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Hail and welcome.
Back in January of this year I released an episode, “Pema Chödrön and the Sublation of Mental Illness,” and mentioned that it marked a significant but nevertheless largely invisible shift of the trajectory of the show: instead of just collating the ideas of others, as I had mostly been doing since 2018 when I started this whole thing, I would start using episodes to develop and present my own theories. The reaction I got from that and the next eleven episodes, up through the last episode on Judas, was very positive. This episode is going to mark a similar shift: rather than using each episode to develop a different idea, I am now going to be directing this project towards the development and presentation of a single philosophical and sociological theory: ecumenical phenomenology. What that is and where the idea came from in the first place are matters I’ll discuss presently, but first I want to offer the same caveat I offered last time: the fundamental nature and focus of this show remain the same and you might not even have noticed the shift if I hadn’t said anything. It remains important to me that I make each episode self-contained: interesting, entertaining, and informative in itself, but I am going to ask that you bear with me to some degree on the central matter of ecumenical phenomenology, because it’s going to take a while to lay the groundwork that will allow me to talk about the theory and its implications. But I think it’s going to be well worth it.
One of the most common requests I get is to talk more about the specifics of my theology. There are some things that I’ve hinted at in the past, such as the relationship between Satan the Accuser and the first light of creation and my experience of Satan as an abstract reality, about which my listeners have requested more details, and I haven’t been able to provide them because, although the total picture was apparent to me, the details remained vague and I haven’t had the language in which to cast them. Once the groundwork is laid and the theory is explained—and I’m not sure how many episodes that will take—I will be able to talk about my theology more clearly and more specifically than I have heretofore been able. I think those episodes will be enormously satisfying to those of you who want more content like “William James and Satanic Pantheism” and “Theologia ex Luce et Tenebra.” I’ll be bringing in content like that at every opportunity along the way—there will be some in this episode as well—but I hope you’ll bear with me through some especially dense and theoretical episodes to get to the really good stuff.
The chain of thought that led me to ecumenical phenomenology started late last year. I mentioned at the time that I was collaborating with Damon and Charlie of the excellent podcast Absences. Purely as a result of the general circumstances of peoples lives, we haven’t gotten out any collaborative episodes yet, though are still hoping to. But that’s not to say that the collaboration hasn’t been enormously fruitful so far. I’ve been conversing regularly with Damon in particular and he’s exposed me to stuff I never would have come across otherwise. But our initial conversations centered around an idea that both of us had stumbled upon independently: civilizational thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics is the scientific study of a group of interrelated physical phenomena: heat, work, temperature, and energy. Energy is dispersed around the universe in such a way that it can do work by being transferred from one thing to another, work in this scientific case being just the name for that specific transference. But the transference is never perfectly efficient. Some energy is always lost to the general environment. As a consequence of this, over time, the distribution of energy throughout the universe becomes more homogeneous. It can’t be transferred as much because there’s fewer places it can be transferred to, and so it’s less available to do work. Damon and I had some similar ideas about how this applied to the life cycle of civilizations, and in the course of working to develop those ideas, I hit upon an idea—the ecumenicon—which I have since developed into the broader theory of ecumenical phenomenology.
I think the connection between civilizational thermodynamics and ecumenical phenomenology is plenty interesting on its own, but as I discovered, it would take a full episode just to get through that and would present a whole host of ideas without actually exploring any of them, ending with a brief description of ecumenical phenomenology without enough time to explain it in sufficient detail and no room to actually start applying it. So, such an episode might get everything out on the table in the most efficient way, but it wouldn’t serve as a very good episode in itself and probably wouldn’t lead to my audience really understanding what it is that I’m getting at.
How then to best present the theory to my audience?
The reality is that I can barely even take credit for ecumenical phenomenology as being my theory in particular. Really, all that I’ve done is taken three existing theories and made a small tweak to one of them that allows that theory to “translate” between the other two, so that the third theory uses the second theory to provide answers to questions posed by the first theory. My approach, then, will be to focus on each of those theories on their own in turn, and then tie them together. The first theory is the theory of abstract objects established largely by Plato, and in fact an idealist take on that theory which places abstract reality foremost in human experience; the third theory is the philosophical school of phenomenology as established by Edmund Husserl, and more specifically his concept of the life-world; and the second theory, which translates between the two, is the connectionist theory of mind.
Let’s get into it, and I think the best place to start is with the particular thinker who got me started on both philosophy and the study of religion: William James.
