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Panpsychism in the West
In Panpsychism in the West, the first comprehensive study of the subject, David Skrbina argues for the importance of panpsychism -- the theory that mind exists, in some form, in all living and nonliving things -- in consideration of the nature of consciousness and mind. Panpsychism, with its conception of mind as a general phenomenon of nature, uniquely links being and mind. More than a theory of mind, it is a meta-theory -- a statement about theories of mind rather than a theory in itself. Panpsychism can parallel almost every current theory of mind; it simply holds that, no matter how one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. After a brief discussion of general issues surrounding philosophy of mind, Skrbina examines the panpsychist views of philosophers from the pre-Socratics to the post-structuralists.
The original edition of Panpsychism in the West helped to reinvigorate a neglected and important aspect of philosophic thinking. This revised edition offers expanded and updated material that reflects the growth of panpsychism as a subdiscipline. It covers the problem of emergence of mind from a non-mental reality and the combination problem in greater detail. It offers expanded coverage of the pre-Socratics and Plato; a new section on Augustine; expanded discussions of Continental panpsychism, scientific arguments, Nietzsche, and Whitehead; and a new section on Russellian monism. With this edition, Panpsychism in the West will be continue to be the standard work on the topic.
The original edition of Panpsychism in the West helped to reinvigorate a neglected and important aspect of philosophic thinking. This revised edition offers expanded and updated material that reflects the growth of panpsychism as a subdiscipline. It covers the problem of emergence of mind from a non-mental reality and the combination problem in greater detail. It offers expanded coverage of the pre-Socratics and Plato; a new section on Augustine; expanded discussions of Continental panpsychism, scientific arguments, Nietzsche, and Whitehead; and a new section on Russellian monism. With this edition, Panpsychism in the West will be continue to be the standard work on the topic.
384 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2005
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598 people want to read
About the author
David Skrbina
15 books28 followersPioneer of ecophilosophy. He also stood for the office of Lieutenant Governor for the U.S. state of Michigan as the Green Party candidate in 2006, as the running mate of Douglas Campbell.
He has developed an ecologically-centered worldview encompassing ethics, metaphysics, and cosmology. He is Deputy Director of the Eco-Philosophy Center.
He has been active in the University of Michigan calling for divestment from Israel. He also corresponded with Theodore J. Kaczynski and wrote an afterword for his book "The road to revolution"
He has developed an ecologically-centered worldview encompassing ethics, metaphysics, and cosmology. He is Deputy Director of the Eco-Philosophy Center.
He has been active in the University of Michigan calling for divestment from Israel. He also corresponded with Theodore J. Kaczynski and wrote an afterword for his book "The road to revolution"
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 16, 2021
A very fascinating and well-written book that covers the history of panpsychism in Western philosophy, starting with the early pre-Socratics and ending with an overview of modern arguments for and against the view. The greatest insight to be gained from this volume is simply the great extent and historical popularity of panpsychism in the West.
Skrbina argues very convincingly that panpsychism has actually been the prevalent metaphysical view for most of Western history, and backs this argument up with a remarkably large variety of direct citations from a great number of prominent Western philosophers favourable to the view, including (but certainly not limited to): all the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Campanella, Bruno, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, James, Whitehead, Bateson, and on and on...
A very valuable read to anyone who has the idea that panpsychism is a new and/or theoretically unsupported view.
Skrbina argues very convincingly that panpsychism has actually been the prevalent metaphysical view for most of Western history, and backs this argument up with a remarkably large variety of direct citations from a great number of prominent Western philosophers favourable to the view, including (but certainly not limited to): all the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Campanella, Bruno, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, James, Whitehead, Bateson, and on and on...
A very valuable read to anyone who has the idea that panpsychism is a new and/or theoretically unsupported view.
May 31, 2016
I selected and read this book out of an interest in philosophy and the emergence of consciousness, only becoming aware of the authors eco credentials after I'd finished it. In fact he keeps his personal views on that matter, for the most part, at some considerable distance from the main body of the work, and he seems more concerned with presenting a thorough factual account of the history of this particular subject, rather than promoting any agenda.
The writing style is excellent and he provides just the right amount of stimulation to keep the flow going, whilst communicating at a level that is neither too academic nor too pop orientated. I'd say for the most part it's at a level that would cater for philosophy students and those who've read some philosophy before out of interest. I'm very surprised it isn't more popular than it is, particularly when contemporary neuroscience literature is making such a hash of trying to explain consciousness via the materialist belief system.
The writing style is excellent and he provides just the right amount of stimulation to keep the flow going, whilst communicating at a level that is neither too academic nor too pop orientated. I'd say for the most part it's at a level that would cater for philosophy students and those who've read some philosophy before out of interest. I'm very surprised it isn't more popular than it is, particularly when contemporary neuroscience literature is making such a hash of trying to explain consciousness via the materialist belief system.
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June 7, 2009I find Cartesian Dualism to be very distasteful. While panpsychism at first glance appears ridiculous (e.g., from "mind of a rock" arguments),it solves so many philosophical problems about the nature of emergences of mind, without necessarily requiring a separate "mindstuff" with all of its attendant properties. Thus, if a panpsychist should be an object of ridicule, at least, as Skrbina catalogs, he or she shall be in good company with many of the great thinkers of the western philosophical tradition. One very interesting point is the positive ecological consequence of panpsychism (paralleled in the Christian tradition by St. Francis of Assisi & Teilhard de Chardin). The animal rights people have certainly tried to make legal consequences of philosophical positions, and so I wonder whether one could make a legal argument for protection of non-living resources (e.g., oil wells or coal deposits) based on their "rights" even in the absence of their moral agency.
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May 24, 2016I skimmed this as I quickly realised it wasn't going to have anything about the author's correspondence with the Unabomber (not really sure why I thought it might) and I'm a bit ill and not really up for a thorough and systematic review of Western panpsychism which this appears to be and I'm sure is great if that is what you need. The cover is a missed opportunity, they could have drawn a smiley face on the rock.
March 16, 2026
(This is a review of the Revised Edition, 2017.)
If I were to make a single reading recommendation to those uninitiated in panpsychist philosophy who wish to learn more, it would be this excellent book, an overview of the important role played by panpsychism in Western philosophy and, later, scientific speculation. It is not a philosophic fleshing out of all possible ways panpsychism might be conceived, interpreted, or elaborated, but is instead a vast yet compact survey of the embrace of the idea in the history of thought limited to the sphere of Western Culture. (Panpsychism, though called by a variety of other names, is so pervasive in the Eastern philosophies and theologies of Asia that its presence goes without saying.)
Skrbina’s writing style is fluid and articulate. It makes for a pleasurable read, though the price of this style might be found in a relative lack of depth and detail. This, however, is only to be expected in such a thorough survey. After offering a succinct definition of panpsychism — “[W]e may say panpsychism holds that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality” (p. 2) — he fleshes out comparable but differing terminology like animism, hylozoism, panbiotism, vitalism, pansensism, pantheism, panentheism, and panexperientialism.
He makes clear the status of panpsychism as an ontological metaphysics. It refers to both the ultimate nature of mind and of reality. “In this sense, it is a higher-order theory, a meta-theory, of mind. It is a theory about theories. It simply holds that, however one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. Because of this, there are panpsychist extensions of most conventional theories.” (p. 3)
He deftly notes how different panpsychism is from “mechanistic materialism”, but accepts that there are physicalist formulations of panpsychism. The other major contrast is with emergentism, which he claims is assumed to be true by nearly every contemporary philosopher of mind (not even to mention the scientists). “They believe that, in the distant past, mind did not exist. Today it does. Ergo, it must have emerged, in an absolute sense, from an organic milieu that was devoid of mind” (p. 17).
Panpsychists see such a brute emergentist claim as equivalent to an inexplicable miracle. Mind could not emerge from no-mind, so it could only have been here all along.
I am not certain that space and time might not, in some sense, be seen as emergent in terms of Big Bang theories of origin or quantum fields, but I take his point that they are essential to the existence of this universe. Skrbina sums up, “The bottom line seems quite clear: One is either an emergentist, or one is a panpsychist. There seems to be no middle ground.” (p. 20)
At this point, he begins his detailed survey, which is the bulk of the book. He makes it clear that panpsychism — though often severely repressed by the Church in Mediaeval and early Renaissance times and later, after Galileo, by the scientific worldview — has also been astonishingly pervasive in all Western philosophy, right from its apparent first conceptions beginning with Pythagoras and Heraclitus in ancient Greece.
He finds panpsychism present as potential or actuality in several ancient approaches, surprisingly perhaps including Plato. In an extended section, he makes his argument that Plato was a panpsychist, even though he is generally identified in the history of philosophy as the paradigmatic idealist. Skrbina finds strong evidence in Plato’s writings, but I can only concede that sometimes Plato sounds like a panpsychist. As long as Platonic reality is based in the invisible forms or ideas, Plato will continue to be an idealist, at least as I see it.
He does not see much panpsychism in the Epicureans, who are materialists, but he convincingly portrays the metaphysics behind Stoicism as panpsychist. He sees panpsychist influences among the Neoplatonists, more in Porphyry than in Plotinus, but otherwise ignores any approaches that might be called mystical. The rise of Christendom muzzled all panpsychist thought for a great many years, but Skrbina notably identifies St. Francis of Assisi as somehow evading the inquisition and preaching panpsychism: “Francis’ view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of panpsychism of all things animate and inanimate” (p. 74) Other Christian thinkers who leaned toward panpsychism readily recanted when pressured to do so.
It is in the Renaissance that panpsychism seemed to have a rebirth of its own, as so many thinkers avidly embraced the concept, even though some of them were monks. I must note that in his survey, Skrbina does not note that these rebellious thinkers were often inspired by the esoteric wisdom of the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus, who was very influential during this time. “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several major philosophers advocated or were strongly sympathetic to panpsychism, including Paracelsus, Cardano, Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno, Campanella, Henry More, Margaret Cavendish, Spinoza, and Leibniz” (p. 78). Some of the most outspoken panpsychists like Giordano Bruno and Thomas Campanella refused to recant to the RC Inquisition with tragic results, Campanella being imprisoned for most of his later life, and Bruno burned at the stake.
