On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn

Revisiting my dialogue with Matt Segall on Michael Brooks & CIIS

Feb 21, 2026

Iain McGilchrist Conference at CIIS – March 2024

Abstract

Matt Segall’s process-relational panexperientialism preserves a set of intuitions I regard as philosophically significant: that experience is not an accidental latecomer to an otherwise inert cosmos, that reductive materialism cannot exhaust what nature is, and that the language of God, Spirit, and participation need not disappear simply because premodern metaphysics has been superseded. My argument is that the epistemological structure supporting those intuitions remains insufficiently differentiated.

A recent dialogue between Segall and Graham Harman makes the difficulty visible from within Segall’s own project. Segall turns toward German Idealism to recover the depth of the “I,” self-consciousness, and freedom that Whitehead does not adequately secure, while hesitating before the anthropocentrism such a move might reintroduce. I describe the resulting problem as enchanted flatland: a cosmology rich enough to restore interiority, participation, and experience to nature, but not yet sufficiently differentiated with respect to the distinct perspectives and modes of inquiry through which subjective, intersubjective, objective, and interobjective dimensions become available.

Behind this disagreement lies Michael Brooks’s unfinished political project. A cosmopolitan socialism capable of engaging religion, meaning, and the sacred requires more than a richer metaphysics; it requires a framework capable of relating interior development, cultural meaning, institutional power, and material conditions without reducing one to another. My own response has emerged through the encounter between the process-relational and Aurobindonian integral tradition surrounding CIIS and a Canadian philosophical formation shaped by Charles Davis, Jacques Maritain, George Grant, Leslie Armour, and Sean McGrath. Wilber’s epistemological pluralism, Habermasian critique, Enactive Fallibilism, and Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism provide different pieces of what I now call Integral Facticity: an attempt to recover metaphysical and spiritual depth without insulating it from correction, dialogue, or historical difference.

Tags: Matt Segall, Michael Brooks, CIIS, Process Philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, Speculative Metaphysics, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, Panexperientialism, Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, German Idealism, Schelling, Integral Theory, Ken Wilber, AQAL, 8 Zones, Pre/Trans Fallacy, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, IACT, Metapattern Institute, Integral Humanism, Jacques Maritain, Charles Davis, George Grant, Leslie Armour, Sean McGrath, Canadian Philosophy, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Civilizational Dialogue, Jürgen Habermas, Critical Theory, Steven C. Hayes, ACT, Evan Thompson, Enactivism, Žižek, Lacan, John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Cosmopolitan Socialism, Religion and the Left, Spirituality and Politics, Meaning Crisis

I. Integral Politics & the Future of the Left

In the summer of 2022, I welcomed Matthew David Segall as my ninth guest on the Integral Facticity podcast. Our episode, “Varieties of Integral, Michael Brooks, and the Next Left,” turned out to be more aptly titled than either of us probably understood at the time. Matt and I were already operating with distinct, if still only partially articulated, versions of “integral,” and the conversation brought that difference close enough to the surface that I have continued returning to it ever since.

The immediate context was Michael Brooks, who had died two years earlier at the age of thirty-six. His death crystallized something for many of us who had been following what he was trying to build: a serious left politics required a philosophical anthropology adequate to the human beings it hoped to organize. Religion and the question of meaning could not be treated as merely instrumental concerns, useful insofar as they mobilized constituencies, supplied cultural cohesion, or offered psychological consolation. The sacred could not simply be surrendered to the political right. Nor could cosmopolitanism become a vehicle for absorbing distinct civilizations into a supposedly universal account of liberation, with their histories, religious traditions, and political inheritances gradually stripped of their particularity in the process. A genuinely cosmopolitan politics would have to make room for encounter and transformation without requiring historical difference to disappear.

This was part of what excited both me and Jeremy D Johnson when we first began talking about an integral left. Brooks’s Against the Web had gestured toward a cosmopolitan socialism informed by Wilber’s developmental thought, Cornel West’s insistence that the left could not abandon the spiritual and religious dimensions of human life, and Žižek’s structural critique of ideology. He was trying to hold together moral development, spiritual seriousness, material analysis, and genuine internationalism without reducing any one of those concerns to another.

