Through & Beyond the Threshold

My Review of Matthew D. Segall's Work & the Future of Integral Political Praxis

Feb 28, 2026

Theoros Series at CIIS - Matt Segall & Evan Thompson – November 2024

Abstract

This essay engages Matthew David Segall’s three books and his political theology chapter on Carl Schmitt, offering the sustained textual encounter Segall rightly asked for in response to my earlier diagnostic claims and essays. I argue that Segall’s process-relational panexperientialism — his synthesis of Whitehead and Schelling within a post-Kantian speculative framework — is serious philosophical work that overcomes the bifurcation of nature and grounds democratic values in the persuasive love of a Whiteheadian God. But I press a structural question: can a cosmology that extends experience all the way down to every actual occasion, while leaving perspective-differentiation and perspective-taking undertheorized, realize the “democracy of fellow creatures” it envisions? Drawing on Habermas’s communicative rationality, Wilber’s perspectival architecture, Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, and the ACT Hexaflex — synthesized through Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT) — I argue that the psychological dimensions of political polarization and depolarization require resources that process cosmology and political theology have not yet provided. Michael Brooks’s integral political praxis serves as a case study of psychological flexibility operating in the political register. The argument is an invitation to collaboration: integral political praxis needs the ontological ground that process-relational cosmology provides, and process-relational cosmology needs the perspectival architecture and psychological infrastructure of Integral Facticity and IACT to realize the democratic vision it articulates.

Tags: Matt Segall, Process Philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, F.W.J. Schelling, Post-Kantian Philosophy, Political Theology, Carl Schmitt, Panexperientialism, CIIS, Philosophy Cosmology and Consciousness, Physics of the World-Soul, Crossing the Threshold, German Idealism, Sean McGrath, International Schelling Society, Rudolf Steiner, Daniel Dombrowski, Rawlsian Liberalism, Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, Bruno Latour, Gaian Political Ecology, Imago Dei, Adventures of Ideas, Democracy of Fellow Creatures, Integral Theory, Ken Wilber, AQAL, 8 Zones, Integral Spirituality, Wilber-Combs Lattice, Allan Combs, William Irwin Thompson, Jorge Ferrer, R. Michael Fisher, Zachary Stein, Jürgen Habermas, Communicative Action, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, Jonathan Haidt, Moral Foundations Theory, Addiction/Allergy Pattern, Steven Hayes, ACT, Hexaflex, Psychological Flexibility, Perspective-Taking, Defusion, IACT, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, Integral Epistemological Pluralism, Integral Political Praxis, Michael Brooks, Cosmopolitan Socialism, Matt McManus, Jordan Peterson, Postmodern Conservatism, Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Canadian Philosophy, Leslie Armour, George Grant, Charles Taylor, Concordia University, Evan Thompson, Enactivism, Prosocial, Metapattern Institute

I. A Public Process Philosopher

Matthew David Segall is among the most intellectually serious and publicly engaged process philosophers working today. Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, Segall has spent over a decade developing a distinctive philosophical vision that weaves together Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational cosmology, F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and a growing engagement with political theology, personalism, and the philosophy of science. His three books — The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency (2014), Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (2021), and Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (2023) — chart a trajectory from Schelling recovery to Whiteheadian cosmology to a mature synthesis of both within a post-Kantian speculative framework. His peer-reviewed contributions span journals including Process Studies, World Futures, Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences, and Cosmos and History, and his book chapters address subjects from psychedelic realism to political theology to the origin of life. He sits on the governing board of the International Process Network, the editorial board of World Futures, and the founding editorial board of the Institute of Applied Metatheory.

What distinguishes Segall from many academic philosophers is his commitment to public scholarship. His blog Footnotes2Plato has for years served as an open philosophical notebook, and his presence across the podcast landscape — from Revolutionary Left Radio to Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, from dialogues with John Vervaeke to conversations with biologist Michael Levin — demonstrates a genuine desire to bring Whitehead and Schelling into conversation with a broader intellectual public. He has presented at the Esalen Institute, Schumacher College, and Harvard’s Emerson Hall. He has engaged thinkers as diverse as Iain McGilchrist, Merlin Sheldrake, Bernardo Kastrup, and Ilia Delio. In July 2022, Segall joined me on The Integral Facticity Podcast for a conversation titled “Varieties of Integral, Michael Brooks, and the Next Left” — a dialogue that, in retrospect, planted seeds for everything that follows in this essay.

I am writing as someone who has read Segall’s work carefully, who has benefited from his scholarship, and who believes his project deserves wider engagement — particularly from those working in speculative philosophy, critical theory, and applied psychology. Our projects share deep structural affinities: both are oriented toward grounding human flourishing in something deeper than procedural liberalism, both take the speculative tradition seriously as a living resource rather than a historical artifact, and both insist that philosophy must remain in dialogue with the full range of human experience. What I offer here is a careful engagement with Segall’s published work, followed by an account of where my own research — rooted in health informatics, integral human development, and the Canadian speculative tradition — leads me to extend the conversation into territory I believe our projects can better map together. My hope is that this essay establishes the ground for a sustained intellectual partnership between our two research programs, since neither process-relational cosmology, integral humanism, or integral political praxis can realize its full potential in isolation.

II. The Conversation So Far

The occasion for this essay is a renewed exchange between Segall and myself that began in February 2026 and has already produced two essays on my side.

