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Title: For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics)
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Manufacturer: State University of New York Press
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| For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics) by State University of New York Press Is dedifferentiating subjective and objective the way? | Freya Mathews has provided us with a book that is beautifully expressed and thoroughly scholarly. It contains so many eloquent and lyrical passages that one is tempted to consider it in its corpus a poem rather than a philosophical tract. Nevertheless her depth of research and philosophical understanding would be enough to satisfy any philosopher. I particularly like her almost off-the-cuff remark about the need not to express one's spirituality on p. 186, note 6, so appropriate in this age of degradation of the spiritual.
I would take exception, however, to her way of approaching the subjective-objective division which she rightly confronts as the big elephant-in-the-room that has been obstructing philosophy since Descartes. Her approach is to overcome the division by extending its one side, the subjective pole, to everything that is considered to be objective, to the universe as a whole. In her "panpsychism," matter itself becomes subjective; and it "calls on us" to recognize it as such. Thus the subjective-objective split is overcome.
But is this not a regression simply to the mythological thinking that we have been at such pains to move out of? And in doing so, indeed, have produced the subjective-objective division? In this earlier mythological world outlook, "
"objective" is not yet being distinguished from "subjective," a fact that accounts for such characteristics of this thinking as word magic and superstition. It took many centuries to evolve from the mythic mentality, centuries that slowly led to the establishment of "reason" in the face of what could be illogical, and was often - - and still is - - enshrined in religious and philosophical belief systems that are crushing to the human spirit. This development has been slow: Plato had to combat Homer, the enlightenment had to combat the authority of the church, and today, still, science has to combat the myth of creationism. Mathews is much too sophisticated not to recognize the value of this march to reason; but it seems to me that trying to return to this previous mentality is fraught with the danger of returning again to the unreasonable.
I think a better path is to not to abolish the subjective-objective division through its dedifferentiation - - through undoing what we have through the centuries accomplished - - but to preserve it in recognition of its importance to stepping into rationality. We should attempt, instead, to go beyond it. The path to this kind of solution is pointed to in Kant's Copernican revolution where we change our focus from "being" to "knowing." The subjective-objective division becomes then a template (form, category) that we use for organizing our experience; alongside such other templates as space, time, and number, it becomes simply a principle of ordering. This path is best represented in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms of the neo-Kantian, Ernst Cassirer, where he examined the way in which all these templates were developed in the course of cultural history.
| | For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics) by State University of New York Press excellent | | This is a tightly argued, beautifully written work. I read it a month ago and have kept chewing it over and refering back to it ever since. A fascinating progression from Mathews' earlier book, The Ecological Self. I particularly like her use of the Eros and Psyche myth. | | For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics) by State University of New York Press Product Description | | In For Love of Matter Freya Mathews challenges basic assumptions of Western science, modern philosophy, and environmental philosophy, arguing that the environmental crisis is a symptom of a larger, metaphysical crisis. Western science rests on the premise that the world is an inert backdrop to human presence rather than a communicative presence in its own right, one capable of dialogical congress with us. Mathews explores the transformative effects of a substitution of the latter, panpsychist premise for the former, materialist one. She suggests that to exist in a dialogical modality is to enter an expanded realm of eros in which the self and world are mutually kindled into a larger, more incandescent state of realization. She argues that any adequate philosophical response to the so-called "environmental crisis" cannot be encompassed within the minor discipline of environmental philosophy but must instead address the full range of existential questions. |
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