For Love of Matter
A Communicative-Self-Realizing Metaphysic that could Reorient Us toward Purposeful Regeneration just like Our Mother’s
‘We are the glorious World’s humans…
animated soil rising up
from its Sacred Ground.’
(dyk the word human is derived from the Latin: humus meaning soil…intuitively extended to the concept of humility, as in the Latin word humilis, meaning lowly or humble…implying being grounded and connected to the Earth)
(dyk the word matter comes from the Latin: mater which means mother…intuitively extended to the Latin word materia for referring to a substance something is made from, especially wood)
The book, For Love of Matter, is about an entirely different form of fulfillment, one which finds us not in command of the world, but kneeling tenderly at its feet, awaiting its command, trying to divine its will.
From this point of view, the world is our sovereign, our solace, our beloved, and we are its people <3
Ironically, the book is much less about physical matter and much more about how the mind might think about matter…how our psyche might be as much matter as our matter is psyche. Wow.
The idea of mind being separate from matter is 400 years old and counting. This deanimation of our reality during The Enlightenment is still, exactly, how we experience the World...whether you even know that or not. It’s why, as a culture, we’re spiritually impoverished, plus is responsible for the current ecological-existential crisis we’re in. If we do extinct ourselves it will be because we never pushed back on the known, wholly, wrong claims of plenty of scientists-philosophers, over the course of 300 years.
The author, Freya Mathews, offers a scientific-philosophical exploration of a reanimated world. Not only to counter our crises but to know-embody the truth about our existence. Nice. So no longer will we assume things work in the manner of classical-antiquated physics, like a cosmic piece of hardware fashioned out of inert matter…we’ll, instead, realize and delight in the fact that we’re like eddies-currents within a subjectival-dyanmic meshwork…like jello or plasma…right along side all other creatures…staking out our relative identities within the meshwork. Mathews champions any view that dismantles the foundational dualism of Western thought, preferring to monistically reunite mentality with materiality…attributing psychic dimensions to all physicality the way panpsychism does.
When the World is understood
in Panpsychist terms,
the whole spectrum of
Western thought undergoes
a profound shift away
from the Scientific Revolution
direction…the direction we’ve
been imprisoned in
for 400 years…and are currently victimized by.
In other words, The Enlightenment’s Story of Nature rendered Nature a mere backdrop to any questions concerning the meaning of life and the nature of good. The, exclusively, male scientists of that era assumed such questions must lie in the datum of humanity only. Their assumptions are why Western thought is so humanistic, human-reflective, self-reflective…as they put human mentality, their own assumptions-desires, at the center of their resolve to launch an investigation of the entire Universe. These men operated in a model of knowledge is power...with power key to conquering Nature…conquering its mysteries. This is why epistemology/theoretical knowledge replaced metaphysics/relevancy of knowledge as the de rigueur way of understanding the world. They’re why humans became the protagonist instead of Earth…regarding the philosophical drama of our human existence. Their approach is in high-contrasting relief to the 300,000 year old assumption before it, the approach of literally all ancient cultures across the globe which centered Earth as the most important element of their story…existence…reality. To make the point that the Scientific Revolution is an extremely isolated blip on our deep-time radar screen cannot be overstated. The, so called, Revolution is a bug, not a feature, regarding the real way the world works. And if we don’t correct it…well you already know.
Beyond being the reason why Science and Religion have long lost their hold on the popular imagination…our current society’s dispossession and cynicism is rooted in this period.
Mathews’s knows her invitation to replace the old with a new metaphysical framework must be consistent with modern science evidence and reason to become part off the world’s unfolding. Using both she skillfully and convincingly argues that our space-time Universe can only be explained if subjectivity is taken as fundamental to the nature of reality.
Panpsychism
An Argument from Realism
The Way of the and the Many
Conclusion Ideas
-fairy tale stuff p18