The rise of the empiricists (including Bacon, Hobbes, and Kepler) de-emphasized both religion and the inner life of the world but often allowed a kind of pansensism in material objects. Still, counting and objectivity mattered more. “This, then, was the beginning of the mechanistic worldview—the mathematization of natural phenomena. Galileo took this up in earnest, and greatly advanced scientific philosophy. … Materialist and mechanistic philosophy began to dominate Western thinking.” (p. 98)
There are major sections on the famous spiritual panpsychists, Leibniz and Spinoza, both remarkable visionaries, but there are also surprising panpsychist tendencies found among the deniers of deity.
From this point on, Galilean science tends to divorce itself from philosophy, becoming both mechanically and reductively materialist, at least until the quantum revolution opened the gates to consciousness once again. There are exceptions among scientists, such as Lotze (1817-1881), Haeckel (1834-1919), and Mach (1838-1916). In 19th century philosophy, panpsychism came into its own under the likes of Schiller, Schopenhauer, and, more controversially, Nietzsche. In America, panpsychism achieved a new depth and philosophical subtlety in the works of Peirce, Royce, James, and others. (C. S. Peirce, if his writings can be penetrated, is unique in this field.) This continued into the twentieth century with Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, and Russell, not to mention others like Teilhard de Chardin and Hartshorne. (Such listings are deceptive. The text itself is much richer with compact discussions and colourful anecdotes, so the book should be read in its entirety.)
It seems the parallel yet divergent approaches of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell present a situation to contemporary panpsychism not unlike that of the Plato-Aristotle schism of ancient times, Whitehead standing in for Plato, the more inclined to inner speculation, and Russell for Aristotle, the more outer world oriented.
Whitehead’s approach indicated that each event in ongoing time – the occasion of experience – lasted about a micro-second. It both emerged from the objective world, providing continuity and was influenced toward novelty by the creativity of the formless, teleological eternal objects. Once its micro-second of experience ended, it became a non-experiencing objective entity, a part of the many, thus Whitehead’s formula, “The many become one and are increased by one” (1929/1978, p. 21). However, experiences can only fuse with the evolutionary addition of an experiencer, which can allow them to be held in memory. Once such memory can be conceptually controlled, as in human beings, experience can reflexively become conscious of itself then and only then becoming conscious experience. Thus, panexperientialism (a word not used by Whitehead) is based in unconscious experience. So Whitehead was a panpsychist only in a limited sense.
Russell seems unwilling to let experience exist on its own, so he tends more toward dualism, perhaps better seen as a pansensist. Pansensism means experiencing a sensation, which may only be momentary and unremembered by any central processor. Though its effects may linger physically, if it is not remembered, it does not necessarily imply the existence of an experiencer. Pansensism, like panexperientialism, does not necessarily imply a mind or experience that is conscious of itself, i.e., a conscious experiencer. Russell recognizes that memory is necessary to bring about consciousness. Russell also appears also to be a panpsychist only in a limited sense. (To his credit, Skrbina does not deal with the hair-splitting trap of analytic philosophy when it comes to dealing with the Byzantine vicissitudes of Russellian monism, constitutive or not.)
Aside from the panpsychist views emerging from a scientific perspective, further philosophical panpsychism in the West up to the present may be broadly summarized as footnotes to Whitehead and/or Russell, the former being the more speculative. Skrbina praises the process philosophers like Hartshorne for carrying on the panpsychist flame in the form of panexperientialism, “most notably Griffin but also including Ford, Birch, De Quincey, and others” (p. 265).
Skrbina cites Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self as emphasizing “that the wavelike nature of quantum particles may be interpreted as mind, and hence ‘the wave/particle duality of quantum “stuff” becomes the most primary mind/body relationship in the world’” (pp. 286-287).
New developments in science led to materialist “heretics” – such as Eddington, Pauli, and Wheeler – embracing panpsychism, at least in some form:
Skrbina does an excellent job of succinctly summarizing each of their contributions or viewpoints and relating them to one another. His last chapter, “Toward a Panpsychist Worldview”, stands alone as a compelling argument for this particular ontology. But he also makes time for a stimulating – and convincing – rebuttal of many of the major recent theories of consciousness that ignore, dismiss, or mock panpsychism: “The standard materialist, being fundamentally committed to an anti-panpsychist view, has no unbiased standpoint from which to make a judgment. Thus, any ruling of ‘unintelligible’ or ‘false’ is meaningless. … Materialism, and the accompanying analytical and logical philosophy, seems to have reached the terminal stage.” (p. 337).
I would not be a worthy critic if I didn’t offer some of my own criticisms or hesitations, as I call them, to indicate my statements are personal and do not impinge on the overall quality of the work. As an introduction to panpsychism or as an important chapter in the history of philosophy, this is still truly a five-star book.
Skrbina’s definitions of panpsychism use the terms “mind” and “subjectivity”. Can an electron be said to have a mind or subjective experience? If at some point before events and perspectives separate the subjective from the objective, are they not one thing, process or essence? Can they ever really be conceived separately? In the same way, the idea of consciousness emerging from the unconscious mind is fallacious because without any conscious mind, it makes no sense to speak of an un-conscious. In the same way, without an experiential schism between outer objective reality (including one’s own body) and the inner subjective reality of one’s mind, it makes no sense to speak of either as distinct or ultimate. You can’t have one without the other. So the use of the term “mind” or even “subjectivity” is fallacious as well – until they are distinguished from their binary oppositions “world” and “objectivity”. Language and its binary structure make meaning by identifying opposites and polarities, so it is unlikely there was any real split between mind and matter or subjectivity and objectivity until we made it so in language. This is in line with Whitehead’s identification of conscious experience as a rare but specific form of experience, as Whitehead clearly states:
In this revised edition, he goes out of his way to more deeply address Whitehead and to praise panexperientialism. Still, nowhere can I find it explicitly stated that panexperientialism considers that consciousness (i.e., conscious experience) does not “go all the way down”, only experience does. Experience happens without consciousness, so the two are differentiated: conscious experience is a rare, apex form of experience requiring at least a brain. This is essential to grasping panexperientialism.
The book’s approach is generally restricted to a traditional definition of Western philosophy with some examples from scientific speculation. However, panpsychism is very much present though often disguised behind a rhetoric of spiritual idealism in the thinking of the Neoplatonists (who are briefly mentioned) and the Gnostics (who are not). There’s no mention of the important European tradition of the alchemical-hermetic philosophies, which, along with their quest for purification and personal transformation, had a strong vein of vitalistic physicalism, i.e., panpsychism. Frances Yates is not cited in the book. However, such hermetic thinking was central to the Renaissance panpsychists, which put them afoul of the Church. Panpsychism may have been even more widespread than Skrbina postulated!
If I were to make a single reading recommendation to those uninitiated in panpsychist philosophy who wish to learn more, it would be this excellent book, an overview of the important role played by panpsychism in Western philosophy and, later, scientific speculation. It is not a philosophic fleshing out of all possible ways panpsychism might be conceived, interpreted, or elaborated, but is instead a vast yet compact survey of the embrace of the idea in the history of thought limited to the sphere of Western Culture. (Panpsychism, though called by a variety of other names, is so pervasive in the Eastern philosophies and theologies of Asia that its presence goes without saying.)
Skrbina’s writing style is fluid and articulate. It makes for a pleasurable read, though the price of this style might be found in a relative lack of depth and detail. This, however, is only to be expected in such a thorough survey. After offering a succinct definition of panpsychism — “[W]e may say panpsychism holds that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality” (p. 2) — he fleshes out comparable but differing terminology like animism, hylozoism, panbiotism, vitalism, pansensism, pantheism, panentheism, and panexperientialism.
He makes clear the status of panpsychism as an ontological metaphysics. It refers to both the ultimate nature of mind and of reality. “In this sense, it is a higher-order theory, a meta-theory, of mind. It is a theory about theories. It simply holds that, however one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. Because of this, there are panpsychist extensions of most conventional theories.” (p. 3)
He deftly notes how different panpsychism is from “mechanistic materialism”, but accepts that there are physicalist formulations of panpsychism. The other major contrast is with emergentism, which he claims is assumed to be true by nearly every contemporary philosopher of mind (not even to mention the scientists). “They believe that, in the distant past, mind did not exist. Today it does. Ergo, it must have emerged, in an absolute sense, from an organic milieu that was devoid of mind” (p. 17).
Panpsychists see such a brute emergentist claim as equivalent to an inexplicable miracle. Mind could not emerge from no-mind, so it could only have been here all along.
Every structured being in the universe – animals, plants, rocks, planets, stars – all, at some point, did not exist; now they do; therefore, they did emerge. But not everything can plausibly do so. Time, for instance, seems inconceivable to have ever emerged from a timeless cosmos. So too with space; we simply cannot conceive how spatiality could have come into being in a universe that was not spatial. Time and space must have always existed, everywhere. They are “pan” qualities of reality. … Panpsychists add one more item to the list: mind. Experientially, subjectivity, qualia … the emergence of such things is inconceivable, from a universe utterly without them. … Panpsychists prefer a rational, naturalistic, and non-miraculous universe. And in such a universe, mind must have always been present. (p. 19)
I am not certain that space and time might not, in some sense, be seen as emergent in terms of Big Bang theories of origin or quantum fields, but I take his point that they are essential to the existence of this universe. Skrbina sums up, “The bottom line seems quite clear: One is either an emergentist, or one is a panpsychist. There seems to be no middle ground.” (p. 20)
At this point, he begins his detailed survey, which is the bulk of the book. He makes it clear that panpsychism — though often severely repressed by the Church in Mediaeval and early Renaissance times and later, after Galileo, by the scientific worldview — has also been astonishingly pervasive in all Western philosophy, right from its apparent first conceptions beginning with Pythagoras and Heraclitus in ancient Greece.
He finds panpsychism present as potential or actuality in several ancient approaches, surprisingly perhaps including Plato. In an extended section, he makes his argument that Plato was a panpsychist, even though he is generally identified in the history of philosophy as the paradigmatic idealist. Skrbina finds strong evidence in Plato’s writings, but I can only concede that sometimes Plato sounds like a panpsychist. As long as Platonic reality is based in the invisible forms or ideas, Plato will continue to be an idealist, at least as I see it.