The tensions inside that project were substantial. How could religion remain more than ethics, psychology, or political utility without restoring an older metaphysical certainty? Could developmental distinctions survive the postmodern critique of totalizing narratives? And could an integral left make claims about development while remaining genuinely open to traditions and civilizations whose historical trajectories did not simply reproduce the Western story of modernization?

In “Beyond the Master Signifier”, I later tried to reconstruct some of what Brooks had accomplished in practice. Mapping his work against Hayes’s Hexaflex, I argued that the counterpublic he built through The Michael Brooks Show and Against the Web could sustain substantive moral commitments while remaining structurally open to correction. In IACT terms, it operated more like a growth hierarchy than a dominator hierarchy. What Brooks never had the opportunity to develop was the philosophical structure that could make explicit and extend the synthesis he had begun to embody in his own work.

The Integral Facticity podcast began partly as an attempt to work through that problem, and my conversation with Matt already contained the beginnings of the philosophical divergence I am trying to clarify here. Segall described Wilber as the gateway through which he had discovered Whitehead, Schelling, Sri Aurobindo, and much else, while making clear that he would “probably not” return to Wilber as a governing framework. He was “allergic to theories of everything” and wanted to maintain a degree of “irony or distance” from his own cosmological vision. In that sense, he had moved through Wilber and beyond him.

My movement was almost the reverse. I found myself returning to Wilber, not out of renewed enthusiasm for the political or cultural milieu that had developed around American integral theory, but because his epistemological pluralism seemed to identify a problem that process metaphysics alone could not resolve: how to place contemplative disclosure, developmental psychology, scientific inquiry, cultural interpretation, and political analysis into relation without allowing any one of them to become the explanatory ground of the others. That question became increasingly important as I thought about what Brooks had been trying to do. The left’s difficulty with religion and spirituality was not simply that it lacked an adequate language for them; it lacked a philosophical framework capable of relating interior development, cultural meaning, institutional power, and material conditions without reducing one dimension of human life to another. Matt and I agreed on much of this diagnosis. Where we began to diverge was over whether a process-relational cosmology could itself provide the integrative structure the problem required, or whether integration depended upon a more explicit differentiation of methods, domains, and validity claims.

On February 17, 2026, Segall published “Heaven Save Us from Metaphysics in Denial”, a defense of speculative metaphysics against Walter Veit’s scientific supersessionism and a strong statement of the process-relational cosmology he has continued developing since our conversation. I agree with much of his argument, particularly the refusal to treat physicalism as though it were simply what remains once metaphysics has disappeared. Yet reading it returned me to the question that remained unresolved in 2022: does the epistemological structure of Segall’s framework provide what Brooks’s project required but never received?

A recent conversation with Graham Harman helps clarify why I think the answer remains incomplete.

II. Whitehead, Harman & Enchanted Flatland

The dialogue between Segall and Graham Harman is useful because the philosophical difficulty appears there not as an objection imposed on Whitehead from outside, but as a tension generated within Segall’s own attempt to think with him. Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology turns in part on a question concerning relation: can an entity be exhausted by the relations into which it enters?

Whitehead rejects the classical picture of enduring substances carrying accidental properties. Actual entities become through prehension and relation. Harman’s objection is that something is lost when being is rendered entirely relational. His familiar example of Socrates makes the point intuitively: Socrates may be happy at one moment and miserable at another while remaining Socrates. Neither those properties nor the totality of his present relations exhausts what he is. Harman names this excess withdrawal.

Segall attempts to locate something analogous within Whitehead’s account of concrescence, where an actual entity achieves a novel and private perspective upon the universe before perishing and becoming available to subsequent occasions. There is unquestionably a kind of privacy here, but it remains bound to the occasion. It does not obviously provide the enduring depth Harman intends to preserve when he argues that an object cannot be reduced to its relations.

The more revealing issue appears when Segall acknowledges that he has needed the German Idealists — Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel — to think adequately about something Whitehead does not fully provide: the “I,” self-consciousness, freedom, and the distinctive depth of the subject. Whitehead gives him an ontology capable of refusing the picture of an inert universe from which experience mysteriously emerges, but once the question turns toward self-conscious spirit, the conceptual resources of German Idealism begin doing work that Whitehead alone cannot.

