Further to a previous post which touched on the subject, I have been thinking some more about the speculative materialism of Ernst Bloch. Bloch contended that there is a striving, subjective aspect in nature which drives it towards what is 'not yet' and portends the possibility of a future utopia. The influences on Bloch upon which he based these ideas include Aristotle, Avicenna, Giordano Bruno, Schelling and Hegel.
Of course, to the modern mind brought up with a materialistic scientific world view it is hard to make any sense of the notion that material reality has utopian tendencies, or indeed any purposive attributes at all. If what goes on in nature is ultimately determined by the laws of physics, how could there possibly be any room for a utopian drive to play a part in what goes on? Further, how could material reality as a whole have the propensity to strive towards anything in the first place?
In attempting to answer such questions, contemporary panpsychism may be of assistance. Cosmopsychism is the panpsychist view that the cosmos as a whole is a conscious subject. Some contemporary philosophers, such as Philip Goff, contend that cosmopsychism allows for purposive attributes of the cosmos to play a part in how nature has developed. Goff proposes that the fine tuning of physical laws and constants for the possibility of life could be accounted for by the actions of an anticipative cosmic subject. Goff explores this issue further in a very interesting looking forthcoming book titled Why? The Purpose of the Universe.
Contemporary speculations on the purposive attributes of the cosmos, such as those of Goff, may thus provide an avenue for interpreting and making sense of the purposive drive in nature posited by Bloch.
The following is an excerpt from a draft of my Master's thesis, where I explored this potential for interaction between panpsychism and Bloch's materialism:
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) is best known in the English-speaking world for his three volume work The Principle of Hope, which explores utopianism and its expressions in art, religion, literature and popular culture (Bloch 1986). However, underpinning Bloch’s utopian philosophy was a speculative materialist metaphysics which has only recently begun to be translated and explored in depth in English (Bloch 2019, Moir 2019a, Moir 2019b). These works indicate that Bloch’s materialism is very consonant with some forms of contemporary panpsychism.
Moir (2019a, pp. 27-28) describes how Bloch’s materialism was motivated by the same concerns of contemporary philosophers regarding the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ - how mind, experience and qualities can arise from supposedly inert matter possessing only quantitative properties. Bloch’s solution draws on the teleological or purposive properties of matter postulated by Aristotle; the characterisation of matter as having immanent developmental tendencies of Middle Eastern philosophers such as Avicenna (980-1037) and of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600); and on the dialectical method of Hegel. He concludes that all phenomena in the material world are connected by a self-actualising drive which is striving towards a yet to be determined goal (Moir 2019a, p. 66).
The self-actualising tendencies in nature are evinced by its tendencies towards more complex forms, which indicate that there is something within matter that is not yet as it should be, towards which is it developing (Moir 2019b, p. 7). Thus, Bloch (2019, p. 66) argues that ‘the Aristotelian matter-concept and its radicalizing (penetrating to the roots) Avicenna-Bruno metamorphosis are alive in dialectically conceived materialism, an especially noteworthy ferment’. The utopian tendencies which Bloch envisaged in the social realm are thus derived from a self-realising impulse which is contained within material reality itself. Whilst this striving for completion which is manifest in the increasing complexification of matter and the utopian tendencies within society do not provide a guarantee of the historical achievement of utopia, Bloch’s materialism nevertheless provides the basis for a rational hope (Moir 2019a, pp. 75-76).
In arguing that Bloch’s materialism can be profitably interpreted within the framework of contemporary panpsychism, some further clarification about how the word 'consciousness' is used and how the ubiquity of consciousness in panpsychism is characterised is in order. Moir (2019b p. 6) notes that although there is a subjective element in Bloch’s conception of matter, he did not believe matter was ‘alive’ or that ‘life, consciousness and thought are simply contained pre-formed within it’. Rather, the subjective factor in matter is an ‘impersonal "agent," which tends dynamically and energetically towards the actualisation of possibilities within it’ (2019b, p. 6). In this regard, it is important to note that, for panpsychists, consciousness is not equated with the human experience of self-consciousness or existence as a cognitive, self-reflecting personal agent. Consciousness does not necessarily imply self-consciousness for the panpsychist. Further, Human consciousness is a highly developed form of consciousness which is inferred as being vastly different from nonhuman forms of consciousness. Thus, the impersonal subjective factor in matter which Moir refers to can readily be accommodated within a panpsychist framework. The compatibility of Bloch’s materialism with panpsychism is further evinced by Bloch’s appreciation and development of the ideas of Giordano Bruno, one of the foremost philosophers of panpsychism of the Renaissance (Skrbina 2017).
