Matthew David Segall

The history of civilization has been one of empire, slavery, power, and exploitation. The drive to dominate, to control and manage others, to divide the world into masters and servants, to flatten difference and bend the world to our will, has been a driving force of history. This drive for domination manifests in patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, fascism, and technocracy. This grasping for control is the original sin, a false Logos that has obscured the true Logos of creation. In our modern secular world, the concept of Logos has largely been forgotten, yet the false Logos of control remains as strong as ever and threatens to undo civilization itself. Through a path of kenosis, of self-emptying, we can rediscover the true Logos and transform our relationship with the world.

This book is a philosophical experiment in thinking, feeling, and willing beyond the transcendental threshold of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy. It draws inspiration from the organic process philosophies of F. W. J. Schelling and A. N. Whitehead to articulate a descendental aesthetic ontology showing the way across the epistemological chasm that Kant's critiques hewed between knowledge and reality. This descendental inversion of Kantian transcendentalism aims to bridge the chasm-not by resolving the structure of reality into clear and distinct concepts-but by replanting cognition in the aesthetic processes that power it. The key to this reconnection is found in a new etheric power of imagination, which if consciously cultivated can grant the process philosopher direct experience of the cosmic creativity expressing itself in both the depths of the soul and throughout the physical world. With human knowing no longer conceived of as a transcendental onlooker but rather rooted again in cosmogenesis, the ancient hermetic maxim that we are microcosmic participants in the Life of the Whole is reaffirmed.

The essays compiled herein are written on behalf of earth, the ground upon which I walk and the soil into which I will one day return. They contain the thought-traces of a thinker in love with wisdom.