That move immediately raises another problem. If the “I” occupies a distinctive philosophical position, what prevents human access from becoming the privileged standpoint from which the rest of being is interpreted? If spirit cannot be reduced to the cosmological process that precedes it, how do we avoid reconstructing an anthropocentric metaphysics in which nature is read retrospectively from the standpoint of human self-consciousness?

I do not think this can be solved by selecting Whitehead, Harman, or German Idealism as the final ontology. Each protects something the others have difficulty preserving. Harman secures an excess beyond relation but offers relatively little account of developmental or contemplative depth. Whitehead restores interiority to nature but distributes it through a process ontology in which the distinct status of first-person self-consciousness becomes difficult to specify. German Idealism restores freedom, spirit, and the irreducibility of the “I,” but risks reinstalling human consciousness as philosophically privileged.

The problem therefore arises prior to the search for a final metaphysical synthesis. Before deciding which ontology is most comprehensive, we need to distinguish the perspectives and modes of inquiry through which the phenomena under discussion become available. No cosmological description, however expansive, can stand in for the first-person and intersubjective perspectives through which interiors are enacted, interpreted, and investigated.

This is where Wilber’s 8 Zones remain useful to me. Their function is not to adjudicate the metaphysical dispute between Whitehead, Harman, or Schelling, but to differentiate perspectives and methodologies that cannot simply be derived from one another. A first-person contemplative disclosure, a phenomenological description, a third-person neuroscientific account, a cultural interpretation, and a speculative cosmology may all concern dimensions of the same event without constituting interchangeable forms of knowledge. The question is not simply what exists? but also from which perspective does this dimension become available, through which injunctions or practices, and under what conditions can the resulting claims be challenged?

That distinction matters because the restoration of interiority does not by itself resolve the problem of differentiation. Whiteheadian panexperientialism can reject the reduction of experience to exterior matter and insist that some form of interiority belongs to reality all the way down. But Wilber’s objection is that interior and exterior, subjective and objective, cannot be derived from a single process description without losing something essential about the perspectives through which each becomes available. A cosmology may therefore be profoundly hospitable to experience while still asking one explanatory framework to carry more weight than it can bear. The issue is not whether subjectivity has been included within the picture, but whether the distinct dimensions and modes of inquiry through which reality is disclosed have been adequately differentiated.

This is what I mean by enchanted flatland. The phrase names a tension Wilber already identifies within process thought. The cosmos has been re-enchanted relative to materialist flatland: nature is no longer dead extension awaiting the arrival of human consciousness, but a creative and experiential process in which human subjectivity emerges from a world already alive with interiority, relation, and value. Yet the richness of the ontology does not by itself guarantee a corresponding differentiation of perspectives. If interior and exterior, first-person and third-person, individual and collective dimensions are finally coordinated through a single cosmological description, the Kosmos may have become more enchanted while remaining flatter than its metaphysical richness initially suggests.

Wilber’s Pre/Trans Fallacy makes the same problem visible developmentally. Participation, unity, immersion in a living cosmos, and dissolution of the ordinary subject-object boundary can describe experiences organized at very different developmental levels. “God incarnate in every galaxy” could name a mature contemplative realization, while an undifferentiated oceanic merger with nature might produce superficially similar language. Phenomenological resemblance alone does not establish developmental equivalence.

The same principle applies more broadly. A framework may speak continually of novelty, openness, becoming, and fallibilism while remaining difficult to challenge if every objection can ultimately be redescribed within the cosmology itself. Fallibilism has to mean more than declaring a system revisable. Something encountered through another method, another perspective, another body, or another tradition must retain the capacity to force substantive revision.

This is where I think Segall’s criticism of scientific supersessionism is correct but incomplete. Physicalism does not become metaphysically neutral simply because it derives authority from the sciences. Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness remains pertinent: the extraordinary explanatory and predictive success of physics does not entail that reality is identical with the abstractions through which physics models it. Kant likewise did not render metaphysical inquiry meaningless. One can accept that dogmatic metaphysics has been superseded while remaining open to questions concerning the conditions of experience, value, consciousness, freedom, and transcendence.