The first, “On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn”, was a direct response to Segall’s “Heaven Save Us from Metaphysics in Denial” — his defense of speculative metaphysics against Walter Veit’s scientific supersessionism. My essay conceded that Segall was right about Veit: scientific supersessionism is philosophically untenable, and Segall handles the refutation well. But I pressed a deeper concern: that Segall’s Whiteheadian framework had adopted the surface features of the post-metaphysical turn without fully internalizing its demands, producing what I called an “enchanted flatland” — richer than materialist metaphysics in denial, but still unable to protect first-person subjective and contemplative depth as irreducibly its own. I used a recent dialogue between Segall and Graham Harman to make the structural failure visible from the inside, and I situated the argument within the Canadian speculative tradition — running from John Watson through Leslie Armour to Sean McGrath — and the integral pluralism of Fred Dallmayr and Ken Wilber, as the ground from which an alternative could be built. The essay argued that Michael Brooks’s unfinished project of cosmopolitan socialism needed precisely the philosophical architecture that neither process-relational cosmology nor the wider orbit of meaning-crisis thinkers (Vervaeke, Dempsey, McGilchrist) had yet provided.

The second, “Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up?”, examined Ken Wilber’s reception history within and beyond the integral community. Drawing on Wilber’s own intellectual autobiography, his 1983 engagement with Habermas and Bellah, R. Michael Fisher’s documentation of systematic misreadings, and Zachary Stein’s placement of Wilber within American Pragmatism, I argued that the post-metaphysical architecture of Integral Spirituality — the 8 Zones, the Wilber-Combs Lattice — deserves the serious philosophical engagement it has never received. The essay also engaged Jorge Ferrer’s participatory critique as a genuinely substantive contribution — one whose epistemological insights remain underhoused without the structural architecture that Wilber, Habermas, and Dallmayr each provide in different registers. Finally, it made explicit the connection I see between Wilber’s post-metaphysical spirituality and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s psychological flexibility model — the bridge that IACT is designed to build.

Segall responded with a substantive and direct critique — and he was right on the central point: I had made diagnostic claims about the limitations of process philosophy without engaging his actual texts, without demonstrating through sustained written work what I was claiming to see. He also clarified his intellectual formation in ways that matter for this conversation: his distance from Wilber began in 2007, well before CIIS, when he read Integral Spirituality and found it too abstractly categorical for the kind of thinking he was after. The influence that shaped his alternative was not Ferrer’s participatory critique but William Irwin Thompson, whose attention to the concrete particulars of poetry, painting, and culture offered a different model of what thinking about the evolution of consciousness could look like. These are important clarifications, and I am grateful for them.

I conceded the reciprocity point immediately. He was right. I had read his work on process philosophy but had not engaged in any written substantial form on it — I had not demonstrated, through sustained written form or text, what I was claiming to see on Whitehead or the process philosophical tradition. I committed to revisions of the original essay and to a follow-up piece engaging his primary books. We are also in the process of scheduling a dialogue. This essay is the result of that commitment — an attempt to do what Segall rightly asked me to do: engage his work on its own terms before offering my critique or own ideas. It is also, I hope, the beginning of a sustained research and collaborative dialogue on our two projects.

III. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology

Physics of the World-Soul originated as Segall’s doctoral comprehensive examination at CIIS, supervised by cosmologist Brian Swimme, and evolved through multiple editions before its 2021 publication with SacraSage Press. The book carries a foreword by John Cobb, Jr., who praises Segall’s work as “at the cutting edge” of Whitehead scholarship and credits him with presenting Whitehead’s thinking in properly Whiteheadian terms — as a developmental process rather than a finished system.

The title itself signals Segall’s governing intuition. “Physics of the World-Soul” nods to Schelling’s 1798 Von der Weltseele — his search for a “higher physics” rooted in “universal organicity” — and announces that Segall reads Whitehead as an inheritor of Schelling’s post-Kantian Naturphilosophie, whether or not Whitehead studied Schelling directly. This genealogical claim is the book’s distinctive contribution to Whitehead studies. Where most interpreters read Whitehead through the lens of British empiricism and mathematical logic — the tradition of Russell, with whom Whitehead co-authored Principia Mathematica — Segall reads him as completing a trajectory that begins with Schelling’s protest against the Kantian bifurcation of nature into noumenal and phenomenal domains.

The book’s three-part structure moves from the development of Whitehead’s cosmology (tracing his progression from mathematical physics through the philosophy of science to the mature philosophy of organism), through engagements with contemporary scientific theory (emergence, the origin of life, spacetime, quantum decoherence), to Whitehead’s theological vision (the world-soul, the function of God in cosmological process). Segall’s central argument throughout is that Whitehead’s philosophy of organism overcomes the “bifurcation of nature” — the modern separation of experienced qualities from their material substrates — by recognizing that experience pervades the cosmos at every level of organization. This is panexperientialism: not the claim that atoms think, but the claim that the experiential texture of reality runs deeper than human consciousness and that what physics calls “energy” and what lived experience calls “feeling” are descriptions of the same cosmological process from different angles.

Segall’s treatment of William James’s radical empiricism as a precursor to Whitehead’s reformed subjectivist principle is philosophically illuminating — both thinkers reject the Kantian transcendental ego while insisting that experience, properly understood, is not subjective in the sense that Descartes meant. Experience is the fundamental texture of the cosmos, not a property that mysteriously emerges from inert matter at some threshold of biological complexity. This Jamesian insight sets up what is perhaps Segall’s strongest contribution in the book: his account of Whitehead’s relationship to Kant. As he shows, Whitehead shares with Schelling the conviction that the Kantian restriction of knowledge to phenomenal appearances — the famous limitation of theoretical reason — cannot be the last word on the relationship between mind and nature. But where Fichte and Hegel responded to Kant by radicalizing the transcendental subject, Schelling and Whitehead responded by radicalizing nature itself, discovering in it an experiential depth that the Kantian framework had foreclosed. The “bifurcation of nature” that Whitehead diagnoses in The Concept of Nature — the splitting of the world into primary qualities (measurable, real) and secondary qualities (experiential, merely apparent) — is, as Segall shows, the direct descendant of Galileo’s original move and the Kantian epistemology that systematized it. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is thus not a rejection of modern science but a rejection of the impoverished ontology that has accompanied it since the seventeenth century.

