Psychedelics Today podcast on Consciousness, Capitalism, and Philosophy



Segall discusses the relationship between consciousness and neuroscience: how science is helpful, but ultimately amounts to just one of many different tools towards describing consciousness (not truly understanding it), and how science, philosophy, and religion need to focus on their specialties but also work together towards better defining the human experience. And he talks about the importance of philosophy in trying to make sense of non-ordinary states of consciousness. 

As this is a very back-and-forth, philosophically-based conversation, they talk about a lot more: William James, David Ray Griffin’s concept of “hardcore common sense presuppositions,” Richard Dawkins, scientism, positivism, how we’re slowly thinning the line between technology and humanity, Timothy Leary and whether or not anyone really “dropped out,” German idealism, how capitalism co-opts everything, John Cobb, Alfred North Whitehead, Universal Basic Income, the death denial in capitalist life, and how to use the relationship between the internet and capitalism to improve society. 

Notable Quotes

“The thing about capitalism is that it lives inside each of us at the level of our desires and our drives because we’ve been shaped by it. So we can’t pretend like it’s this big, bad monster out there that other people believe in. The problem with capitalism is that it’s not just a worldview you decide to believe in or not; it is the very structure, again, of your desires and your sense of identity. It’s inside of you.”

“They say cannabis causes problems with motivation. Well yea, once you see through the value structure of our society, you lose motivation to participate because it’s no longer appetizing to you to engage in the rat race.” 

“Fifty years later, after Leary was saying ‘Turn on, tune in, and drop out’, a lot of people thought that they followed his instructions, but again, capitalism co-opted the whole hippie movement, and by the 90s, they were selling Che Guevera t-shirts at the shopping mall and Apple was using the Beatles to sell computers.” 

“The way that liberals tend to think about these questions [is that] they get really mad at Facebook for being biased in what ads they allow and not censoring certain things and selling ads to Russians and stuff. …A publicly traded corporation has one purpose: to maximize shareholder profits. And that’s the business model for Facebook, and so they’ll take money from anyone who wants to sell ads. They’re a private company. They’re not a public utility that has anywhere in its corporate charter as part of its mission: ‘improving civil society’ or ‘helping America maintain its democracy.’ Why would we expect a private corporation to do that? There’s no incentive in capitalism for that. And yet we get mad and blame Mark Zuckerberg. Why aren’t we blaming capitalism? That’s where the source code for this problem is.” 

“Psychedelics aren’t necessarily going to wake us up, but I think that’s why we need philosophy. These substances and these experiences need to be contained within a meaningful story and a meaningful theory of reality so that we can make sense of what we’re experiencing and integrate it, and not only come out of those experiences with a profound sense of what’s wrong with our society, but with at least a good idea for what we’d like instead.”

Emanation, Emergence, and Meaning: Thinking with Vervaeke and Kastrup

Here’s a link to an academic article laying out the significance of Whitehead’s panexperientialism for the hard problem of consciousness:

John Vervaeke and I recorded a dialogue a few days after I recorded the video above. View it here: Dia-logos with John Vervaeke: Emergence, Emanation, and Bernardo Kastrup’s Idealism

Alchemical Consciousness After Descartes: Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism as Psychedelic Realism

The following is an essay originally submitted for publication in a book on philosophy and psychedelics. After some feedback from the editors, I realized it is too long and includes too many (I hope interesting!) digressions. I’ll be thoroughly revising my submission for the book, so I figured I’d share this earlier version here. Feedback welcome!

Abstract: The study of consciousness is today’s most exciting philosophical frontier. Such an inquiry provides an obvious example of the relevance of psychedelic experience: what better way could there be for coming to terms with the intimate mystery our own consciousness than through the ingestion of psychedelic—literally, “mind-manifesting”—chemicals? In the chapter to follow, I offer a creative reading of Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, reinterpreting his famous Gedankenerfahrung (“thought-experiment”) as a sort of psychedelic trip through hell and heaven and back again. I next turn to Whitehead’s process-relational reimagining of modern Cartesian philosophy, detailing how his approach more adequately incorporates the psychedelic ground of consciousness. I argue that Whitehead’s philosophy of organism opens up the possibility of a psychedelic realism that would allow us to take the ontologically revelatory nature of these experiences seriously. My hope is that this comparative reading of Descartes and Whitehead opens up a road not taken by modern natural science and philosophy, one leading away from the self-alienation and cosmic disenchantment that have so plagued contemporary science and society. Self-integration and world re-enchantment are possible. Ingested responsibly and in service of philosophical inquiry, psychedelics may act as alchemical catalysts providing an especially powerful medicinal aid in service of this Great Work.