Nor is Segall returning to a closed a priori metaphysics. His method is abductive, iterative, Jamesian and Peircean, and his panexperientialism is far more sophisticated than the caricature that everything possesses human-like consciousness. My disagreement is therefore narrower but, I think, more consequential. The question is whether process-relational fallibilism is sufficient by itself, or whether a post-metaphysical philosophy requires a more explicit differentiation of perspectives, methodologies, and validity claims before metaphysics can enter into genuinely reciprocal relations with contemplative inquiry, psychology, neuroscience, hermeneutics, social theory, and politics.

That question eventually returned me not only to Wilber, but to the distinct integral traditions through which I had come to think about the relationship between metaphysics, spiritual practice, human development, and political life.

III. Two Integral Traditions

I did not encounter integral thought as a single philosophical genealogy. By the time Matt and I spoke in 2022, I had already spent years moving between traditions that used the same term while carrying very different intellectual histories.

Albert Low was my first Zen teacher at the Montreal Zen Center. Low had also served as an associated lecturer at CIIS in consciousness studies, linking the contemplative world in which I trained in Montreal to the West Coast milieu in which Segall now works. Gregory Baum connected those worlds from another direction. Baum served as exterior examiner on Marc Lalonde’s doctoral work under Charles Davis at Concordia, while also participating in the cosmological conversation surrounding Thomas Berry and what would later become central to the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness tradition at CIIS.

There was also an embodied route. I travelled from Montreal to Esalen and participated in one of George Leonard’s Integral Transformative Practice workshops. Leonard and Michael Murphy had watched participants undergo powerful breakthroughs only to return quickly to established patterns once they went home. ITP emerged partly from the recognition that transformation required sustained practice across body, mind, heart, and soul rather than dependence on peak experience alone.

That intuition stayed with me. Any philosophy claiming transformative depth eventually has to answer to what happens when it encounters embodiment, relationships, institutions, ordinary life, and forms of resistance that do not disappear because the theory can interpret them coherently. Peak experience may provide evidence, but it does not by itself validate the conceptual structure within which the experience is understood.

This helps explain why CIIS has always felt intellectually familiar to me. The “integral” in CIIS is rooted explicitly in Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga rather than Wilber’s AQAL framework. Haridas Chaudhuri carried that lineage into the institutional world from which CIIS eventually developed, while figures such as Richard Tarnas, Brian Swimme, and Sean Kelly later extended the project through the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program. Its attempt to overcome modern materialistic consciousness through participatory cosmology, spiritual philosophy, and a renewed relation to cosmic history is one I understand sympathetically.

The other meaning of integral entered my intellectual life through Concordia. I studied under Marc Lalonde, whose doctoral work under Charles Davis developed a critical theory of religious insight in dialogue with Habermas. Davis had moved from the centre of British Catholic theology through the crisis of Vatican II and eventually toward a critical theology capable of taking modern social theory seriously without reducing religion to sociology or procedural reason.

When I first introduced the language of “integral theory” into Lalonde’s classroom, his immediate association was not Ken Wilber but Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism. That moment has become emblematic for me because it exposed two different intellectual histories carrying the same term.

Maritain’s Integral Humanism, published in 1936, sought a social and political order adequate to the whole human person against both bourgeois individualism and totalitarian collectivism. The Catholic tradition in which I encountered the term began therefore not with a map of consciousness but with philosophical anthropology, transcendence, political community, and the common good.

The Canadian philosophical tradition complicated that inheritance further. George Grant’s Lament for a Nation taught me to see cultural absorption as philosophical before it becomes simply economic or political: technological civilization homogenizes not only institutions and markets but the frameworks through which a people understands itself. Charles Taylor’s account of strong evaluation supplied a vocabulary for the moral horizons within which human beings decide what is worth valuing in the first place. Leslie Armour’s “community of communities” and philosophic federalism asked how real plurality could inhabit a common political and philosophical space without being dissolved into either state totality or liberal atomism.

Sean McGrath brings another strand of this Canadian formation back into direct contact with Segall. His recovery of Schelling, speculative philosophy, and the Carmelite tradition emerges from a much older Canadian engagement with German Idealism running through figures such as John Watson and later James Bradley and Armour. As I argued in my essay on McGrath, I do not think his work has fully crossed the post-metaphysical threshold either. His metaphysical commitments become most intelligible from within forms of participatory and contemplative formation that remain difficult to translate into differentiated public claims.