The book’s engagement with contemporary science — particularly its treatment of the hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life, drawing on the work of astrobiologist Bruce Damer and biochemist David Deamer, and the implications of quantum decoherence for process ontology — demonstrates Segall’s commitment to keeping speculative philosophy in dialogue with empirical research. This is admirable and distinguishes his work from the more purely textual approach of many process scholars. His engagement with Bruno Latour’s argument that science never actually purified itself of the experiential and value-laden dimensions it claimed to exclude — a Latourian thesis that resonates with Whitehead’s own diagnosis of the bifurcation of nature — connects Physics of the World-Soul to the broader intellectual conversation about the limits of scientific materialism.

What Physics of the World-Soul does not do, and does not attempt, is address the subjective, psychological, and political dimensions of the cosmology it articulates. The book is a cosmological text, and a fine one. But cosmology alone, however integral in aspiration, does not tell us how human beings navigate the moral and political landscape they inhabit. It tells us what the cosmos is. It does not tell us how to live within it. This is not a criticism — it is a description of the book’s scope. The question is whether Segall’s later work extends into these dimensions, and this is where Crossing the Threshold and his political theology become essential.

IV. Crossing the Threshold: Schelling and Whitehead After Kant

Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore/Integral Imprint, 2023) is the mature statement of Segall’s philosophical project — the published development of his doctoral dissertation, “Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead.” Where Physics of the World-Soul is primarily a work of Whiteheadian cosmology with Schellingian overtones, Crossing the Threshold attempts a genuine synthesis of both thinkers around the problem of post-Kantian speculative philosophy.

The title’s “threshold” refers to the Kantian limit — the line beyond which, according to the critical philosophy, speculative reason cannot venture without falling into dogmatic metaphysics. Segall’s argument is that both Schelling and Whitehead crossed this threshold, not by retreating to pre-critical dogmatism, but by developing modes of speculative thinking that take Kant’s critical insights seriously while refusing to accept his restrictions as final. Schelling crossed the threshold through his philosophy of nature, his positive philosophy of mythology and revelation, and his late engagement with the “dark ground” of existence that resists rational comprehension. Whitehead crossed it through his method of imaginative generalization, his reformed subjectivist principle, and his insistence that the task of philosophy is “to conceive a complete fact” rather than to critique the conditions of possibility for factual knowledge.

The “etheric imagination” of the subtitle signals Segall’s engagement with Rudolf Steiner’s phenomenological epistemology alongside Schelling and Whitehead — a move that positions his project within the broader landscape of participatory and enactive approaches to cognition. Steiner frames the inquiry while Schelling and Whitehead provide the philosophical substance: his “esoteric ether of formative forces” is one of three ether theories woven through the book alongside Schelling’s “polarized ether of universal organization” and Whitehead’s “topological ether of creative events.” This is a bold inclusion. Steiner remains a controversial figure in academic philosophy, and Segall’s willingness to take him seriously as a philosophical interlocutor — rather than merely as the founder of Waldorf education and biodynamic agriculture — reflects the same intellectual generosity that characterizes his engagement with Whitehead. Segall’s claim is that the imagination is not merely a faculty of subjective fancy but a participatory organ through which the human being apprehends real structures of the cosmos — what Whitehead would call the ingression of eternal objects into actual occasions. This is Schelling’s intellektuelle Anschauung (intellectual intuition) translated into Whiteheadian terms: direct participation in the creative advance of nature. Whether one follows Segall into the Steinerian dimensions of this claim or not, the philosophical argument stands on its own: if experience really does pervade the cosmos at every level, then the human imagination — understood not as fantasy but as the capacity to participate in what is — must be more than a merely subjective faculty.

Deleuze plays a significant role in the book that deserves acknowledgment. Segall positions him as both a post-structuralist challenge to the cosmotheanthropic vision of Schelling and Whitehead and as one of the most powerful inheritors of their deepest insights. An entire section of Chapter 3 is devoted to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, and the Epilogue — “Incarnational Process Philosophy in the Worldly Religion of Schelling, Whitehead, and Deleuze” — engages him at length as a thinker whose commitment to immanence and worldly renewal runs parallel to the process tradition even where it diverges from its theological commitments. For readers coming from the continental tradition, Deleuze provides a crucial third voice in the book’s conversation.

Crossing the Threshold thus attempts to integrate cosmology (the nature of the physical universe), theology (the function of the divine in cosmic process), and anthropology (the nature and vocation of the human being) within a single post-Kantian speculative framework. This is an ambitious project, and Segall prosecutes it with real philosophical sophistication. He is not merely juxtaposing Schelling and Whitehead but reading each as illuminating dimensions of the other’s thought — Schelling’s developmental dynamism enriching Whitehead’s sometimes static categorical scheme, Whitehead’s logical precision disciplining Schelling’s sometimes effusive speculative flights.

I see Segall’s project as belonging within the broader German Idealism revival associated with Sean McGrath at Memorial University, Jason Wirth at Seattle University, the International Schelling Society, and the wider constellation of thinkers working to recover the speculative tradition after its marginalization by analytic philosophy. In “On Sean McGrath’s Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge,” I argued that McGrath’s recovery of the Western contemplative tradition — from his early Heidegger scholarship through the Secular Christ podcast to the confessional Lost Road — is genuine and irreplaceable, but that it requires the post-metaphysical architecture of a new integral humanism to become communicable across the pluralist divides of a post-metaphysical public sphere. That argument applies, in a different register, to what I want to say about Segall’s process philosophy here. Segall adds something novel to this conversation: a sustained integration of Whitehead and enactivism with the Schellingian inheritance, producing a kind of process-relational panexperientialism grounded in a participatory and enactive ontology. This is genuine philosophical work, and it deserves engagement from traditions beyond the process community.

