Universal Minds: Inspired by Panpsychism and Siri Hustvedt
Watercolor, ink, and India ink on paper
When I was little, I would fill my stuffed animals with my imagination until the cloth and stuffing came alive, or so I thought. I convinced myself that these toys thought and felt and loved as I did.
Perhaps this was pure imagination; perhaps it was deep empathy, but as I grew older, I found myself attached to even more inanimate objects. A rock or feather or note or piece of fabric all at once held possibility, and the possibility quickly turned into a kind of humanness. I found myself anthropomorphizing these objects.
As years go by, my anthropomorphism has become a bit more objective. So when I read a passage in Siri Hustvedt’s book The Blazing World, a term that brought succor to my childhood caring for inanimate things, this term is “panpsychism,” defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as “the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.”According to panpsychism, the mind, soul, or consciousness is a universal element shared by all things–animate and inanimate. Hustvedt unravels panpsychism in The Blazing World by way of a daughter making a movie about a woman named Esperanza who hoarded objects, objects nestled in piles of rags so they would be “nice and comfy”:
“After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of ‘panpsychism.’ Mother said this meant that the mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and ‘it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position’. Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza.”
Whether through our childhood toys, moments, or the scraps of our daily lives, each of us has probably experienced panpsychism. Perhaps we need to keep panpsychism in mind as we interact with each other. Perhaps the empathy and compassion we desperately need to connect can be found inside us already, in our minds, our imaginations.
(Update 11/9/23: For a fun and engaging deeper dive into panpsychism, check out Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness By Philip Goff.)
272 days done, 93 to go.
NadiaCDM 