To live is to dance with an unknown partner whose steps we can never fully predict...
David Abram (The Invisible World)
How do we overcome the detached attitude that is characteristic of our Western objectifying approach to reality and how do we "return to the world," how do we reanimate it and renew our ethical relationship with it? How do we open ourselves to synergy with humans, with other animals and plants, and with larger living systems, and how do we begin to think and create "from within the world"?
Freya Mathews is a prominent Australian ecophilosopher whose main interests are focused on panpsychism and ecological metaphysics, a critique of the metaphysics of modernity. She also explores the possibilities of developing a new ecological civilization and in this context is interested in indigenous perspectives on sustainability (especially Australian and Chinese) and how they might be adapted to the context of contemporary global society. She also deals with ethics and wilderness restoration in the context of the Anthropocene. She is the author of several important books – The Ecological Self (1991); For Love of Matter / A Contemporary Panpsychism (2003); Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture (Reviving reality: for the renewal of culture / 2005) etc.
The text of the first part of this introductory lecture on the philosophy of Freya Mathews, delivered on August 11 at the fifth seminar of the Traveling University of Nature “Everything around me lives, feels like I do…/ paths to regenerative culture” (August 10-15, 2020), is based primarily on two of the author’s texts: “Thinking from Within the Calyx of Nature (In: Environmental Values 17, 1, 2008) and “Do the Deepest Roots of a Future Ecological Civilization Lie in Chinese Soil? (lecture at the symposium “Learning from the Other: Australian and Chinese Perspectives on Philosophy” 2014-2015; published by the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2016) and further from her book For Love of Matter / A Contemporary Panpsychism (SUNY Press, Albany 2003).
Communicative panpsychism
The panpsychism that Mathews developed goes beyond the conventional notion of mind-matter dualism. It is a metaphysics that, in a certain extended sense, attributes mind not only to selected individuals—humans, animals, plants, or whatever—but to the world itself in the sense of its unity. In panpsychism, we are called upon to perceive the world as an entity in itself, with its own rights, purposes, and meanings, as well as its own communicative capacities, with a propensity to communicate with individuals through its own specific emanations. Wherever this communicative participation takes place, it takes place in a poetic order—in the order of poetic revelation—which can develop simultaneously with the causal order. This poetic order, the order of meaning, transcends the causal order but in no way violates it. The world is therefore a kind of spiritual "being" - it is the One that can communicate with the Many - with the Ten Thousand Things - which are its own ultimate emanations.
Within panpsychism, all things, including the Earth itself, are integral to the fabric of the living cosmos, all is the same sentient, feeling canvas. Mind is a fundamental aspect of matter, just as matter is a fundamental aspect of mind: we are part of a world that has depth as well as structure, meaning as well as form. From the perspective of panpsychism, the cosmos represents a single whole, One a continuous field of mind/matter that differentiates in its evolution into Many self-actualizing and self-aware beings. These beings, this community of subjects, address each other in mutual contact (meeting) and mutual communication and together create poetic ecology: fundamentally erotic beings – they are touched by the world and in turn touch it. For example, it is now widely accepted that trees in a forest are not a collection of individuals, but are in constant communication with each other and with the fungi that permeate their roots.
In this relational ecological reality, together with the causal order, also develops communicative order, or the order of meaning. This communicative order of meaning is of course not realized in human language: it is necessarily poetic order, communicating meaning in images and metaphors that do not occur in words or thoughts, but through material form in the language of things. Modern people have become alienated from this poetic order: if we understand the world only as a crude inert object, then it will appear to us as such. But if we invoke it as a living being, then we can – if we are open to it – receive a meaningful response.
Freya Mathews calls this perspective of inquiry “communicative panpsychism,” or ontopoetics—its main practice or method is invocation. If we deliberately invoke the world as a living being, then it can respond, it can respond to us. Our invocation can happen through loving presence and attunement, through song, prayer, through pilgrimage, through ceremony or festival. Through the language of myth and archetypes, and through the language of traditional religion. According to Freya Mathews, our lives harbor within them possibilities for poetic manifestation that are far more extensive than the manifestations defined by the materialistic concepts of modern society. The practice of invocation allows us to address the world directly in the hope that it can respond to us with gestures that express a familiar attunement.