Consciousness in the Wild

I just finished a 2.5 hour debate with David Long (moderated by Bruce Alderman of The Integral Stage). David is a proponent of “Integral 2.0,” an attempted upgrade of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory which David feels amounts to a kind of idealistic creationism when it comes to cosmological questions and the origins of consciousness. David argues for a form of emergentism, the idea that consciousness or sentience emerges out of neutral physics and chemistry at some point in evolutionary history. I argued against emergentism by pointing out that as an account of consciousness it ultimately collapses into either epiphenomenalism or dualism (I unpack why in this article). I argue in favor of a Schellingian/Whiteheadian form of evolutionary panpsychism. The debate should be uploaded in the next few days, and I will share it here. Below are a few reflections offered in an attempt to bridge my position with David’s.

I’m fine with saying that consciousness is an emergent property/product of a complex system. But the system in question is not just the neurons in the skull, it’s the system of the universe.

When we abstract brain physiology from the wider organism-environment field and evolutionary developmental history to which it belongs, when we stick a brain in a laboratory fMRI machine, we may learn some interesting things about how we’re wired up to respond to the world. DARPA/The Pentagon is spending billions on brain science, because it pays off if the goal is the instrumentalization of human souls. It could also pay off therapeutically, if that’s what society valued.

But consciousness is different “in the wild.” Out here in the midst of human history on an imperiled planet earth we conscious beings find ourselves not only embodied but embedded within the body of the world. This world-body’s horizons are analogous to our rentinal blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye. The light of sight recedes into the darkness of a seer unseen.

As an emergent product of cosmogenesis, consciousness can’t quite get a handle on its comic origin. A finger can’t touch itself. An eye can’t see itself.

We reach for the edge of space-time only to have it recede from us at an ever-accelerating rate. My consciousness is limited in its capacity for ever-vigilant attentiveness to the entire experiential field encompassing me. My focus on this field is always shifting from locus to locus and fades off at fractal edges. Consciousness is an emergent product of the entire history and extent of the cosmos. I mean this quite literally and physically. What else could it be?

The Rheomode Series, a YouTube playlist

I’ll be spending more time at the South Yuba River for the remainder of the summer. I’ll be recording more videos thinking with rocks, water, air, and fire. I’ll keep adding them to this playlist below.

“What you thought was dead and inanimate betrays a secret life and silent, inexorable intent. You have got caught up in a hustle and bustle where everything goes its own way with strange gestures, beside you, above you, beneath you, and through you; even the stones speak to you, and magical threads spin from you to things and from things to you. … But if you watch closely, you will see what you have never seen before, namely that things live your life, and that they live off you: the rivers bear your life to the valley, one stone falls upon another with your force, plants and animals also grow through you and they are the cause of your death. A leaf dancing in the wind dances with you; the irrational animal guesses your thought and represents you. The whole earth sucks its life from you and everything reflects you again. Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner; for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things, no matter how remote, how precious, how secret it is. It inheres in things. Your dog robs you of your father, who passed away long ago, and looks at you as he did. The cow in the meadow has intuited your mother, and charms you with total calm and security. The stars whisper your deepest mysteries to you, and the soft valleys of the earth rescue you in a motherly womb. Like a stray child you stand pitifully among the mighty, who hold the threads of your life. You cry for help and attach yourself to the first person that comes your way. Perhaps he can advise you, perhaps he knows the thought that you do not have, and which all things have sucked out of you.”

-C. G. Jung, The Red Book (Liber Secundus 27/28).

Integral Entheogens (Ep. 5) – Molecular Alchemy and the Evolution of Spirit

Thanks to Bruce Alderman and The Integral Stage for putting this together!

In Episode 5, Matthew Segall discusses how entheogens or “ecodelics” have impacted him personally and philosophically, inspiring some of his deepest ontological insights and courses of inquiry — particularly in the areas of panpsychism, deep or integral pluralism, and process thought. He then offers some suggestions on how to work most profitably with psychedelics for personal and spiritual growth.














1. Why not Whitehead?: A Brief Historical Excursus

“Urge & urge & urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.



—Whitman (“Song of Myself”)








2. The Place of Consciousness in a Physical Universe



a) Eliminativism





b) Epiphenomenalism





c) Emergentism











—Whitehead ([1938] 1968, 150)














5. The Wonder Remains


—Whitehead ([1938] 1968, 168-169)



Works Cited






















































Toward a Communicative Cosmos: Whitehead and Media Ecology (updated draft)

Below is a draft of a paper I’ll offer at the MEA Convention in a few weeks. I share it here in the hopes that my readers may provide feedback that helps me improve it. I have something like 15 minutes to present as part of a panel on “Philosophical Perspectives,” so I’ll only be able to extemporaneously summarize the text below. I hope to submit some version of this paper to the Explorations in Media Ecology journal.