V. Political Theology and the Democracy of Fellow Creatures

The most directly relevant of Segall’s writings for the argument I want to develop here is his chapter “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: A Process Theological Intervention,” published in From Force to Persuasion: Process-Relational Perspectives on Power and the God of Love (Cascade Books, 2024). This piece reveals the political implications of Segall’s cosmological and theological work and clarifies why he sent it to me specifically in the context of our exchange.

Segall’s chapter critically engages Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberal political theology — the decisionist theory that sovereignty belongs to whoever decides on the exception — not to rehabilitate Schmitt but to show that process theology can answer the challenge Schmitt poses to liberalism more adequately than liberalism has answered it for itself. Schmitt’s diagnosis of liberalism’s contradictions is genuinely brilliant — the pretence to metaphysical neutrality, the repression of the sovereign decision, the vulnerability to demagogic capture. What makes Segall’s intervention distinctive is that he takes the force of Schmitt’s critique seriously without following Schmitt into fascist dictatorship.

The chapter’s central move is a Whiteheadian inversion of the theological-political transfer that Schmitt identified. Schmitt argued that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts — sovereignty is the political analogue of divine omnipotence. Segall, drawing on Whitehead’s observation in Process and Reality that this transfer operated in the reverse direction as well — “the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar” — shows that the entire Schmittian framework rests on an idolatrous image of God as imperial ruler. Process theology replaces this with a God who persuades rather than coerces, “the judge arising out of the very nature of things,” who “dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love.” Where Schmitt reads sovereignty downward from an omnipotent God to the sovereign decider, Whitehead reads it upward from the creative process of each actual occasion to a God whose power is persuasive rather than coercive. This is not a minor theological adjustment. It transforms the entire political-theological settlement.

Segall then engages Daniel Dombrowski’s admirable process reading of Rawlsian political liberalism to argue that Whitehead’s cosmology is compatible with democratic values while grounding them in something deeper than procedural formalism. He turns to Emmanuel Mounier’s philosophical personalism, which defines the person as a “living activity of self-creation, communication, attachment” irreducible to either abstract individualism or collectivist absorption. The chapter also engages Latour’s Gaian political ecology at length, showing how the climate crisis scrambles the categories of Hobbesian political philosophy by revealing that “nature” is not the inert background against which human politics unfolds but an animate, responsive, and increasingly dangerous participant in the political process itself.

What emerges from this synthesis is Segall’s most ambitious political-philosophical claim: a cosmopolitical vision grounded in Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, where the rise of human civilization exemplifies the persuasive lure of ideas in the adventure of cosmogenesis. Segall draws on Whitehead’s conviction that civilization advances when wisdom kindles brief flashes of freedom and knowledge into the flame of virtue, making inherited customs malleable enough to light the way toward juster futures. The resulting politics is what Whitehead called a “democracy of fellow creatures” — a depth democracy that rejects modern anthropocentric individualism, totalitarian collectivism, and techno-scientific materialism in favor of a cosmopolitical vision where each of us exists as individuals-in-community. This is a genuinely compelling political ontology, and it is grounded in the Whiteheadian conviction that “the basis of democracy is the common fact of value experience, as constituting the essential nature of each pulsation of actuality.”

The chapter’s strongest passage addresses the imago Dei principle — the claim that human persons possess inalienable dignity because they are created in the image of God (or hold Buddha-nature, or participate in some comparable spiritual source). Segall argues, persuasively, that this principle enhances rather than pollutes public reason, since there is no such thing as a genuinely neutral starting point for the derivation of liberal values. He observes, following Dombrowski, that even Rawls ultimately held individual rights to be inalienable because the human person is created in God’s image — a natural rights commitment established independently of social conventions. Liberals committed to individual rights and reasonable pluralism should be more forthright about the metaphysical grounds of their commitments. The failure to affirm the divine value of persons, Segall argues through Mounier, leaves a vacuum that is inevitably filled by objectifying concepts — whether the fascist Volk, the communist re-education program, or the neoliberal reduction of persons to consumers and market units.

I find this argument entirely convincing as far as it goes. Segall is right that liberalism without metaphysics loses its justification. He is right that Whitehead’s process theology provides a more adequate metaphysical ground than either Schmittian decisionism or liberal proceduralism. He is right about the imago Dei principle. And he is right, via Dombrowski, that a process reading of Rawls can hold together individual rights and social solidarity without collapsing into either atomistic libertarianism or collectivist authoritarianism.

The question is what this process liberalism does not yet address. And here is where I want to extend the conversation into territory where I believe our projects can mutually enhance each other.

VI. Where Process Philosophy Meets Its Limit: The Turn to Habermas and a New Integral Humanism

Segall’s political theology, his cosmopolitical vision of a “democracy of fellow creatures,” and his process reading of Rawlsian liberalism all converge on a recognizable settlement: democratic pluralism grounded in persuasion rather than coercion, rooted in the spiritual dignity of persons, and open to the nonhuman world through a pan-experientialist cosmology. This is a sophisticated and attractive vision. But it shares a structural feature with a number of other contemporary projects working in adjacent intellectual space — Matt McManus’s liberal socialism, the late Michael Brooks’s cosmopolitan socialism — that I want to name precisely. It was, in fact, Brooks’s vision of a cosmopolitan socialism that could take religious and moral seriousness as genuine rather than dismissing it — combined with his untimely death in July 2020 — that led me to launch The Integral Facticity Podcast and to reach out to Segall for our original 2022 conversation.

Mapped against Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, these projects all operate primarily within three of the six universal moral foundations: Care, Fairness, and Liberty. The binding foundations — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — are either absent from the analysis, treated as pathological vestiges of pre-modern social organization, or acknowledged only to be dissolved into the process-relational framework. I call this the addiction/allergy pattern in political cognition: the Left is addicted to the individualizing foundations (Care, Fairness, Liberty) and allergic to the binding foundations (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity), while the Right exhibits the inverse pattern. The metaphor is precise, not merely rhetorical. In Acceptance and Commitment Training, psychological inflexibility manifests as either excessive attachment (fusion, addiction) or excessive avoidance (experiential avoidance, allergy). Both are failures of flexibility. Both foreclose the contact with the full range of experience that psychological health requires.

