https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=15akhXGHwzo

Hello everyone. I’m frequently humbled and touched, motivated and encouraged when people contact me by email or texting or commenting or they greet me on the street and tell me that my work has been transformative for them. If this has been the case for you and also if you want to share it with other people, please consider supporting my work by joining my Patreon community. All financial support goes to the Vervecki Foundation where my team and I are diligently working to create the science, the practices, the teaching and the communities. If you want to participate in my work and many of you ask me that, how can I participate, how can I get involved, then this is the way to do it. The Vervecki Foundation is something that I’m creating with other people and I’m trying to create something as virtuously as I possibly can. No grifting, no setting myself up as a guru. I want to try and make something really work so that people can support, participate and find community by joining my Patreon. I hope you consider that this is a way in which you can make a difference and matter. Please consider joining my Patreon community at the link below. Thank you so very much for your time and attention. Welcome everybody to another episode of Voices with Vervecki. I’m very excited about this. This is my third time talking, well in recorded fashion, we’ve talked before outside of that, but third time on Voices with Vervecki with Matt Seagal. I think one of the premier philosophers for the understanding and not just the understanding of Whitehead but the rich way in Whitehead is applicable today for profound problems that are not just sort of philosophical or theoretical but deeply existential and ethical in nature. Like I said, Matt just does a fantastic job at this and he has written a new book and we’re going to talk about this. I’m very excited about it because it converges with a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking about and this frequently happens when Matt and I talk. So Matt, welcome. Could you just reintroduce yourself again and then let, you know, start by, you know, however, what context you want to set up or we can begin a discussion of your book and feel free to shamelessly promote it because I, it, like you’re working on because I, it, like your work is important and valuable. Thank you so much, John. Wonderful to join you again in dialogue. So yeah, I teach philosophy at CIIS in California, California Institute of Integral Studies in a program called Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, which is where I did my own doctoral work and actually this book is a revised and expanded version of my dissertation. And so what I’m trying to do in this book is engage with Immanuel Kant and I treat him as a kind of guardian of the threshold. What’s on the other side of the threshold? Knowledge of reality, right? And Kant with his transcendental method tried to challenge dogmatic metaphysics, as he called them, pointing out the ways that there was this uncritical attempt to grasp mind-independent objective knowledge and Kant examined reason itself. He did what he called an imminent critique of reason and showed how actually everything we thought we were knowing, the very objects of knowledge are in fact constructed by the activity of reason itself, meaning sensibility or this, what’s given to us in our perceptual experience, right? And so there’s this realm of things in themselves, Kant would say, but we know nothing about it except that it exists. Yes. And so from that sort of starting point, I try to build on Schelling, who was responding directly to Kant, was a student of Fichte’s, who was also building on Kant’s philosophy in ways that Kant did not really appreciate. But nonetheless, Fichte, Schelling, and then Hegel would inherit Kant and give birth to this new kind of metaphysics, which in some ways Kant himself was aiming to do. He wasn’t trying to say we can’t do metaphysics, he was trying to put metaphysics on a scientific basis to inaugurate a more scientific form of philosophy, right? And the German idealists thought they were carrying that work forward. Schelling is unique in the treatment he gives to nature, to the natural world. He kind of in some ways inverts Kant’s question, rather than saying what must mind be such that nature can appear to us in the way that it does. Schelling, as I read him, says, what must nature be such that mind could have emerged from it? And in this respect, I think he is much like Whitehead, who is also at the core of this book, Whitehead engages directly with Kant as well, and even says I’m inverting Kant, just as Schelling was. Whitehead did not explicitly draw on Schelling, except for once, he cites him once, in concept of nature. But I see these two, Schelling and Whitehead, as in a lineage with each other of process thinking, process philosophy, and a lot of my work is trying to build that bridge and make that connection explicit. Last thing I’ll say before we can sort of get into this is that, you know, etheric imagination is there in the title, and that’s probably a very new term for most people. And it has multiple connotations. So in Schelling’s natural philosophy, he was engaging with the physics of the time, which of course made reference to an ether, a luminiferous ether medium through which light would propagate, right? Which in the 20th century was understood to have been eliminated by Einstein’s revolutions, although Einstein would later say, oh, my space-time manifold is in fact a new ether, and so it’s less an elimination than a transformation. Whitehead similarly developed an ether theory in a post-Einsteinian context, directly in response to Einstein, actually. Whitehead didn’t think of it as a material ether, or even as a kind of geometric ether, as you could say Einstein’s was, but as an ether of events, which follows from his process relational view of nature. Some have argued that