A Panel Presentation for the 18th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association

Convention theme: “Technology, Spirituality, Ecology”

Title: Toward A Communicative Cosmos: Whitehead and Media Ecology

Author: Matthew T. Segall, PhD

Affiliation: California Institute of Integral Studies


“…it is not to be wondered at, that there is nothing attributed unto Pan concerning loves, but only of his marriage with Echo. For the world or nature doth enjoy itself…but where there is enough there is no place left to desire. Therefore there can be no wanton love in Pan or the world, nor desire to obtain anything (seeing he is contented with himself) but only speeches…It is an excellent invention that Pan or the world is said to make choice of Echo only (above all other speeches or voices) for his wife: for that alone is true philosophy, which doth faithfully render the very words of the world; and it is written no otherwise than the world doth dictate, it being nothing else but the image or reflection of it, not adding anything of its own, but only iterates and resounds”
—Francis Bacon (The Essays, Or Councils, Civil and Moral [1718], 18)

“Not all communication is human communication. Animals and machines, atoms and the earth, the seas and the stars are themselves full of curious communications, and our efforts to have intelligence with such entities reform our own practices as well. A vision of communication committed to democracy cannot foreclose on entering into intelligence with radical otherness, including the earth, other species, machines, or extraterrestrial life.”
—John Durham Peters (“Space, Time, and Communication Theory”)

—Alfred North Whitehead (PR, 50)


In what follows, I draw upon Alfred North Whitehead’s organic cosmology in an attempt to expand the scope of media ecology beyond its ordinarily humanistic horizon. Neil Postman defined media ecology as the critical study of how media technologies envelope and form cultures. As McLuhan famously put it, “Man is an extension of nature that re-makes the nature that makes the man” (Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, 66). This definition of media ecology is premised on the idea that human beings have a foot in two different worlds: a natural or physical environment that includes our own living bodies, and a media environment that extends our embodied expressions into a non-material space of meaning. Each form of communication technology (e.g., speech, the alphabet, the printing press, radio, TV, the Internet, etc.) creates a surrogate nature, an artificial environment within which new cultures grow, sometimes deformed due to their alienation from and lack of resonance with original nature. Today, largely because of a lack of resonance, we find ourselves the late capitalist denizens of a planet in crisis. Geologists and Gaian physiologists tell us that we have entered the Anthropocene. Technological civilization, in its rush to establish a new and improved second nature on top of the first, has neglected to consider that first nature—the Earth—is not a mere stockpile of raw material waiting to fuel the growth and innovation of the human economy, but a complex and highly differentiated ecopoietic superorganism (see Mind in Life by Evan Thompson, 120-122). The planetary ecological crisis has made the modern theory of a bifurcated nature obsolete. Cultural productions and physical processes, perhaps once separable in thought, are now irrevocably entangled at a geochemical level. Our ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology; by the idea, that is, that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies, but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s organic cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on the medium instead of the message, such that the world itself is brought into view as a medium of communication. Perhaps such an imaginative generalization of media ecology into an ecological metaphysics or metaphysics of the medium can sensitize us to the primal logos of the cosmos.

This work is already well underway, carried forward by theorists including Jussi Parikka, John D. Peters, Mark B. N. Hansen, Adam Robbert, and Andrew Murphie. They each (especially the latter three) turn to Whitehead’s process-relational metaphysics in search of a more cosmological media ecology. Recognizing that humans represent only one of the cosmos’ many forms of communicative being, and that the storage, transmission, and transformation of meaning occurs at every scale from the quantum to the geological to the galactic, opens up new theoretical perspectives on and practical interventions into the study of media as environment and environment as media. In alignment with this conference’s theme, becoming conscious of a communicative cosmos has profound technological, ecological, and theological implications.

Part 1 makes the case for cosmologizing media theory beyond the study of human communication. Part 2 engages more specifically with Mark Hansen’s Feed Forward, arguing that his “inversion” of Whitehead is an unnecessary radicalization of an already radical theory of perception.


Part 1

McLuhan and Postman theorized media largely from an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., media as “extensions of man”). There is much to be learned from such a perspective. But it is not the only perspective from which to study media. Unlike Postman, with his prophet-like criticisms of new media’s deleterious effect on contemporary culture, McLuhan’s Catholic faith sometimes led him to offer a more theologically charged take on electronic media. He went so far as to suggest that what we now call the Internet may be the technological incarnation of the mystical body of Christ (of course, he also worried that electronic media were just Satan’s latest temptation). God has an important role to play in Whitehead’s media theory, as well, though less as a subject of religious worship than as a metaphysical principle providing coherence to his cosmological scheme. For Whitehead, God is that infinite actuality which introduces an ideal harmony or aesthetic order into the world, making cosmos out of chaos by providing the initial aim or erotic lure conditioning every creative act: God “is the mirror which discloses to every creature its own greatness” (RM, 139). Whitehead’s is an aesthetic theory of Being wherein God is the poet of the world.