But that limitation is also the reason his work matters here. It confronts the same question I encounter in Segall from another direction: how can metaphysical and contemplative depth survive without either retreating into an insulated tradition or presenting one form of disclosure as the ontology within which every other form of knowledge must find its place?

The distinction between these integral traditions is therefore not simply biographical. The CIIS lineage emphasizes participation, cosmology, consciousness, and spiritual transformation. The Canadian Catholic and speculative line I inherited places greater pressure on philosophical anthropology, institutional mediation, historical particularity, public reason, and the dangers of cultural absorption. Wilber enters between them less as a final metaphysical authority than as a methodological resource for keeping different dimensions and methods in relation without prematurely collapsing them.

What I have been trying to think through ever since is the possibility of an integral philosophy capable of synthesis without absorption: differentiated enough to preserve distinct modes of knowing, traditions, and historical formations, but integrative enough that their encounter can produce more than parallel monologues.

It is out of this problem that Integral Facticity has gradually taken shape.

IV. From Integral Facticity to Integral Pluralism

Integral Facticity begins from a limit on every integral ambition. Inquiry is never conducted from nowhere. We begin already situated within bodies, histories, languages, institutions, practices, and inherited worlds whose meanings precede the theoretical frameworks we later construct. Heidegger’s language of thrownness matters to me because it refuses the fantasy that a sufficiently comprehensive map can finally escape the conditions from which it was drawn.

I am writing from Montreal, formed partly within a Catholic intellectual tradition at Concordia, shaped by particular teachers, contemplative practices, political commitments, and institutional histories. None of this establishes the truth of the claims I make. It does, however, condition which questions became visible to me, which traditions initially appeared plausible, and which blind spots I remain more likely to carry. Those conditions do not settle the truth of a philosophical claim, but they help determine which problems become intelligible, which conceptual resources appear available, and which assumptions remain hardest to see from within a given historical and intellectual formation.

Habermas enters because facticity cannot provide its own corrective. A religious, contemplative, or political tradition can disclose something of considerable existential depth while remaining mistaken about the conceptual framework through which that disclosure is interpreted. Communicative rationality introduces a different requirement: claims to truth, rightness, and legitimacy must remain open to justification, criticism, and revision through discourse with others.

The tension matters in both directions. Facticity without communicative rationality can become existentially rich but epistemologically self-sealing. Communicative rationality without factical grounding risks becoming procedural and comparatively thin, capable of specifying how disagreements should be negotiated without generating the moral, spiritual, or existential horizons that make those disagreements matter. Wilber without Habermas can become deep but dogmatic; Habermas without Wilber rigorous but flat.

Enactive Fallibilism is my attempt to give this tension a practical form. It joins Peircean fallibilism with the enactivist insight, developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, that cognition is not the activity of a detached spectator representing a pre-given world. Knowing emerges through an embodied organism’s ongoing relation with its environment.

The body therefore possesses epistemological significance beyond being another object for theory to explain. It is one of the places where theory encounters resistance. A framework that claims to support psychological, contemplative, ethical, or political transformation eventually has to answer to what happens when someone attempts to live within it. Experience is not infallible, but neither should a theory be capable of interpreting every failure, contradiction, or embodied resistance as evidence that the practitioner has simply misunderstood the theory.

Fallibilism becomes meaningful only when something encountered can force revision not merely of conclusions but of the categories through which the conclusions were reached.

IACT — Integral Awareness and Commitment Training — is where these commitments become operational for me. It places Steven Hayes’s ACT Hexaflex in relation with Wilber’s AQAL framework, Ostrom’s Core Design Principles at the prosocial level, and the 8 Zones as an epistemological spine. The point is not to create another grand synthesis in which every method finally finds its assigned box. The zones repeatedly return us to a more modest question: how do you know this, and by what method?

A first-person contemplative report and a third-person neuroscientific account may concern the same event without constituting the same kind of knowledge. A hermeneutic interpretation of a religious tradition and a systems analysis of the institution carrying it may illuminate one another without becoming interchangeable. A sociological account of ritual can disclose structures of power invisible to practitioners while still failing to exhaust what the practice discloses phenomenologically or spiritually.

