Matthew D Segall

This article brings media ecology into conversation with Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism in an effort to lure the former beyond its normally anthropocentric orientation. The article is divided into two parts. Part 1 spells out the way Whitehead's approach can aid media ecology in developing a less anthropocentric theory of communication. Part 2 engages more specifically with Mark B. N. Hansen's Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Hansen's work is an example of the exciting new directions opened up for media theory by Whitehead's panexperientialist ontology, but I argue that Hansen's attempt to "invert" Whitehead's theory of perception is based on a terminological confusion

Gebser suggests that the world-constituting reality of time first irrupted into Western consciousness with the publication in 1905 of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This was the first indication of an emerging mutation from the three-dimensional, Copernican world of the mental structure into the four-dimensional world of the integral structure. My presentation will critically examine Einstein’s role in this evolutionary initiation by situating his concept of a space-time continuum within its early 20th century context.  While Einstein’s relativity theory played a central role in the 20th century revolution in physics, revisiting the debates he was engaged in with thinkers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead reveal that his perception of time was still obscured by the residue of the mental structure’s spatializing tendency. As Gebser remarked, we are “compelled to become fully conscious of time—the new component—not just as a physical-geometric fourth dimension but in its full complexity” (EPO, 288, 352). During his controversial debate with Bergson in Paris in 1922, Einstein argued that the former’s understanding of time as “creative evolution” was merely the subjective fantasy of an artist, and that, as a hard-nosed scientist, he was concerned only with the real, objective time made manifest by the geometrical reasoning of relativity theory. Bergson, for his part, argued that Einstein had mistaken a particular way of measuring time (i.e., clock-time) for time itself. Whitehead’s meeting with Einstein shortly after this debate with Bergson, though not as public, was no less significant. Whitehead similarly argued that the philosophical implications of Einstein’s brilliant scientific theory must be saved from Einstein’s faulty interpretation. My presentation will review these early 20th century debates about the nature of time in light of Gebser’s prophetic announcement of the birth of a new structure of consciousness. More than a century after Einstein’s theory was published, mainstream scientific cosmology still has not fully integrated the immeasurably creative character of qualitative time. I will argue that Bergson and Whitehead’s largely neglected critiques and reconstructions of relativity theory help show the way towards the concrete realization of Gebser’s integral structure.

This talk compares several approaches to the emergence of religion in human evolution. I contrast Robert Bellah’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s pluralistic, cosmologically oriented accounts to Daniel Dennett’s reductionistic, adaptationist account. Following Bellah and Whitehead, I root the emergence of religion in the ritualized play of our hominid ancestors. Foregrounding the importance of play behavior (instinctive in all mammals)  is a direct challenge to adaptationist explanations of religion in terms of its sociobiological utility. I then argue that the history of human religious expression should count as data requiring interpretation within any adequate cosmological scheme. Materialistic approaches seeking to “explain away” religious expression stem from an incoherent bifurcated image of nature, wherein dead matter is given explanatory priority over life and consciousness, which are relegated to the status of improbable epiphenomena. This approach, which ends up claiming that the emergence of human consciousness and its attendant religious experiences are an improbable accident, provides the exact opposite of a proper scientific account. Bellah and Whitehead in their own ways re-imagine the materialist’s bifurcated image of nature, making it possible for the project of “naturalizing religion” to proceed in a non-reductionistic way. The guiding research question is no longer “how can the history of human religious experience be explained away as a product of mechanical forces?”, but instead becomes “what must the universe be like, such that human religious experiences are possible?”

Richard Tarnas and Matt Segall deepen and complexify Max Weber's well known narrative concerning the disenchantment of the world due to modern science and rationality by engaging Bruno Latour's thesis that, in some sense, we have never been modern. While the earth community and wider cosmos have indeed been disenchanted, the adventure of modernity can also be understood to be the result of misenchantment due to the increasingly powerful effects of technology, money, and mass media on the human psyche.

"As religious scholar Lee Gilmore argues in her book Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man, the annual Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, NV provides that growing sector of the population who identify as “spiritual but not religious” with an opportunity to cultivate the communal ethos and participate in the ritualistic catharsis normally associated with traditional forms of religion. Some theologians have criticized so-called SBNRs for being “self-centered” and warn that the growth of such an identity has more to do with the degeneration of culture by consumerism than with any genuine flowering of spirituality. The continual growth of Burning Man (the festival sold out for the first time in 2011), defined by its rejection of advertising and commodification, suggests that there is more to the story.

Gilmore argues that this annual pilgrimage to the desert, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, is forcing academics to

“reconsider the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ as defined less by matters of institution, doctrine, and belief and more by questions of ritual, practice, and experience” (Burning Man Blog).
After returning from my second journey to Black Rock City earlier this week, I can say with some degree of certainty that Burning Man represents the emergence of new, prototypically American religious movement. Its ethos strives to find the sacred balance between individual expression and collective participation. Its peculiar form of religiosity weds art and science into a carnivalesque celebration of bodily beauty and soulful intelligence. Its gift economy encourages the kind of authentic encounter between strangers no longer permitted in the hustle and bustle of the “default world.” Its “leave no trace” policy fosters the kind of ecological awareness that is necessary if our species is to survive the environmental crises of the coming century.