Further refinement of how Bloch's work can be related to contemporary panpsychism can be achieved by aligning it to specific contemporary panpsychist models. For Bloch, material reality is developing in a direction towards something which is other than its current state. This suggests both that nature is unified, in the sense that there are interconnections between its different elements and manifestations, and purposive, in the sense that it has a drive towards certain forms of actualisation. Two contemporary forms of panpsychism which are consistent with these features are the ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ of Mathews (2020) and the ‘agentive cosmopsychism’ of Goff (2019). Both these models assert that the cosmos itself is a unified and agentive entity, although they develop this theme in different ways with different purposes in mind. For Mathews, whose model has broad metaphysical ambitions, the universe is a self-realising system with characteristics of selfhood, conativity, reflexivity and meaningfulness. It also actively seeks communicative engagement with the finite selves which are part of its self-differentiating activities (Mathews 2020, p. 142).
In contrast to this, Goff model aims to be as simple and parsimonious as possible whilst also being consistent with contemporary physics. Thus, Goff goes no further in attributing mental properties to the cosmos than to say it is an agent which can represent the future and act to realise value (Goff 2019, pp. 108-112). This is reasonably consistent with Moir’s depiction of Bloch’s account of material reality as an impersonal agent that tends towards actualisation of its inherent possibilities. Whilst Moir does not explicitly refer to material reality as making representations of the future, such a form of representation is arguably implicit within any notion of striving towards something which has yet to be achieved. Thus, whilst Mathew’s model of the cosmos as seeking communicative engagement with its parts goes beyond the ‘impersonal agent’ of Bloch, Goff’s model is more closely aligned with Moir’s explication of Bloch. This is not to say that Mathews’ and Bloch’s models could be not developed in mutually fruitful ways, but such a development is beyond the scope of this discussion.
In order to understand why Goff attributes purposive mental properties to the cosmos, it is necessary to consider the ‘fine-tuning’ problem of the cosmos. The fine-tuning problem refers to the fact that the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics are improbably conducive to the emergence of life. For instance, if the masses of electrons and quarks or the strength of nuclear and gravitational forces had been slightly different, then chemical complexity and the emergence of stars which are necessary for life would not have happened. Goff (2019, p. 105) refers to the estimate of physicist Lee Smolin that the chance of the initial conditions and laws of the universe being conducive for the eventual emergence of life as being in the order of 1 in 10 to the power of 229.
Various explanations for fine-tuning have been proposed, from the existence of multiple universes to theistic explanations. However, Goff proposes that the most parsimonious and least problematic explanation for fine tuning is that in its initial moments the cosmos ‘chose’ the conditions and laws that would facilitate the later emergence of life. This proposal is based on the assumption that a comic subject exists, which is argued for on separate and independent grounds. Thus, based on the assumption that cosmopsychism is a reasonable explanation for human consciousness and the need to account for the fine-tuning problem, Goff argues that the cosmos acted purposefully to realise the conditions which would allow life, a thing of great value, to emerge.
Goff’s explanation of fine-tuning can be related to Bloch’s materialism in that, for Bloch, matter is driving toward ‘something that is fundamentally not as it should be, or at least not yet as it should be’ (Moir 2019b, p. 7). If material reality is aiming towards something that has not yet been achieved then one would expect that, at a particular point in time, material conditions would show evidence of potentials which might be realised at a later date. That is, under Bloch’s model one would expect there to be physical evidence of latent capacities which come to fruition at a later time. This is precisely what the fine-tuning problem indicates about the initial conditions of the universe. Thus, Goff’s agentive cosmopsychism is not only consistent with Bloch’s materialism but also lends it evidential support.
Although Goff limits the agentive capacities of the cosmos to its first few moments before the laws of physics became fixed, there other panpsychist models which could accommodate continual interventions by the cosmic subject throughout its history. For example, Whitehead’s metaphysics likens the laws of physics as being descriptive rather than prescriptive and as being akin to the ‘habits’ of nature (Griffin 1998, pp. 190-193). The occasional modification or breaking of such habits could provide not only for the capacity for free human actions, but also the potential for the cosmos to actualise its drive towards that which ‘is not yet as it should be’. Thus, there is much potential for mutual influence and development between panpsychism, in its various manifestations, and Bloch’s materialism.
References
Bloch, E 1986, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. N Plaice, S Plaice & P Knight, MIT Press, Cambridge.
Bloch, E 2019, Avicenna and the Aristotelian left, trans. L Goldman & P Thompson, Columbia University Press, New York.
Goff, P 2019, ‘Did the universe design itself?’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 85, pp. 99 –122, doi: 10.1007/s11153-018-9692-z
Griffin, DR 1998, Unsnarling the world knot: consciousness, freedom and the mind-body problem, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Mathews, F 2020, ‘Living cosmos panpsychism’, in W Seager (ed.), The Routledge handbook of panpsychism, Routledge, London, pp. 131-143, doi: 10.4324/9781315717708
Moir, C 2019a, Ernst Bloch’s speculative materialism, Historical materialism book series, e-book, Brill, Leiden.
Moir, C 2019b, ‘In defense of speculative materialism’, Historical Materialism, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 123-155, doi: 10.1163/1569206X-00001609
Skrbina, D 2017, Panpsychism in the west, 2nd edn, The MIT Press, Cambridge
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