This is why I continue to think epistemological differentiation has to precede integration. The aim is not to isolate domains but to preserve enough methodological and perspectival differentiation that they remain capable of correcting one another.

Similar tensions are visible across the wider attempt to move beyond reductive modernity. John Vervaeke’s distinction among propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing and his ecology of practices move in a direction I find productive precisely because no single epistemic form is asked to resolve the meaning crisis. Iain McGilchrist likewise offers a powerful critique of abstraction and decontextualization, although The Matter with Things raises the familiar problem of how one moves from phenomenological and cognitive claims about attention toward metaphysical claims about consciousness and panentheism. These projects do not fail because they attempt to recover transcendence or participation; the question is how such recoveries remain accountable to the perspectives and methods through which they become available.

But epistemological pluralism alone is not enough. A philosophy may carefully distinguish contemplative, scientific, psychological, and social forms of knowing and still carry one historical civilization’s assumptions about progress, rationality, or development into its encounters with others.

This is where Fred Dallmayr’s work has become increasingly important to me.

Dallmayr’s account of civilizational dialogue is not simply a defense of difference against development. In Beyond Orientalism, he opposes both the absorption of other traditions into a universalizing Western trajectory and the opposite tendency to treat civilizations as closed, mutually incommensurable worlds. His alternative is a hermeneutics of difference in which traditions enter dialogue from distinct historical horizons while remaining capable of being transformed through the encounter.

That distinction is crucial. Dialogue does not require freezing cultures into permanent identities. Nor does integration require reducing their differences to stages of a single story. What emerges from a genuine encounter cannot be fully known before the encounter takes place because interpretation itself may alter the horizons of the participants.

Dialogue Among Civilizations extends this by questioning the assumption that modernization provides a single normative trajectory toward which every civilization must ultimately converge. Different histories disclose different configurations of religion, community, freedom, reason, and political life. The purpose of dialogue is not to abandon every possibility of universality, but to allow whatever commonality emerges to be generated through reciprocal encounter rather than through prior absorption.

Dallmayr’s integral pluralism gives this argument a political form that resonates strongly with what I have been trying to recover from Brooks. Integration does not mean restoring plurality to a pre-existing totality, while pluralism does not mean leaving different traditions sealed beside one another. Wholeness is relational and unfinished; difference is not simply tolerated but becomes one of the conditions through which new forms of understanding become possible.

Placed beside Maritain, another meaning of integral begins to emerge. Maritain’s integral humanism seeks an order adequate to the whole person and the common good; Dallmayr’s integral pluralism asks what happens when persons, traditions, and civilizations carrying different historical horizons enter into relation. The whole is neither an atomized plurality nor a totality already waiting to absorb its parts.

This also changes how I understand development. The problem is not development per se. Developmental distinctions can disclose real differences in psychological organization, moral complexity, institutional capacity, or contemplative realization. The danger comes when those distinctions are generalized into a philosophy of history that interprets civilizational difference before dialogue has begun. Developmental knowledge can enter the encounter, but it must itself remain open to revision by what the encounter discloses.

Integral Facticity therefore becomes less a theory of everything than a discipline imposed upon every theory of everything. Facticity reminds us that the map is drawn from somewhere. Habermas requires public accountability. Wilber differentiates perspectives, domains, and methods. Enactive Fallibilism keeps the framework exposed to embodied resistance. Dallmayr prevents integration from becoming another name for historical absorption.

Together they suggest a form of integral thought in which synthesis is not the elimination of difference but a provisional achievement of dialogue.

V. The Road Through and Beyond

The political stakes of this argument return me finally to Brooks, Žižek, and the question of absolute freedom.

Brooks valued Žižek because Žižek understood how deeply ideology enters into the formation of the subject. Capitalism does not reproduce itself only through false beliefs imposed from above. Enjoyment, fantasy, contradiction, and desire attach subjects to structures they may consciously oppose. Any left politics that ignores those dimensions remains vulnerable to reproducing the very forms of domination it believes it has overcome.

The difficulty appears in what follows the diagnosis. Žižek’s account of absolute freedom repeatedly draws upon the Christian language of kenosis, divine self-emptying, while radicalizing that emptying into negativity and void. Within Christian theology, however, kenosis is not merely disappearance. Self-emptying makes relation possible. The space opened through relinquishment is a space in which the other can appear as genuinely other.

