world was a bank of resources awaiting use. If elephants, rhinoceroses, and fruit bats are not persons, then they have no claims upon our sympathies, no rights against our convenience, no defense against our ambitions. If trees are effectively natural machines, they are no better or worse off, on their end, being cut down to suit our needs, and those needs justify their exploitation. If water, land, fire, sky, and heaven above are not sacred, then they are indeed nothing other than hylē, “wood” for the furnace of greed along with the trees. If human beings themselves are only deemed worthy of rights on some notion of a degree of curated consciousness, of bodily phenotype or culture or intellectual accomplishment, then some are worthy of subjugation and others of rule (in point of fact, several of the societies conquered by Europeans were older, more successful, and more sophisticated than they were; in this case, emergentism and later Social Darwinism functioned as a myth of consolation in addition to a justification for abuse). Materialism and emergentism can be compatible with more egalitarian and environmentally conscious attitudes, no doubt, but more at the level of fact than theory: it is surely true that many materialists want to preserve biodiversity and respect indigenous peoples, but why they should do so beyond a kind of enchantment with their phenomenal illusion is no more intelligible than why they should mistake their personal feelings for family or friends—in a world, remember, mindless and dead—for something like love (which in their worldview cannot really or meaningfully exist).
“You shall know them by their fruits.” Even if panpsychism were not true, it would clearly be a more appropriate philosophical basis for such impulses than materialism is. That is not the same as to say that panpsychists are always pacifists or cosmopolitans or animal lovers, at least not all at the same time. Genghis Khan was an animist, after all, as were the Romans (some of the worst ecological offenders in human history, leading the Johannine apocalypticist to call for the destruction of “those who destroy the earth,” Rev 11:8).3 But it is to point out that at no point in the human past has so rampant, intentional, and devastating a destruction of the nonhuman world occurred as that encouraged by the philosophy of a dead world. It is emergentism that stands behind the continuationist interplanetary and interstellar aspirations of the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos’ of the world: there is no real point to expanding humanity, in their cult, other than because when the humans should disappear, so too will the profit (never mind the other life forms that stand to lose if we corrupt the planet beyond repair, not to mention the planet itself). And it is a psychology of epiphenomenal illusion that stands somewhat more subtly behind political and social misanthropy of all kinds on the scene today, even when promoted by those who theoretically believe in the reality of the human soul (but not, to be clear, any other kinds of souls, and not as in any way equally shared between humans). In an era when many of our behaviors are indeed motivated by beliefs, some of which we are conscious of and some of which we are unconscious of, analyzing how beliefs lead to actions is deeply important for ensuring that our activity in the world can be for a blessing and for repair rather than for destruction. There is a pragmatic reason to be a panpsychist, whether or not panpsychism is true: if we believe that everything is alive and conscious, we are far more likely to act with reverence towards one another (where we have the most direct experience of consciousness) and towards the natural world (where we otherwise act on the habitual assumption that nothing is conscious).
