Retrospective 2024-45

This is a retrospective of week 45, 2024 (2024-11-04–2024-11-10).

I’ve started reading Sarah Kendzior’s books Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America and They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent this week.

I will return to these books next week.

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I’ve also listened to the following podcasts this week:

• Emotions and the Brain with Mark Solms (Host: Leanne Whitney)
• Shame: The Hidden Struggle with Pat DeYoung (Host: Leanne Whitney)
• Nonlocal Consciousness and Religion with Stephan A. Schwartz (Host: Jeffrey Mishlove)
• Understanding Alfred North Whitehead with Matthew David Segall (Host: Jeffrey Mishlove)
• Matthew Segall, PhD Presents: Rudolf Steiner’s “Social Threefolding”

Below are some highlights from the podcasts (my emphasis in italics):

Play

We mammals need to play. It’s a biological urge.

—Mark Solms https://youtu.be/k1KpEPIZopA?t=2385

A viable group is … organized like this [showing a broad-based pyramid with the hands], where there’s something in it for everybody, and you learn to collaborate, cooperate, reciprocate, take account of, “is this working for all of us?” That’s viable play. The most striking failure of play is war.

—Mark Solms https://youtu.be/k1KpEPIZopA?t=2860

Out of…seeking and play, in particular, emerge…the arts.

—Mark Solms https://youtu.be/k1KpEPIZopA?t=2993

Is it possible that we can create a framework where human beings have a better chance of thriving, and maybe at this point, even surviving, depending upon what it is that we do to our environment?

—Leanne Whitney https://youtu.be/k1KpEPIZopA?t=3681

Affect or feeling (felt sense)

I think that that affect, in other words feeling, is the elementary form of consciousness. And it is prerequisite for all the other forms [of consciousness], it is the kind of primordial form of consciousness upon which all the others are contingent.

—Mark Solms https://youtu.be/k1KpEPIZopA?t=4103

Attunement (sensing)

I’ll use these terms very gently … just for the conversation. But the capitalism, the economy, the thing that has to keep moving, does have a predatory nature to it. So there is no time left … which does allow the level of attunement that is…very necessary.

—Leanne Whitney https://youtu.be/TwVYVFKUGsE?t=2262

Power over

I could totally go with you there and expand it to the trees, and the earth, and the being a part of … circles of relationship…, rather than top down, kind of hierarchical power over, relations. I think that a hierarchical power over situation does set itself up much more for shame. When you are left behind in the connection—when the connection doesn’t happen, when the caring for each other, when the being responsible for each other and all the beings on the planet becomes like not something you think about—then huge swaths of what it means to be human on the planet are just forgotten about.

—Pat DeYoung https://youtu.be/TwVYVFKUGsE?t=2467

Kavanah (sincere feeling, direction of the heart)

In Judaism there is a term called kavanah, which is the spirit with which you perform the ritual or the prayer. It’s not enough to just go through the motions.

—Jeffrey Mishlove https://youtu.be/cWaSzto7d1o?t=2373

A worldview founded on well-being

The way to solve the problem is to change the cultural worldview, to change the paradigm, if you will. To recognize … [1] that consciousness is fundamental, and that we are all interconnected and interdependent, that we do not have dominion over the earth, we are part of a big matrix of consciousness, and [2] that we’re going to select which technologies to emphasize, and how to emphasize them, not on the basis of which one is going to be the most profitable, but instead on which one will create the greatest well-being. … I have developed what I call the theorem of well-being, and I think that the only way that human civilization is going to survive is by adopting the theorem of well-being, that is that the highest social priority must be to foster well-being, from the individual, the family, the community, the state, the nation, the planet itself, that it is in finding resonance…with a worldview founded on well-being.

—Stephan A. Schwartz https://youtu.be/cWaSzto7d1o?t=2818

You simply cannot have the kind of neoliberal profit above all worldview that now dominates how most of human societies operate. It’s not going to save us. It’s not about technology, it’s about changing the way we look at the world.