2011 marked the first year in the festival’s history that the temporary wooden temple structure reached higher into the sky than the ritually burned effigy known as “The Man.” To my mind, this is a symbolic change, representing Burning Man’s transition into a new phase of existence. No longer simply about burning the Man to revel in the destruction of the shackles of the patriarchal status quo, its participants are beginning to explicitly recognize the vibrant spiritual culture they have constructed to replace it. 2011 also marks the birth of The Burning Man Project, a non-profit organization committed to renewing urban centers with the power of radical participation and artistic expression. More than 20 years after the young festival was kicked off Baker Beach for being perceived as a public nuisance, San Francisco mayor Ed Lee recently welcomed the BMP back to the city of the movement’s birth.

Despite its encouraging expansion back into the default world, the lifeblood of the Burning Man experiment remains the weeklong ritual in the desert of northern Nevada. It is there that a new way of being human is being born, that the traditional boundaries between the sacred and the profane are being redrawn or perhaps erased all together. Viewed as a collective phenomenon, it seems to me that the individuals involved in the movement are only just beginning to understand the full meaning of the world they are bringing forth together. It is as if the massive gathering of hippies, freaks, engineers, healers, artists, witches, jedis, and weirdos is being unconsciously lured to the desert by higher powers to provide a landing pad or interdimensional portal for a new kind of intelligence to incarnate upon the earth. Just as the Judeo-Christian religions of our collective past were generated by the profound transformations of desert-dwelling prophets, the planetary spirituality of our collective future is being generated by a now more democratic form of initiation."

In his study of Schelling’s naturephilosophy (Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, 2006), Iain Hamilton Grant offers a novel characterization that supplants the vitalist and idealist labels usually attached to him. The speculative realist movement is full of delightfully strange ideas, but Schelling’s naturephilosophy presents an especially surprising case study. Schelling breaks the correlationist circle imposed by Kantian transcendentalism by thinking the becoming of the universe with Plato, of all people, whose philosophy is generally considered to be the paradigm case of idealism. Grant’s reading of Plato’s physics challenges those who would call him a two-world metaphysician. Instead, Plato is interpreted as a participatory realist, struggling to account for the way Ideas are realized in the becoming of the universe. My presentation will review Schelling’s speculative response to Kant’s transcendentalism by focusing on three texts: Schelling’s “Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature,” Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” and Plato’s “Timaeus.” I will argue for the plausibility of Schelling’s geocentric response to Kant’s Copernican Revolution, wherein the earth itself becomes the transcendental ground of human consciousness.

In this dissertation, I lure the process philosophies of F. W. J. Schelling and A. N. Whitehead into orbit together around the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I argue that Schelling and Whitehead’s descendental aesthetic ontology provides a way across the epistemological chasm that Kant’s critiques opened up between experience and reality. While Kant’s problematic scission between the phenomenal world and the thing-in-itself remains an essential phase in the maturation of the human mind, it need not be the full realization of mind’s potential in relation to Nature. I contrast Schelling’s and Whitehead’s descendental philosophies with Kant’s transcendentalism by showing how their inverted methods bridge the chasm—not by resolving the structure of reality into clear and distinct concepts—but by replanting cognition in the aesthetic processes that power it. Hidden at the generative root of our seemingly separate human capacities for corporeal sensation and intellectual reflection is the same universally distributed creative power or imaginal ether underlying star formation and blooming flowers. Human consciousness is not a transcendental onlooker upon the world but a microcosmic participant in the Life of the Whole. Humanity is a development of what has always been enveloped in the Earth and wider universe, as natural as leaves on a tree. 

Through a creative interweaving of their process-relational orientations, I show how the power of imagination so evident in Schelling’s and Whitehead’s thought can provide philosophy with genuine experiential insight into cosmos, theos, and anthropos in the aftermath of the Kantian revolution. The two—anthropos and cosmos—are perceived as one by a common sense described in this dissertation as etheric imagination. This etheric sense puts us in touch with the divine life of Nature, which the ancients personified as the ψυχὴ του κόσμου or anima mundi.

Whitehead was among the first initiates into the new cosmological story, but grasping the novelty of his vision also requires remembering the insights of the ancients, even if in a modern context. This book therefore situates Whitehead's animate cosmology in the context of the larger historical arc of Western natural philosophy dating back to Plato. It also bring's Whitehead's philosophy of organism into conversation with several components of contemporary scientific cosmology-including relativistic, quantum, evolutionary, and complexity theories-in order to both exemplify the inadequacy of traditional materialistic-mechanistic metaphysics, and to display the relevance of Whitehead's cosmological scheme to the transdisciplinary project of integrating these theories and their data with the presuppositions of civilized society.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) spent his philosophical career striving to realize the Absolute system, but he did so in full recognition of the fact that the Absolute is not finally a logical system, but a living actuality. Accordingly, for Schelling, “life is the criterion of truth.” Though his critics often dismissed his thought as fragmentary and protean, C. S. Peirce, in a letter to William James, remarked that it was precisely Schelling’s “freedom from the trammels of system” and willingness to approach philosophical ideas experimentally rather than dogmatically that he admired most: “In that, he is like a scientific man.” This book, written in the context of a resurgence of interest in Schelling's work, as well as during a planetary ecological emergency and geo-political crisis, draws upon the deep well of his thought in the hope that it can aid human civilization’s attempt to re-imagine itself. Schelling's philosophy provides many of the anthropological, theological, and cosmological resources necessary for bringing forth an alternative form of modernity no longer bent on the destruction of earth and the disintegration of human communities.

A collection of essays on a range of topics, including the role of imagination in philosophy, the possibility of an ecological Christianity, inter-religious dialogue as soul-making, and the centrality of organic thinking in Romantic poetry.

I explore the ideas of thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead, Francisco Varela, Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson, and Alf Hornborg in an attempt to critique both techno-industrial capitalism and mechanistic biology. I offer the beginnings of an integral response to market cosmology.