McLuhan said of all media prior to electronic technologies that they were “extensions” or “prostheses” of the human being, but with the emergence of digital media and the Internet, an uncanny reversal seems to be occurring: the human is becoming an extension of media. According to McLuhan, we are ourselves being “translated into information” (UM, 57). Digital media have been characterized as “environmental,” “elemental,” and “atmospheric” because they surround and dissolve our classical conception of human agency. Data is now the most powerful weapon in the world, as the governments, corporations, and anonymous hackers who wield it have the ability to shape our collective perceptions and actions, even while we continue to believe we are individuals thinking for ourselves. The situation is decidedly double-edged: we have instantaneous access to more information about each other and the world than ever before in human history, but this information also has access to us.

Whether we call it the informational revolution, the technozoic era, or the Anthropocene, it is clear that our species has become a planetary force on par with supervolcanoes and meteorites. Just as this realization begins to dawn on us, media theorists are articulating a “non-anthropocentric, non-prosthetic, and radically environmental theory of media” (Hansen, FF, 250). Hansen, Murphie, and Robbert turn to Whitehead’s panpsychism in order to re-imagine the ontology of media as part of an effort to overcome the modern bifurcation of nature. The bifurcated theory of nature has it that nature is a soundless, scentless, colorless affair, with all experience and interpretation, all emotion and purpose, all value and agency, reserved for the human or at most the animal (and for some, for God). Media theory has tended to treat human perception as though it existed in an ontologically unique domain outside and above mere material existence: humans and their technologies do the mediating, while nature itself remains passively mediated. In protest against the bifurcation of nature, Whitehead articulated a radical account of perception, whereby the affective inheritance of our own just past bodily experience becomes analogous to all of nature’s causal transactions. Human temporality, even if stretched and intricately folded, is still continuous with cosmic temporality. For Whitehead, the ultimate concrete facts composing nature are non-conscious acts of perceptivity: to be actual is to be the achievement of a specific form of feeling, or what Whitehead refers to as a “prehension” (RM, 88, 91). Causal efficacy in nature is the transmission of an occasion of feeling from the settled past into the cresting wave of the present. Once an actual occasion’s present form has reached completion, its perceptivity perishes and it offers itself as an expression feeding the emergence of subsequent prehensive actualities. “Expression,” says Whitehead, “is the one fundamental sacrament…the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace…the recipient extends his apprehension of the ordered universe by penetrating into the inward nature of the originator of the expression. There is then a community of intuition by reason of the sacrament of expression proffered by one and received by the other” (RM, 118). Where McLuhan described the “miracle” whereby “in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world, because human perception is literally incarnation” (“Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,” 82), Whitehead goes further by arguing that “Every event on its finer side introduces God into the world,” such that “the world lives by its incarnation of God in itself” (RM, 140). Expression and prehension are the systole and diastole movements of cosmic creativity, the call and response between God and the world. Every creature, whether atomic, galactic, biotic, or anthropic, is privy in various degrees to this conversation. McLuhan’s theological intuitions already offer media ecology one way beyond its ordinarily anthropocentric charter. But by accepting some version of the bifurcation of Nature, McLuhan falls short of the “becoming-cosmological of media” (Hansen, FF, 244) that is achieved by Whitehead. Media theory’s founding insight, that “the medium is the message,” must be translated into cosmology.

Adam Robbert offers one translation in the form of a “geocentric media ecology”: “Organisms are media ecologists enveloped by the media ecologies of other organisms…the Earth itself is not a passive ground upon which events unfold, but a medium that constrains and conditions the energetic cascade of organismic and ecosystemic development” (“Earth Aesthetics: Knowledge and Media Ecologies,” 6). Along similar lines, Jussi Parikka suggests that “the Earth as living creature communicates via the assembled resources it fashions and provides” (“The Geology of Media,” The Atlantic [Oct 11, 2013]). Parikka offers his own translation of “the medium is the message” into cosmology via a psychogeophysical inquiry into the memories of rocks, raising a dilemma “anyone deep into Alfred North Whitehead would find attractive”: “how do the soil, the crust, the rocks, and the geological world sense?” (A Geology of Media, 62-65. Emphasis mine). Such questions may seem odd at first, but they are an invitation to consider anew the ontological implications of the way natural sciences like geology and astronomy have taught us so much about the cosmos by treating it as a kind of recording medium.