Whitehead was in fact more relativistic than Einstein in that his, not only his physics was relativistic, but his epistemology. Yes. And we can get into what that means. But I’m also thinking with Rudolf Steiner, who actually uses this phrase, etheric imagination, to talk about the kind of intuitive thinking that, or imaginative thinking we could also say, that allows us to to, as it were, appear beneath the sensory surface of the living worlds, to participate in in the life of that world. And there’s also a late text published after Kant’s death, as Opus post humus, that Eckhart Forster has edited and written some marvelous commentaries on, where Kant himself explores the idea of this kind of etheric medium, which would allow the human being in our own embodied thinking activity to build a bridge, as it were, to the interiority of nature. And so a very fragmented text that Kant left us with, he died before he could finish it, and there are multiple drafts, like 10 or 12 drafts of him trying to work through these ideas. And so I wanted to pick up where Kant left off, building on Whitehead, Schelling, and Steiner, to try to develop some understanding of what you could call an organ of perception, etheric imagination, that would allow us to cross this Kantian threshold. So that’s the basic outline here. Right. And so let’s go, this is really impressive, but I think we should go through it piece by piece, open it up. That was a good overview. I think also if we could get it into, I think also if we could get it into, why would a non-philosopher, and you and I are both philosophers, so we got to be careful around this, but why would a non-philosopher care about this? I mean, somebody might say, well, you know, Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, like, what do I, why should, like, how do, what does that matter to me? And I think your point is that the Kantian threshold isn’t some dusty academic idea in libraries or, you know, history of philosophy, that that threshold has been insinuated into the very way in which we interpret the world, understand ourselves. Is that fair to say that that is something that you’re implying? Great. Okay. So you’re nodding. So can you, let’s slow down because you, I mean, you have, you know, significant phenomenological gift. And so can we open up the way in which that notion of the threshold isn’t something just that, you know, arcane epistemologists worry about, but something that is impacting on how people are experiencing themselves and the world? Is that a fair question, first of all? Yeah, no, absolutely. I would hope that this text is relevant to non-philosophers, I’m not quite sure. Sorry, there’s a helicopter flying overhead. I wouldn’t want to deny anyone the title philosopher just because they haven’t gone to university or whatever. Right? So I think the curious, the intellectually curious person would find this book interesting and important because, well, because of the problem that Kant was trying to address, it’s not just that he wanted to put metaphysics on a more scientific basis, he wanted to find some way of preserving sort of the credibility of human freedom in the context of the advancing natural scientific method, which in Kant’s day was just a Cartesian Newtonian method that was proceeding to mechanize more and more of the natural world. And if more and more of the natural world could be explained through mathematical modeling and a kind of mechanistic understanding, Kant realized that eventually the human being would be swallowed up into that as well. And yet, phenomenologically speaking, we have this feeling of freedom. Yes, yes. Right. And he took it very seriously. We have conscience and we feel if we have done something that we know is wrong, we regret it, as if we could have done otherwise. I just want to be clear here too, and you know, making use of Brandon and others here, Brandon and Schindler and others, you know, Kant’s notion of freedom isn’t what we think of freedom, which is just sort of maximal choice. Kant’s notion of freedom is instead of grounding it in choice, you should be grounding it in something like autonomy, the idea that we can be the source of norms that we nevertheless bind ourselves to. In fact, it was the autonomy of reason that he often used as a fundamental presupposition in his arguments about the limitations of reason. Reason was this sort of, so I want to make it clear because, you know, we’ve been living in the rain shadow of American culture for a long time where we think freedom means choice. And if you hear that, I think you’re missing Kant’s point. Kant wants to know the kind of freedom in which it makes sense to think of you as a moral being, a being that can bind itself to the authority of certain normative standards without feeling that they are imposed on it. And so it’s this idea that the mechanistic universe would make us lack any responsibility for our actions, or ultimately possess any autonomy within that kind of universe. And he thought that this would fundamentally undermine the notion of cognitive, rational, and moral agency. Is that, first of all, Matt, do you find that a fair thing to do? Because the word freedom, of course, is laden with all kinds of important value. And I think you’re right to connect Kant to the problem of freedom. I think Brandom and Schindler and a host of other people are saying yes. But I think it’s very important because they take pains to say, look, we’re not talking about primarily freedom that’s grounded in a notion of choice. We’re talking about freedom that’s grounded in a notion of autonomy. And then if you place it that way, how it’s wrapped up with autonomy and identity, you can start to see why Kant is so important for everyone in a very central way. Sorry, that was a little bit wordy, but I just wanted to get that in. No, that’s very important. I assume we’re speaking to a mostly American audience. And in America, it’s very easy to think that freedom means, you know, in a consumer