As already mentioned, to be a panpsychist is inarguably to be much more at home with the history of human experience, especially as expressed in philosophy and religion, than is to be something else. Especially for Western philosophy, panpsychism characterizes the hallmark thinkers. Several Presocratics were panpsychists of one sort or another: Thales’ belief that “all things are full of gods” (Aristotle, De Anima 411a7), Anaximenes’ pneumatology, Heraclitus’ “ever-living fire” (pyr aeizoon), Anaxagoras’ belief in the ubiquity of nous (Aristotle, Metaphysics 984b15), and Empedocles’ ensouled elements (De Annima 404b11) are all examples of this kind of view. Plato seems to have undergone a transition over the course of his Dialogues on the subject. Some passages in Plato reflect a more dualist take like, for example, Phaedrus 245e, 246b, and 275b and Laws 896a, 895c, 896d, 898d, and 899a-b, identifying soul (Greek: psyche) as the active principle and body or matter as the passive principle of change in the cosmos.4 But in other texts, like Republic, “it is clear that the degree of affective and cognitive adequacy in soul is due to the reliability of the influence it receives from the object that is experienced or known,” i.e., from the corporeal: hence, “it would indeed be a mistake to claim that in Plato souls are strictly active.”5 Most famously, in Sophist 247d-e, the Eleatic Stranger—Plato’s avatar for this dialogue—posits: “I suggest that anything has real being that is so constituted as to possess any sort of power either to affect anything else or to be affected, in however small a degree, by the most insignificant agent, though it be only once. I am proposing as a mark to distinguish real things that they are nothing but power,” which is probably to say that they have “the capacity for dynamis.”6 And again, later: “Can we ever be made to believe that motion and life and soul and mind are not present with perfect being?” (249a), which is to say that everything partaking of being also partakes of soul and mind to some degree. Soul is the “cause of the whole” (Epinomis 988d), “older than the body” (Laws 892a), which is “both second and later” than soul (896c), which imparts being (959a) and is “the first genesis of all things” (899c).7 Indeed, “thinking that Plato was a panpsychist is to say that self-motion is pervasive in Plato’s cosmology, including the self-motion of, or self-motion in, plants, stars, the sun, and earth” in addition to animals and humans.8 Collectively, the individual souls of all such entities in Plato’s cosmos form but part of the World Soul (first introduced in Philebus 30a) which appears in many of Plato’s later dialogues (Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, Laws, Epinomis). But it is already hinted in earlier places, like Republic 462c-d, where Plato suggests the first hints of what will later become the full-blown doctrine of cosmic sympatheia for the Stoics. It is to this divine World Soul that Plato insists on eventual assimilation (Theaetetus 176b-c; Timaeus 90a-d; Republic 500c-d).9 Aristotle’s closest approximation seems to have been through adopting Anaximenes’ pneumatology: as he writes, “Animals and plants come into being in earth and in liquid because there is water in earth, and pneuma in water, and in all pneuma is vital heat, so that in a sense all things are full of soul” (Generation of Animals 762a18-20). While Epicureans denied the soul’s immortality, they do seem to have qualified Democritean atomism by positing that will, the essential power of free self-motion, is fundamental to all atoms and therefore the source of human free will itself.10 But clearly, the Hellenistic defenders of panpsychism par excellence were the Stoics, who eclectically combined Presocratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian concepts into a unified corporeal theory in which pneuma was the active principle of spermatic reason (logos spermatikos) ubiquitous in the universe and responsible for its rational operation.11
The reorganization of eclectic Hellenistic philosophy around the Platonic tradition that occurred with the so-called “Middle Platonists” and their Neoplatonic successors was essentially, irreducibly panpsychist in outlook. Plotinus is here the most important thinker: just as the soul is the cause (though indirectly) of the body’s life and existence (Enneads I.1.7), so it is the cause of the universe’s perdurance (II.1.1); soul is that substance that causes the circumambulation of the heavens (II.2.1-3); stars perform signaling and causative functions in the single, rational animal that is the cosmos (II.3.7-8; IV.4.30-45), as part of the larger dispensation of the sensible universe by the World Soul, contemplating the Nous (II.3.16-17); gnostics misunderstand the relationship of the World Soul to the universe, which organizes its various constituent elements, bodies, and souls into the best possible harmony (II.9.7-9); the World Soul subsumes all individual souls (III.3.1; IV.3.1-8; IV.9; V.1.2; VI.4-5.1); the World Soul is always at the higher level of the intelligible (III.4.4); earthly Love is produced by the World Soul (III.5.3).