In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters asks: “What if we took nature as the epitome of meaning rather than mind? What if the fecundity of meaning in nature provided our model of communication?” (MC, 380). Peters approaches the cosmologization of media theory by calling for an “infrastructural aesthetics” to replace both structuralism (the ambition to “explain the principles of thought…by way of a combinatorics of meaning”) and post-structuralism (“with its love of gaps, aporias, and impossibilities, its celebration of breakdown, yearning, and failure, its relish for preposterous categories of all kinds and love of breathless syntax”) (MC, 33). Infrastructural aesthetics lifts the taken for granted background of our human living and dying into the foreground, bringing that which habitual use and abuse has made imperceptible out from behind the veil and into view. Whitehead’s method of speculative philosophy could be described likewise, as for him metaphysics is the pursuit of those generalities so finely woven into the texture of our everyday experience that they become “obscured by their persistent exemplification” (PR, 5). “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake an analysis of the obvious” (SMW, 4), which perhaps explains why philosophy is such a rare vocation. But for Whitehead, philosophy must not become the enemy of habitual commonsense. Infrastructural ignorance has been an essential component of our species’ uniquely powerful form of intelligence: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them” (Intro to Math, 61). Instead, philosophy must deploy the method of “imaginative rationalization” (PR, 5) to seek out and make explicit the unacknowledged cosmological presuppositions that provide justification for our civilized commonsense. Infrastructural aesthetics is the effort to bring to light the vibrant materiality of the medium underlying the ephemerality of the messages it conveys. It is the effort to unearth the way the ground we walk on supports and enables our understanding of media, our communicative capacity, our consciousness, and our very being: “Ontology, whatever else it is,” says Peters, “is usually just forgotten infrastructure” (MC, 38). In a discussion of Einsteinian cosmology, Peters refers to the way “infrastructural warps can be embraced as epistemic sources” (MC, 364). In other words, the red shift and gravity lensing detected in ancient/distant light signals tells us something important about the universe. Distortions in these cosmic messages, far from ruining our ability to decipher their meaning, communicate something significant to us about the medium of space-time itself: “…light is not simply a signal carrier, but the basis of the universe’s structure—not just message but being…Time, the universe’s key dimension, is tied to signal velocity, and ontology is bound by the finitude of communication” (MC, 366, 368).

Whitehead’s philosophy of organism allows a radical new possibility to become thinkable, that the world can be re-imagined as a medium because the cosmos is itself composed of communicative processes at every scale. The world itself has always been, in Whitehead’s terms, “a medium for the transmission of influences” (PR, 286). “Ironically,” writes Andrew Murphie, “the idea that there’s too much mediation (a world over-run by media which would otherwise run smoothly) leads media theory and practice astray,” since, as Whitehead’s philosophy reveals, “We have too small a concept of mediation” (“The World as Medium,” 11n11).

Cosmologizing media theory means finally, decisively, letting go of the Cartesian-Kantian framework that extends mere matter forever beyond a meaning intending mind. “Nature abounds in meaning,” says Peters, “most of which we have no idea how to read or even acknowledge that it is there. There is an exquisite pattern in DNA and the neurons of sea slugs, in photons and the red shift, in the bonds of the carbon atom and the fortuitously odd behavior of water…There is clear intelligence of some kind in planetary, physiological, and genetic feedback loops. We…should understand intelligence at all scales, as the dynamic, restless, inarticulate genius of life-forms evolving in their environments…with human brain intelligence just one glorious outpost of organic evolution” (MC, 381).

Such a scale-free conception of intelligence requires a more general theory of communication (indeed, a more general general semantics!) than that which supposes the paradigm case of communication is one human mind trying to convey a thought to another. With a truly (and not just metaphorically) ecologized media theory, we can come to see the prehuman world was always already a medium for the transmission of “data.” Humans are not just now being transformed into information by digital media; like the universe, we were always already made of self-interpreting information. For Whitehead, a bit of information, a datum, is a “potential for feeling” (PR, 88), and every potential seeks satisfaction through actualization in an occasion of experience.

There is much that remains to be unpacked, but my time is short. I can only end by offering a plea to media theorists to join Whitehead’s protest against the bifurcation of nature. Contrary to McLuhan’s argument that languaging humans are unique among biological organisms in that we “[possess] an apparatus of transmission and transformation based on [our] power to store experience” (UM, 59), Whitehead’s organic cosmology invites us to recognize that the transmission and transformation of experience is the very basis of causal connection throughout the universe. Human language is just a further, loopier elaboration upon this cosmic capacity for communicative transaction. So to McLuhan I say, yes, there is a logos in the anthropos, there is a living God at the heart of our human perception and symbolism: a Spirit runneth through our alphabetic letters. But there is another logos: a logos of the cosmos. Thus the need for a cosmological media theory, not just an anthropological or theological one.

