The Panpsychist Critique

ES3409. Week 5

The main exponent of a revitalised panpsychist current in ecological thinking is Freya Mathews

“[t]o characterize a metaphysic in which mentality in some sense is restored to materiality, I resort, in these pages, to the old but little-used term panpsychism. This term is often associated with the view that every material object is also a subject, a centre of subjectivity. But I do not restrict the term in this way. I characterize any view that reunites mentality with materiality, and thereby dismantles the foundational dualism of Western thought, as panpsychist, inasmuch as it attributes a psychical dimension to all physicality.” (Mathews, 2003, p.4)

The language of panpsychism is rarely used even in those traditions which anticipate it

Mathews argues that “space and time and the existence of a universe at all can only be explained if subjectivity is taken as fundamental to the nature of reality.” (Mathews, 2003, p.7)

Dualistic theories may be contrasted with materialist theory, but “materialism and idealism are in fact just flip sides of dualism itself, since materiality is dualistically conceived from the perspective of materialism and ideality is dualistically conceived from the perspective of idealism.” (Ibid., pp.26-7)

As Mathews states, “[t]he true converse of mind-matter dualism is neither [mechanical] materialism nor idealism but a position that posits some form of nonduality or mind-matter unity, implicating mentality in the definition of matter and materiality in the definition of mind. Yet there is not even a well-established name, in the history of philosophy, for such a view.” (Mathews, 2003, p.27)

“Materialism and idealism are equally retrograde from an environmental point of view: the materialist regards the world as an inert lump of putty for his own designs; for the idealist it is an inconsequential mirage of appearances, knowable and hence for practical purposes nonexistent in its own right. (Mathews, 2003, p.27)

Pansychism and Romanticism

In one of Mathews’ few forays into politics she seeks to distinguish her ecological panpsychism from what she takes to be the politically reactionary legacy of Romanticism. For Mathews, “[t]he reasons for such a legacy are complex, but… is largely attributable to the fact that Romanticism was literally a reaction to Enlightenment thought.” (Ibid., p.173)

Mathews’ charge is that in political terms, Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers were essentially locked in a battle of reversal, each privileging alternate sides of a dualistic epistemology.

“Appealing exclusively to the heart for understanding, particularly in matters of morality, politics and religion, is treacherous as those on the political left have always known, because the heart is likely to cherish beliefs and prejudice, such as racism, xenophobia and sexism, implanted in people’s minds in early life.” (Mathews, 2003, p.174)

Mathews’ Pansychism Mathews’ starting point is experiential, phenomenologically

grounded in the “palpable sense of the world from within, a sense that everything that exists in the realm of extension… partakes of some kind of presence to itself that is intrinsic to matter per se.” (Mathews, 2003, p.31)

There may be a distinction to be made between subjectivity and consciousness. Whether this is a legitimate or merely a semantic distinction is a difficult question. For Mathews, subjectivity may be regarded as subtending thoughts, feelings and sensations.

In this case, subjectivity would constitute that deeper level of self-presence out of which thoughts and feelings arise. It is arguable, contra Descartes, that we are alive to our own corporeality even when we are not thinking at all: our flesh is present to itself whether we are conscious or unconscious, awake or asleep…[t]hat is to say, our bodies go on existing for themselves even when they are not being registered by our conscious minds.” (Mathews, 2003, pp.31-2)

Mathews’ Pansychism [A]ll matter can be imagined as occupying space from

within in this way. Extension is thus imagined as having an inner as well as an outer, visible and otherwise sensible dimension. And just as it is our subjectivity, the innerness or presence-to-itself of our own body, that assures us that we are really here, that we really do occupy the space that our body appears to occupy, so we could say, it is this innerness, this presence-to-itself of matter generally that renders the world at large real as opposed to mere externalised husk or insubstantial phantom. (Ibid., p.32)

Problem of proprioception

Mathews’ Pansychism Consciousness as an instance of material self-registration

may be universal in the sense that it is an experienced fact within a single and unbroken material plenum, and thus a phenomenon of the plenum as a whole, and inseparably interrelated with all other material events occurring across the plenum, but its presence nevertheless persists as a perturbation of that plenum only under certain very distinct and localised conditions within the universe – those associated with brains

For Mathews, by contrast with consciousness, “subjectivity,” in an extended or analogical sense, is the illusive property that distinguishes a thing itself from its mere appearance: it is the fact that matter is present-to-itself, that it occupies space from within as well as from without, which ensures that bodies are really there. (Mathews, 2003, p.32)

Causality in panpsychism Mathews (2003, p.35) argues, such accounts of causal

power or force are mere reifications of empirical data unless supported by an idea of agency which derives from our subjective experience of intentionality, of willing and causing. We understand one thing causing another because we have experienced our agency and ascribe to objects a similar though less conscious or unconscious potential to affect other objects. It is not difficult to read such arguments as Mathews does, as lending some weight to the panpsychist case that what distinguishes cause from succession and repetition is some quality in matter analogous to our own subjectivity, a sense of its presence-to-itself.

Panpsychism and Cartesianism

Mathews (2003, p.35) argues, such accounts of causal power or force are mere reifications of empirical data unless supported by an idea of agency which derives from our subjective experience of intentionality, of willing and causing. We understand one thing causing another because we have experienced our agency and ascribe to objects a similar though less conscious or unconscious potential to affect other objects. It is not difficult to read such arguments as Mathews does, as lending some weight to the panpsychist case that what distinguishes cause from succession and repetition is some quality in matter analogous to our own subjectivity, a sense of its presence-to-itself.

Causality in panpsychism The Cartesian proof of real matter outside the mind relies

on the assumption that what reflexive subjectivity identifies for itself is the activity of a discrete atopic mind. Mathews’ panpsychist argument (2003, p.37) is that Descartes simply does not allow for the possibility that what is ‘registered’ in self-reflection might be merely a point of activity within a wider field of subjectivity.

“[S]uppose an alternative metaphysical presupposition is adopted – suppose that we do regard ostensibly individual minds as points of reflexivity in a wider field of “mind,” a field which is manifest to us, externally, so to speak, as the manifold of physical reality, physical reality is thus seen as a continuum that is possessed of a mental as well as a physical dimension.” (Mathews, 2003, p. 38)

Causality in panpsychism The Cartesian proof of real matter outside the mind relies

on the assumption that what reflexive subjectivity identifies for itself is the activity of a discrete atopic mind. Mathews’ panpsychist argument (2003, p.37) is that Descartes simply does not allow for the possibility that what is ‘registered’ in self-reflection might be merely a point of activity within a wider field of subjectivity.

“[S]uppose an alternative metaphysical presupposition is adopted – suppose that we do regard ostensibly individual minds as points of reflexivity in a wider field of “mind,” a field which is manifest to us, externally, so to speak, as the manifold of physical reality, physical reality is thus seen as a continuum that is possessed of a mental as well as a physical dimension.” (Mathews, 2003, p. 38)

Causality in panpsychism “In this case there would be no discrete individuals in the

world, and no categorically or metaphysically distinct substances, so mind-body dualism would dissolve, and with it the “problem of knowledge,” in the sense of how the problem of mind, once severed from the world, can reestablish contact with that world… All parts of the continuum may be considered as sharing in an underlying subjectival condition, and every part already participates in all other parts, since subjectivity, like space, is intrinsically indivisible.” (Ibid., p.38)

The limits of Mathews’ panpsychism, like Dietzgenite ‘cosmic socialism’ before it are plainly marked by the political consequences of socially enacting the ethics that flow from it, and again the uncomfortable assertion that the truth of its claims are proved by their rejection within the pathological individualist order engendered by the capitalist mode.