capitalist context, my ability to choose between cornflakes and Cheerios and Wheaties. And it’s not at all, it’s about agency and autonomy, as you’re saying. And it’s, can a human being initiate a free action? Or are we just bound up in this causal nexus of the world machine? Right. And, you know, Kant’s way of addressing this issue is, I mean, as he puts it in, I think it’s the introduction to the critique of pure reason, he says, I found it necessary to limit knowledge to leave room for, he says, faith, I think, but he means faith in freedom. Yeah, right. That we’re justified in believing in freedom, because our knowledge is limited to phenomena, right? And he’s just leaving a back door open for the possibility that freedom is real, and that it can be justified. And so that puts us in a rather precarious situation, though, because first of all, most scientists are not willing to accept that their knowledge of nature is merely of an apparent nature, they want to know nature as it really is. Exactly. And, you know, Kant himself in his later critiques, the critique of judgment in particular, acknowledges that mechanistic science in its pursuit of mathematical laws, lawfulness, cannot, he thinks, in principle, explain the living world, living organisms. Yes, that’s, your arrow made a, made important use of that work by Kant, where the inner teleology could never be explained by a mechanistic worldview in which a reduced notion of efficient causation, where efficient causation isn’t just causing things to be, it’s causing them only to be in motion. So you get a reduction of all the causes to one cause, and then you got efficient causation reduced to, right, causing things to be in motion. And then once you have that, then of course, teleology has no place within the universe, and yet reason itself operates teleologically. And so, you know, Kant has to, like, well, you put it, he has to erect this threshold, this barrier between the world and reason, because he sees them as ultimately irreconcilable. Right, right. And in this critique of judgment, he’s also, you know, he’s talking about teleology, and he’s very critical of this old sort of theological form of natural theology, where you would imagine that, you know, at 2 p.m., the wind blows, because otherwise it would be too hot, and the crops would, would wither and die, and this is because there’s this providential world order, and he’s like, this makes no sense. We’re projecting our own, the structure of reason onto the world in an inappropriate way, when we imagine that that’s how it works. But he does want to say that in each organism, and perhaps in nature as a whole, there’s some kind of imminent purposiveness, he says, right, where the parts of an organism produce one another for the sake of a whole. Yes. And this is a form of causality that is found nowhere in the physics of Newton or, or, or Descartes. And it seems to threaten circular explanation. It seems to threaten, like, he, like, you know, he’s perplexed by a tree, because as you try to describe the causal pathways, you seem to be going in circles, feed what we would now call feedback loops. But for him, this is like this, like this is would be a circular explanation, and it wouldn’t have what is, you know, what is prototypical in the Newtonian billiard ball kind of model. I mean, he at one point, he even concludes that a science of biology is not possible for, for this reason, which is really, you know, that tells you how committed he is to, to certain, this very truncated and reduced model of causation. Right. Yes. And so I think in this final critique, there’s a sort of, you know, crack in the Kantian edifice that opens up. Yeah. Where all of a sudden, the mechanisms of understanding that can determine everything in the physical world, at least, can’t determine constitutively what’s going on in living organisms. Yes. And this is the crack that Schelling exploits. Oh, I hadn’t seen that before. Oh, right. Right. I see. I mean, because it gets caught into a weird performative contradiction. Right. Because he’s obviously, he’s obviously a living thing. Right. In a very, right. And I think actually, having read Schelling’s philosophy of nature is that’s what led Kant in this later, posthumous work that I mentioned to try to develop. Oh, I didn’t know. So he’s trying to respond. So he, he, he at least gets to the crack and then he sees Schelling sort of opening the crack and he’s then responding to that. Is, is, is that what you’re saying? Oh, wow. This is, this is what Eckhart Forster argues as well. And, you know, and in the interim, before Schelling, there’s Fichte, right. And, you know, you point out this performative contradiction. Fichte also thinks that Kant does this. And I mean, Fichte really, really admired Kant, right. And in many ways saw his own work as carrying forward the spirit of Kant, even though the letter of Kant had these issues. But one of these performative contradictions is in, and this is a controversial point. So I don’t want to make it seem like there aren’t some who would defend Kant here, but in the critique of pure reason, you know, when Kant marks this realm of things in themselves with a mere X as a kind of placeholder, he says that this, this realm of things in themselves is the cause of our sensory experience. And what he’s doing there is applying a category of the understanding meant only for the phenomenal realm. He’s inappropriately extending it beyond the phenomenal realm. That was his argument against causal arguments for God. You couldn’t extend cause, which is within the phenomenal to the explanation of the origin or creation of the phenomenal. I do think that that’s a very strong critique, by the way, that he’s asserting a causal relation that he denies. And then he’s also assuming it in really powerful ways. He’s assuming that there are people outside of his phenomenology that are structuring information and making it intelligible to him. That’s why he’s writing books and weird things