The case of Jordan Peterson illustrates the point. Peterson’s cultural intervention — which I analyzed at length in my McGrath essay and which Matt McManus has diagnosed as a paradigmatic instance of “postmodern conservatism” — speaks directly to the binding foundations of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity that progressive politics has systematically neglected. When Peterson tells young men to clean their rooms and stand up straight, he is speaking the language of Authority and Sanctity. When he frames environmentalism as a threat to loyalty to family and community, he is mobilizing the Loyalty foundation against the Care foundation. The postmodern conservative movement has been winning the cultural war on precisely this point: by capturing the binding foundations and deploying them against progressive causes — framing climate activism as disloyalty, gender equity as an assault on sacred order, social safety nets as corrosive of personal authority. The progressive response has been to diagnose these appeals as pathological — as fascism, as regression, as false consciousness. But Haidt’s research demonstrates that Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity are not pathologies. They are universal features of human moral cognition, present across all cultures, grounded in evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience. Peterson’s capture of them is the problem, not their existence. The question is not whether they are real — they are — but how they are held: rigidly, through fusion with a particular ideological formation, or flexibly, through the capacity to engage all six foundations in response to context rather than from a fixed political identity. Conservative moral cognition is not defective liberal cognition. It is a different configuration of the same moral palette, emphasizing different foundations for different adaptive reasons. The process-relational framework, as Segall deploys it in his political theology, does not yet provide the conceptual tools to make this distinction — to separate the legitimate moral foundation from its authoritarian or postmodern conservative capture.

This is where my own intellectual formation diverges from Segall’s. I come to these questions not through Whitehead and Schelling primarily, but through Jürgen Habermas and Ken Wilber — and crucially, through the practical psychology of Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Training. My research at Concordia University in Applied Human Sciences and Religious Studies was shaped by the question of how human beings actually navigate moral and political complexity in practice, not only in speculative theory. The Applied Human Sciences program at Concordia is grounded in the concrete conditions of human development — health, education, community, institutional life — while the Religious Studies program placed these concerns in dialogue with the full range of theological, philosophical, and contemplative traditions. It was in this context that I first encountered the problem that has driven my research ever since: the gap between what our best theories tell us about human flourishing and what our best practices actually deliver.

Habermas’s theory of communicative action provided the social-theoretical framework: how do persons with different comprehensive doctrines achieve genuine understanding through discourse rather than through either force or mere procedural tolerance? His insistence on the “unfinished project of modernity” — the claim that the Enlightenment’s emancipatory promise has been betrayed not by reason itself but by the colonization of the lifeworld by systems of money and administrative power — resonated deeply with my own experience of institutional life and my encounter with the integral tradition. Wilber’s integral theory provided the perspectival architecture: the recognition that multiple irreducible ways of knowing — phenomenological, empirical, hermeneutic, systemic, contemplative — each possess their own validity conditions that cannot be collapsed into one another, and that navigating across these irreducible perspectives is not a theoretical synthesis but an embodied praxis.

The integration of Habermas and Wilber is not straightforward — they stand in productive tension. Habermas provides epistemological rigor, fallibilism, and a genuine account of communicative rationality, but has no access to the contemplative territory that the speculative tradition takes as its ground. Wilber provides the perspectival architecture — quadrants, zones, methodological pluralism — that differentiates irreducible ways of knowing, but can lack the epistemological discipline Habermas demands. My own position, which I have been developing under the name Integral Awareness and Commitment Training, holds this tension rather than resolving it prematurely. The tension itself is productive: Habermas keeps Wilber honest about the conditions of discourse, while Wilber keeps Habermas honest about the irreducible plurality of ways of knowing that discourse must navigate.

The meta-theoretical architecture I have been developing to hold this tension is what I call Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP). I laid out the framework in detail in “Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem”, where it emerged from an intervention into the Shaul-Žižek-Johnston-Pippin debate about the relationship between German Idealism and psychoanalysis — a debate that demonstrated what happens when genuinely different epistemic modes are forced into a single theoretical register. IEP holds that there are irreducibly different ways of knowing — phenomenological, empirical, hermeneutic, systemic, contemplative — each possessing its own validity conditions, its own standards of evidence, and its own characteristic distortions when it overreaches into territory that belongs to another mode. This is not relativism. The perspectives are not equal in every domain — empirical methods are better suited to certain questions than contemplative methods, and vice versa. But they are irreducible: none can be translated without remainder into the terms of any other. The task is not to synthesize them into a single meta-perspective — which would reproduce the very flatland the architecture is designed to overcome — but to differentiate them clearly enough that they can be held in productive relation, each contributing what it alone can see. IEP draws on Wilber’s methodological pluralism (the 8 Zones) for the structural differentiation, on Habermas’s validity claims for the epistemological discipline, and on Dallmayr’s integral pluralism for the cross-cultural and cross-traditional scope. It is the epistemological ground on which Integral Facticity and IACT stand — without it, the framework has no way of distinguishing between irreducibly different forms of access to the same experiential reality, and the pluralism it claims collapses into either a covert monism or an undifferentiated relativism.

What Habermas, Wilber, and IEP together provide, and what I find not yet adequately addressed in Segall’s process framework, is an account of perspective-taking as praxis — the recognition that persons do not simply differ in their comprehensive doctrines (Rawls’s horizontal pluralism) but differ in their capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously without collapsing them into one another. This is not about developmental stages. It is about psychological flexibility: the capacity to defuse from any single perspective, to accept the full range of experience including experiences that challenge one’s existing framework, to observe one’s own perspective as a perspective rather than as reality itself, to remain present to what is actually happening rather than to ideological scripts, and to act from chosen values rather than from rigid identification with any particular position. This is what Hayes’s ACT Hexaflex describes, and it is the practical mechanism that neither Habermas’s communicative rationality nor Wilber’s perspectival architecture provides on its own.