—Stephan A. Schwartz https://youtu.be/cWaSzto7d1o?t=2914

Limits of Logic

Obviously, he [Alfred North Whitehead] was no slouch when it comes to the methods of logical analysis, but he didn’t think that logic could finally get to the bottom of things. He really did believe that aesthetics, and imagination, and poetry, gave us some purchase on the ultimate nature of things, that logic could not penetrate to. Whereas the analytic philosophers would think of poetry, and art, and whatnot, as nice window dressing, and maybe make our lives more enjoyable, none of that’s relevant for understanding the nature of reality. Whitehead disagrees with that. He’s really seeking some integration of the best of what analysis can give us with a deep appreciation for the aesthetic basis of reality, and the poetic basis of mind, you could say. He’s really an integrative thinker.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=390

Deeper Aesthetic Order

And so Whitehead ends up having to accept that there’s an ineradically intuitive dimension even to logic and mathematics. Whereas I think, as I said, Russell was quite troubled by this. He really, really wanted, and in some sense needed reality to be resolvable in logical terms. Whitehead was freed from that search and it only became apparent decades later with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, what the true nature of the paradoxes they were running into were. What Whitehead ends up saying in 1938, decades later after Gödel, is in his book Modes of Thought, which might be the most approachable book he wrote for those who are interested in diving into his thought for the first time, he says that logic is a subset of aesthetics, that logical order is actually an expression of a deeper aesthetic order. This is from one of the premier logicians of the 20th century. That gives us a lot to think about there.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=536

Bring Experiencing Back

Whitehead’s always thinking holistically, and thinking about the way in which we can’t do without these more rationalistic methodologies, including logic and mathematics, but that that needs to be integrated with a more experientially grounded approach to understanding reality.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=845

So he [Whitehead] really wants to do justice to our aesthetic experience and not reduce down to material particles, which is the usual form of reductionism that we hear about, or reduce up to some ultimate whole that would make our individual experience somehow illusory.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=1138

And so Whitehead rethinks this picture and says, we can’t pick and choose what’s in nature and what’s in the mind. He says, everything we perceive is in nature, whether that’s the precise measurements made by the detectors that physicists are building, or it’s the red hue of a beautiful sunset. Our subjective experience is part of nature. So he wants to bring experience back into nature and rearticulate a philosophy of science that would avoid this bifurcation [between primary quantifiable characteristics and secondary qualitative characteristics]. And so like [William] James’s radical empiricism, we have to really be inclusive in our picture of what direct experience reveals to us about the world, and not pick and choose and making these arbitrary distinctions that, “oh, this is real because I can quantify it, and this is not real because it’s the taste of a strawberry”.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=1344

So we have to bring experience back into nature from Whitehead’s point of view.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=1410

What is Life?

Notoriously in biology, very often if you ask a biologist, “what is life? what is the essence of life?” They’ll give you a list of characteristics, like metabolism and reproduction and etc, etc, but, “what is its essence?” “what is its core?” They can’t really tell you because it’s not physical. It’s an activity, it’s a feeling, and it’s something subtler than what can be measured by some kind of instrumentation, something subtler than what would be amenable to counting, basically, arithmetic and geometry, which are the usual methods deployed by physics to understand the natural world. What do we do if we can’t get our way to the essence of life by counting things or measuring things? We need to develop a new form of perception. I think drawing on Goethe, drawing on Steiner and indeed drawing on Whitehead, we need to really recognize that imagination, yeah, it can spiral off into fantasy and become detached from the natural world, but we can also cultivate it as a method of perceiving more deeply into the natural world and perceiving the way that the forms of plants and animals are generated through time and get a sense, not just for nature as it appears to us in an instant as spatially extended, but nature as it grows through a process of metamorphosis. And like Goethe, distill the formative forces that are at work behind the scenes, but they’re also apparent. Again, if we can look at nature through this series of metamorphoses that it goes through, we begin to distill these formative powers and so it takes just as much an artistic sensitivity as a scientific discipline to begin to perceive in this way, but I think it’s possible and I think it’s sort of the next major leap forward in our attempt to scientifically understand the natural world and really get at life in a way that would do it justice in a non-reductionistic way.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=2015