like that, that don’t fit like in what he’s doing in a really clear way. Yeah. You know, I think in Fichte’s idealism, which is a very radical form of idealism, I think he clarifies that this is not a kind of solipsism, even though it might at first appear as though when, you know, Fichte says all of nature is an appearance brought forth by the transcendental ego. It’s important to remember that the transcendental ego is not my or your empirical ego. It’s in Fichte, it becomes clear as this kind of intersubjective ground that we all share in the context of an ethical community. Right. And so it’s going to become a big deal in Hegel at some point, but go ahead. Yeah. No, exactly. So just to resist the temptation to caricature Kant or Fichte as being sort of locked up in their own mind and forgetting that they’re actually writing books to communicate to others, I think they’re trying to understand the transcendental ground of the possibility for that kind of communication, right, which shouldn’t be confused with solipsism, though there’s still a problem here because, and this is the problem Schelling really zeros in on, nature is reduced to an appearance. And Fichte says, we only come to know nature by transforming it into ourselves, basically. And so Fichte doesn’t claim that there is no world out there, but he says, we only come to know it through these through our practical transformation of it. Right. Kant put it this way in the Opus post humus, we know the world, to know the world, I must first manufacture it in my own self. I must first manufacture it in my own self. And in some ways, I think this Fichtean approach is kind of what won out in the industrialized West in the sense that knowledge became instrumental. And we now say most scientists would say, I only know something if I can reverse engineer it and build it, build a model of it. Right. And if you think about the way that the earth continues to be progressively transformed into something made by human beings, yeah, yeah, the in framing is very much this Fichtean point of view run wild. Right. We think there’s nothing to be known about nature that we cannot make ourselves. Yeah. And so what can I can I following? Yeah, I’m following. But I also want to, I want to push back a little bit on the the stuff about intersubjectivity, because it seems to me that a Kantian can’t talk about there being other minds, but only the appearance of other minds. And since minds are the things that attribute and are the bearers of that to which appearance appears, I think this is where the critique that I made actually lines up with the Fichte critique. There has to be something behind the appearance that’s causing the appearance, right, of the mind, or else you are a solipsist. Yeah, I don’t. This is. Yes, go ahead. I think you’re so I think you’re right. And I would hear I would distinguish between theoretical and practical philosophy, I think in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. What we share is the categorical structure of the understanding with its necessary and universal categories, right, all human beings share that, he would say. And so that’s the basis for communication about about science and what is that claim something that he can know? I mean, he claims to know it a priori. And I, you know, the the analytic synthetic distinction I know is is obviously about it. Yeah, yeah, dissolved or reduced to paradox. But can he know it? I mean, that’s, that’s a good question. But but to in theoretical philosophy, at least he’s claiming that there’s this shared set of categories that everybody has to use to to say anything about objects in nature in a in a logical way. But then in practical philosophy, this is where the solipsism comes in Kant forbids us from he doesn’t think that a moral deed can be undertaken as a result of love, or Yes, exactly. Exactly. Sympathy. Yes. Right. And so we’re told this is like he really emphasizes the autonomy here. Yes. And so much so that I think we are left as the sort of just a disembodied intellect trying to calculate our way toward the good, as though as though the good were something beyond our capacity to achieve as embodied social creatures. I think that’s, that’s where very well said what you just said. Yeah, yeah. So, so that’s where the solipsism comes in is the practical philosophy, I think. Yeah, and I don’t want to get nitpicky. Because I think that’s where the because all I’m trying to do is perhaps I’ll water it down. Like the like when you when you sort of when you reify autonomy, it starts to get harder and harder to bring in connectivity. That’s the way I would put it. And what I see you doing, especially the way you’re making you the way you’re making use of challenging, but especially the work on the imaginal is you’re trying to say that threshold isn’t a wall. It’s actually something that’s filled by a function. And this is what I take it you to be saying about the etheric imagination. Is that fair to Yes, yes. So instead of we could like whether or not we’re going to come to the exact same conclusion about how solipsism shows up in Kant, let’s at least say that you share the idea that this gets very, very like, we get very, very locked inside in some important way, we get fundamentally cut off from our own embodiment, because our body is not is in no way privileged with respect to the whole Kantian argument. And we’ve already noted that. And then of course, being in the world, our connection to the world is deeply severed. And for me, and this is where I find your work so exciting. That disconnectedness from our embodiment in the world is sort of an endemic feature of what I’ve been calling the meeting crisis. And you’re actually, you’re actually not proposing just an argument, you’re trying to, it’s almost like platonic anamnesis, you’re trying to get people to remember this faculty, if that’s even the right word, and it’s the wrong word, just, just let me have it for now. So I can get the right this idea. No, no, no, but