Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
Matt Segall ~ process philosopher ~ fascinated by mind, life, matter, and how it all hangs together as a whole ~ assistant professor
In my new book *Crossing the Threshold* (Revelore, forthcoming; cover below is just a concept), I treat Kant as the guardian of the threshold of knowledge of the divine, the cosmos, & the soul--three idea he considered off limits to philosophers because we could have no sensory experience of them, or so he argued. I admit Kant's critiques are never going to be relevant to the vast majority of human beings. But I have found that the psychological mood & self- & world-conception given expression in their pages pervades our disenchanted modern world.
Perhaps you will know what I mean when I say there is something like a philosophical unconscious underlying contemporary culture and commonsense attitudes. Metaphysics is the attempt to surface what everyone already knows so intimately that we barely bother to notice it at all.
Kant is something like "our" (a gross generalization roughly equivalent to anyone who identifies as intellectually 'modern') collective super ego. In my book I point to what I felt he had either repressed or willfully ignored, which in the simplest but also the most crucial sense could be described as Love. I am attempting to re-enliven philosophy by bringing it to its senses, by reminding it how to love wisdom again. The ultimate aim is to re-plant humanity on earth under sky, redirecting our attention from abstractions toward the planetary emergency.
I am very happy to accept that characterization. Though mine would be a relational, organic, participatory realism.
I affirm narrative but try to ground it liturgically in ritual enactment (particularly in the epilogue), as otherwise I do worry story remains merely abstract and unable to touch, much less transform our lives. Our most important symbols must also be made realities.
Steiner is best understood as a fruition of the German idealist impulse. He certainly needs some rehab, polishing, & translation but the more I take in his various lectures on the future course of evolution the more stunned I am by his prescience.
And also I must admit I am still often totally bewildered by some of his theoretical intuitions & historical accounts. It's just that he's so often brilliantly insightful that I'm inclined to keep an open mind about what I cannot make sense of.
That's true. I insist on taking him seriously as a philosopher! He's a stunning example of what a truly philosophical life can look like in the 20th & perhaps still in the 21st century.
How can the past remain immanent in the present without making it identical to itself? Only by way of eternity. Eternal objects mediate the moments of time, preserving the past & projecting the future in the now.
Right, the question is something like how to integrate efficient & final causation (i.e., conformation with past & openness to future). Argument is not for "actual" objects, but "potential" objects (what Whitehead calls "eternal objects") held in reserve.
Whitehead claims he has conceived of a mode of mereotopological extension that is pre-space & pre-metrical-time & thus properly metaphysical. He’d agree that within our cosmic epoch space, time, & color limit our perception
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