#freya mathews

[earthisaperson]

In order to experience [this feeling], we have to walk the land. At a certain time for everybody, the land will take over. The land will take that person. You think you’re following something, but the land is actually pulling you. When the land start pulling you, you’re not even aware you’re walking—you’re off, you’re gone. When you experience this, it’s like a shift in your reality. You start seeing things you never seen before … all of a sudden [the training process you have acquired through your upbringing] doesn’t fit anything. Then something comes out of the land, guides you. It can be a tree, a rock, a face in the sand, or a bird.

—Freya Mathews in The World Hidden Within the World

[geopsych]

It is as if the veil of the ordinary is drawn aside and a mythic world that exists only for our eyes, pristine and untouched, still dripping with the dew of creation, is vouchsafed to us. There is such intimacy in this revelation, such incomparable largesse in the gift, such breath-taking unexpectedness, we cannot help but to surrender to it. Thereafter we will become as infatuated, at some level of function, as a mystic, holding the world as a beloved in our hearts despite the undiminished perils, griefs and trials it presents to us in our everyday transactions.

Freya Mathews, On Desiring Nature. I’ve had these moments.

[perkwunos]

Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism

[perkwunos]

It is worth noting that the fact that we can, from the present metaphysical point of view, be assured of such subject-subject encounters, perhaps allays Cartesian anxiety in a psychological as well as an epistemological fashion. For the problem of knowledge, from its Cartesian formulation to its contemporary currency in the wave of postmodernism and poststructuralism, revolves around the quest for certainty. But why did Descartes, in the early modern period, yearn for certainty? Why does deconstructive postmodernism, with its defiant acquiescence in a terminal lack of certainty, ultimately seem so bleak? Perhaps we moderns yearn for epistemological certainty as a substitute for primordial relationship. To live in relationship with another is not to enjoy certainty, for unpredictability is an essential feature of relationships in which the goal of the parties is not to acquire knowledge but to establish intersubjective contact. However, living in relationship does provide existential groundedness: the recognition of the other is what calls me into selfconsciousness and confirms my ongoing identity as a distinct individual. When the other ceases to exist, I lose my foothold in the world, and start to fall. It is then that I might try to ground myself through certainty, through establishing a firm foundation for my now destabilized sense of self and world. Skeptical positions that simply acquiesce in the impossibility of certainty do nothing to alleviate the anxiety of existential ungroundedness, despite their compensatory inflation of the epistemological subject. Perhaps it is only by reinstating our foundational relationship with world as our primordial co-respondent that this anxiety, and its accompanying obsession with knowledge as an end in itself, can be assuaged.

Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism

[perkwunos]

Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism

[perkwunos]

When the world is understood in panpsychist terms, the whole spectrum of Western thought undergoes a profound shift, a shift away from the direction in which it has been drifting since the time of the scientific revolution, back towards its original starting point, namely metaphysics. By draining matter of any animating principle, science had ensured that the world itself could no longer be regarded either as morally significant in its own right or as the lodestar for human meanings and purposes: henceforth, we would have to find our ends and meanings in ourselves, by means of our innate power of reason. In other words, this scientific story, with its deanimation of nature, rendered the world a mere backdrop to questions concerning the meaning of life and the nature of the good. From the viewpoint of science, the answers to such questions must lie in the existential datum of humanity itself. Western thought had thus become humanistic, self-reflective. Older tendencies to understand human destiny in terms of our place in a greater scheme of things were replaced by recourse to human mentality as the reference point for all our philosophical reflection, where this had the further consequence, for philosophy, of putting the very reality of the already demoted world in doubt. Epistemology in this sense replaced metaphysics as the frame of philosophical thought. …

When world is resurrected however, it becomes a protagonist again in the philosophical drama of human existence. Questions concerning human identity and destiny, the justification for knowledge and the proper ends of life—questions that are foundational to a range of disciplines, including epistemology itself, ethics, psychology, politics, economics, and theology—can no longer be asked independently of questions about the nature and purpose of this questing world.

Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism

[perkwunos]

[Christianity’s] strong points were consolation, compassion, affirmation of the sanctity of self. But it threw little light on the meaning of world. It left world more or less out of the picture, focusing on God, on the one hand, and self, on the other. The hot line it set up between God, who was beyond the world, and soul, which was within the self, completely bypassed the material realm. In this way the manifest world was in effect excluded from the spiritual drama.

…

… I was drawn to the Old Testament, with its exultant language of praise, but the Christianity of my teachers was strangely mute on the meaning of the sunrise, the wind, the creek, the herons, and cranes, the light before the storm—the things that spoke so palpably, if inscrutably, to me. Since such religion had nothing to say about the spiritual significance of these luminous poetics, I gave it up, even before I left school, and upon entering university, I turned to philosophy: if I could not explore the spiritual significance of the manifest world in religion, I thought, maybe I would find some clues in this ancient discipline.

This was in the late 1960s, and philosophy in the English-speaking world happened to be going through a phase which I, with my yearning, found particularly arid. It was all about logic and the structure of language, while metaphysical questions—questions about the nature of reality—had long since been debunked as naive and old-fashioned. After my first year of this (I was by now in London), I was determined to give it up. But I was lucky enough to meet, just at that point, a wonderful teacher. … This tuned-in teacher took me back to the metaphysicians of the early modern period, who were indeed attempting to fathom the ultimate meaning of the world. I became completely enamored of Leibniz and Spinoza in particular, two philosophers who, in their different ways, sought to capture the intuition that everything is woven from the same skein, that everything informs everything else, and hence that “mind” in some sense must be intermingled with “matter.” …

Freya Mathews, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism

[geopsych]

Each time the world arranges itself with poetic intent, each time it manifests in the poetic image of our invocation, it is as if it presents itself to us for the very first time. It is as if the veil of the ordinary is drawn aside and a mythic world that exists only for our eyes, pristine and untouched, still dripping with the dew of creation, is vouchsafed to us. There is such intimacy in this revelation, such incomparable largesse in the gift, such breath-taking unexpectedness, we cannot help but to surrender to it. Thereafter we will become as infatuated, at some level of function, as a mystic, holding the world as a beloved in our hearts despite the undiminished perils, griefs and trials it presents to us in our everyday transactions.

Freya Mathews in her brilliant essay On Desiring Nature.