This is what I mean by “enchanted flatland” — a term I use carefully, aware of its polemical edge, to name a structural feature rather than a deficiency. Segall’s process-relational panexperientialism re-enchants nature, overcoming the bifurcation that has haunted modernity since Descartes. That is a real achievement. But by extending experience all the way down to every actual occasion while leaving the question of perspective-differentiation and perspective-taking undertheorized, the result is a cosmological democracy that does not yet have the psychological and political tools to realize itself. Whitehead’s God persuades rather than coerces — but the process tradition has not yet adequately addressed why persuasion so often fails, why persons remain fused with partial perspectives despite the availability of broader ones, or how the transition from fusion to flexibility actually occurs in lived experience. There may be resources within the process tradition for addressing these questions that I have not yet encountered, and I put this forward as a genuine inquiry rather than a settled verdict.

VII. Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, and IACT

My own research, conducted through the Metapattern Institute under the banner of Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT), attempts to address precisely this gap. The Metapattern Institute is a digital humanities research hub focused on knowledge mobilization through integral humanism, with roots in health informatics and integral human development. Its research program synthesizes Wilber’s integral theory with Habermas’s post-metaphysical philosophy and Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Training to produce a framework that is simultaneously cosmologically grounded, psychologically informed, and practically applicable. The institute’s orientation toward the concrete conditions of human flourishing — health, development, community, institutional life — reflects my formation in Applied Human Sciences at Concordia and subsequent research in health studies, and distinguishes this work from purely speculative approaches.

The grounding concept is what I call Integral Facticity — the irreducible givens of embodied existence (biological, psychological, social, cultural) that constitute the starting point for any genuine inquiry into the human condition. Integral Facticity is not a theory imposed from above but a description of what is already the case: we are embodied beings, embedded in relational fields, navigating multiple perspectives, and always already thrown into a world that precedes and exceeds our comprehension of it. This is Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrownness) integrated with Wilber’s AQAL quadrants and Habermas’s lifeworld — facticity understood integrally, as the full spectrum of conditions within which human flourishing unfolds.

The methodological companion to Integral Facticity is Enactive Fallibilism. Drawing on Evan Thompson’s enactivist philosophy of mind, Charles Sanders Peirce’s fallibilism, and the pragmatic tradition, Enactive Fallibilism holds that systems — cognitive, social, political, institutional — are tested not by their internal logical consistency but by whether they produce or alleviate suffering in lived experience. A system that produces systematic suffering is falsified enactively — the body registers what theory may obscure. This is not grievance. It is empirical method applied to the conditions of life. When a political ideology consistently produces dehumanization, the appropriate response is not to adjust the ideology’s internal premises but to recognize that it has been tested and found wanting by the only tribunal that matters: the lived experience of actual persons.

IACT operationalizes these principles through the ACT Hexaflex — six interrelated psychological processes (defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, present moment awareness, values clarification, and committed action) that together constitute what Hayes calls psychological flexibility: the ability to contact the present moment fully as a conscious human being and to persist in or change behavior in the service of chosen values. What IACT adds to standard ACT is the integral frame: the Hexaflex operates not only at the individual level but across all four of Wilber’s quadrants (individual interior, individual exterior, collective interior, collective exterior) and across the irreducible perspectives that IEP differentiates. Applied to politics, this means that the Hexaflex provides the mechanism for what Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory describes: the capacity to engage all six moral foundations flexibly, without fusion with any particular configuration.

Here is where I believe a practical gap remains — one that process liberalism, even in Segall’s cosmologically sophisticated version, does not yet address. Segall tells us that Whitehead’s God persuades rather than coerces and that the cosmos is a “democracy of fellow creatures.” But the question remains: how does a human being who is fused with the Care/Fairness cluster (the standard liberal configuration) defuse enough to recognize the legitimacy of the Loyalty/Authority/Sanctity foundations without abandoning their own moral commitments — or how does a person fused with the binding foundations (the standard conservative configuration) open to the individualizing foundations without experiencing that opening as a betrayal of everything they hold sacred? IACT provides one such mechanism. The Hexaflex is the practice through which persons develop the psychological flexibility to hold the full moral palette without collapsing into either relativism (nothing matters) or fundamentalism (only my configuration matters).

Jacques Maritain’s integral humanism, which I take as the anthropological ground of this work, makes the same move at the level of political philosophy that IACT makes at the level of practice. Maritain, who played a central role in drafting the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, insisted that the dignity of the human person cannot be reduced to any political program, economic system, or ideological formation. His integral humanism holds that the human being is simultaneously natural and supernatural, individual and social, material and spiritual — and that any political philosophy adequate to the full range of human experience must hold all of these dimensions without reducing any to the others. This is not personalism alone, though Maritain was a personalist. It is integral humanism — an account of the human person that includes the personalist dimension while also theorizing the developmental well-being, cultural, and institutional conditions within which persons flourish or suffer.

My grounding in Maritain is not incidental. It reflects a specifically Canadian intellectual genealogy — one that runs through George Grant, Charles Taylor, Leslie Armour, and the tradition of Canadian speculative philosophy that has always been more hospitable to metaphysical inquiry, more attentive to the communal dimensions of political life, and more resistant to the libertarian individualism of the American philosophical mainstream than its southern neighbors. Armour’s substantive moral pluralism — his insistence that genuine pluralism requires engagement with the substance of competing moral visions rather than a procedural bracketing of their truth claims — is a direct influence on my conception of Integral Epistemological Pluralism. Taylor’s argument in Sources of the Self that modern identity is constituted by moral frameworks that cannot be abandoned without self-dissolution informs my account of Integral Facticity. And Fred Dallmayr’s cross-cultural dialogue between integral humanism and non-Western traditions of political thought provides a cosmopolitan dimension that keeps this work from collapsing into European provincialism.