He does not see much panpsychism in the Epicureans, who are materialists, but he convincingly portrays the metaphysics behind Stoicism as panpsychist. He sees panpsychist influences among the Neoplatonists, more in Porphyry than in Plotinus, but otherwise ignores any approaches that might be called mystical. The rise of Christendom muzzled all panpsychist thought for a great many years, but Skrbina notably identifies St. Francis of Assisi as somehow evading the inquisition and preaching panpsychism: “Francis’ view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of panpsychism of all things animate and inanimate” (p. 74) Other Christian thinkers who leaned toward panpsychism readily recanted when pressured to do so.
It is in the Renaissance that panpsychism seemed to have a rebirth of its own, as so many thinkers avidly embraced the concept, even though some of them were monks. I must note that in his survey, Skrbina does not note that these rebellious thinkers were often inspired by the esoteric wisdom of the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus, who was very influential during this time. “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several major philosophers advocated or were strongly sympathetic to panpsychism, including Paracelsus, Cardano, Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno, Campanella, Henry More, Margaret Cavendish, Spinoza, and Leibniz” (p. 78). Some of the most outspoken panpsychists like Giordano Bruno and Thomas Campanella refused to recant to the RC Inquisition with tragic results, Campanella being imprisoned for most of his later life, and Bruno burned at the stake.
The rise of the empiricists (including Bacon, Hobbes, and Kepler) de-emphasized both religion and the inner life of the world but often allowed a kind of pansensism in material objects. Still, counting and objectivity mattered more. “This, then, was the beginning of the mechanistic worldview—the mathematization of natural phenomena. Galileo took this up in earnest, and greatly advanced scientific philosophy. … Materialist and mechanistic philosophy began to dominate Western thinking.” (p. 98)
The other person of note … is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). A poet and playwright, Cavendish also produced three major works on natural philosophy. … She advocated a form of materialism in which the cosmos was an organic whole composed of organic and animate parts. (p. 104)
There are major sections on the famous spiritual panpsychists, Leibniz and Spinoza, both remarkable visionaries, but there are also surprising panpsychist tendencies found among the deniers of deity.
Among the most notorious of these [atheist or near-atheist] philosophers was Julien LaMettrie (1709-1751). Author of the provocative and scandalous L’Homme Machine [The Human Machine], LaMettrie was the first thinker to unabashedly—though anonymously—claim that man was purely a natural automaton and did not require an immortal soul to account for his behavior. … In openly denying the immaterial soul, he carried scientific philosophy to its logical limit. …
It is quite common, even today, to equate materialism with mechanism. But, as has been noted, the two are logically independent. … Though he obviously adopted the term “machine” in his L’Homme Machine, it was in a specifically vitalistic sense. LaMettrie’s writing demonstrated that he had quasi-panpsychist and hylozoist inclinations, which necessarily have no role in a mechanistic materialism. Vitalistic materialism sees some degree of life and mind in all things; it seeks a natural rather than a supernatural explanation. (pp. 122-123)
From this point on, Galilean science tends to divorce itself from philosophy, becoming both mechanically and reductively materialist, at least until the quantum revolution opened the gates to consciousness once again. There are exceptions among scientists, such as Lotze (1817-1881), Haeckel (1834-1919), and Mach (1838-1916). In 19th century philosophy, panpsychism came into its own under the likes of Schiller, Schopenhauer, and, more controversially, Nietzsche. In America, panpsychism achieved a new depth and philosophical subtlety in the works of Peirce, Royce, James, and others. (C. S. Peirce, if his writings can be penetrated, is unique in this field.) This continued into the twentieth century with Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, and Russell, not to mention others like Teilhard de Chardin and Hartshorne. (Such listings are deceptive. The text itself is much richer with compact discussions and colourful anecdotes, so the book should be read in its entirety.)
It seems the parallel yet divergent approaches of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell present a situation to contemporary panpsychism not unlike that of the Plato-Aristotle schism of ancient times, Whitehead standing in for Plato, the more inclined to inner speculation, and Russell for Aristotle, the more outer world oriented.
The best-known and most controversial panpsychist of the twentieth century was Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). The nominal founder of process philosophy, Whitehead took the insights of Heraclitus, Bergson, James, and Russell and combined them with the revelations of the so-called new physics of the day to create an intricate and complex philosophical system. Process philosophy saw time as a fundamental ontological entity, something deeply implicated in the nature of being. … On this view, the event is the fundamental reality of the world. (p. 213)
Whitehead’s approach indicated that each event in ongoing time – the occasion of experience – lasted about a micro-second. It both emerged from the objective world, providing continuity and was influenced toward novelty by the creativity of the formless, teleological eternal objects. Once its micro-second of experience ended, it became a non-experiencing objective entity, a part of the many, thus Whitehead’s formula, “The many become one and are increased by one” (1929/1978, p. 21). However, experiences can only fuse with the evolutionary addition of an experiencer, which can allow them to be held in memory. Once such memory can be conceptually controlled, as in human beings, experience can reflexively become conscious of itself then and only then becoming conscious experience. Thus, panexperientialism (a word not used by Whitehead) is based in unconscious experience. So Whitehead was a panpsychist only in a limited sense.
Whitehead’s student and colleague Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), in the latter part of his career, held to a neutral monist process view in which events were the primary reality, comprising both mind and matter. In that sense he continued the line of thinking of Bergson and Whitehead. Russell’s neutral monism was unique, however, in that he proposed that mind and matter each resulted from a set of causal laws; matter from physical laws of science, mind from “mnemic” laws that were not yet understood. The relationship between these two sets of laws (if there was one) was not clear. (p. 219)
Russell seems unwilling to let experience exist on its own, so he tends more toward dualism, perhaps better seen as a pansensist. Pansensism means experiencing a sensation, which may only be momentary and unremembered by any central processor. Though its effects may linger physically, if it is not remembered, it does not necessarily imply the existence of an experiencer. Pansensism, like panexperientialism, does not necessarily imply a mind or experience that is conscious of itself, i.e., a conscious experiencer. Russell recognizes that memory is necessary to bring about consciousness. Russell also appears also to be a panpsychist only in a limited sense. (To his credit, Skrbina does not deal with the hair-splitting trap of analytic philosophy when it comes to dealing with the Byzantine vicissitudes of Russellian monism, constitutive or not.)
Aside from the panpsychist views emerging from a scientific perspective, further philosophical panpsychism in the West up to the present may be broadly summarized as footnotes to Whitehead and/or Russell, the former being the more speculative. Skrbina praises the process philosophers like Hartshorne for carrying on the panpsychist flame in the form of panexperientialism, “most notably Griffin but also including Ford, Birch, De Quincey, and others” (p. 265).
Dual aspect views, which are at least implicitly panpsychist, were defended by thinkers as diverse as Feigl, Nagel, Globus, Plumwood, and Chalmers. In the work of Abram, Berman, Zohar, Wilber, Harvey, and Orr, populist treatments also emerged. The endorsement of panpsychism by the prominent analytic philosopher Galen Strawson was a major development in the field. So-called Russellian monism has been taken up in earnest by professional philosophers, many of whom spell out the panpsychist implications. And various efforts have been made to build upon the insights of Peirce to connect recent work in chaos theory and dynamical systems to forms of panpsychism. (p. 265)
Skrbina cites Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self as emphasizing “that the wavelike nature of quantum particles may be interpreted as mind, and hence ‘the wave/particle duality of quantum “stuff” becomes the most primary mind/body relationship in the world’” (pp. 286-287).
New developments in science led to materialist “heretics” – such as Eddington, Pauli, and Wheeler – embracing panpsychism, at least in some form:
The equation of mass and energy furthered the notion that the underlying nature of matter was something vaguely spirit-like. Quantum mechanics emerged as an accepted theory of atomic and and subatomic particles; its bizarre, indeterminate implications led many scientists to panpsychist conclusions, beginning with John Haldane in 1932 and continuing with Jeans, Sherrington, Wright, Rensch, Walker, Cochran, Dyson, Bohm, and Hameroff. (pp. 242-243)
Skrbina does an excellent job of succinctly summarizing each of their contributions or viewpoints and relating them to one another. His last chapter, “Toward a Panpsychist Worldview”, stands alone as a compelling argument for this particular ontology. But he also makes time for a stimulating – and convincing – rebuttal of many of the major recent theories of consciousness that ignore, dismiss, or mock panpsychism: “The standard materialist, being fundamentally committed to an anti-panpsychist view, has no unbiased standpoint from which to make a judgment. Thus, any ruling of ‘unintelligible’ or ‘false’ is meaningless. … Materialism, and the accompanying analytical and logical philosophy, seems to have reached the terminal stage.” (p. 337).
I would not be a worthy critic if I didn’t offer some of my own criticisms or hesitations, as I call them, to indicate my statements are personal and do not impinge on the overall quality of the work. As an introduction to panpsychism or as an important chapter in the history of philosophy, this is still truly a five-star book.
Skrbina’s definitions of panpsychism use the terms “mind” and “subjectivity”. Can an electron be said to have a mind or subjective experience? If at some point before events and perspectives separate the subjective from the objective, are they not one thing, process or essence? Can they ever really be conceived separately? In the same way, the idea of consciousness emerging from the unconscious mind is fallacious because without any conscious mind, it makes no sense to speak of an un-conscious. In the same way, without an experiential schism between outer objective reality (including one’s own body) and the inner subjective reality of one’s mind, it makes no sense to speak of either as distinct or ultimate. You can’t have one without the other. So the use of the term “mind” or even “subjectivity” is fallacious as well – until they are distinguished from their binary oppositions “world” and “objectivity”. Language and its binary structure make meaning by identifying opposites and polarities, so it is unlikely there was any real split between mind and matter or subjectivity and objectivity until we made it so in language. This is in line with Whitehead’s identification of conscious experience as a rare but specific form of experience, as Whitehead clearly states:
Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experience. Also this character of our experience suggests that consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base. (1929/1978, p. 267)
In this revised edition, he goes out of his way to more deeply address Whitehead and to praise panexperientialism. Still, nowhere can I find it explicitly stated that panexperientialism considers that consciousness (i.e., conscious experience) does not “go all the way down”, only experience does. Experience happens without consciousness, so the two are differentiated: conscious experience is a rare, apex form of experience requiring at least a brain. This is essential to grasping panexperientialism.
