A World Where Dust Breathes Forth Its Joy
Can panpsychism liberate us from meaningless materialism?
There is a line from William Blake that inspired the fantasy novels of Philip Pullman. The English poet tells of one day talking with a fairy, and the fairy makes him a promise. Together, the sprite says, they will perceive that the world is awake and that “every particle of dust breathes forth its joy”.
Seen aright, even humble dirt is alive.
Pullman was captivated by the vision. The phrase led to the central role of Dust in his great fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. Much of the action of the novels is driven by the human effort to detect dust and understand how it is animate. And there’s philosophy behind Pullman’s interest in this lowly stuff. The philosophy is the theory known as panpsychism.
The name is from two Greek words: pan, meaning all, and psyche, meaning mind. Panpsychism or “all-mind” is, therefore, the proposal that reality is, at base, mind-like rather than made of inert physical matter.
The notion is completely counter to a general assumption of modern science, which is that the universe functions like a vast assembly of interacting components: atoms ruled by forces. Under this view, the cosmos doesn’t think or feel. Rather, it follows blind laws and mechanical processes, which science works out and describes.
However, this materialism raises big problems, of which one of the biggest is how entities that clearly think and feel, such as us, have evolved. The quandary is called the hard problem of consciousness, “hard” because there is no agreed solution to the problem, with many scientists and philosophers admitting they have little or no idea how to tackle it at all.
This is where panpsychism comes in, as it argues that mind, in some form or another, goes all the way down.
Atoms and forces, for example, aren’t obeying laws but following inclinations, to behave in this way or that. Brains are complex enough arrangements of this mental substrate to produce thinking and feeling: the qualities we call consciousness. Hence the appeal of Blake’s vision: “Every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.”
One of the most lively advocates of panpsychism is the British philosopher, Philip Goff. He has overcome the fear of opprobrium and ridicule that can come with embracing the philosophy; as he puts it, panpsychism is often treated as simply “crazy” or “obviously wrong”. Who is prepared to put their reputation on the line to defend it?
He is, and has worked out some of the implications. It’s quite a journey.
Panpsychism might mean that the universe recognises and responds to considerations of value, something no machine does of its own volition, not even having volition. Things of beauty would, therefore, be intended - not merely the byproducts of random evolutionary processes. Life such as is found on Earth could be the end product of nearly 14 billion years of deliberating intelligence, and maybe not the final end point to boot.
Richer futures may await our far-distant children.
Our lives have meaning, Goff believes, because we are contributing to the great project of existence. The good we enjoy and the suffering we bear are significant. These experiences are not forgotten but are remembered by the cosmos, helping forge possibilities for tomorrow.
The conjecture is fascinating and, to my mind, a great step on from the stoical atheism that has recently dominated the cultural climate, at least in the Western world. This bleak worldview proposes that human dignity comes with braving the meaningless that surrounds us.
But that mindset looks increasingly outdated.
Yes, there is still a tendency among public intellectuals to assume that the cosmos is an enormous, whirring gadget and that our brains, too, are akin to advanced computers wired in certain ways. But I doubt any physicist, if pressed, would agree that such metaphors are right.
Since the revolutions of Albert Einstein, the cosmos no longer fits the mechanical model. Quantum fields and entangled particles, gravity waves and time dilation, just don’t work like that. A new vocabulary is needed to refresh our imaginative engagement with reality.
Maybe Blake can help inspire new metaphors. Ditch “dark Satanic mills”, welcome “Eternity’s sunrise”.
Maybe belief in God has a place, too? Within pantheism, the idea that nature and God are one and the same thing might follow.
Goff, for one, holds off from a traditional view of God, mostly because of what is called the problem of evil. Which is a problem. How can the suffering that comes with being conscious be reconciled with the intentions of a deity who can be called good, especially since suffering can be so apparently unnecessarily and horrifically excessive?
I don’t know the answer to that, though it does seem to me that we wouldn’t recognise the dreadfulness of suffering, and so deeply object to it, if love and goodness weren’t fundamental qualities of existence.
Further, Goff’s theology seems inadequate to me. He argues for a divinity with limited powers who learns about what is good through the painful emergence of things: in the jargon, a process view. But this feels like a vision of the divine made to the measure of human understanding: one finite being imagining another finite being with more power.