Segall’s political theology leans on Mounier’s personalism and Whitehead’s process theology to ground democratic values. I want to suggest that Maritain’s integral humanism does complementary work with a broader scope, precisely because it holds together the spiritual dignity of persons (which personalism affirms) with a substantive account of the social, economic, and political conditions required for that dignity to be realized (which personalism, in its purer forms, can leave underspecified). When integral humanism meets Haidt’s moral psychology and the ACT Hexaflex, the result is a framework that addresses what process liberalism has not yet taken up: a lived practice for navigating moral and political pluralism with both conviction and flexibility.

VIII. The Brooks Case Study: Integral Political Praxis Through the Hexaflex

Has anyone actually practiced what this framework describes? The late Michael Brooks (1983–2020) — political commentator, author of Against the Web, co-host of The Majority Report, and host of The Michael Brooks Show — provides the most compelling case study of psychological flexibility in political praxis that I have found. It was Brooks’s practice, not his theory, that first brought me to the analysis I am offering here. And it was my conversation with Segall on The Integral Facticity Podcast in 2022, titled “Varieties of Integral, Michael Brooks, and the Next Left,” that first put these threads in dialogue.

I developed the full Hexaflex-Haidt mapping of Brooks’s practice in “Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Michael Brooks and the Integral Left” (August 2025) and extended the theoretical architecture in “Beyond the Master Signifier: Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility and Virtue Ethics” (February 2026). What I want to do here is present the mapping in a form that makes visible what it offers to the conversation with Segall — specifically, what a perspectival-praxis account adds to the cosmological and political-theological ground Segall has laid.

What follows is not a claim that Brooks consciously employed ACT processes or Haidt’s moral foundations framework. He did not use this language. The significance lies in what the mapping reveals about the practicability of psychological flexibility in the political register — and about what becomes possible when praxis meets the kind of cosmological depth Segall provides.

The ACT Hexaflex describes six interrelated processes that together constitute psychological flexibility. Brooks exhibited all six in his political praxis, and each illuminates a dimension of the problem that process liberalism has not yet addressed.

Defusion — the capacity to hold verbal content as verbal content rather than as the final word on reality — was Brooks’s signature quality. He held strong ideological commitments (democratic socialism, anti-imperialism, materialist analysis) with a characteristic humor and lightness that set his practice apart from the fusion-driven certainty of most political discourse. He could advocate passionately for a position in one segment and satirize the rigidity of that same position’s adherents in the next. This is what it looks like when someone holds political conviction without rigidity — when the verbal network of ideology serves as a tool rather than a cage. Whitehead’s God persuades rather than coerces, but defusion is the psychological process through which a person becomes capable of being persuaded rather than locked inside their existing commitments.

Acceptance — the willingness to contact the full range of experience without avoidance — showed in Brooks’s engagement with conservative moral intuitions. He engaged Authority, Loyalty, and Sanctity with curiosity rather than contempt. His interviews with right-wing figures and his analyses of conservative movements demonstrated a willingness to contact the full moral spectrum rather than dismissing the binding foundations as pathological. He accepted that these foundations index real features of human social life, even when they were being mobilized in the service of domination. This is the process-level answer to the addiction/allergy pattern: not agreement with conservative positions, but the refusal to avoid the moral experience they carry. Segall’s process theology tells us that every actual occasion has experiential depth. Acceptance is the psychological practice through which a person stops excluding the moral experiences that don’t fit their ideological self-image.

Self-as-Context — the capacity to observe one’s own perspective as a perspective rather than as reality itself — was evident in Brooks’s ability to take the perspective of a Brazilian worker, an Indian farmer, a conservative American voter, or a Marxist intellectual without being captured by any single vantage point. This is Hayes’s observing self operating in the political register: the capacity to see systems of perspectives rather than being embedded within a single one. It is also the psychological precondition for Habermasian discourse — you cannot enter the ideal speech situation if you cannot distinguish your perspective from reality itself. And it is what Wilber’s perspectival framework makes visible: the difference between being at a perspective and being able to take a perspective.

Present Moment Awareness — contact with what is actually happening rather than with ideological scripts about what should be happening — characterized Brooks’s media practice. His commentary was marked by an immediacy and responsiveness that distinguished it from the scripted talking points of most political media. He was present to the material, willing to be surprised by it, capable of adjusting his analysis in real time rather than forcing events into predetermined templates. Process philosophy tells us that the actual occasion is always novel. Present moment awareness is the psychological process that allows a political actor to register that novelty rather than assimilating it to prior categories.

Values Clarity — the capacity to identify and articulate what matters without confusing values with rules — was visible in everything Brooks did. His values — solidarity, internationalism, the dignity of working people, intellectual honesty, humor as a mode of truth-telling — were not abstract commitments maintained at a distance from daily life but lived orientations that shaped every segment, interview, and public appearance. His values were his compass, not his cage. This is the difference between values-driven action and ideology-driven action: values provide direction without dictating the specific behavior required in every situation.

Committed Action — behaving in the service of chosen values even when it is difficult — was Brooks’s most visible quality. He built institutions, took risks, cultivated relationships across political and cultural lines, and committed to the long-term work of political transformation rather than the short-term satisfactions of ideological purity. He did not merely theorize cosmopolitan socialism. He practiced it.