The book’s approach is generally restricted to a traditional definition of Western philosophy with some examples from scientific speculation. However, panpsychism is very much present though often disguised behind a rhetoric of spiritual idealism in the thinking of the Neoplatonists (who are briefly mentioned) and the Gnostics (who are not). There’s no mention of the important European tradition of the alchemical-hermetic philosophies, which, along with their quest for purification and personal transformation, had a strong vein of vitalistic physicalism, i.e., panpsychism. Frances Yates is not cited in the book. However, such hermetic thinking was central to the Renaissance panpsychists, which put them afoul of the Church. Panpsychism may have been even more widespread than Skrbina postulated!
June 6, 2024
There is probably no better book around for becoming acquainted with what panpsychism is and why thinkers down the ages have been attracted to it. As the title suggests, it presents a historical overview of panpsychism in western philosophical thinking. However, it is also an argument for panpsychism. The author is not impartial: he has clearly produced this work to advocate for the rehabilitation and recognition of this neglected and oft berated way of viewing of the world.
Panpsychism is a simple enough idea: namely, that consciousness is, in some form, spread throughout all things. Not only humans and some animals, but all physical matter has some degree of mind or mindlike quality. To put it another way, while science can accurately measure the external aspects of reality, panpsychism claims that every dimension of reality has, or could have, an insider perspective, not accessible to third person observation.
The shades and variety of this idea are many and various. But it should be pointed out, there is no vast body of empirical data from which one can conclude the truth of panpsychism. Many claim there is no evidence for it at all. It’s probably better, therefore, to describe panpsychism as a very persistent, but not unreasonable, intuition. This explains why the basic notion of panpsychism (‘everything has mind’) is not fundamentally different in the age of quantum mechanics than it was in the pre-Socratic era. All that has changed are the attempts to justify it.
That being so, what has perhaps gained credence in recent years is the growing sense that arguments to the contrary are inadequate. The author particularly targets the illogicality of emergence theory or ‘emergentism’ as a way of explaining how some parts of the physical world (you, me, some animals) have a subjective life while everything else ostensibly does not. Emergentism, writes Skrbina, maintains that at some point in organic evolution, things like mind, subjectivity, feeling, a sense of what it is like, and so on…just appeared. As he puts it “mind came from that which was utterly devoid of mind”. Just like that! To which the panpsychist has always responded: “Mind could never have emerged from no mind. Therefore, it was there all along”. While there are a number of distinct arguments put forward for panpsychist perspectives, this argument from non-emergence probably underlies them all.
One of the challenges faced by panpsychism is to define the scope of what mind or consciousness actually is. Skrbina provides a taxonomy of terms which helps underscore that human self-awareness sits at the very high end of the consciousness scale. Below this are many mind-like qualities as feeling, awareness, experience, sensation, and so on. To the degree that molecular, chemical and even atomic levels of existence demonstrate forms of reactivity, attraction and repulsion, one could argue they also possess a kind of proto ‘awareness’. Whether this can be regarded as a ‘mental’ quality is an open question.
However, understanding ‘consciousness’ in the broadest possible terms is necessary to deflect the cheap shots to which panpsychism has always been vulnerable. ‘What, are you saying that this rock has feelings? That this lettuce harbours resentment? That my toaster has a love life?’ Panpsychism says none of these things, but it does maintain that those entities which do have minds are made from the same suite of physical components as those which (apparently) do not. So wouldn’t it make more sense to assume that those fundamental physical components also have some kind of fundamental mind stuff? Otherwise it looks as if mind is outsourced from somewhere else, or else just magically appears.
But of course this just leads to panpsychism’s second Achilles heel, the dreaded ‘combination problem’: If lower level entities, such as cells, have exceedingly simple proto-minds, how do they combine to arrive at more complex forms of mind, since no amount of worm-brains added up will ever amount to anything more than a worm-mind. Endless iterations of panpsychism attempt to answer this conundrum.
Arguments pro and con aside, we shouldn't lose sight that this is still a historical survey, from the pre-Socratic Thales who claimed that “all things are full of gods” to contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson who maintains that “all physical stuff is energy, in one form or another, and all energy...is an experience-involving phenomenon”. One of the enriching outcomes of ploughing through this volume over many weeks is to discover how many great minds (pun intended) have held panpsychist views. See the list at the end.
Another benefit has been to appreciate the changing fortunes of panpsychism throughout the ages. Panpsychism has not always been a minority view. Both the pre-Socratics and the major philosophical schools following Plato and Aristotle into late antiquity saw the material world imbued with life/reason/mentality of one kind or another. With the ascendance of Christianity, panpsychism was overshadowed by dualism in which the conscious was largely limited to God or the human soul (hence a mere 7 pages for this section). The advent of Renaissance philosophy brought about a resurgence of panpsychist views, but it soon became clear that the future belonged to the age of science and materialism in which a mechanistic view of the universe would prevail. But the wheel turns, and for the last century quantum mechanics has thrown much that is weird and wonderful into our understanding of the physical world, including a possible role for consciousness.
The final chapter provides a very useful summary of the arguments for and against, and to his credit, the author clearly articulates the objections to panpsychism. Regardless of the final truth of the matter, the author maintains that panpsychism stems from a more “optimistic, life-affirming, and sympathetic perspective on the world” which surely is needed. In any case, when it comes to whether panpsychism is actually true, panpsychism can perhaps be better regarded as a platform, or a worldview, from which we can ask fundamental questions about reality. Such a worldview takes the inner life as seriously as the outer.
In the end, I gained a great deal from reading Skrbina’s survey. You could almost describe it as an introduction to Western philosophy in its own right, but from the perspective of panpsychism. In such a survey some figures and ideas loom larger, others are diminished, so that overall the big questions – where we came from, why we are here, where we are going – end up with quite a different flavour.
A list of all the men in this book, plus 4 women, advocating panpsychism
Chapter 2 – Ancient Origins
2.1 Pre-Socratics: Thales – Anaximenes – Pythagoras – Parmenides – Heraclitus – Anaxagoras – Empedocles – Leucippus and Democritus
2.2 – Plato
2.3 – Aristotle
2.4 – Epicurus
2.5 – Stoicism
2.6 – The Christian Era
Chapter 3 – Renaissance (16th and 17th centuries)
3.1 – Transition to Renaissance: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – Paracelsus
3.2 – Italian Naturalists: Girolamo Cardano – Bernardino Telesio – Francesco Patrizi – Giordano Bruno
3.3 – William Gilbert
3.4 – Tommaso Campanella
3.5 – Early scientific philosophers: Johannes Kepler – Francis Bacon – Thomas Hobbes – (Rene Descartes*) – Henry More
3.6 – Baruch Spinoza
3.7 – John Locke – Isaac Newton
3.8 – Gottfried Leibniz
Chapter 4 – Continental Panpsychism of the 18th century
4.1 – French Vitalistic Materialism: Julien LaMettrie – Pierre-Louis Maupertuis – Denis Diderot
4.2 – Immanuel Kant – Joseph Priestly
4.3 – German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie: Johann Herder – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Friedrich Schelling
Chapter 5 – Panpsychism, Mechanism, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany
5.1 – Arthur Schopenhauer
5.2 – Gustav Fechner
5.3 – R. Herman Lotze – Eduard von Hartmann – Ernst Mach – Ernst Haeckel – Ernst und Bertzst
5.4 – Friedrich Paulsen
5.5 – Friedrich Nietzsche
Chapter 6 – The Anglo-American Perspective
6.1 – William Kingdon Clifford – Samuel Butler – Herbert Spencer – Morton Prince
6.2 – William James
6.3 – Paul Carus – Josiah Royce – Charles Sanders Pierce
Chapter 7 – Panpsychism in the Years 1900-1950
7.1 – Charles Strong – William Montague – Henri Bergson
7.2 – Ferdinand Schiller
7.3 – Samuel Alexander – (Henryk Skolimowski**) – Peter Ouspensky – Nicholai Lossky – Leonard Troland – John Dewey – Durant Drake
7.4 – Alfred North Whitehead
7.5 – Bertrand Russell
7.6 – Phenomenology***: (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel) – Graham Harman
7.7 – Teilhard de Chardin
7.8 Charles Hartshorne (Alfred North Whitehead again)
Chapter 8 – Scientific Perspectives
8.2 – Arthur Eddington – J.B.S. Haldane – James Jeans – Charles Scott Sherrington – Wilfred Agar – Julian Huxley – Sewall Wright – Bernard Rensch
8.3 – Gregory Bateson
8.4 – Evan Walker – Charles Birch – Freeman Dyson – Michael Lockwood – Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose – John Wheeler
8.5 – David Bohm
Chapter 9 – Panpsychism from 1950 to the Present
9.1 – Herbert Feigl – Arthur Koestler – Gordon Globus
9.2 – Panpsychism and Environmental Philosophy: John Muir – Aldo Leopold – Albert Schweitzer – Lynn White Jr. – Gregory Bateson – Christopher Stone – Roderick Nash – J. Baird Callicott – Jay McDaniel – Susan Armstrong Buck and James O’Brien – Tim Sprigge – Val Plumwood – Freya Matthews
9.3 – Morris Berman – Danah Zohar – Rupert Sheldrake – Ken Wilbur – David Abram – (Graham Harvey, Peter Ells, Alex Wendt) – Stuart Kauffman
9.4 – Detractors: Charles Bennett – Paul Edwards – Arne Naess and Ernest Partridge – Gerald Edelman – Nicholas Humphrey – Colin McGinn – Daniel Hutto – John Searle. Defenders: Tim Sprigge – Thomas Nagel
9.5 – Charles Sanders Pierce – David Skrbina – Neil Theise and Menas Kafatos
9.6 – David Ray Griffin – Christian De Quincey – David Clarke
9.7 – Galen Strawson
9.8 – Russellian Monism: (Russell, Eddington, Schopenhauer) – David Chalmers
* Not a panpsychist!
** A great source of inspiration for the author, but barely discussed.
*** Nothing to see here.
Panpsychism is a simple enough idea: namely, that consciousness is, in some form, spread throughout all things. Not only humans and some animals, but all physical matter has some degree of mind or mindlike quality. To put it another way, while science can accurately measure the external aspects of reality, panpsychism claims that every dimension of reality has, or could have, an insider perspective, not accessible to third person observation.