Žižek preserves the rupture but gives us comparatively little account of the developmental or practical work through which a subject might inhabit freedom differently after the rupture has been recognized. This is one reason I have repeatedly brought the Lacanian tradition into conversation with Steven Hayes. Lacan and relational frame theory converge on a powerful insight: language precedes the reflective subject and helps produce the “I” that later imagines itself to be its sovereign user. Yet ACT develops practical techniques of defusion, perspective-taking, values clarification, and committed action through which one’s relation to language can actually change.

Neither side is sufficient by itself. Žižek provides a structural warning against every easy fantasy of liberation; Hayes supplies practical resources for transformation that structural critique alone does not provide. Brooks’s politics needed both.

Segall and Žižek can therefore be read as almost opposite responses to the same post-metaphysical difficulty. Žižek retains theological language while evacuating much of the metaphysical and spiritual world to which that language once referred. Segall restores a spiritual and participatory cosmos but, in my view, does not yet adequately differentiate the perspectives and methodologies through which its claims become epistemically accountable. One preserves negativity at the cost of a richer spiritual anthropology; the other restores spirit to nature while leaving the relation among metaphysics, perspective, and epistemology insufficiently resolved.

The road through and beyond runs somewhere between them.

This is why my criticism of Segall remains an invitation rather than a rejection. I do not want to abandon the participatory universe, the refusal of dead matter, or the intuition of God incarnate in every galaxy. I want those claims placed within an architecture capable of sustaining them without asking cosmology to do the work of contemplative practice, psychology, neuroscience, theology, political philosophy, and civilizational dialogue simultaneously.

Nor do I want epistemological differentiation to terminate in a new academic pluralism where every discipline politely occupies its own domain. The point of differentiation is to make stronger forms of integration possible because the perspectives and practices involved retain enough integrity to challenge and transform one another.

The same applies politically. The Indigenous philosophical inheritances that John Ralston Saul insists are constitutive of Canada, the Carmelite contemplative tradition McGrath retrieves, the Catholic intellectual tradition through which Davis and Lalonde confronted modernity, the Aurobindonian lineage behind CIIS, and the Zen tradition Albert Low carried forward in Montreal should not become interchangeable illustrations of truths an integral framework already possesses. But neither should they be preserved as sealed historical worlds whose integrity requires immunity from encounter.

A genuinely dialogical integral philosophy would have to permit something more difficult: encounters in which the traditions involved remain recognizably themselves while also becoming capable of learning something that neither could have generated in isolation.

This, more than any final metaphysical synthesis, is what I now take the post-metaphysical turn to require.

There is a substantive conversation waiting to happen among the process-relational tradition Segall inhabits, the Canadian speculative and religious traditions I have been trying to recover, Vervaeke’s ecology of practices, Wilber’s epistemological pluralism, and the IACT framework emerging through the Metapattern Institute. I do not regard these as rival systems from which a single winner must be selected. Their philosophical value lies partly in what becomes visible when their differences are preserved long enough for the encounter itself to become transformative.

In 2022, watching the first Webb images, Segall described every galaxy as God incarnate. I believed him then, and I still think there is something deeply right in the intuition. What I have been trying to build since is not an argument against it, but a framework capable of asking what kind of claim it is, from which perspective it becomes available, what practices make such a disclosure possible, how it relates to other forms of knowledge, and what could require us to revise the terms through which we understand it.

Physicalism may indeed be metaphysics in denial. But there is a parallel danger in metaphysics that has passed through enough of the modern critique to become self-conscious while remaining insufficiently differentiated to recognize when one perspective or mode of disclosure has begun speaking for the rest. The answer is not less metaphysics, less religion, or less openness to God. It is a form of integral thought in which metaphysical depth, perspectival and epistemological pluralism, embodied fallibility, and civilizational dialogue remain capable of correcting and transforming one another.

That, at least, is the road I now see running through the unfinished conversation Matt and I began around Michael Brooks four years ago: the recovery of metaphysical and spiritual depth without either reducing it to third-person explanation or insulating it from the possibility of correction.

Integral [+] Facticity

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