The American philosopher William James, brother of novelist Henry James, was born in 1842, and spent most of his life in the then-emerging discipline of psychology. Towards the turn of the century, he developed an interest in religion. At the time, science had developed to a point at which more and more people were starting to ask questions about the ontology of religious objects in terms of their objective reality. Given what we knew about the world in the year 1900, in other words, could we honestly make unprovable and unscientific claims like “God exists” and still be able to call ourselves rational and sane? Hadn’t we moved past all of that as a species? Couldn’t we now call ourselves a more rational and enlightened species, a species of people who don’t take things on faith or tradition but who rather ask scientific questions and come to scientific and objectively true conclusions?
William James, being a psychologist, thought that that was a completely wrongheaded way to look at religion. Over the years, perhaps just out of a psychological interest in the general workings of the human mind, James had accumulated a large number of letters, documents, and so forth, describing peculiar experiences that people had had, experiences which defied the ordinary scientific explanations for psychological experiences and which had a certain number of features in common, among them an association with religion and religious symbols. He spent some time analyzing these experiences and presented his findings in a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. These lectures were transcribed and compiled into one of James’ most famous books: The Varieties of Religious Experience.
James’ basic idea was that, regardless of the ontology of religious objects—for example, whether or not God actually exists—the experiences themselves are real in terms of their being experiences, and that to really understand religion, we shouldn’t be skipping past the experiences and asking whether or not the objects of those experiences are real, but rather looking at the experiences themselves.
As I’ve mentioned before on this show, when I first read The Varieties of Religious Experience in 2009, I was deeply immersed in the scientific rationalist viewpoint of Sam Harris, who views all religious experience and thought as fundamentally illegitimate and deceptive. And as much as I’ve come to loathe Harris, I think it’s important that his perspective be taken into account, especially in an age where religious claims are being used absent rational basis to justify oppression and atrocity. When evangelical Christians make ethical or metaphysical claims based on their particular interpretation of the Bible, it’s important to remember that those claims are flatly false and that their interpretation is unreasonable, disingenuous, and impermissible in a rational, civilized society. But we can’t say that and then go back to the religious experiences themselves and invalidate them in terms of their being experiences. We can and should question any secondary claims we make as a result of our experiences, but if I take a few grams of mushrooms and hallucinate a giant snake consuming the world, I can at least say that I had that experience, and that experience may be highly meaningful to me despite it being hallucinatory and even despite my knowing that the experience was hallucinatory. William James says, forget about the ontology, forget about whether there actually is a snake consuming the world, let’s just look at the experience and try to understand what those sorts of experiences say about human experience in general. And what’s really interesting about James’ perspective here is how he relates these religious experiences to our broader way of experiencing the world.
This philosophical perspective of looking at experience itself is known as phenomenology, and remember that the name I’ve given to my particular theory of everything is ecumenical phenomenology, so you’re going to find that the perspective of looking at experience itself is critical to the understanding of the broader theory. But at this stage, there’s really only one thing you need to know about ecumenical phenomenology, and that’s something stated by James himself in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims… in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.
p. 56
I’ll be going more into detail about the nature of this abstract reality in future episodes, but consider at the moment the example of my fountain pen, which is, at the time of my writing this, next to my computer on my desk. When I look at the fountain pen, I don’t see some arbitrary arrangement of matter but rather something which I can describe as being “a fountain pen.” I could tell you that there’s a tube of green resin on my desk into which a metal spade has been inserted, and that this tube is filled with a teal liquid and that when I press the spade to paper the liquid flows through the tube and out onto the paper, and while all of that is indeed the physical essence of the fountain pen, it’s far easier and more meaningful for me to tell you that I have a fountain pen on my desk. In fact, if I tell you that I have a fountain pen on my desk, you may get many of its details wrong. You may think that the resin is red rather than green, or that the liquid inside is black rather than teal. But those physical details, however real they are, are ancillary to the abstract reality that this object is, for both of us, a fountain pen. Neither of us can go out into the world and find the archetype of a fountain pen, the physically real thing to which we can compare the thing on my desk to verify that it is a fountain pen, but we don’t need to and in fact don’t really care to, because we understand that the idea of a fountain pen is something abstract, something that doesn’t exist in physical time and space, even though the object is more real to both of us as a fountain pen, as a physical manifestation of this abstract reality, than it is as a resin tube filled with liquid. Even more to the point, even in terms of the abstract idea of a fountain pen, what we’re looking for is no definitive archetype but rather a family resemblance, as Wittgenstein would put it.
To understand ecumenical phenomenology, begin with the understanding of the ecumenicon as a label for this “higher universe of abstract ideas.” Now consider this: what if I were to present to you an ontology which demonstrates this universe of abstract ideas as being objectively real? What if that ontology provided not only a demonstration of the reality of this abstract universe but a formal description of its processes and dynamics? What if I were to use that ontology to build a revolutionary Satanic theology whose full scope my prior ideas had only hinted at?