there’s a there’s a there’s a there’s a mode of perception, or at least of knowing that you can gain access to that is actually the remedy to that. So it’s not just a theoretical proposal, it’s something you can transformatively enact. I think that’s what’s so promising in your work. Is that is that fair to say to that, to bring that up that way? Yes, thank you for saying it. It’s exactly what I’m aiming to do. This book is not a it’s not an argument. It’s an experiment. And I’m inviting people to go through that experiment with me. Excellent. So let’s focus on that. What does that look like? What does that look like? Well, it is very much an act of an amnesis. Yeah, and of recollection, not only of the body, but of the the power of imagination, which caught himself in the process of trying to not only have the body but of the the power of imagination, which caught himself. There’s a very interesting change that comp makes between the first and second editions of the critique of pure reason and heidegger makes a big deal of this. In the first edition, the imagination plays a very prominent role. Yeah. As you know, he says it’s the common root of the understanding and sensibility. And he says it’s hidden from us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Particularly the productive imagination, not the really reproductive imagination, which human the empiricists have a lot of important things to say about how it associates things we experience in the perceptual world with the productive imagination. It’s creative. Yes. And conscious mentions this and leaves it there. In this intriguing way, and he realizes later, I guess in the second edition, when he’s really keen to head off criticisms that he’s an idealist, he’s like, I have to cover this up. This is this is too weird. Right. So he he takes out a lot of this stuff about the mysterious root of imagination, underlying what seemed to be these two severed halves of our human nature, sensibility and understanding. Yes, because he sort of assumes that they’re just separate. Yes, yes, he does. Right. But in imagination, in the power of imagination, there’s something there’s there’s an activity underway, it’s at the very base of our own experience, that’s not severed into like this. And, you know, in the beginning of my book, I try to go through each of the three content and critiques, the critique of pure reason of practical reason, then of judgment. And there’s a way in which Kant is going through the different capacities of our soul thinking in the critique of pure reason willing in the critique of practical reason, and then feeling in the critique of judgment. Yes. And my sense is that in a kind of embodied phenomenological way, when we when we examine the source of our own sensory experience of the external world and of our own thinking experience of the concepts which connect up the percepts that come through our senses, that at the core of this is a is is really feeling and feeling is what is the bridge, Kant himself says this is it’s the bridge between thinking and willing. And the reason that Kant and many Western philosophers have been both fascinated and terrified of imagination is because feeling and emotion are quite unruly. They can’t be easily determined by thinking they can make us see things that aren’t there. And so, you know, Kant’s very worried if he goes too deep into this emotion-laden imaginative activity that he might lose his mind. You know, he’s worried about madness, enthusiasm, all these things that he thinks distract the philosopher from from truth. But I think we don’t have a choice if we want to overcome this Kantian dualism, at least an epistemological dualism, we have to explore the depths of imagination. And, and this is difficult, because in in this context, some of the rules of logic, which I take very seriously, when are important, like non contradiction and excluded middle and these things. We have to be able to learn to think ambiguity and to think in a polar way. Such that we don’t get stuck in this stuck with the idea that reality is composed of, you know, just clear and distinct, or could be known through clear and distinct concepts alone. Okay, so this is good. This is a pivot point, not because I can hear a lot of people saying, Oh, I know what Matt’s talking about. This is, this is romanticism, right? And in pejorative sense. And I just, I just have to give in to the irrational and give in to my intuition. And that’s what connects me in some magical fashion to reality. And I take it, just by what I have read of your book that you’re not simply proposing that which is a well, fraud, and I think perhaps in many ways worn out trope, you’re trying to do something deeper. And at times you you I don’t know if you were intending so but you invoke Corbin’s distinction between the imaginative and the you’ll sometimes use the imaginal where, as you said, the imaginalism is a way in which we are augmenting perception, not trying to remove ourselves from it into an internal world of fantasy or something like that. So yeah, so I’m reading you correct. So tell us, tell the people who are are cheering, oh, see, we should just abandon logic and abandon reason and science is evil. And we just have to, you know, you know, the decadent romanticism and how pervasive is in our culture, because we’ve talked about this before. So I know you’re not proposing that. So I’m just asking you by contrast, sharpen your position in contrast to that proposal, which is extant and pervasive. And I think often in a deleterious fashion. So just just to sharpen things up even more. So the goal here is not to destroy logic and leave us just with feeling and emotion. The idea is that Cartesian rationality, let’s say is has left us um, severed and alienated from from the world in this domain of, of concepts, which does well enough determining a physical world understood an abstraction from anything living. But when you bring the living world, when you bring your our own experience back into the world, it’s totally inadequate as a as a tool for thinking. Right. And so going through this threshold means giving up that Cartesian logic and the quest for certainty and all of that. But then we have to reconstruct a different kind of logic on the other side. Excellent. Right. And, you know, this work is well underway before this book before I was even born. And I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. But I think in in Whitehead’s work in particular, we have a very well articulated logic, which is a logic of polarity. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, right. That allows us to think difference without dissociating the halves, the opposites without turning without without ending up in a kind of dualism. And so we can think a difference between physical and mental, while also recognizing that physical and mental are like poles in a in a in a process. And that there’s no concrete reality without both. And there’s a proper sense in which the polarity should has a kind of priority over the poles. We’ve tended to emphasize the poles and background the polarity. And I see Whitehead and a bunch of people, Marlon Ponte as well, trying to invert it and say, no, no, foreground the polarity and background the poles. There’s that kind of reversal. So so so so far, I’ve seen two major moves. One is this kind of an amnesis of where we’re trying to remember and recover and relive this imaginal capacity to enhance our connectedness to reality. And we’re and then that’s coupled with not go not giving into the the the tired duality between Cartesian logic or sort of some decadent kind of romanticism, but moving into this more. I want to say this, not quite like in a platonic sense, there’s dialectical polarity, getting priority over the poles and then and reconstituting what rationality means within that. So yeah, yeah. Is this getting it so far? Yes. And I you know, I would say this is a romantic project, but it’s romanticism coming to page as as Barfield would say. Yes. And I don’t have any problem with that. And I have been sloppy in the past. And I’ve admitted that publicly multiple times. My and I tried to be very specific. My critique is a decadent form of romanticism that is pervasive in our culture. And that is what my critique is directed against. Yeah, because that decadent form of romanticism calls forth its opposite, which is this decadent form of enlightenment rationality. Yes, exactly. Yeah, they’re locked together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, that’s a whole nother conversation about how that is playing out in our culture. But what that means to me is that these are live questions and that because we haven’t adequately addressed the relationship between rationality and reality, and between thinking and embodiment, or between thinking and feeling this this conflict remains. And it’s it’s it’s tearing our culture apart. And it’s it’s making it so that those who do want to preserve meaning are rushing into this very narcissistic form of immature romanticism. Well said. So can I ask something then? Because I see two things also sort of reverberating. And it could just be ignorance that I haven’t read all of your book. So but I see like, like the imaginal as taking like in Corban, it’s it’s it’s it’s between the intellectual and the sensible, but it’s also between the inner and the outer, right? And but I also see life as you know, and a lot of people have been talking about this, Evan Thompson and a whole umbrella and all and me, right about life is also between sort of matter and mind in in an important and is there some and I’m seeing like in shelling, you’re these two are playing off against each other, right? And so these two, if you’ll allow me, and these are only placeholder terms, these two grand intermediaries, right, the imaginal and life seem to belong together in some important way. Is that is that is that fair to? Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, Schelling says that modern philosophy lacks mediating concepts. Ah, and life, life is the mediating concept that allows us to understand how matter and mind can go together despite their differences. Right, right. All right. Precious on his part. Oh, my God, he is so yes, so prescient. While his the sciences that he was drawing on in the early 19th, late 18th, early 19th century have been superseded. And so a lot of what he says in dialogue with those sciences needs to be updated. The underlying philosophical intuitions remain ahead of us, I think, like, we very much in you know, Whitehead does what Schelling attempted in the 19th century in the 20th century with physics, the physics of relativity and quantum theory. And so Whitehead, in some ways, is updating these Schellingian intuitions, bringing them into dialogue, applying them to 20th century science. And so I think the mean the best place to go from here, I think, is to Well, another mediating concept is feeling, right? I was saying earlier, yes, it mediates between thinking and, and sensing, sensibility, or the understanding and sensibility and both Schelling and Whitehead point to Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, which, which is at the beginning of the critique of pure reason, it’s like 20 pages. And in some ways, it’s the most important part of the whole book. And so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, it’s a whole book. And Whitehead complains, like, you know, Kant should have spent 100 pages unpacking the implications of the transcendental aesthetic, which is where he describes space and time as forms of our own intuition. Right. And so Schelling points out that feeling is a sense, feeling is a is still very much needs a critique, Schelling says, and this is late in his life in the 1840s, in his final lectures in Berlin, because he thinks it’s it’s only through a critique of feeling that we can understand how thinking, how the understanding and sensibility or how reason and not just