Descendental Philosophy

And so, descendental philosophy would be reversing this vector and going down into our experience and exploring the subtle textures of our bodily feeling, and in understanding the way in which feelings can be transmitted through our own nervous system. And this is right at the edges of our consciousness. We can’t really shine the full light of our consciousness on our visceral experience, but we do have some sense of it. Whitehead would say, in our own visceral experience, we have an analogy for causal transaction in nature writ large so that we can understand causal connection in the natural world as though it were the transmission of feeling. And so we have access to the inner workings of nature because we ourselves as natural beings directly experience that. And he comes up with this term, technical term, prehension, which for him is like a non-conscious feeling. And he thinks these non-conscious feelings are connecting all of the entities in nature. And so that if you were to ask a Whiteheadian, “well, what is nature made of?” Well, it’s made of pulses of emotion. It’s made of feelings being radiated in every direction and organisms evolve as receivers of these feelings and amplifiers of these feelings. And so our own consciousness, our own physiology is a kind of, he would say, a complex amplifier of this network of feelings that’s pulsing through the natural world all around us.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=2387

…this [Goethian] approach to science doesn’t have that same degree of industrial application and technological payoff. And it’s not going to allow us to master and control nature. But as it turns out…in light of the ecological…catastrophe, that’s underway right now. Maybe there are some reasons to second guess whether this technological approach to the mastery of nature really leads us in a direction of greater control, or, actually, just unleashes chaos, because we’re dealing with a system far more complex than what our mechanistic models might lead us to believe. And so one of the reasons people are looking again at this more organic approach to science, and looking again at the ways in which certain aspects of nature can’t be measured, but might be approachable aesthetically, and by the cultivation of our own human sensory experience and our human imagination, we can begin to perceive these connections in nature that are too subtle to measure in a quantitative way. And that…these aesthetic values like Whitehead goes to great lengths in his book Science in the Modern World to talk about the disaster that resulted from not thinking of aesthetic values as being inherent in the natural world, so that we build things without any consideration for the beauty that’s disturbed, and the way in which beauty has an ecological function, right? And so I would hope that…as this materialist’s technologically oriented understanding of the natural world begins to, as it begins to dawn on people, that this might be part of the source of a lot of our ecological troubles, that we’ll look again at these alternative approaches before it’s too late. But it’s a whole shift in the values of our civilization. It’s more than just a new approach to science. It goes much, much deeper than that,…having to do with how our economy is structured and what we might mean by progress. Like, “is progress just growing the GDP, or is it enriching human life and human flourishing at a qualitative level?” So it’s a big change, and it might take a century before we can notice any real progress there.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/eq4bTUApNl0?t=3075

Social Threefolding

And so when we try to apply three-folding in our own time, and in … different circumstances, we should be aware of the fact that this isn’t a blueprint, or a mold, that we can just stamp to our situation. We really have to find a way to connect with the living impulses in the ideas that all lay out , and then see how they might apply to our place and time.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/CW5lJ1qVwnk?t=315

So ultimately,…for threefolding to work…we’re going to need to have…free human individuals who have developed this moral imagination where we act out of free creative impulses, not because someone told us that’s how we’re supposed to behave, not because we’re obeying some authority,…but a society organized around the free initiative…of human beings.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/CW5lJ1qVwnk?t=717

Waldorf Education

Education should encourage the child to discover their gifts instead of having a standardized curriculum imposed on high. The Waldorf approach is to begin in kindergarten and to try to recapitulate human history in a developmental sense, so that the child relives the various phases of human evolution through their childhood.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/CW5lJ1qVwnk?t=3264

There’s no plan from on high that’s going to solve our problems. It really is about…a kind of spiritual awakening that would be required for three-folding to unfold. Our economic religion of capitalism, I think I have to call it, nowadays really emphasizes human vices and treats human beings as though we’re reducible to our greed and selfishness, right? and anything besides that, love, compassion, etc, we don’t expect that of people, right? The models that economists use rationality in the economic models is, “how can I exploit others to get the most out of this exchange?” And Steiner would say that’s not a good reflection of human nature. We’re actually more than that, we want others to succeed. We want to, we have a sense of sympathy, naturally, for other human beings, and empathy. … Our economic system is actually squashing our virtues, and leading us through a self-fulfilling prophecy to become more greedy, and selfish, and lonely, and competitive. And so there’s a kind of spiritual awakening that needs to occur to remind us who we are. And the good news is human cultural life will always be vibrant and transformative. And you never know, look at human history, you never know when a new spark is going to light something off. … Steiner is really saying, “don’t look to the politicians, don’t look to the capitalist corporations, we’re going to have to turn to ourselves and our communities, our friendships, the bonds that we form through free association, to turn the ship around”. … So start where you are.

—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/CW5lJ1qVwnk?t=3651