Freya Mathews concludes that if the world is to be understood in this way, our fundamental existential ways will have to be revised. It will no longer be appropriate for us to seek to understand the world in the traditional scientific sense, but rather to encounter it in order to elicit its response in us. Nor will it be appropriate for us to take “command of the world,” which has its own purposes and meanings. Rather, we should let it be—we should allow it to unfold in its own way.
This principle "let it be" means that we should conduct our activities in such a way that they feed back into the natural cycles that create our livelihoods, in order to sustain them. Of course, some proactivity will be necessary on our part, but this no longer necessarily means manipulating the world, controlling it, instrumentalizing it, and imposing our own intentions. The type of action we cultivate in the service of our needs can follow a line of synergy rather than intervention and control and imposing ourselves on others. Instead, we can learn to identify the patterns of energy flow that are already in play in order to "ride" with them. Instead of cutting or shortening these flows in an attempt to achieve our own pre-planned goals, we can, according to Mathews, choose them in part with a view to what is possible to accomplish in the world as it is, as it is already evolving; and then use the existing patterns of energy flow to get to those goals.
In doing so, we will find that much of our daily activities, both personal and social, can be reorganized along synergistic rather than coercive and controlling lines. Rather than setting ourselves difficult goals or harboring exotic desires—which, in their pursuit, turn our world upside down—we can work with the grain of the given on a personal level, not against it. Operating in a synergistic mode, Mathews says, requires flexibility, detachment from fixed ideas and predetermined goals, and an eye for opportunities as and when they present themselves. “It may not get you where you thought you wanted to be, but it will get you to the place that feels right for you when you get there.”
How to adopt a moral view of nature? / "theory" versus "strategy"
Freya Mathews repeatedly returns to the question in her essays whether classical Western philosophy is a suitable tool for inducing the necessary “moral perspective” on nature. According to the Australian philosopher, a moral approach involves empathy for the inner reality of other beings, a feeling that, she argues, is evoked by processes of synergistic interaction rather than by the kind of rational reasoning on which philosophy is classically built. But in what ways can we connect with non-human life forms and systems? While synergy with animals poses no fundamental difficulty, synergy with larger life systems takes us into epistemological areas explored only on the fringes of the Western tradition, such as Goethe’s romantic alternative to science.
Mathews therefore asks what kind of knowledge, or what kind of thinking, is involved in achieving an ethical awareness of nature. In this context, he compares and discusses in detail, referring to the article by the French philosopher Francois Jullien (“Did philosophers have to become fixated on Truth?”. In: Critical Inquiry, Summer 2002), two opposing ways of thinking: one he characterizes as “theory" and the second as "strategy" (or synergy). He contrasts the figure of the ancient Greek philosopher with the figure of the ancient Chinese sage. Where the Greek philosopher sought truth, that is, an abstract scheme that would accurately represent reality, the Chinese sage focused on agreement, on harmony. He tried to identify tendencies or dispositions that operate in specific situations and that could be used for his own best benefit or for the benefit of others. The thinking of the sage therefore remained inseparably connected with action, with reality, rather than moving away from it and becoming, like the thinking of the Greeks, an epistemic end in itself. Mathews calls this contrast the contrast between "theory" and "strategy."
The theorist engages in a form of abstract thinking, connected with the search for truth about reality. He selects concepts from the psychocognitive network of his thinking and, by further abstraction, refines them into precisely defined abstract categories. In the process, he shifts his focus from the world itself as the object of his cognition to these materialized categories, which he takes to be ideal entities in their own right. Through a process of deduction and proof, he can eventually create a schema that is considered to accurately reflect and represent a certain aspect of reality. The truth about reality, or some aspect of it, is permanent. In fact, it is eternal: the world changes, but the truth about the world does not change. Things come into being and disappear, but the truth about things is timeless. The goal of thinking is therefore to understand the truth, and understanding the truth is a goal in itself. The theorist's attention is diverted from the "outer" world to this timeless abstract inner realm of categories and thought constructs. Unlike the external world, these constructs are the theorist's own creation, assembled and tested within the theater of his intellect. As a result, the theorist tends to subconsciously see himself as the author or as an active subject in relation to the world, which he experiences as a mere construct or as a passive object. In the process of perceiving the world through the lens of theory, the ancient philosopher thus subconsciously distanced himself from the world; as the architect of the schema, he could not be included among its contents.