The World Soul is a fundamental feature of Platonic tradition; Jews, Christians, and Muslims who absorbed that tradition may well have found this an agreeable truth.12 Jewish and Christian Scripture would seem to be more hospitable to this picture of things than their modern readers typically betray. The biblical cosmos is one where heavens and earth, Sun, Moon, and Stars, birds and fish, plants, animals, and humans, are all directly known to and cared for by God and fellow worshipers of him. So closes the Psalter, as sung each morning by traditional Jews (at Shacharit) and Orthodox Christians (at Orthros): “Let everything that breathes praise YHWH!” (Ps 150:6).13 The goddess Wisdom, in her various afterlives among Early Jews and Christians, also constituted a native conception of a World Soul. Medieval Jewish philosophy, particularly kabbalah (in the sefira of Shekhinah/Malkuth), and medieval Christian and Islamic thinkers synthesized their own form, too: the Muslim philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi (864-935 CE), for example, argued that it was Soul, in the sense of a Platonic World Soul, that was responsible for the world’s imperfections rather than God himself.14 Panpsychism of some form or another is also the normative position of the dharmic philosophies.15
That these authorities all hold to the truth that the world as a whole is ensouled does not on its own mean that it is; it simply means that the ethical credibility, philosophically speaking, stands with the panpsychists over the emergentists. Nor is it the case that each of these figures has exactly the same kind of panpsychism in mind. Plato and his successors are largely idealist panpsychists: for Neoplatonists, the universally active, ensouling principle is incorporeal and mental, and matter is a qualitative manifestation of the archetypical forms that reside within the Soul because of its contemplation of Intellect and Intellect’s contemplation of the One, respectively. For Aristotle, Epicureans, and Stoics, the principle of ensoulment is material. Today, panpsychists still fall along the materialist and idealist spectrum, and not everyone who disputes emergentism or professes to be a panpsychist holds to a theistic worldview.16 But minimally, classical theists are right to highlight the current trends in philosophy of mind as indicative of a reopening for conversations about metaphysics and the divine in the wider culture in a way that is both intellectually respectable and unavoidable. They are also right to say that without the anima mundi, just like without our own anima, our ability to know the mundus itself disappears. And it is the vision of reality as disclosed in the cosmos that we all, whatever our disciplines and sources of knowledge—empirical or revelatory—are seeking, like the spiraling heavens themselves.
See the argument of Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019).
See the account of David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 46-84.
See J. Donald Hughes, Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans: Ecology in the Ancient Mediterranean, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014).
See Daniel Dombrowski, “Plato and Panpsychism,” 15-24 in The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, ed. William E. Seager (London: Routledge, 2020), especially 17 for these references.
Dombrowski, “Plato and Panpsychism,” 17.
Dombrowski, “Plato and Panpsychism,” 17.
Dombrowski, “Plato and Panpsychism,” 18, for references.
Dombrowski, “Plato and Panpsychism,” 18.
Dombrowski, “Plato and Panpsychism,” 19-21.
See John Sellars, Hellenistic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 86-92.
See Sellars, Hellenistic Philosophy, 93-98; for the Peripatetic alternative, see 99-101.
On the World Soul in Platonic Tradition more broadly, see James Wilberding, “The World Soul in Platonic Tradition,” 15-44 in World Soul: A History, ed. James Wilberding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
For more on this, see Robin Parry, The Biblical Cosmos: A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Weird and Wonderful World of the Bible (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), 1-16.
See Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World, A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 52
See Monima Chadha, “Abhidharma Panprotopsychist Metaphysics of Consciousness,” in The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, 25-35; and Jessica Frazier, “The ‘World Soul’ in India: Complex Causality and Artful Emergence in Sakti Vedanta,” in World Soul: A History, 100-123.
See, e.g., Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Great piece mate, I've thoroughly enjoyed reading these (in-part because they so closely resonate with my own thinking). As I've mentioned before, Wilber's 'Integral Theory' has been a hugely useful framework for me in integrating theology/philosophy and the natural sciences, particularly when it comes to the topic of consciousness. It's both a fascinating yet somewhat terrifying time we live in and the ground is indeed fertile for these discussions around philosophy of mind and metaphysics to take place. Thanks for making a very worthwhile contribution(s) to these conversations!
I have to ask: Are current trends in philosophy of mind really pointing away from materialist reductionism and towards panpsychism and soul? I keep hearing this, but in my experience, even more open-minded philosophers (Tim Crane, David Chalmers, Tim Bayne) aren't straying far from the functionalist orthodoxy, and that's to say nothing of neuroscience, which remains tightly wedded to a reductionist agenda. Critiques of the consensus ventured by philosophers like Thomas Nagel are compelling, but I can't help but suspect that their confidence that the house of mind is built on sand is akin to Stephen Meyer's confidence that the neo-Darwinian synthesis is on the verge of collapse: renegades, after all, always believe that victory is nigh.