The shades and variety of this idea are many and various. But it should be pointed out, there is no vast body of empirical data from which one can conclude the truth of panpsychism. Many claim there is no evidence for it at all. It’s probably better, therefore, to describe panpsychism as a very persistent, but not unreasonable, intuition. This explains why the basic notion of panpsychism (‘everything has mind’) is not fundamentally different in the age of quantum mechanics than it was in the pre-Socratic era. All that has changed are the attempts to justify it.
That being so, what has perhaps gained credence in recent years is the growing sense that arguments to the contrary are inadequate. The author particularly targets the illogicality of emergence theory or ‘emergentism’ as a way of explaining how some parts of the physical world (you, me, some animals) have a subjective life while everything else ostensibly does not. Emergentism, writes Skrbina, maintains that at some point in organic evolution, things like mind, subjectivity, feeling, a sense of what it is like, and so on…just appeared. As he puts it “mind came from that which was utterly devoid of mind”. Just like that! To which the panpsychist has always responded: “Mind could never have emerged from no mind. Therefore, it was there all along”. While there are a number of distinct arguments put forward for panpsychist perspectives, this argument from non-emergence probably underlies them all.
One of the challenges faced by panpsychism is to define the scope of what mind or consciousness actually is. Skrbina provides a taxonomy of terms which helps underscore that human self-awareness sits at the very high end of the consciousness scale. Below this are many mind-like qualities as feeling, awareness, experience, sensation, and so on. To the degree that molecular, chemical and even atomic levels of existence demonstrate forms of reactivity, attraction and repulsion, one could argue they also possess a kind of proto ‘awareness’. Whether this can be regarded as a ‘mental’ quality is an open question.
However, understanding ‘consciousness’ in the broadest possible terms is necessary to deflect the cheap shots to which panpsychism has always been vulnerable. ‘What, are you saying that this rock has feelings? That this lettuce harbours resentment? That my toaster has a love life?’ Panpsychism says none of these things, but it does maintain that those entities which do have minds are made from the same suite of physical components as those which (apparently) do not. So wouldn’t it make more sense to assume that those fundamental physical components also have some kind of fundamental mind stuff? Otherwise it looks as if mind is outsourced from somewhere else, or else just magically appears.
But of course this just leads to panpsychism’s second Achilles heel, the dreaded ‘combination problem’: If lower level entities, such as cells, have exceedingly simple proto-minds, how do they combine to arrive at more complex forms of mind, since no amount of worm-brains added up will ever amount to anything more than a worm-mind. Endless iterations of panpsychism attempt to answer this conundrum.
Arguments pro and con aside, we shouldn't lose sight that this is still a historical survey, from the pre-Socratic Thales who claimed that “all things are full of gods” to contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson who maintains that “all physical stuff is energy, in one form or another, and all energy...is an experience-involving phenomenon”. One of the enriching outcomes of ploughing through this volume over many weeks is to discover how many great minds (pun intended) have held panpsychist views. See the list at the end.
Another benefit has been to appreciate the changing fortunes of panpsychism throughout the ages. Panpsychism has not always been a minority view. Both the pre-Socratics and the major philosophical schools following Plato and Aristotle into late antiquity saw the material world imbued with life/reason/mentality of one kind or another. With the ascendance of Christianity, panpsychism was overshadowed by dualism in which the conscious was largely limited to God or the human soul (hence a mere 7 pages for this section). The advent of Renaissance philosophy brought about a resurgence of panpsychist views, but it soon became clear that the future belonged to the age of science and materialism in which a mechanistic view of the universe would prevail. But the wheel turns, and for the last century quantum mechanics has thrown much that is weird and wonderful into our understanding of the physical world, including a possible role for consciousness.
The final chapter provides a very useful summary of the arguments for and against, and to his credit, the author clearly articulates the objections to panpsychism. Regardless of the final truth of the matter, the author maintains that panpsychism stems from a more “optimistic, life-affirming, and sympathetic perspective on the world” which surely is needed. In any case, when it comes to whether panpsychism is actually true, panpsychism can perhaps be better regarded as a platform, or a worldview, from which we can ask fundamental questions about reality. Such a worldview takes the inner life as seriously as the outer.
In the end, I gained a great deal from reading Skrbina’s survey. You could almost describe it as an introduction to Western philosophy in its own right, but from the perspective of panpsychism. In such a survey some figures and ideas loom larger, others are diminished, so that overall the big questions – where we came from, why we are here, where we are going – end up with quite a different flavour.
A list of all the men in this book, plus 4 women, advocating panpsychism
Chapter 2 – Ancient Origins
2.1 Pre-Socratics: Thales – Anaximenes – Pythagoras – Parmenides – Heraclitus – Anaxagoras – Empedocles – Leucippus and Democritus
2.2 – Plato
2.3 – Aristotle
2.4 – Epicurus
2.5 – Stoicism
2.6 – The Christian Era
Chapter 3 – Renaissance (16th and 17th centuries)
3.1 – Transition to Renaissance: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – Paracelsus
3.2 – Italian Naturalists: Girolamo Cardano – Bernardino Telesio – Francesco Patrizi – Giordano Bruno
3.3 – William Gilbert
3.4 – Tommaso Campanella
3.5 – Early scientific philosophers: Johannes Kepler – Francis Bacon – Thomas Hobbes – (Rene Descartes*) – Henry More
3.6 – Baruch Spinoza
3.7 – John Locke – Isaac Newton
3.8 – Gottfried Leibniz
Chapter 4 – Continental Panpsychism of the 18th century
4.1 – French Vitalistic Materialism: Julien LaMettrie – Pierre-Louis Maupertuis – Denis Diderot
4.2 – Immanuel Kant – Joseph Priestly
4.3 – German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie: Johann Herder – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Friedrich Schelling
Chapter 5 – Panpsychism, Mechanism, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany
5.1 – Arthur Schopenhauer
5.2 – Gustav Fechner
5.3 – R. Herman Lotze – Eduard von Hartmann – Ernst Mach – Ernst Haeckel – Ernst und Bertzst
5.4 – Friedrich Paulsen
5.5 – Friedrich Nietzsche
Chapter 6 – The Anglo-American Perspective
6.1 – William Kingdon Clifford – Samuel Butler – Herbert Spencer – Morton Prince
6.2 – William James
6.3 – Paul Carus – Josiah Royce – Charles Sanders Pierce
Chapter 7 – Panpsychism in the Years 1900-1950
7.1 – Charles Strong – William Montague – Henri Bergson
7.2 – Ferdinand Schiller
7.3 – Samuel Alexander – (Henryk Skolimowski**) – Peter Ouspensky – Nicholai Lossky – Leonard Troland – John Dewey – Durant Drake
7.4 – Alfred North Whitehead
7.5 – Bertrand Russell
7.6 – Phenomenology***: (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel) – Graham Harman
7.7 – Teilhard de Chardin
7.8 Charles Hartshorne (Alfred North Whitehead again)
Chapter 8 – Scientific Perspectives
8.2 – Arthur Eddington – J.B.S. Haldane – James Jeans – Charles Scott Sherrington – Wilfred Agar – Julian Huxley – Sewall Wright – Bernard Rensch
8.3 – Gregory Bateson
8.4 – Evan Walker – Charles Birch – Freeman Dyson – Michael Lockwood – Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose – John Wheeler
8.5 – David Bohm
Chapter 9 – Panpsychism from 1950 to the Present
9.1 – Herbert Feigl – Arthur Koestler – Gordon Globus
9.2 – Panpsychism and Environmental Philosophy: John Muir – Aldo Leopold – Albert Schweitzer – Lynn White Jr. – Gregory Bateson – Christopher Stone – Roderick Nash – J. Baird Callicott – Jay McDaniel – Susan Armstrong Buck and James O’Brien – Tim Sprigge – Val Plumwood – Freya Matthews
9.3 – Morris Berman – Danah Zohar – Rupert Sheldrake – Ken Wilbur – David Abram – (Graham Harvey, Peter Ells, Alex Wendt) – Stuart Kauffman
9.4 – Detractors: Charles Bennett – Paul Edwards – Arne Naess and Ernest Partridge – Gerald Edelman – Nicholas Humphrey – Colin McGinn – Daniel Hutto – John Searle. Defenders: Tim Sprigge – Thomas Nagel
9.5 – Charles Sanders Pierce – David Skrbina – Neil Theise and Menas Kafatos
9.6 – David Ray Griffin – Christian De Quincey – David Clarke
9.7 – Galen Strawson
9.8 – Russellian Monism: (Russell, Eddington, Schopenhauer) – David Chalmers
* Not a panpsychist!
** A great source of inspiration for the author, but barely discussed.
*** Nothing to see here.
February 28, 2021
There's an old anecdotal saw about Friedrich Nietzsche that he thought himself crazy, that all of his meditations finally led him to lead the pathetic life of a syphilitics who talked to his horse. True or not, the story's sometimes invoked to caution that philosophy is sort of a dead end, perhaps even an onanistic exercise in some ways. Panpsychism is a branch of philosophy that poses an especial danger (in the eyes of some philosophers), because it posits that mind or consciousness (and perhaps even soul) inhere in all matter. This fusing of ideas and beliefs that have undergone a rigorously Manichean division over the course of centuries seems to threaten to undo all post-Cartesian philosophical progress, if one believes that Panpsychism is just so much soft-headed mush. At best this patronizing view holds Panpsychism is a way to give a philosophic veneer to the Gaia-based idea of Mother Earth as a cybernetic entity whose natural feedback loops we have disrupted due to our soulless materialism and poor stewardship of her (allegedly living and conscious) matter.
Charles Bennett may have summed up the quandary best when he said: "Put me in a world where all is in some sense (however obscure) spirit,...and you embarrass me strangely. Now I no longer feel free to treat any part of the material world merely as means."
Indeed, mostly philosophers find Panpsychism embarassing, off-putting, and a little too new age for serious scholarly engagement. An exception is David Skrbina, whose "Panpsychism in the West" is very good, sometimes even brilliant, and yet remains fairly accessible throughout (for a philosophical text).
He traces the concept of Panpsychism from its roots in Attic antiquity (and arguable even earlier, in animist thought) on into the realm of quantum physics (another subject where I am usually hopelessly lost, but where I manage to stay on track this time out thanks to Skrbina's expert guidance).
No one man or woman can unriddle the mechanistic from the metaphysical, but if there's anyone who can take a good hard look at the overlap in that particular Venn Diagram, seeing the spiritual in the physical and vice versa, Dr. Skrbina is your Huckleberry. Recommended.