This vast reification of thought has become for the West a matter of looking at the world in this eternal mirror in which reality appears from a peculiarly inviolable abstract aspect – mirroring the world down to the last detail, yet inert and incapable of acting with respect to or being influenced by the observer. This dualism is a function of the subject-object dichotomy that accompanies the very act of theorizing. It will therefore implicitly block any view that attributes subjectivity, agency, intelligence, purpose, and being to the whole world. The mode of relating to reality that is prompted by this dualistic view will therefore lead to the assumption that the world is a mere object and that the theorist can therefore use it as he sees fit. By making truth his goal, the human mind has subtly detached itself from reality and become its spectator. It has become a detached observer of the drama, an observer who is invisible from within the drama itself, and in this sense has been granted a status that is distinct from the elements of that drama, from the elements of material reality. It was a new form of activity of the subject who no longer negotiates with the world from within, but who objectifies it in a theoretical “mirror” and then plans and rehearses action in this mirror before carrying it out in the outside world. This calculated form of activity has ultimately resulted in unprecedented efficiency in modern times. The dualistic view bequeathed to the West by the theoretical orientation of philosophy – and which is built into the very process of theorizing – ensures that action that proceeds from theory will never be adaptive and will always be essentially instrumentalist, and such is our civilization today. In fact, this very orientation of philosophy (the orientation to the investigation of truth) has led us to the environmental crisis. Science, as an offshoot of Western philosophy, gave birth to modernity, the instrumentalist form of civilization par excellence, which spread industrialization throughout the world. To the seemingly great benefit of people, but at a deadly cost to the natural environment.
On the contrary strategic awareness is inherently non-dualistic. Rather than establishing an internal subject-object dichotomy and engaging with reality as a passive construct of his own thinking, the strategist remains immersed in a flowing field of concrete particulars and pressures that he does not register as part of an abstract totality in epistemic distancing from his subject; he engages with reality in terms of its immediate impact on the activities of his fully embedded non-dual self. Through strategic experimentation, he quickly discovers that the best way to negotiate within the field of influences in which he is immersed—which includes the cross-cutting wills or efforts (conattivities) of other beings—is to generally accommodate himself to these influences. That is, the best way to negotiate within such a field is to make his own goals and intentions as consistent as possible with the surrounding influences and conattivities, and not to try to impose his own will on them. This is self-evident, since the will which achieves its ends in ways best calculated to conserve its own energy will be most apt to continue to preserve and grow its own existence. Thus strategy—which is the proper field of activity of the Chinese sage—refers to wu wei, to the path of least resistance. It can be understood not only in the sense of giving up one's own goals in deference to the goals of others, but rather as adapting our goals to the goals of others and as using the energy that is already at play in our environment for our own further goals.
At the same time, the strategist discovers that wu wei represents the natural modality of all beings. For this reason, it is the strategy that will naturally be chosen for all beings. When discovering wu wei The strategist thoughtfully, even without the help of theory, also discovers the path of all nature; in China this method is called Tao.
Freya Mathews concludes that the dominant paradigm on which Western philosophy stands cannot lead us to a moral perspective regarding our relationship to nature, because this stance – this “path of truth” – distances us from reality, and also because the concept of truth is inherently conflictual, exclusive. She summarizes it succinctly as follows: “Since rational reasoning or philosophical reason in its traditional form does not intrinsically contribute to a moral perspective nor is it inherently emancipatory in our relationship to nature, it does not seem to be the most appropriate tool for evoking a moral commitment to nature. This does not mean that we should abandon ecological philosophy, but rather that philosophy, along with other forms of knowledge such as science, should be incorporated into a practice of thinking that is capable of evoking a moral perspective."
Synergy and tango ethics
Freya Mathews hypothesizes in this context that such a moral perspective can be evoked through reflective participation in creative co-action (co-action), which is a form of joint action that can be characterized as synergy. Being capable of moral approach simply means having the ability to see and feel the world from the perspective of others. It is the ability to “step into the shoes” of other beings and see things as they see them; to feel things as they feel them, to organize the world around their interests, needs, and desires. Being able to see the world as another sees it means feeling the power of the other’s perspective, it means being moved by that perspective.
