Pan in Panti

Emanuele Coccia, a 21st century European Philosopher and Botanist, has contributed a new book to the rapidly growing library of works on the biosphere, the noosphere, and panpsychism. To be honest, The Life of Plants is a little too ‘new age’ for my taste, but it includes some paragraphs on metaphysics which, I believe, significantly advance the conversation.

Almost all Western philosophers ground their ideas in Aristotle or Plato, but Coccia grounds his thinking in the ideas of Anaxagoras. Part of the cultural explosion that was Greece in the 5th century BCE, Anaxagoras is credited with our title meme: Pan in Panti, “everything (is) in everything”. 

Part of the genius of early Christianity (40 to 325 CE) is the doctrine of Incarnation – the idea that God, creator of Universe, is incarnate as a quantum of being (Jesus Christ) in that Universe. Turns out, Anaxagoras had his own model of incarnation 500 years before John and Paul (2500 years before George and Ringo). In fact, Anaxagoras went even further than Nicaea: everything is incarnate in everything.

Unfortunately, the wisdom of the pre-Socratics was largely swept away by the more academic and systematic works of Plato and Aristotle. Happily though, the wisdom of the New Testament writers has endured and encouraged us to appreciate anew the contributions of Anaxagoras, et al.

Let’s listen-in on some of Coccia’s ideas: “Everything needs to be in everything…to experience being in something that is in turn in us…According to Anaxagoras, this absolute, reciprocal mixture that seems to make everything the site of everything else…is the form of the world and of all being in the world. For there to be a world…the particular and the whole have to interpenetrate, mutually and completely…each thing contains and is contained by every other thing.”

Coccia is wrestling with a common philosophical dilemma. How can we reconcile the solidarity and interactivity of the universe with its lumpiness, i.e. the particularity of events, objects, and qualities? 

20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, suggested that the gap could be bridged by ‘actual entities’ (events), linked with one another by ‘prehensions’ (feelings) and cooperating to form ‘societies’ (objects and persons). 

In Whitehead’s model, every ‘trajectory’ connects God’s Primordial Nature (conceptual values) with God’s Consequent Nature (concrete entities). As with his contemporary, Robert Frost Hot Link, Whitehead’s ‘roads diverge’…but end up at the same destination.

But Coccia seems to take us a step further down the cosmological rabbit hole, i.e. the one that leads is to Wonderland. Again, let’s eavesdrop: “Therefore, a new geometry must be thought out… Cosmos as nature is not a horizon that contains in itself all other beings, nor is it the totality of things, or a totality that transcends its elements… The cosmos – that is, nature – is not the foundation of things, it is their mixture…which nullifies any distinction between container and contained.” 

(Coccia finds it expedient to pay homage to God-free, post-Enlightenment secularity; but we’re not obliged to follow suit. We’re free to draw our own conclusions from his work.) 

So this is not John’s Logos (word, order) nor Solomon’s Sophia (wisdom). Cosmos itself seems to be an emergent phenomenon here. Coccia reaches back further even than Anaxagoras. A 6th century BCE philosopher, Anaximander, believed that Being itself was the result of two (or more) proto-entities freely granting each other ‘reck’. For Anaximander, like the 20th century existentialist, Martin Buber, ‘relation is foundation’.

But back to Coccia: “A thing has to find itself in no-matter-what other thing – what is more, in the things it contains. The fact of being contained in something coexists with the fact of containing this same thing. The container is also the content of what it contains… (so) all action is interaction, or rather interpenetration and reciprocal influence.”

Sts. John and Paul, and Alfred North Whitehead, shared the view that God encompasses all things and that all things include God as one of their elements. In this respect, Coccia does little more than nudge the ball over the goal line, but hey, 6 points is 6 points. 

This sets up a kind of universal reflexivity. Every event is ‘in God’ and God is in every event; therefore, every event is in every other event. X є X’ and X’ є X. Therefore, X є X and X’ є X’. In so far as all sets and their elements are ‘actual entities’, all sets are ‘extra-ordinary sets’. (I’m aware that this violates modern set theory’s Axiom of Foundation; I’m ok with that.)

Potentially, Coccia’s idea has some remarkable philosophical implications. Consider the set of all sets whose members are events. Presumably, from the perspective of any (or almost any) single event, some sets would include past events and some sets would include future events (non-exclusively). 

Presumably, every event, past or future, would be a member of some set. Therefore, every event would be an element in every other event and so all past events and all future events would be elements of every present event. According to Anaxagoras and Emanuele Coccia everything is in everything.

So who needs causality (or teleology) anyway? According to Coccia, “The effect is always capable of modifying its cause, which always resides in the effect.” Best to go with Hume here and discard the idea of causality entirely. According to Whitehead, all actual entities (events) are sui generis and causa sui; every entity emerges out of its universe-spanning Actual World, as a reaction to that world.

Every event, then, consists of the same members, uniquely configured. The cosmos is God’s Kaleidoscope. A limited number of elements generate innumerable unique patterns. 

In fact, the illusion of unidirectional (vectored) action is an artifact of our active/passive voiced languages. Originally (pre-Babel?), most languages at least included a ‘middle voice’ better suited to model Coccia’s interactive cosmos. 

Keep the conversation going.

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