I hope that now you’re starting to see where I’m coming from on this. As I mentioned at the top of the show, the full explication of ecumenical phenomenology is going to take many episodes, but if you’re with me so far, I think you’ll understand why it’s going to be worth it. From this point forward, I’m going to start referring to the ecumenicon and things being ecumenical and so forth; I get that these are terms that I haven’t fully explained yet and I ask that you take sort of leap of faith into the language I’m using. These terms are going to be showing up in my work for a while and I can provide the best explanation of them by providing examples of their use. I’m not asking that you accept the ideas on faith, only that you bear with me on the language, knowing that I’ll be laying out the details over the course of this and future episodes.
Now, let’s continue through an exploration of this abstract universe. A tour of the ecumenicon, if you will.
The central question addressed by ecumenical phenomenology is the matter of Platonism, which, confusingly enough, is not the name for the philosophy of Plato and it’s actually questionable whether Plato could be described as a Platonist in these terms. The thesis of Platonism, however—that abstract objects exist, that James’ “higher universe of abstract ideas” is in some sense real—is derived from one of the central ideas explored by Plato, that of Forms. And to get into that, first let’s talk about what abstract objects are.
Things get thorny right off the bat. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on abstract objects, “The abstract/concrete distinction has a curious status in contemporary philosophy. It is widely agreed that the ontological distinction is of fundamental importance, but as yet, there is no standard account of how it should be drawn” (Falguera et al., 2021). I believe that the ecumenicon provides such an account. But it is possible, prior to our introducing that theory, to identify certain clear-cut cases. My fountain pen is a concrete object: it’s a real thing that I can hold in my hands. Now, my idea of what a fountain pen is in the first place is another matter, but the object itself is clearly an example of a concrete object because of its physical reality. On the other hand, we have Frodo Baggins, the hobbit protagonist of The Lord of the Rings books and movies, who does not really exist. We also have the number three, and while you would have no problem showing me three of something, or a symbolic representation of three (“3” or the word “three”), you could never just show me three itself. Despite this fact, we have absolutely no problem saying that three is a prime number even though you can’t show me primeness itself any more than you can show me three itself. Even more oddly, while Frodo Baggins doesn’t exist, and hobbits don’t exist, we have absolutely no problem saying that Frodo Baggins is a hobbit.
Frodo Baggins and the number three are potential examples of abstract objects, and a central question of philosophy—one with major implications for every philosophical question I can think of—is whether abstract objects really exist, and if they do, what is the nature of their existence, how can we come to know about them (if we can at all), and what are the implications of that knowledge or lack thereof? My answers are as follows: yes abstract objects exist; they are structural features of the ecumenicon; we can know them and do come to know them through communicative rationality and in fact they are constituted by our knowledge of them; and there are no questions for which this claim does not have substantial implications because the ecumenicon is both the scaffold of what a question is in the first place and the scaffold of everything that can be questioned.
So let’s have a look at Plato, and to introduce Plato here I want to refer to something written by the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in his book Intelligence and Spirit by way of describing Plato’s project. Negarestani says that Plato wrote dialogues, “in which he adamantly refuses to say anything on his own behalf” (Negarestani, 2018), because philosophy belongs to no one. I agree with Negarestani and think that Plato wanted to, as much as possible, withdraw from being the voice of rationality, the person explaining to everyone else why he’s correct about something, in order to demonstrate that whatever he may be right about has nothing to do with him personally. After all, Socrates mainly just asked questions, always seeking consensus. That’s something public, something shared, and Plato wanted to portray that process. What is most important in Plato is not his particular conclusions but rather his depiction of philosophy itself as a public process.
The best dialogue to start with in our own investigations would be the Phaedo, which takes place on the occasion of Socrates’ execution. The dialogue takes place within a frame story in which the Pythagorean philosopher Echecrates of Phlius asks Phaedo of Elis, a philosopher whom Socrates had freed from slavery, to tell him the story of the death of Socrates in 399 BCE, after Socrates’ conviction by the Athenian government for the crimes of impiety and corrupting the youth.
Since Socrates knows he’s about to die, the subject of the Phaedo is death, which Socrates says is in fact the subject of all philosophy. Is there an afterlife? If so, what is its nature? Its ontology? And our ontology in terms of whatever part of us might continue to exist in that realm? And what does that say about how we should live and how we should go to our inevitable deaths?