Part 2

Mark Hansen’s Feed Forward: On the Future of 21st Century Media (2015) is densely argued and full of important correctives to the anti- and post-human tendencies of many contemporary theorists. While he accepts the call for an anthrodecentric philosophy, Hansen does not seek to “eschew contact with humans” entirely, as though ontology could ever be completely purified of our existence (FF, 15). Rather, he aims to “resituate,” “intensify,” and even “enhance” human experience by bringing it back into contact with the “causally efficacious lineages that have produced it” (FF, 9, 15). As we become increasingly immersed in and saturated by new forms of digital media, Hansen fears that our species is at risk of being drowned by data: “…in a world linked together by…computational networks and increasingly populated with intelligent sensing technologies ranging from environmental sensors to the smart phones…we now carry with us as a matter of course, experience simply is not what it used to be: far more of what goes on in our daily lives is carried out by machines functioning at their own timescales, meaning outside of our direct perceptual grasp but in ways that do significantly affect our activity” (FF, 23). Hansen argues that Whitehead’s re-embedding of human perception in a cosmic vibratory continuum provides a radical corrective to bifurcated Cartesian-Kantian accounts of the relationship between physical processes and human consciousness, a corrective that may help us meet the challenges posed by 21st century digital media.

But Hansen’s reading of Whitehead, assisted by Judith Jones’ beautiful book Intensity (1998), positions itself as an “inversion” of Whitehead’s ontology, which Hansen argues is still residually anthropocentric. Much of what Hansen proposes leans heavily on Jones, even though she herself only claims to be offering a slight revision and reemphasization of concepts already present in Whitehead’s texts (I, x). Hansen summarizes the reasons for his “inversion” of Whitehead’s ontology:

“The canonical interpretation of Whitehead, which is largely justified by his own writings, holds that only concrescence is creative because it is only in concrescence that actualities wield their subjective power; once they ‘perish,’ undergo transition, and enter the settled world, actualities become merely objective (or superjectal), meaning that they become passive and inert and can only become creative again if they are taken up by future concrescences of new actual entities” (FF, 13).

This is, to put it generously, a misleading reading of the role of concrescence and transition in Whitehead’s process-relational ontology. In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead clearly characterizes objects as antecedent and given to newly concrescing occasions, but definitely “not…generated in that occasion.” The new occasion “does not create the objects which it receives.” Actual occasions do not “[arise] out of a passive situation which is a mere welter of many data.” “The exact contrary is the case,” Whitehead tells us, “[since] the initial situation includes a factor of activity which is the reason for the origin [of the new] occasion of experience” (AI, 179; emphasis mine). Objects are not inert, left to die into the past, but have an expressive capacity that itself serves as the primary phase of each new occasion’s entrance into the present. “The creative process is thus to be discerned in that transition by which one occasion, already actual, enters into the birth of another instance of experienced value” (RM, 99).

Hansen develops a non-prosthetic account of digital media in terms of what he calls “worldly sensibility.” Rather than attributing all agency and creativity to human consciousness, Hansen attributes a kind of sensitivity to data itself, a “datasense,” “[thereby positioning] data-gathering as an independent producer of sensibility (causal efficacy) in its own right” (FF, 149). Hansen claims his project involves a radicalization of Whitehead’s theory of perception, in that Whitehead’s account of concrescence still over-privileges the subject-pole, and thus by extension the humanness, of experience. Hansen instead emphasizes superjective transition over subjective concrescence, and similarly seeks to heighten the distinction between what he describes as the “empirical” and “speculative” aspects of Whitehead’s scheme. But Whitehead does not privilege concrescence over transition, or subjective prehension over superjective expression. His cosmological scheme is an attempt at harmonizing the two principles characterizing reality’s process, and his analogization of philosophic method with the flight of an airplane suggests he also sought a harmonization between speculative and empirical methods (PR, 5). Whitehead is not a phenomenologist; he is, like Schelling, an organic realist. Experience, in the most general or metaphysical terms, is an “oscillation between concrescence and transition of actual entities…or ‘societies’…ranging from the most ‘micro’-level phenomena, for example, quantum decoherence, to the most ‘macro’-level phenomena, for example, geological and cosmological processes” (FF, 14). Here, Whitehead and Hansen are in complete agreement.