Charles Bennett may have summed up the quandary best when he said: "Put me in a world where all is in some sense (however obscure) spirit,...and you embarrass me strangely. Now I no longer feel free to treat any part of the material world merely as means."
Indeed, mostly philosophers find Panpsychism embarassing, off-putting, and a little too new age for serious scholarly engagement. An exception is David Skrbina, whose "Panpsychism in the West" is very good, sometimes even brilliant, and yet remains fairly accessible throughout (for a philosophical text).
He traces the concept of Panpsychism from its roots in Attic antiquity (and arguable even earlier, in animist thought) on into the realm of quantum physics (another subject where I am usually hopelessly lost, but where I manage to stay on track this time out thanks to Skrbina's expert guidance).
No one man or woman can unriddle the mechanistic from the metaphysical, but if there's anyone who can take a good hard look at the overlap in that particular Venn Diagram, seeing the spiritual in the physical and vice versa, Dr. Skrbina is your Huckleberry. Recommended.
Read
December 11, 2019Skrbina writes a book about theories, not a theory, he claims (p.2). He restricts his discussion to the notion of "mind" as it has been understood from various perspectives in living and non-living things in this philosophical history. Panpsychism, as a philosophical perspective, links beings and mind in a way no other system does, he maintains. However, due to the data and context in which he philosophizes he is confined to discussing his position from within a Hellenized philosophical perspective. His work is a western philosophical treatise and this is reflected in the title words, "in the West." Perhaps, at a later date, a book might appear entitled, Panpsychism in Philosophy. With that as a possibility, I view, Skrbina's work as a preamble to a discussion on "mind" within a de-Hellenized, that is, Western conception of epistemology uninfluenced by Greek notions. I view Skrbina's perspective on Panpsychism, as part of an evolutionary process leading to a possible de-Hellenized understanding of mind. Whether or not such de-Hellenization is his intent is conjecture on my part. However, he hopes to introduce us into a broader concept of mind that may arise from considering "the evolution of panpsychist thought from the time of the pre-Socratics through the present" (p. 22). He does this successfully within the Hellenist heritage. As a sub-stratum to theology, my own discipline, Skrbina's critical philosophical history provides theologians with the incentive to re-visit the philosophical underpinnings of western theology although this is not his intent (p.2). Even though Panpsychism in the West, as a theory about theories, does not attempt a philosophical de-Hellenization it does offer to theologians a sub-stratum from which to re-conceive the person as sharing in mind-like qualities with the rest of its environment. From my perspective, the broader concept of mind Skrbina seeks may be found in a de-Hellenized worldview.
August 1, 2022
Introduction
If I were to make a single reading recommendation to those uninitiated in panpsychist philosophy who wish to learn more, it would be this excellent book, an overview of the important role played by panpsychism in Western philosophy and, later, scientific speculation. It is not a philosophic fleshing out of all possible ways panpsychism might be conceived, interpreted, or elaborated but is instead a vast yet compact survey of the embrace of the idea in the history of thought limited to the sphere of Western Culture. (Panpsychism, though called by a variety of other names, is so pervasive in the Eastern philosophies and theologies of Asia that its presence goes without saying.)
Skrbina’s writing style is fluid and articulate. It makes for a pleasurable read, though the price of this style might be found in a relative lack of depth and detail. This however is only to be expected in such a thorough survey. After offering a succinct definition of panpsychism — “[W]e may say panpsychism holds that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality” (p. 2) — he fleshes out comparable but differing terminology like animism, hylozoism, panbiotism, vitalism, pansensism, pantheism, panentheism, and panexperientialism.
He makes clear the status of panpsychism as an ontological metaphysics. It both refers to the ultimate nature of mind and of reality. “In this sense it is a higher-order theory, a meta-theory, of mind. It is a theory about theories. It simply holds that, however one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. Because of this, there are panpsychist extensions of most conventional theories.” (p. 3)
He deftly notes how different panpsychism is from “mechanistic materialism”, but accepts that there are physicalist formulations of panpsychism. The other major contrast is with emergentism, which he claims is assumed to be true by nearly every contemporary philosopher of mind (not even to mention the scientists). “They believe that, in the distant past, mind did not exist. Today it does. Ergo, it must have emerged, in an absolute sense, from an organic milieu that was devoid of mind” (p. 17). Panpsychists see such a brute emergentist claim as equivalent to an inexplicable miracle. Mind could not emerge from no-mind, so it could only have been here all along.
I am not certain that space and time might not in some sense be seen as emergent in terms of Big Bang theories of origin, but I take his point that they are essential to the existence of this universe. Skrbina sums up, “The bottom line seems quite clear: One is either an emergentist, or one is a panpsychist. There seems to be no middle ground.” (p. 20)
Survey
At this point, he begins his detailed survey, which is the bulk of the book. He makes it clear that panpsychism — though often severely repressed by the Church in Mediaeval and early Renaissance times and later, after Galileo, by the scientific worldview — has also been astonishingly pervasive in all Western philosophy, right from its apparent first conceptions beginning with Pythagorus and Heraclitus in ancient Greece.
He finds panpsychism present as potential or actuality in quite a number of ancient approaches, surprisingly perhaps including Plato. In an extended section he makes his argument that Plato was a panpsychist, even though he is generally identified in the history of philosophy as the paradigmatic idealist. Skrbina finds strong evidence in Plato’s writings, but I can only concede that sometimes Plato sounds like a panpsychist. As long as Platonic reality is based in the invisible forms or ideas, Plato will continue to be an idealist, at least as I see it.
He does not see much panpsychism in the Epicureans, who are materialists, but he convincingly portrays the metaphysics behind Stoicism as panpsychist. He sees panpsychist influences among the Neoplatonists, more in Porphyry than in Plotinus, but otherwise ignores any approaches that might be called mystical. The rise of Christendom muzzled all panpsychist thought for a great many years, but Skrbina notably identifies St. Francis of Assisi as somehow evading the inquisition and preaching panpsychism: “Francis’ view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of panpsychism of all things animate and inanimate” (p. 74) Other Christian thinkers who leaned toward panpsychism readily recanted when pressured to do so.
It is in the Renaissance that panpsychism seemed to have a rebirth of his own as so many thinkers avidly embraced the concept even though some of them were monks. I must note that in his survey, Skrbina does not note that these rebellious thinkers were often inspired by the esoteric wisdom of the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus, who was very influential during this time. “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several major philosophers advocated or were strongly sympathetic to panpsychism, including Paracelsus, Cardano, Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno, Campanella, Henry More, Margaret Cavendish, Spinoza, and Leibniz” (p. 78). Some of the most outspoken panpsychists like Giordano Bruno and Thomas Campanella refused to recant to the RC Inquisition with tragic results, Campanella being imprisoned for most of his later life, and Bruno burned at the stake.
The rise of the empiricists (including Bacon, Hobbes, and Kepler) de-emphasized both religion and the inner life of the world but often allowed a kind of pansensism in material objects. Still, counting and objectivity mattered more. “This, then, was the beginning of the mechanistic worldview—the mathematization of natural phenomena. Galileo took this up in earnest, and greatly advanced scientific philosophy. … Materialist and mechanistic philosophy began to dominate Western thinking.” (p. 98)
“The other person of note … is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). A poet and playwright, Cavendish also produced three major works on natural philosophy. … She advocated a form of materialism in which the cosmos was an organic whole composed of organic and animate parts.” (p. 104)
There are major sections on the famous spiritual panpsychists, Leibniz and Spinoza, both remarkable visionaries, but there are also surprising panpsychist tendencies found among the deniers of deity.
From this point on, Galilean science tends to divorce itself from philosophy, becoming both mechanically and reductively materialist, at least until the quantum revolution opened the gates to consciousness once again. There are exceptions among scientists, of course, such as Lotze (1817-1881), Haeckel (1834-1919), and Mach (1838-1916). In 19th century philosophy, panpsychism came into its own under the likes of Schiller, Schopenhauer, and, more controversially, Nietzsche. In America, panpsychism achieved a new depth and philosophical subtlety in the works of Peirce, Royce, James, and others. (C. S. Peirce, if his writings can be penetrated, is unique in this field.) This continued into the twentieth century with Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, and Russell, not to mention others like Teilhard de Chardin and Hartshorne. (Such listings are deceptive. The text itself is much richer with compact discussions and colourful anecdotes, so it’s best the book be read in its entirety.)
It seems the parallel yet divergent approaches of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell present a situation to contemporary panpsychism not unlike that of the Plato-Aristotle schism of ancient times, Whitehead standing in for Plato, the more inclined to inner speculation, and Russell for Aristotle, the more outer world oriented.
Whitehead’s approach indicated that each event in ongoing time – the occasion of experience – lasted about a micro-second. It both emerged from the objective world, providing continuity and was influenced toward novelty by the creativity of the formless, teleological eternal objects. Once its micro-second of experience ended, it became an non-experiencing objective entity, a part of the many, thus Whitehead’s formula, “The many become one and are increased by one” (1929/1978, p. 21). However, experiences can only fuse with the evolutionary addition of an experiencer, which can allow them to be held in memory. Once such memory can be conceptually controlled, as in human beings, experience can reflexively become conscious of itself then and only then becoming conscious experience. Thus panexperientialism (a word not used by Whitehead) is based in unconscious experience. So Whitehead was a panpsychist only in a limited sense.
Whitehead’s student and colleague Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), in the latter part of his career, held to a neutral monist process view in which events were the primary reality, comprising both mind and matter. In that sense he continued the line of thinking of Bergson and Whitehead. Russell’s neutral monism was unique, however, in that he proposed that mind and matter each resulted from a set of causal laws; matter from physical laws of science, mind from “mnemic” laws that were not yet understood. The relationship between these two sets of laws (if there was one) was not clear. (p. 219)
Russell seems unwilling to let experience exist on its own, so he tends more toward dualism, perhaps better seen as a pansensist. Pansensism means experiencing a sensation, which may only be momentary and unremembered by any central processor. Though its effects may linger physically, if it is not remembered, it does not necessarily imply the existence of an experiencer. Pansensism, like panexperientialism does not necessarily imply a mind or experience that is conscious of itself, i.e., a conscious experiencer. Russell recognizes that memory is necessary to bring about consciousness. Russell also appears also to be a panpsychist only in a limited sense. (To his credit, Skrbina does not deal with the hair-splitting trap of analytic philosophy when it comes to dealing with the Byzantine vicissitudes of Russellian monism, constitutive or not.)