sensibility, but reality itself fit together. And Whitehead picks this up and process in reality and says, he’s trying to replace Kant’s critiques, his critique of pure reason rather with a critique of feeling. And, and so in the chiasmus, the middle part of my book, I engage Kant’s reflections on in the transcendental aesthetic on space and time, and really make clear what Schelling and Whitehead are proposing here in regard to our experience our aesthetic encounter with with what we call space and time, that these are not just forms of human intuition. When we from Whitehead’s point of view, when we experience the spatio temporal continuum, what we’re really doing is inheriting the achievements of organisms, other than ourselves, which over the course of billions of years have developed this habitual way of relating to one another that’s in fact so habitual that we can mathematically determine it with with a very high degree of precision. But nonetheless, it’s not just that mathematical determination. That’s an abstraction from a an ecology or a community of organisms, which which we in Whitehead’s terms are pre-ending, which we’re feeling. And so all of a sudden, it’s an inversion of Kant, rather than space and time being projected from our mind, space and time are this community of organisms, the pattern of mutual pre-hension that they have achieved over billions of years being felt by our organism. And as human beings, we have this capacity to to mathematize this. But what we’re mathematizing is a real world. Of other beings. Right. And so that’s I think this is the key. This is the key flip that’s occurring here. Okay. In both Shelling and Whitehead. So just a quick clarification point again, to avoid misinterpretation, you’re using the word organism and you don’t necessarily mean a biological entity. Thank you. Yes. I mean, a self organizing entity, anything. Whitehead’s term is concrescence. And for him, reality is composed of concrescent, congressing actual occasions of experience. Right. And so he’s generalizing this term organism in a way that Shelling does as well, so that it can refer to any self organizing entity, whether we’re talking about a hydrogen atom, or a star, or a galaxy, or biological organism. So Whitehead would say physics is the study of the smaller organisms. If particle physics is the study of the smaller organisms and biology is the study of the larger organisms, you could say astrophysics is the study of the even larger organisms. But organism becomes this kind of master category for Whitehead as for Shelling, that science is the study of organisms and their relationships. The identity of things is bound up with their, fundamentally with their self organization. They’re dynamical in some fashion. Sorry for interrupting. I just want to make sure that I’m getting… Yeah, no, it’s easy for me to forget that Whitehead uses words in ways that other people do not use. So I do not use them. So yeah, it’s an important question. So the idea is, like, I want to go back, there’s this notion that let’s say we have a normal, I hope this works, Matt, we have a normal biological meaning of feeling, which is this kind of apprehensive connectedness, right? And then, and notice I’m using those words because they’re going to help me. And then you have a pre-hensive connectedness that Whitehead is talking about, that is found between these self organizing processes. It’s hard to use words that aren’t… Yes. Right? So, and I remember reading him about this and about, you know, and how he said that our notion of causation ultimately presupposes this deeper pre-hensive relationship between things, that they have to be bound in their identity, not just in the correlation of their movements, or else we don’t get real causation. Is that the kind of thing? Am I on the right track about what’s coming in here, this idea that, right, feeling connects us to that aspect of reality? Like, I’m trying to get the two feelings together. I’m trying to get, because I’m trying to make it phenomenological, right? I know what feeling is in one sense, and this is a biological expression of a wider reality that is found, right, among non-biological organisms, self-organizing processes. And I’m trying to get that. So, I’m asking for your help. It does. Yeah. Yeah. So, it’s typically, I mean, in Kant and in most philosophers, even today, feeling is something private. Yeah. Subjective. And in Whitehead, it’s subjective. And Whitehead, not only is he saying that subjects are everywhere, that, you know, he says outside of the experience of subjects, there is nothing, nothing, nothing, mere nothingness. Yes. But the human is not the only subject. Animals are not the only subjects. Subjectivity goes all the way down, right? He’s a panpsychist or pan-experientialist is the favorite term of Whiteheadians. But for Whitehead, feeling is not just private anymore. It doesn’t just belong to subjects or is not just a property of a substantial subject. Feeling is a vector. He talks about vector feelings, in fact. And so, feeling is what connects subjects to one another. And so, in Whitehead’s view, and so, when we talk about an actual occasion, we’re not talking about an enduring entity. No. We’re talking about a moment of experience that arises and perishes, right? So, it arises, and this is true of human experience, just as much as it would be true of the experience of a hydrogen atom, right? It arises out of a past inheriting many objects in its past. It receives its past. It pre-hens its past. And that past actually grows into and becomes part of this newly emerging subject of experience. It’s self-organization, right? It takes the past and it does something unique in its self-organization to that past. And then, does it then sort of pass it on? Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly. It’s the process of appropriation. A new subject is emerging out of the inheritance of its past. It achieves satisfaction, he’ll say, which is a new perspective on the entirety of the past, which has been absorbed through feeling into this new moment of experience. And then, it perishes and itself becomes, he calls it a superject. So, the subject becomes a superject or an object. And that object then has objective immortality because it’s going to be pre-hended by the next occasion of experience, which picks it up, right? And so, the whole history of the universe is this, you can almost think of it, I mean, Whitehead says that his is a cell theory of actuality. And so, you could think of the history of the universe as this process of embryological development of cell division. And it’s growing more complex as it goes because each new cell is inheriting everything to come before it. But it’s simultaneously differentiating and integrating, like an embryo. It’s not just differentiating and integrating, right? Yes. Transcending and including what has come before. Sorry for interrupting. I just want to make sure I’m not dropping things. So, we’ve got these medians, we’ve got the imaginal, we’ve got life, and we’ve got feeling. And we’ve now broadened feeling, I think, very well. Very well. I think what you did here was really good. We broadened it so we can understand. How does this feed back for us in overcoming the Kantian threshold? I know you wanted to go somewhere else, but I really want to make sure that that point, like, is our imaginal life a way in which we can apprehend, appreciate, appropriate that feeling so that we can overcome the, cross the threshold to use your language? Is that what I’m supposed to be taking from this? Yeah, no, absolutely. We’ve, you know, Whitehead says philosophers have been obsessed with their visual feelings and with clear and distinct ideas. Yes. And they’ve denigrated and neglected the feelings of the viscera. And my basic claim here is that there’s this new research program that we need to engage in as philosophers, which is diving into these, the depths of imagination, cultivating a form of feeling, which we can bring a new kind of polar logic to digest and understand. But to replant ourselves, and plant is an important term. We don’t have time to get into the whole digital philosophy part of this, but I think plants provide a very apt metaphor to understand the kind of thinking. Michael Marder’s work is very important here. But if we can cultivate this kind of imaginative perception, then we can give birth to a new kind of philosophy that would allow us to see ourselves as cosmic beings. We are outgrowths of this process of cosmogenesis. And that when we’re doing science and physical cosmology, trying to understand the origins of the universe, yes, we need to use models and abstract thinking in mathematics, but we can also access that history through our feeling. Because we ourselves are recapitulations of this multi-billion year process. It’s all inside of us. Yeah, yeah, there’s a way. And so there’s a deep kind of participatory knowing going on, right? We know through our being, and not through any representation or model in a really deep way. That’s what I hear you saying. Yeah, we can use these models to coordinate and to assess and to test. We need, absolutely, I’m not trying to say they do away with scientific. But just to be clear for anyone who’s wondering, that would be retro-romanticism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a both-and thing. But the problem with all the scientific modeling is, I mean, even many physicists are pointing this out, like Sabine Hassenfelder, the models have become so detached from anything empirical or observable. They would actually be subject to Kant’s critique. Like, they really, a lot of, like string theory, like what? How does this, this cannot connect to any possible experience? And like, yeah, yeah, I agree. Matt, I think you’re gonna have to come back. We’re gonna have to do a part two on this, okay? I really invite you to come back and we’ll do a part two on this because this is really, really important stuff you’re doing. And I think your book is really good. How can people get your book? Let’s now shift to the seamless promotion because I think a lot of people are gonna be interested in what you’re saying. Thanks, John. And yeah, Amazon, obviously. But it’s also, for those who want to avoid Amazon, it’s available at bookshop.com as well as the publisher’s website, which is revelor.com. So there are many ways to get it. Yeah. You’ll come back, right? And we’ll do a part two on this and just give you, I felt bad because a couple of times I sort of truncated you because I wanted to at least get like the- You asked important questions and I appreciate the questions you asked. Very, very important, led to clarifications. And I just, last thing I want to say is that this is a, this is an experiment. Yes. Right? And I’m inviting people to undertake the experiment with me and it’s a whole new form of philosophical research. It’s a re-imagination of what philosophical research can be. Excellent. And so if anything, this is a beginning. I’m not claiming to have- I want to talk to you about that too. I want to talk to you about that philosophical experimentation and the kind of philosophical experimentation I’m doing in this dialectic into theologos practice. And those two also talk to each other in some way that you and I should unpack. I think that that holds a real possibility for a very fertile discussion. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And I’d love to connect it to your work on Neoplatonism. I think there are deep convergences there as well. So- Oh, yeah. We’ll have to do it again. Yeah. Okay. Well, you’re going to be coming back again soon. Thanks so much for this. Everybody, I really recommend Matt’s work as a whole and his new book. To my mind, Matt is on the track of the true, the good, and the beautiful in a really powerful way and a really helpful way. So everybody look forward to the next video, like part two of this. But also get into Matt’s work. It’s really worth it.