Freya Mathews is an Australian environmental philosopher who argues that the universe is one living, self-creating whole, and that matter is not dead stuff but has an inner side, a view she now calls living cosmos panpsychism. In The Ecological Self (1991) she argued that each living being is a self made by and bound up with its environment, and that the universe itself may be a Self; in For Love of Matter (2003) she argued that the world is to be met and encountered, not only explained. Her picture of an interconnected, living world comes close to animism at many points, though she reaches it by philosophical argument, sets her own view apart from animism, and does not count rivers or rocks as selves in their own right, which Therapeutic Shamanism does.
Who is Freya Mathews? #
An Australian philosopher who has taught in Australian universities since 1979 and is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Philosophy at La Trobe University, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her books include The Ecological Self (1991), For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (2003), Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture (2005) and Ardea: A Philosophical Novella (2016). She also helps to run a private biodiversity reserve in northern Victoria.1
What did she argue in The Ecological Self? #
That modern culture rests on a mistaken picture of the world, and that a better one is possible. The old picture, which she traces to Newton’s physics, treats the universe as a heap of separate atoms, and people, too, as separate units, islands bumping into one another. In its place she argued, drawing on the philosopher Spinoza and on twentieth-century physics, that the universe is one continuous, indivisible whole, within which particular things arise like ripples on water.
Within that whole, some things are selves. A self, for Mathews, is a system that keeps itself in being and strives to go on, what Spinoza called conatus, the “endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being”.2 Organisms are selves, and so, she argued, may be ecosystems, the living Earth and the universe as a whole, which she called the ecocosm.3 No self stands alone. Quoting the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, “The unit of survival is an organism-in-its-environment.”4 That is the ecological self, a self that is made by its relationships with everything around it.
She also argued that the picture a culture holds of the universe shapes how its people live. “A good cosmology is good for its adherents, and a bad cosmology predictably has the reverse effect”, and a culture with no living picture of the world leaves people adrift.5
What did she say about identifying with nature? #
That it is not enough on its own. The deep ecology movement, following the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, taught that the small human self can widen until it identifies with ever larger wholes, and in the end with the whole of nature, so that caring for the world becomes a kind of self-love. Mathews agreed with the direction but warned that identifying with the universe means nothing unless the universe really is a self with its own striving and its own good. Otherwise identification could as easily leave a person indifferent to what is lost, or even licence harm.6 Her answer was to argue that the universe is such a Self.
What did she argue about matter? #
That matter has an inside. In For Love of Matter she argued that every part of the physical world has a felt, inner dimension as well as the outer one physics measures, so that matter is present to itself and not merely there to be seen. This is panpsychism, and she was careful about which kind. Defensible versions, she wrote, “do not in my opinion include those caricatures that inscribe faces on individual tables and chairs.” The universe as a whole is a psychophysical unity, and individual objects share its nature “but are by no means necessarily subjects in their own right”.7 In the new Introduction to The Ecological Self (2021) she named her position living cosmos panpsychism.8
From this she drew a way of living. If the world has its own inner life, the right relationship with it is encounter, not only investigation. People can kneel at the world’s feet as its people instead of standing over it as its masters.9 They can call it up and address it, as in the Aboriginal English idea of “singing up” country, awakening it to the presence of its people.10 “The point is not to explain the world, but to sing it.”11 See What is panpsychism, and how is it different from animism?
How do her ideas connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At many points, reached from a different direction. Her ecological self, made by its relationships, sits close to the shamanic experience of the interconnected web. In ordinary reality we experience ourselves as separate individuals; looked at more deeply, everything is connected to everything else and part of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, which is why shamanic peoples experience a world that is profoundly alive and can be communicated with.12 Her claim that matter has an inner life parallels the animist experience that everything is made of energy, and that this energy is alive and conscious.
Her insistence that the world is to be met, not only dissected, is close to the heart of shamanic practice, which is about relationship with the other-than-human Peoples. She also says that panpsychism is reached in the end by experience, with argument giving no more than “permission and motivation” for the practice of encounter.13 Animism goes further on this point, since it is not a belief so much as an experience.14
And she holds that the One and the Many are both fully real, the universe as a whole and the particular selves within it. In Therapeutic Shamanism, too, everything is part of Great SpiritGreat Mystery (Great Spirit). The unknowable from which everything comes. Better rendered ‘the Great Mystery’: animism has no interventionist creator-god, and the truly infinite cannot be prayed to, bargained with or journeyed to. More about this on one level, and separation and individuality are just as real on another; one does not cancel the other out.15 See Is animism the same as ‘all is one’?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Over who counts as a self. In The Ecological Self Mathews asks whether a river is a self and concludes that it is not, because a river does not strive to keep itself in being, so rivers “are dynamic but non-purposive, and accordingly fail to qualify as selves”, and rocky outcrops are the same. They matter as parts of the living systems that are selves, but not in their own right.16 In Therapeutic Shamanism the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, which include rocks, water, air and the chemical elements, are themselves conscious and alive, just in a way very different from ours, and our animist ancestors knew that the mountain, the rivers, the rocks and the waterfalls were alive and to be treated with honour and respect.17 See What are Stone People and what gifts do they bring?
Mathews draws the line between her view and animism herself. Animism, she writes, has traditionally meant a landscape full of indwelling spirits, where her panpsychism places an inner, psychic side in matter itself.18 Animism in Therapeutic Shamanism is something else again, neither a theory of spirits inside things nor a theory of mind in matter, but the lived experience of a world full of persons, kin to be in relationship with, on a round table where nothing ranks above anything else. Her universe as the one great subject, with ordinary things sharing its nature without being subjects in their own right, is not the same as animism, in which each being is a person in its own right.
What do critics say about her panpsychism? #
Critics of panpsychism in general object that there is no direct evidence for consciousness in matter, since it cannot be measured, and that no one has explained how tiny scraps of experience could combine into a single mind like ours, which is known as the combination problem.19
Mathews replies in two ways. Starting from the whole universe as one subject, not from tiny particles, avoids the combination problem as usually put. And on simplicity, she argues that her view needs only our own plain, real universe, with the single addition that it has an inner as well as an outer side, where some rival pictures in physics need an almost endless number of unseen universes.20