Aside from the panpsychist views emerging from a scientific perspective, further philosophical panpsychism in the West up to the present may be broadly summarized as footnotes to Whitehead and/or Russell, the former being the more speculative. Skrbina praises the process philosophers like Hartshorne for carrying on the panpsychist flame in the form of panexperientialism, “most notably Griffin but also including Ford, Birch, De Quincey, and others” (p. 265).
Dual aspect views, which are at least implicitly panpsychist, were defended by thinkers as diverse as Feigl, Nagel, Globus, Plumwood, and Chalmers. In the work of Abram, Berman, Zohar, Wilber, Harvey, and Orr, populist treatments also emerged. The endorsement of panpsychism by the prominent analytic philosopher Galen Strawson was a major development in the field. So-called Russellian monism has been taken up in earnest by professional philosophers, many of whom spell out the panpsychist implications. And various efforts have been made to build upon the insights of Peirce to connect recent work in chaos theory and dynamical systems to forms of panpsychism. (p. 265)
Skrbina cites Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self as emphasizing “that the wavelike nature of quantum particles may be interpreted as mind, and hence ‘the wave/particle duality of quantum “stuff” becomes the most primary mind/body relationship in the world’” (pp. 286-287).
New developments in science led to materialist “heretics” – such as Eddington, Pauli, and Wheeler – embracing panpsychism, at least in some form:
The equation of mass and energy furthered the notion that the underlying nature of matter was something vaguely spirit-like. Quantum mechanics emerged as an accepted theory of atomic and and subatomic particles; its bizarre, indeterminate implications led a number of scientists to panpsychist conclusions, beginning with John Haldane in 1932 and continuing with Jeans, Sherrington, Wright, Rensch, Walker, Cochran, Dyson, Bohm, and Hameroff. (pp. 242-243)
Skrbina does an excellent job of succinctly summarizing each of their contributions or viewpoints and relating them to one another. His last chapter, “Toward a Panpsychist Worldview”, stands alone as a compelling argument for this particular ontology. But he also makes time for a stimulating – and convincing – rebuttal of many of the major recent theories of consciousness that ignore, dismiss, or mock panpsychism: “The standard materialist, being fundamentally committed to an anti-panpsychist view, has no unbiased standpoint from which to make a judgment. Thus any ruling of ‘unintelligible’ or ‘false’ is meaningless. … Materialism, and the accompanying analytical and logical philosophy, seems to have reached the terminal stage.” (p. 337).
If I were to make a single reading recommendation to those uninitiated in panpsychist philosophy who wish to learn more, it would be this excellent book, an overview of the important role played by panpsychism in Western philosophy and, later, scientific speculation. It is not a philosophic fleshing out of all possible ways panpsychism might be conceived, interpreted, or elaborated but is instead a vast yet compact survey of the embrace of the idea in the history of thought limited to the sphere of Western Culture. (Panpsychism, though called by a variety of other names, is so pervasive in the Eastern philosophies and theologies of Asia that its presence goes without saying.)
Skrbina’s writing style is fluid and articulate. It makes for a pleasurable read, though the price of this style might be found in a relative lack of depth and detail. This however is only to be expected in such a thorough survey. After offering a succinct definition of panpsychism — “[W]e may say panpsychism holds that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality” (p. 2) — he fleshes out comparable but differing terminology like animism, hylozoism, panbiotism, vitalism, pansensism, pantheism, panentheism, and panexperientialism.
He makes clear the status of panpsychism as an ontological metaphysics. It both refers to the ultimate nature of mind and of reality. “In this sense it is a higher-order theory, a meta-theory, of mind. It is a theory about theories. It simply holds that, however one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. Because of this, there are panpsychist extensions of most conventional theories.” (p. 3)
He deftly notes how different panpsychism is from “mechanistic materialism”, but accepts that there are physicalist formulations of panpsychism. The other major contrast is with emergentism, which he claims is assumed to be true by nearly every contemporary philosopher of mind (not even to mention the scientists). “They believe that, in the distant past, mind did not exist. Today it does. Ergo, it must have emerged, in an absolute sense, from an organic milieu that was devoid of mind” (p. 17). Panpsychists see such a brute emergentist claim as equivalent to an inexplicable miracle. Mind could not emerge from no-mind, so it could only have been here all along.
Every structured being in the universe – animals, plants, rocks, planets, stars – all, at some point, did not exist; now they do; therefore they did emerge. But not everything can plausibly do so. Time, for instance, seems inconceivable to have ever emerged from a timeless cosmos. So too with space; we simply cannot conceive how spatiality could have come into being in a universe that was not spatial. Time and space must have always existed, everywhere. They are “pan” qualities of reality. … Panpsychists add one more item to the list: mind. Experientially, subjectivity, qualia … the emergence of such things is inconceivable, from a universe utterly without them. … Panpsychists prefer a rational, naturalistic, and non-miraculous universe. And in such a universe, mind must have always been present. (p. 19)
I am not certain that space and time might not in some sense be seen as emergent in terms of Big Bang theories of origin, but I take his point that they are essential to the existence of this universe. Skrbina sums up, “The bottom line seems quite clear: One is either an emergentist, or one is a panpsychist. There seems to be no middle ground.” (p. 20)
Survey
At this point, he begins his detailed survey, which is the bulk of the book. He makes it clear that panpsychism — though often severely repressed by the Church in Mediaeval and early Renaissance times and later, after Galileo, by the scientific worldview — has also been astonishingly pervasive in all Western philosophy, right from its apparent first conceptions beginning with Pythagorus and Heraclitus in ancient Greece.
He finds panpsychism present as potential or actuality in quite a number of ancient approaches, surprisingly perhaps including Plato. In an extended section he makes his argument that Plato was a panpsychist, even though he is generally identified in the history of philosophy as the paradigmatic idealist. Skrbina finds strong evidence in Plato’s writings, but I can only concede that sometimes Plato sounds like a panpsychist. As long as Platonic reality is based in the invisible forms or ideas, Plato will continue to be an idealist, at least as I see it.
He does not see much panpsychism in the Epicureans, who are materialists, but he convincingly portrays the metaphysics behind Stoicism as panpsychist. He sees panpsychist influences among the Neoplatonists, more in Porphyry than in Plotinus, but otherwise ignores any approaches that might be called mystical. The rise of Christendom muzzled all panpsychist thought for a great many years, but Skrbina notably identifies St. Francis of Assisi as somehow evading the inquisition and preaching panpsychism: “Francis’ view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of panpsychism of all things animate and inanimate” (p. 74) Other Christian thinkers who leaned toward panpsychism readily recanted when pressured to do so.
It is in the Renaissance that panpsychism seemed to have a rebirth of his own as so many thinkers avidly embraced the concept even though some of them were monks. I must note that in his survey, Skrbina does not note that these rebellious thinkers were often inspired by the esoteric wisdom of the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus, who was very influential during this time. “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several major philosophers advocated or were strongly sympathetic to panpsychism, including Paracelsus, Cardano, Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno, Campanella, Henry More, Margaret Cavendish, Spinoza, and Leibniz” (p. 78). Some of the most outspoken panpsychists like Giordano Bruno and Thomas Campanella refused to recant to the RC Inquisition with tragic results, Campanella being imprisoned for most of his later life, and Bruno burned at the stake.
The rise of the empiricists (including Bacon, Hobbes, and Kepler) de-emphasized both religion and the inner life of the world but often allowed a kind of pansensism in material objects. Still, counting and objectivity mattered more. “This, then, was the beginning of the mechanistic worldview—the mathematization of natural phenomena. Galileo took this up in earnest, and greatly advanced scientific philosophy. … Materialist and mechanistic philosophy began to dominate Western thinking.” (p. 98)
“The other person of note … is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). A poet and playwright, Cavendish also produced three major works on natural philosophy. … She advocated a form of materialism in which the cosmos was an organic whole composed of organic and animate parts.” (p. 104)
There are major sections on the famous spiritual panpsychists, Leibniz and Spinoza, both remarkable visionaries, but there are also surprising panpsychist tendencies found among the deniers of deity.
Among the most notorious of these [atheist or near-atheist] philosophers was Julien LaMettrie (1709-1751). Author of the provocative and scandalous L’Homme Machine [The Human Machine], LaMettrie was the first thinker to unabashedly—though anonymously—claim that man was purely a natural automaton and did not require an immortal soul to account for his behavior. … In openly denying the immaterial soul, he carried scientific philosophy to its logical limit. ...
It is quite common, even today, to equate materialism with mechanism. But, as has been noted, the two are logically independent. … Though he obviously adopted the term “machine” in his L’Homme Machine, it was in a specifically vitalistic sense. LaMettrie’s writing demonstrated that he had quasi-panpsychist and hylozoist inclinations, which necessarily have no role in a mechanistic materialism. Vitalistic materialism sees some degree of life and mind in all things; it seeks a natural rather than a supernatural explanation. (pp. 122-123)
From this point on, Galilean science tends to divorce itself from philosophy, becoming both mechanically and reductively materialist, at least until the quantum revolution opened the gates to consciousness once again. There are exceptions among scientists, of course, such as Lotze (1817-1881), Haeckel (1834-1919), and Mach (1838-1916). In 19th century philosophy, panpsychism came into its own under the likes of Schiller, Schopenhauer, and, more controversially, Nietzsche. In America, panpsychism achieved a new depth and philosophical subtlety in the works of Peirce, Royce, James, and others. (C. S. Peirce, if his writings can be penetrated, is unique in this field.) This continued into the twentieth century with Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, and Russell, not to mention others like Teilhard de Chardin and Hartshorne. (Such listings are deceptive. The text itself is much richer with compact discussions and colourful anecdotes, so it’s best the book be read in its entirety.)
It seems the parallel yet divergent approaches of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell present a situation to contemporary panpsychism not unlike that of the Plato-Aristotle schism of ancient times, Whitehead standing in for Plato, the more inclined to inner speculation, and Russell for Aristotle, the more outer world oriented.