This deity is not adequate to the name of God. For one thing, a lesser deity would need access to a further source of transcendent goodness to distinguish the good from the bad: what Iris Murdoch called “the sovereignty of good.” In theology, a general principle is that lesser gods not only imply a supreme Being of beings or Light of lights but a God beyond being itself.
Another problem is that Goff’s notion of power seems strikingly mechanical, as if God were a kind of omnipresent fixer. But divine power is not about celestial prodding and poking, but an eternal allure. God’s power draws us and all things towards what is good, beautiful and true; it is a freeing power of attraction and sympathy, rather than a determining power of cause and effect - dunamis rather than exousia, in the ancient Greek.
Other issues dog panpsychism. Philosophers and the scientists who consider it have other reasons for rejection. If mind not matter is basic, then technical issues arise, such as how countless bits of mental dust can make a unified single centre of awareness, such as you and me: the so-called combination problem.
And yet, for all the problems, there is an energy to the panpsychist proposal that won’t easily be dissipated. The hard problem is otherwise just too hard.
Further, panpsychism attracts younger minds. I remember one weary academic protesting to me that too many undergraduates these days want to learn about it. But maybe younger generations sense that something is up with the received worldview? Physicalism is inadequate.
Also, I suspect that many physicists secretly don’t believe it. The cosmos they study appears to be an expression of impressive, superhuman intelligence, so maybe it is. The physics is smarter than them, which is why it is so fascinating to study.
For myself, I reckon panpsychism is a stepping-stone theory. Why wouldn’t it take a seemingly crazy proposal to shake us free of meaningless materialism, given that idea has become so entrenched?
No. We are aware because awareness is a feature of the universe that bore us. Is that thought so outlandish? Is it really one for the fairies?
The world is not a machine, but a sacrament. Every particle of dust a whispered hymn, every atom a trembling vesper of the unseen. Blake’s fairy did not lie: the cosmos is awake, not as a mind trapped in matter, but as a mind becoming matter, a slow, groaning descent of spirit into the weight of things. This is the heart of incarnational mysticism, that God does not stand aloof, spinning the gears of creation from afar, but inhabits the dust, breathes in its fractures, suffers its longing.
Panpsychism, far from a mere philosophical curiosity, might be the dim echo of this deeper truth: that if mind is indeed fundamental, then matter is not its opposite, but its vessel. The universe does not have consciousness; it is consciousness, crucified across the dimensions of space and time, aching toward its own transfiguration. The "combination problem" that troubles philosophers, how tiny sparks of awareness coalesce into a unified self, is but the shadow of a greater mystery: how the infinite contracts itself into finitude, how the Word becomes flesh.
Here, panpsychism brushes against panentheism, not as a crude pantheism that flattens God into nature, but as the recognition that the world is in God, even as God exceeds it. The dust does not merely "breathe forth its joy", it groans, as Paul says in Romans, caught between the already and the not-yet of its own redemption. If even atoms have inclinations, as Goff suggests, then perhaps they, too, are pilgrims, drawn toward a goodness they cannot yet name.
And what of suffering? The God of process theology, learning alongside creation, is too small… a demiurge fumbling in the dark. But the God of the mystics is not aloof, nor is He merely sympathetic. He is immanent in the agony, the divine consciousness poured out into the very fabric of a broken world. The hard problem of evil is not solved, but assumed, as Christ assumed the cross.
The materialists are right about one thing: dust is all we are. But they have forgotten the older truth: that dust is also what God became.
Thoroughly impressed with the Blake book. Thanks for the discount at Realisation! It was refreshing at the festival to see Christianity still healthy in Britain; in the States it's become the sheeps' clothing favored by our wolves. Jesus' message has not only largely been lost here for many, but fully inverted, his name claimed by evil. But enough on our sad politics. For my part I see the creative in nature, including our own, as wellspring of virtue. To more enable this, for ourselves and others, essential. Yet on defining 'God' I go with the first draft of the young Shaftesbury's first published essay, from his Dutch exile, arguing a flawed image of God is worse than no image at all. He later came to worship Nature as God, while defending himself against the charge of atheism. Shaftesbury was the source of Franklin's deism, via Characteristicks, read by Franklin as a teen. You complain of the deists' 'sky God'. Yet the deists largely followed Shaftesbury, with God not in the sky but sublime Nature. That quibble aside, the depth you've brought to Blake equals that of an older Blake scholar I once sat in the class of, Allen Ginsberg. Quite enlivening!