Hansen claims he needs to to “radicalize” Whitehead because he sees the latter as still too centered on human consciousness. Whitehead betrays an anthropocentric residue, according to Hansen, when he defines causal efficacy merely in reference to the last tenth of a second of our human experience: “Whitehead’s…reductive rechristening of perception qua causal efficacy as ‘nonsensuous perception’…jettisons the crucial ‘vector character’ of perception, the way lineages of causal efficacy stretch far into the background of perception, and not just to its most immediate just-past” (FF, 20-21); “Whitehead effectively identifies causally efficacious perception with—and, I would argue, limits it to—the immediate past of sensory perception” (FF, 24). But Whitehead is merely using our human experience of causal efficacy as a specific example of the way superjective expressions transition into subjective prehensions, an example close to home: “In human experience, the most compelling example of non-sensuous perception is our knowledge of our own immediate past” (AoI, 178). But in the context of his metaphysics, the example is generalized as an account of causal relations as such; that is, our nonsensuous perception of our own immediate past is imaginatively extended so as to characterize the becoming of actual occasions at every scale. And it is not clear to me that causal efficacy of the sort Hansen refers to as “worldly sensibility” is completely beyond human perception, as he claims: we may have access to it in certain extreme states (psychedelics, NDEs, flow states, etc.). On the other hand, it could be that we become other-than-human during such extreme experiential episodes.

Early in his book, Hansen puts a definitional stake in the ground by referencing Husserl’s distinction between sensation and perception: “sensation [is] the nonintentional material on which perception, and intentionality, is erected” (note 3, p. 271). Hansen argues that Whitehead’s account of “nonsensuous perception” must be replaced with an account of “non-perceptual sensation” (p. 19), but I have a feeling this is a merely a definitional issue having to do with a difference in how Husserlian phenomenologists demarcate “sensation” vs. “perception.” Whitehead explicitly acknowledges the lack of consistency in the philosophical tradition’s various definitions of “perception”: Sensationalist doctrine suggests that perception is always through stimulation of the various sense-organs, but Whitehead argues that “there is a wider meaning” beyond this limited use of the term (AoI, 178). “Tacit identification of perception with sense-perception must be a fatal error barring the advance of systematic metaphysics” (AoI, 180). Below I excerpt two sections of my dissertation that unpack Whitehead’s account of the two pure modes of perception (which I also refer to as “aesthesis”), causal efficacy and presentational immediacy, which I believe makes clear there is no need for the “inversion” Hansen has attempted.

Analysis of prehensionality from my dissertation (pgs. 132-143): It is all too easy to define aesthesis according to the misplaced concreteness, so prevalent among modern philosophers of both the empiricist and rationalist schools, which has it that our primary form of sensory experience is of bare patches of qualia free of all relations. Whitehead called this mode of perception “presentational immediacy” or “sense-perception,” contrasting it with the more primordial mode of “causal efficacy” or “sense-reception.” The latter mode of perception, as its name suggests, directly links our experience to that of other actualities in our causal lineage. That human experience is linked to other actualities by such lineages contradicts the Kantian paradigm, for which perception is “mere appearance” and so causally epiphenomenal. From Whitehead’s perspective, “experience has been explained [by modern philosophers] in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first”: because presentational immediacy (i.e., derivative appearances in the subject) provides us with clear and distinct ideas that are accessible to conceptualization by the understanding, it has been given genetic priority, when in fact, causal efficacy (i.e., primordial feelings of objects) deserves this honor (PR, 162.). “The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy,” according to Whitehead, in that while Kant endeavors to construe experience as a process whereby “subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world,” Whitehead’s philosophy of organism describes experience as a process whereby the order of the objectively felt data pass into and provide intensity for the realization of a subject (PR, 88). In short, in Kant’s philosophy “the world emerges from the subject,” while “for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world” (PR, 88).

Rather than treating the objective world as an appearance constructed by subjective activity, as Kant and most other modern thinkers do, Whitehead reverses the direction of the process of perception such that each subject is described as arising from its feelings of other objectified subjects, or superjects (PR, 156). “In the place of the Hegelian [or Kantian] hierarchy of categories of thought,” writes Whitehead, “the philosophy of organism finds a hierarchy of feeling” (PR, 166).