The best-known and most controversial panpsychist of the twentieth century was Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). The nominal founder of process philosophy, Whitehead took the insights of Heraclitus, Bergson, James, and Russell and combined them with the revelations of the so-called new physics of the day to create an intricate and complex philosophical system. Process philosophy saw time as a fundamental ontological entity, something deeply implicated in the nature of being. … On this view, the event is the fundamental reality of the world. (p. 213)
Whitehead’s approach indicated that each event in ongoing time – the occasion of experience – lasted about a micro-second. It both emerged from the objective world, providing continuity and was influenced toward novelty by the creativity of the formless, teleological eternal objects. Once its micro-second of experience ended, it became an non-experiencing objective entity, a part of the many, thus Whitehead’s formula, “The many become one and are increased by one” (1929/1978, p. 21). However, experiences can only fuse with the evolutionary addition of an experiencer, which can allow them to be held in memory. Once such memory can be conceptually controlled, as in human beings, experience can reflexively become conscious of itself then and only then becoming conscious experience. Thus panexperientialism (a word not used by Whitehead) is based in unconscious experience. So Whitehead was a panpsychist only in a limited sense.
Whitehead’s student and colleague Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), in the latter part of his career, held to a neutral monist process view in which events were the primary reality, comprising both mind and matter. In that sense he continued the line of thinking of Bergson and Whitehead. Russell’s neutral monism was unique, however, in that he proposed that mind and matter each resulted from a set of causal laws; matter from physical laws of science, mind from “mnemic” laws that were not yet understood. The relationship between these two sets of laws (if there was one) was not clear. (p. 219)
Russell seems unwilling to let experience exist on its own, so he tends more toward dualism, perhaps better seen as a pansensist. Pansensism means experiencing a sensation, which may only be momentary and unremembered by any central processor. Though its effects may linger physically, if it is not remembered, it does not necessarily imply the existence of an experiencer. Pansensism, like panexperientialism does not necessarily imply a mind or experience that is conscious of itself, i.e., a conscious experiencer. Russell recognizes that memory is necessary to bring about consciousness. Russell also appears also to be a panpsychist only in a limited sense. (To his credit, Skrbina does not deal with the hair-splitting trap of analytic philosophy when it comes to dealing with the Byzantine vicissitudes of Russellian monism, constitutive or not.)
Aside from the panpsychist views emerging from a scientific perspective, further philosophical panpsychism in the West up to the present may be broadly summarized as footnotes to Whitehead and/or Russell, the former being the more speculative. Skrbina praises the process philosophers like Hartshorne for carrying on the panpsychist flame in the form of panexperientialism, “most notably Griffin but also including Ford, Birch, De Quincey, and others” (p. 265).
Dual aspect views, which are at least implicitly panpsychist, were defended by thinkers as diverse as Feigl, Nagel, Globus, Plumwood, and Chalmers. In the work of Abram, Berman, Zohar, Wilber, Harvey, and Orr, populist treatments also emerged. The endorsement of panpsychism by the prominent analytic philosopher Galen Strawson was a major development in the field. So-called Russellian monism has been taken up in earnest by professional philosophers, many of whom spell out the panpsychist implications. And various efforts have been made to build upon the insights of Peirce to connect recent work in chaos theory and dynamical systems to forms of panpsychism. (p. 265)
Skrbina cites Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self as emphasizing “that the wavelike nature of quantum particles may be interpreted as mind, and hence ‘the wave/particle duality of quantum “stuff” becomes the most primary mind/body relationship in the world’” (pp. 286-287).
New developments in science led to materialist “heretics” – such as Eddington, Pauli, and Wheeler – embracing panpsychism, at least in some form:
The equation of mass and energy furthered the notion that the underlying nature of matter was something vaguely spirit-like. Quantum mechanics emerged as an accepted theory of atomic and and subatomic particles; its bizarre, indeterminate implications led a number of scientists to panpsychist conclusions, beginning with John Haldane in 1932 and continuing with Jeans, Sherrington, Wright, Rensch, Walker, Cochran, Dyson, Bohm, and Hameroff. (pp. 242-243)
Skrbina does an excellent job of succinctly summarizing each of their contributions or viewpoints and relating them to one another. His last chapter, “Toward a Panpsychist Worldview”, stands alone as a compelling argument for this particular ontology. But he also makes time for a stimulating – and convincing – rebuttal of many of the major recent theories of consciousness that ignore, dismiss, or mock panpsychism: “The standard materialist, being fundamentally committed to an anti-panpsychist view, has no unbiased standpoint from which to make a judgment. Thus any ruling of ‘unintelligible’ or ‘false’ is meaningless. … Materialism, and the accompanying analytical and logical philosophy, seems to have reached the terminal stage.” (p. 337).
April 21, 2026
THE book on Panpsychism. As a kid, I was a Panpsychist by default, and only through an education in modern science and religion was it trained out of me. As I've gotten older, I've found myself gravitating back towards it, and I'm excited to see the stigma against this philosophy starting to thaw in serious circles. The author may be a little biased in how broadly he includes historical figures as Panpsychists, but he does an excellent job drawing directly from their literature and letting the reader come to their own conclusions. Scholarly but incredibly readable, I'm so grateful this book exists.
Read
March 19, 2022an interesting and illuminating overview on an idea often dismissed out of hand as frivolous and silly by too many supposedly serious thinkers. I was a little frustrated at the all too conventional chronology of philosphy being presented as the greeks, 2000 years of nothing worth talking about, and then descartes. Also think maybe he sometimes provides a little too simplistic interpretations of certain philosophers ideas to back up his own thesis. But i would still recommend as a starting point for pansychism and how it relates to many other philosophical frameworks
September 22, 2025
The standard reference on panpsychism. Comprehensive but accessible, and avoids unnecessary philosophical jargon, providing a clear and concise historical account. While its structure can feel somewhat repetitive as chapters follow a similar pattern, the book remains a valuable resource.
August 4, 2023
Learned lots of new stuff.
August 16, 2025
Panpsychism in the West by David Skrbina is an excellent book, offering a thorough and detailed exploration of the historical development of panpsychism in Western philosophy. Contrary to the common perception that panpsychism is a fringe view, Skrbina illustrates how it was a widespread belief, with roots extending back to the ancient Greeks. While a full summary would be extensive, I’ll highlight some key points.
Panpsychism posits that mind and the physical are fundamentally conjoined, existing in parallel from the beginning. All matter possesses both an extrinsic, "physical" aspect and an intrinsic, "mental" aspect. It is a meta-theory of mind, asserting that all things possess some mind-like quality. Importantly, this view does not conflict with modern empirical findings. Skrbina carefully examines the perspectives of numerous panpsychist thinkers across history, including Spinoza, Diderot, Empedocles, Schopenhauer, Plato, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Fechner, and Galen Strawson, among others. The book is well-structured and systematically identifies recurring patterns and arguments in their works.
One of the most compelling arguments Skrbina discusses is the Argument from Non-Emergence: “It is inconceivable that mind should emerge from a world in which no mind existed; therefore mind always existed, in even the simplest of structures” (329). This is encapsulated in the principle ex nihilo nihil fit (“nothing comes from nothing”). Another significant argument is the Argument by Continuity: “A common principle of substance exists in all things. In humans, it accounts for our soul or mind, and thus by extrapolation it infers mind in all things” (330). This argument also rejects the problem of arbitrarily distinguishing between enminded and supposedly mindless objects.
Skrbina also addresses the Combination Problem, a central challenge to panpsychism: How can a unified consciousness emerge from the mental qualities of lower-order entities, such as atoms or subatomic particles? He provides several critiques of this problem, referencing William James’s conclusion that “the self-compounding of mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain fact… mental facts do function both singly and together, at once” (323). Skrbina also invokes Diderot’s analogy of a swarm of bees, arguing that the tight interaction and continual action-reaction within a cluster is sufficient to establish the unity of a collective mass.
Personally, I lean toward panpsychism or philosophical idealism or possibly both. While I haven’t yet decided between the two, I am firmly opposed to physicalism. The Hard Problem of consciousness points to the inadequacy of reductionist accounts, which tend to explain away rather than genuinely address the interiority of experience. I also appreciated Skrbina’s insights into dynamical systems theory and its connection to the ubiquity of mind (pp. 300–302).
Panpsychism posits that mind and the physical are fundamentally conjoined, existing in parallel from the beginning. All matter possesses both an extrinsic, "physical" aspect and an intrinsic, "mental" aspect. It is a meta-theory of mind, asserting that all things possess some mind-like quality. Importantly, this view does not conflict with modern empirical findings. Skrbina carefully examines the perspectives of numerous panpsychist thinkers across history, including Spinoza, Diderot, Empedocles, Schopenhauer, Plato, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Fechner, and Galen Strawson, among others. The book is well-structured and systematically identifies recurring patterns and arguments in their works.
One of the most compelling arguments Skrbina discusses is the Argument from Non-Emergence: “It is inconceivable that mind should emerge from a world in which no mind existed; therefore mind always existed, in even the simplest of structures” (329). This is encapsulated in the principle ex nihilo nihil fit (“nothing comes from nothing”). Another significant argument is the Argument by Continuity: “A common principle of substance exists in all things. In humans, it accounts for our soul or mind, and thus by extrapolation it infers mind in all things” (330). This argument also rejects the problem of arbitrarily distinguishing between enminded and supposedly mindless objects.
Skrbina also addresses the Combination Problem, a central challenge to panpsychism: How can a unified consciousness emerge from the mental qualities of lower-order entities, such as atoms or subatomic particles? He provides several critiques of this problem, referencing William James’s conclusion that “the self-compounding of mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain fact… mental facts do function both singly and together, at once” (323). Skrbina also invokes Diderot’s analogy of a swarm of bees, arguing that the tight interaction and continual action-reaction within a cluster is sufficient to establish the unity of a collective mass.
Personally, I lean toward panpsychism or philosophical idealism or possibly both. While I haven’t yet decided between the two, I am firmly opposed to physicalism. The Hard Problem of consciousness points to the inadequacy of reductionist accounts, which tend to explain away rather than genuinely address the interiority of experience. I also appreciated Skrbina’s insights into dynamical systems theory and its connection to the ubiquity of mind (pp. 300–302).
July 4, 2012
Didn't finish this one. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unab...
March 9, 2016
Competent look inot the world and theory of panpsychism but not excactly what was expected.
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