WHEN ROCKS BECOME TELEPHONES
 

A brief philosophical look at how perhaps “inanimate” objects may not be.

Craig Chalquist

March 7th, 2022

Describing Charles Hartshorne’s Whiteheadian concept of compound individuals, David Griffin writes that they “differ in kind from mere aggregations of individuals, such as rocks and telephones,” because the molecules constituting them do not create a higher-order sense of experience. The older term, “panpsychism,” implies “that all things are psyches” and suggests they are conscious. But they are not.[1]  

Griffin equates psyche with consciousness. However, depth psychology observes a distinction between the two. In virtually all the work of Freud, Jung, Janet, and their colleagues, consciousness is held as surface, a very small layer of a greater and perhaps infinite psychic field. Freud compared consciousness to the tip of an iceberg,[2]  Jung to a chain of islands rising from a vast sea, with the psyche the sum of all conscious and unconscious processes.[3]

At first blush, this might seem a squabble about terminology. Whether we refer to “psyche” or “experience,” rocks and telephones lack it.

Or do they?

Quite some time ago, back when the word “terrapsychology” was still floating adrift somewhere in my unconscious, I went for my usual late afternoon walk. I was living in Escondido at the time. Several significant losses had placed me in a state of protracted grieving, and my heart felt heavy as I slowly made my way around the neighborhood, lost in thought.

At one point, from sheer soul weariness, I halted and put my back to a tree. A breeze sprang up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a leaf detach from above me and float down. I opened my hand, not caring whether the leaf landed on it or went by.

As it settled into my palm, I looked down and noticed its shape: a teardrop. It had landed in just the right position to resemble a falling tear.

A strange feeling crept over me then. Instead of remaining the distracted observer of this part of the neighborhood—leaf, tree, sidewalk, street, houses—my perspective reversed. It was as though I were being “watched” by these things. The sense that they understood and even sympathized with my grief was strong, intuitive, and uncanny. I felt seen.

Afterward, the usual explanations occurred: projection, sensing what I desired to sense, and so on. But none of these could erase that uncanny moment.

Had I known then of the Griffin passage quoted above, I would have had a hard time accepting it. The difficulties only increased as my encounters with a sentient-seeming world multiplied.

About a month after the leaf event, I rode my bike down the street cursing the fact that I could not find even part-time work. As a graduate student of depth psychology, I was putting together what I thought of as the first steps toward a psychoanalysis of place: a methodology for studying how the presence of the locales we inhabit works its way deeply into us, such that crowded freeways parallel crowded communications, flattened meadows depress us, restored rivers renew our own vitality. The parallels run beyond causal or literal effects.

Seized with the feeling that Escondido itself was preventing me from working (I was studying the city from a depth perspective), I said out loud, “You know what? Fuck this place.” My mouth had not closed before a bee flew into it.

I spat it out reflexively, glad that it had not stung me: my last bee sting had sent me to the hospital in anaphylactic shock. As I tried to make sense of this, a car cut me off. I stopped at an intersection and was cut off again while crossing it. Another car brushed me. I stopped and sat on my bike.

What I perceived then is difficult to describe. I felt as though the entire city were angry with me. A brooding, before-the-storm heaviness lurked invisibly but palpably on the air.

“Sorry,” I said. In a few moments the heaviness dissipated, and I went my way without further near-misses.

The rocks and telephones, automobiles and bees, lack the nervous system for a differentiated consciousness. But they are not mere aggregates. They, and we, occupy some kind of intersubjective field together. And they speak.

References

Freud, Sigmund. 2005. The Unconscious. London: Penguin.

Jung, Carl. 1970. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Griffin, David. “Consciousness as Subjective Form: Whitehead’s Nonreductionist Naturalism.” In Weber, Michael, and Weekes, Anderson, eds. 2009. Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind. New York: SUNY Press.