On Whitehead’s reading, Kant privileges perception in the mode of “presentational immediacy” and ignores or at least marginalizes the deeper and more ontologically relevant perceptual mode of “causal efficacy.” “Presentational immediacy” displays reality in a way amenable to representational analysis, showing only the more or less clear and distinct surfaces of the world as they are presented to a reflective subject here and now. It is the end product of a complex process of unconscious prehensive unification accomplished by the society of actual occasions composing our organism and nervous system. “Causal efficacy” unfolds behind the scenes of the Cartesian theater of presentational immediacy, hidden in the unrepresentable depths of reality, carrying vague emotional vectors from the past into the present. Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is punctual (hence its relative clarity and distinctness), while perception in the mode of causal efficacy is transitional (hence its vagueness). Presentational immediacy allows for intentional consciousness, the subjective capacity for attentional directedness toward the eidos of objects. Causal efficacy is prehensional, the presubjective capacity to inherit the affective influences of objects. The former mode requires that a mind remain at a distance from things, sensing their essence rather than prehending their causal presence, while the latter implies the interpenetration of things, the transition from the superjective beings of the past into the subjective becoming of the present. Whitehead’s alchemical distillation of consciousness reveals an experiential structure even deeper than conceptuality, an ontologically primordial mode of experience shared in by every actuality in the cosmos. If anything is a priori, it is not the transcendental structures of human conceptuality as Kant argued, but the descendental processes of cosmic prehensionality.
(pgs. 156-159): Prehension should not be thought of as resulting in an actual occasion “having” experience of other occasions, as though an occasion were “the unchanging subject of change” (PR, 29). This would inevitably lead back to the classical bifurcated conception of substantial minds qualified by their private representations of supposedly public material objects. For the philosophy of organism, an actual occasion is not a pre-existent subject qualified by its representations of ready-made objects. Instead, actual occasions are re-imagined as dipolar “subject-superjects” (PR, 29). The “subject” phase of a concrescing occasion emerges from the prehensions of antecedent occasions which it unifies, while in the “superject” phase the occasion, having attained satisfaction as a unified drop of decisively patterned experience, perishes into “objective immortality,” which then initiates another round of prehension by a subsequently concrescing actual occasion. Whitehead expresses the perpetual perishing of subjective immediacy into objective immortality in terms of his “principle of relativity,” such that “it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’” (PR, 22). Actual occasions are thus describable in two ways: as “being” and as “becoming.” These ontological designations are not separable, since, according to Whitehead’s correlative “principle of process,” an occasion’s “being” arises from its “becoming”: “how an actual [occasion] becomes constitutes what that actual [occasion] is” (PR, 23). The description of an occasion according to its genetic “becoming” provides an account of the occasion’s own subjective aim (i.e., its final cause), while the description according to its extensive “being” provides an account of its superjective effect as prehended by other occasions beyond itself (i.e., as efficient cause). Creative process is said to manifest in two ways, as the concrescence of each individual entity, and as the transition from one occasion to the next. Concrescence describes “the real internal constitution of a particular existent,” while transition describes the perishing of a particular existent’s process, thereby “constituting that existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existences elicited by repetitions of process” (PR, 210). “The transition is real, and the achievement is real,” writes Whitehead. “The difficulty is for language to express one of them without explaining away the other” (Modes of Thought, 102).

End Notes

♠ Also quoted by Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media, 60).

♣ Or perhaps this assumes too shallow an understanding of analogy, which is plenty cosmological (in the Whiteheadian aesthetic sense) already if, like McLuhan, we adopt the Thomist theory of analogical perception, wherein “the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos.…Analogy is not concept. It is community. It is resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the divine Logos. … [I]mmediate analogical awareness … begins in the senses and is derailed by concepts or ideas” (McLuhan to John W. Mole, 18 April 1969). In other words, perhaps analogical reasoning links us via perception/aesthesis to the cosmic logos.

♥ E.g., consider how Postman criticisms of modern technology resemble the prophet Isaiah: “Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands” (Isaiah 2:8); or the prophet Jeremiah: “They burned incense to other gods and worshipped the works of their hands” (Jeremiah 1:16).

♦ See my dissertation for more on the convergence of Whitehead and Schelling’s process philosophies: Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (2016). A media determinist might argue that in my attempt to cosmologize media theory, I am simply mistaking the meaning created by words for meaning discovered in the world. That alphabetic literacy serves as the media a priori for cosmological speculation I do not doubt. But Schelling’s philosophy of language reveals the way alphabetic consciousness, like the mythic consciousness which preceded it, is only an intensification of potencies already present in nature. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie allowed him to “cognize the physical in language,” and to “arrange…the history of…language…in analogy to the geological” (Schelling, Werke, vol. 8, 452-453). Do humans make sense of the Earth, or are humans the Earth making sense of itself? From Schelling’s point of view, the philosophy of nature is nature itself philosophizing, Autophusis philosophia. For more on the way human myth and language can be read as expressions of the Earth, see “Logos of a Living Earth: Toward a New Marriage of Science and Myth for Our Planetary Future” in World Futures, vol. 68 , Iss. 2, 2012.