Mathews states that synergy is any form of intentional interactivity between two or more parties or parts that come together in such a way that something new and greater than any of the parts is created, yet true to the inner principle of each. Each part spontaneously adapts to this collaboration or expands its intentions or modes of expression in response to its engagement with the other parts. Synergy is characterized by the very immediate experience of intersubjectivity. The impulse to express oneself creatively in synergistic interactions is shaped at the very moment of their emergence by the corresponding impulse of the other person. In creative collaboration with you, I discover new possibilities for my own self-expression, possibilities that I could never have discovered on my own. These new forms of self-expression that spontaneously arise in me in response to you are more uniquely mine than any of my soliloquy could be; yet they are both mine and yours. The essence of synergy is spontaneity. Your self-expression is transformed by my self-expression before I recognize what is actually mine; there is no time to seek your reflection in the mirror of truth and to understand you as an objectified totality, to calculate my response to you in a mediated way. In synergy, your subjectivity acts immediately on my subjectivity. In the midst of this process, I can no longer experience you as an externalized other, as a mere object in a world of objects. Thanks to this, I cannot fail in my epistemic approach to your inner reality, to the reality of your subjectivity. Accordingly, I now have the basis for a moral perspective in experiential awareness.
"All that is required is reflection: through reflection I realize that your subjectivity, which I have experienced from within (from within) the source of my own subjectivity, is as if it were my other self. You are not the fully bounded, fully consistent, and definite unity that I see before me in the compact form of an external body. Rather, you are, like myself, a dynamic, unbounded, indefinite field of dispersing, dissolving, and disintegrating experience, lit up by flashes of enthusiasm, excitement, and anticipation, and clouded by clouds of doubt, fear, and disappointment. In coming to this realization, I have already slipped under your skin and can see beyond the illusion of your object aspect as the compact and complete unity of the body that you represent. I now realize what it is like to be you. I have stepped into your shoes. I have adopted a moral perspective."
Many activities, including discussion, conversation, prompting, sex, music, and dance, can be performed synergistically (and all of these activities can be—and often are—performed non-synergistically). Take dance, for example: in forms such as tango and contact dance, the subtlest movements of one partner shape the movements of the other in this very immediacy and spontaneous way. Each partner enriches his or her own stylistic possibilities by responding creatively to the style of the other. In theatre training, in so-called “impulsive work,” individuals in groups, in ever-evolving, flowing patterns of movement, constantly adapt their own movements spontaneously to those of the others.
It might seem strange to think of tango and contact dance as a training ground for moral awareness. Freya Mathews suggests that this is because in our Western civilization we have become accustomed to thinking of morality and ethics in terms of laws and constraints, in terms of the restraints of private selfish interest, rather than in the context of a larger and more fluid field of possibilities for mediation, that is, in the context of the field of intersubjectivity. In this view, morality is a state of consciousness rather than a definitive principle or a specific disposition. It is always about acting in the context of a felt awareness of the subjectivity of others. I can have this awareness and still occasionally behave “wrongly” towards others: I will have neither a firm rational principle nor a virtuous nature to ensure that I always behave with respect or compassion, says Mathews. As a tango dancer, I can turn towards or away from the other, I can be attracted to him, or on the contrary, I can be irritated or confused by him. But I will never be indifferent. I will never perceive the other as just an external object – either he will be treated inhumanly, as an immoral person treats others, or he will be treated with principled respect, as a person who acts out of honesty or moral principle behaves. It is therefore not entirely inappropriate to think of this ethical approach as a kind of tango-ethics, an ethics that is carefree and flawed, sometimes contradictory and therefore inconsistent, but never autistic and always fully woven into the field of intransigently present subjectivities.
In my subjectivity, all my potentials, opposing and otherwise, coexist together, constituting a diffuse yet indivisible meaning that unifies and shapes my subjectivity and therefore my conativity (will to act). Thus, when I synergize with another entity, I intuitively infer from their overt movements—the small moments of their self-expression—the larger, always hidden, and never fully explicable meanings that are manifested in these small movements. I then allow my small movements to be influenced by these larger, hidden (implicit) meanings. What unites both parties in their moments of synergy are the larger meanings or patterns that inform their respective conative cores; these larger meanings or patterns momentarily merge into new meanings or patterns that are—always momentarily and partially—explicated in their joint movements.