Socrates asks whether there is such a thing as the Just itself: whether the abstract object of Justice exists and whether the world can be thereby described, in the same way that we might say that the color Red exists apart from any particular thing that is red. Everyone agrees that such a thing as Justice does exist, and I do as well. Justice is a structural feature of the ecumenicon, and is a real thing. Plato recognized that Justice is real but didn’t know its structure, just like humans a few thousand years ago would have been able to see the stars but didn’t know what they were. Socrates offers that he had spent his life trying to understand the nature of abstract objects, denying his body in the process because such things can be percieved through thought alone. He suggested that, for this reason, his soul was naturally acquainted with what is eternal more than with what is temporal and so would, having departed his body, gravitate towards what is eternal.
That the soul exists at all is assumed by all present, and that’s a matter I’ve discussed before: the Greek word psyche originated as a kind of placeholder name for that which living things have that makes them alive and which non-living things lack, precluding their being alive. In the Phaedo, Socrates and his guests reason together about the nature of the soul. Cebes of Thebes posits that the soul dies with the body. By way of refutation, Socrates points out that everything that comes to be a certain way has in some way come out of its opposite: bigger comes from smaller and smaller from bigger, just comes from unjust and unjust from just. It’s honestly a pretty clunky argument but I think I see what Plato was getting at. Socrates describes this as being a literal process but certainly we can see how the concept of justice necessitates the concept of injustice, and how the concept of large necessitates the concept of small, and given that just prior, Socrates was discussing Justice as a real thing, I have to wonder whether this more conceptual explanation is the one he was aiming at. This is an early dialogue after all and Plato was still finding his way. And we can also see how life comes from death: my ancestors are almost all dead, and I eat dead animals and plants in order to live.
Socrates’ conclusion is that the soul is an immortal being which passes from the underworld to the world of the living in a reincarnation cycle, and thus that all learning is really just recollection of what the soul already knows, which, being that the soul is immortal, is its knowledge of the eternal Forms, such as the Form of Justice. The Forms are the abstract objects corresponding to every predicate or property.
Now, what I’m going to suggest here is going to reach well beyond anything Socrates or Plato were suggesting, but I have an ecumenical reading of the Phaedo which ultimately justifies their arguments.
What you’re listening to right now is not really my voice but rather some device imitating my voice based on instructions I provided to the device for that purpose. Nevertheless, we have no problem saying that what you’re listening to right now is me. You might say to someone, “I was listening to Todd’s podcast the other day and he said…” and they’re not going to interrupt you and say, “Ah, wasn’t really him though, was it? It was really just the speaker system in your car!” So necessarily, the intersubjective conceptual understanding of who I am—the ecumenical structure of Todd—extends beyond my physical person. In many ways, that structure is my real being, even as I relate to myself. When I ask myself who I am, the first things that come to mind are not my body or my present location in time and space but rather the stories behind those things, which are ecumenical, part of our intersubjective, abstract reality. And my ecumenical being indeed arises from the dead, in the sense that our intersubjective ecumenical reality has been constructed, in substantial part, by people who are long gone. My relating the ideas of Plato is an example of that. Even before I got into my own reading of Plato, when I was just talking plainly about the contents of the Phaedo, I was presenting it from my perspective, the dead Plato and Socrates coming forth through my own ecumenical being. And this being will survive my physical body, because anyone listening to this podcast after I’ve died will reasonably be able to say that they’re listening to me, and more broadly, my thoughts and ideas contribute to the ecumenicon and will continue to do so in perpetuity, propagating through the ecumenicon in waves, even if their origin in my physical person is completely forgotten. So it seems that something matching Socrates’ criteria for the soul actually does exist, even if this reading extends far beyond what he could have possibly intended.
Following the Greeks’ understanding of the soul as what separates life from unlife, the soul is what of us is most dynamic. No rock nor stream nor quasar is so unpredictable as even a mouse. And no life is so dynamic as a human’s. This gulf makes us ignorant. We see the rock and call it dead, see the stream and call it dead, failing to understand that they too are ensouled, though more slowly, more steadily than we. Streams carve canyons and we call the canyons dead. We few who are most alive suffer from it: “We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash,” Rilke said. We cannot contemplate that what lives in us is just as much alive in the stones, and so we fail to distinguish life from death and so fill the world with death. All the same, we suppose.
What happens when we look at the world and see it not as something alive and ensouled by abstract reality but as something static and dead? This is a question answered by the 20th century existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger in his essay “A Question Concerning Technology” (1977, originally published in 1954). And that’s where we’re going to pick up next time.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
James, W. (1982). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature (M. E. Marty, Ed.). Penguin Books.
Negarestani, R. (2018). Intelligence and spirit. Urbanomic ; Sequence.