Mapped against Haidt’s six foundations, Brooks’s practice engaged Care (solidarity with the vulnerable), Fairness (economic justice), Liberty (anti-authoritarianism), Loyalty (solidarity as a binding commitment, not merely a sentiment), Authority (education and mentorship as developmental structures), and Sanctity (the sacred project of human dignity within a materialist framework). He engaged all six foundations without submitting to conservative Dominator Hierarchies and without collapsing into the liberal allergy to the binding foundations that characterizes most Left political media.

The question this raises for the conversation with Segall is pointed. Brooks did all of this without any explicit theoretical framework — no ACT, no Haidt, or hexaflex. He arrived at psychological flexibility in his political praxis through practice, character, and an unusual capacity for holding contradiction. If Brooks could do this through sheer practice, what becomes possible when the praxis is supported by both the cosmological depth Segall provides and the psychological-flexibility IACT offers? The framework does not replace the practice — Brooks’s example proves that the practice can exist without it. But the framework makes the practice teachable, reproducible, and accountable to something beyond individual character.

Brooks died at thirty-six. We cannot know what his practice would have become. But what it demonstrated is precisely the kind of psychological flexibility operating as integral political praxis that this essay argues is both possible and necessary — and that neither process-relational cosmology nor integral humanism can fully realize in isolation from the other.

IX. Setting the Table

I have tried to do in this essay what Segall rightly asked me to do: engage his work on its own terms, demonstrate where it succeeds, and show — through my own framework rather than merely through critique — where I believe the conversation needs to go next.

Segall has given us a process-relational cosmology that overcomes the bifurcation of nature, a political theology that grounds democratic values in the persuasive love of a Whiteheadian God, and a post-Kantian speculative philosophy that crosses the Kantian threshold without retreating to pre-critical dogmatism. This is serious philosophical work. It deserves to be read by everyone working on the question of how to ground liberal democratic values in something deeper than procedural formalism.

What I want to lay out here — clearly, before our planned dialogue — is the full architecture of what I believe our projects need from each other.

As I argued in Section VI, ontological richness without epistemological differentiation is precisely what produces the “enchanted flatland.” Segall’s panexperientialism extends experience all the way down to every actual occasion — a genuine achievement. But it does not differentiate how different ways of knowing access that experience, or theorize the validity conditions that prevent irreducibly different epistemic modes from collapsing into one another. The physicist, the contemplative, the political actor, and the embodied sufferer each access experiential reality through irreducibly different modes — each with its own standards of evidence, its own conditions of adequacy, and its own characteristic distortions when it overreaches. IEP provides this differentiation. Without it, process-relational cosmology can affirm that experience goes all the way down, but it cannot protect the differences between ways of knowing that experience from being absorbed into a single cosmological register — however sophisticated that register may be.

IEP differentiates the perspectives. But differentiation alone does not ground them in the actual conditions of human life. This is where Integral Facticity enters. Integral Facticity names the irreducible givens of embodied existence — biological, psychological, social, cultural, institutional — that constitute the starting point for any genuine inquiry and that no theoretical framework can dissolve or transcend without falsifying lived experience. It is where cosmology meets the concrete: not in the abstract dance of eternal objects and actual occasions, but in the specific facticity of a person who is embodied in this body, formed by these traditions, navigating these institutional constraints, suffering these particular failures of recognition. Segall’s cosmology can tell us that reality is a community of subjects. Integral Facticity insists that those subjects are not interchangeable — that the irreducible givens of each person’s situation are not obstacles to cosmological participation but the very medium through which participation occurs. Without this grounding, the “democracy of fellow creatures” remains a cosmological aspiration rather than a political reality — because actual democracy requires navigating the concrete differences between situated persons, not merely affirming the experiential depth they share.

And this is where IACT becomes necessary — not as a therapeutic technique bolted onto a philosophical framework, but as the practical mechanism through which IEP’s differentiated perspectives and Integral Facticity’s embodied grounding become navigable in lived experience. The ACT Hexaflex — defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, present moment awareness, values clarity, committed action — is the technology of perspective-taking. It is how a person learns to hold multiple irreducible ways of knowing without fusing with any one of them, to remain grounded in the facticity of their own embodied situation without being imprisoned by it, and to act from chosen values rather than from the rigid identification with a partial moral configuration that Haidt’s research documents across the political spectrum. The Brooks case study demonstrates that this is not merely theoretical — psychological flexibility in the political register is practicable. What IACT adds is the architecture that makes it teachable, reproducible, and accountable to the philosophical foundations that IEP and Integral Facticity provide.

The full chain, then, is this: IEP differentiates the irreducible ways of knowing that process-relational cosmology leaves undifferentiated. Integral Facticity grounds those differentiated perspectives in the embodied givens of actual human life. IACT operationalizes the navigation between them through the Hexaflex. And process-relational cosmology — Segall’s distinctive contribution — provides the ontological ground that prevents this entire architecture from collapsing into the very procedural formalism it is designed to overcome. Without Segall’s cosmology, integral political praxis has no answer to the question of why persons possess the experiential depth and spiritual dignity that the framework presupposes. Without the IEP → Integral Facticity → IACT chain, Segall’s cosmology has no account of how the democracy of fellow creatures actually gets practiced by creatures who are psychologically wired to fuse with partial moral configurations and to treat their own perspective as the whole of reality.

This is what I bring to the table. Not a correction of Segall’s project, but its structural complement — the perspectival, embodied, and practical architecture that his cosmological and political-theological work calls for but has not yet developed. Segall’s process philosophy goes through and beyond Kant. My integral humanism goes through and beyond Maritain — updated with Wilber’s perspectival architecture and Habermas’s communicative rationality. Neither project is complete without what the other carries. Whitehead gives us the ontology. Habermas gives us the discourse ethics. Haidt gives us the moral psychology. Hayes gives us the practice. Maritain gives us the integral humanism that holds all four together. The synthesis is not yet built. This essay is my attempt to show that the materials belong on the same table — and that the planned dialogue between our two projects is where the construction can begin.

Integral [+] Facticity

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