Jackie Trono - Sheldrake On The Reanimation of Nature

Outlining the history of man’s ontological relationship to nature, Rupert Sheldrake discusses the progression from an animate understanding before the rise of materialism to an inanimate understanding that has prevailed to modern times with materialism to the reanimated understanding of nature that is arising from modern science in his book, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God.

I find Sheldrake’s commentary on materialism particularly interesting as I used to share that view, which I know find to be patently false. Sheldrake writes,

“Materialism in its philosophical sense asserts that only matter is real, and that everything, including human consciousness, can be explained in terms of matter. As a political doctrine, it places the highest value on material well-being and material progress. In its everyday sense, it refers to a preoccupation with material needs and desires rather than spiritual values. In all these senses, the material world is the sole reality, or at least the only reality of importance” (Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature 74).

Materialism, then, excludes any and all possibility of something transcendent of matter, which directly contradicts quotidian and metaphysical experience of consciousness. Materialists would have us understand that completely counterintuitive idea that the mind is the brain and the brain is no more than an electrochemical machine. Francis Crick put it in the following way, and called this senseless idea the Astonishing Hypothesis.

“‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules…. This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing” (Qtd. Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At 13).

The hypothesis is so astonishing and alien because it bears only a partial reality. The human mind is more than the sum of its constituent subatomic interactions. Clearly, there is something about consciousness that is inexplicable by physics. Once again, materialists would argue that it simply is a lack of the proper instrumentalities that makes the carry-over from brain chemistry to consciousness unclear. However, I find this argument weak considering that it insists that something that obviously exists – individual choice resultant from a consciousness necessarily comprised of more than merely deterministic electrochemical interactions – does not based on what appears to be nothing more than speculation.