Freddy Purcell –
In this article, which I want to make into a series as part of content calls next year, I will provide a short summary of a recently published paper by an Exeter University Academic and write a personal reflection of some of the ideas presented. In this instance, I am reviewing Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes’ paper that he published last week, entitled ‘Pantheism: One and all’. This is on the back of the Phil on Tap talk on similar themes that you can find the summary for here.
In this article, Sjöstedt-Hughes argues that the concept of Pantheism, basically that all is God, is ambiguously defined. He provides a detailed history of the concept, looking back to some of its ancient foundations in Plato, before picking up on Spinoza’s development of Monist Pantheism and its tumultuous reception. Sjöstedt-Hughes explains this form of Pantheism as the belief that forms of things, like minds or matter, are examples of an infinite number of expressions for one fundamental substance. That substance being God or Nature. Sjöstedt-Hughes spends a significant portion of the article explaining this concept and its history as he believes it is the main form Pantheism. The rest of the article is spent on different forms of Pantheism. Sjöstedt-Hughes argues that Idealist Pantheism is the only other legitimate form of Pantheism, this being the idea that the fundamental substance of the world is mental. He then argues that several forms of Pantheism are contradictory or miss the key element of theism, which he argues is that this God must have consciousness. This links Pantheism closely to Panpsychism (the idea that all is mind), but Sjöstedt-Hughes effectively makes a distinction between the two. The article therefore provides an interesting history and clear explanation of what Pantheism entails on a conceptual level.
The article made for fascinating summer reading, and I found the broad conceptual history Sjöstedt-Hughes provides to be particularly interesting. The concept of Pantheism was only named in the late 17th century, but he effectively shows that in the Western tradition, the idea goes as far back as Plato. Sjöstedt-Hughes also argues that Plato set up an opposing idea to Pantheism through a transcendent creator (demiurge) that provided the foundation for Christianity’s historical hostility to the idea. While the evidence is tenuous, the suggestion that this cultural background of Christian opposition is foundational in opposition to psychedelics that bring on Pantheistic experiences is very interesting.
One point of conceptual difficulty I found with Pantheism was that Sjöstedt-Hughes (p.7) argues (in something reminiscent of the ontological argument, for those of you who studied RS A-Level) that a pantheistic God must have a mind. He argues that this mind must be as different to our minds as our bodies are to the infinite expanse of space, but doesn’t provide much detail on this. Although he does detail a fascinating history of the idea of a universal consciousness. My question is if this sort of mind is so different to ours, in what way is it still a mind? As an omniscient being, God’s mental processes would be different, and embodied cognition would be equally alien. Therefore, including God’s mental existence under the concept of mind implies a massive spectrum of consciousness that presumably extends down to life like insects, or maybe even single celled organisms. I don’t think this is necessarily an issue for Pantheism, but considering Sjöstedt-Hughes places a mental aspect as key to God’s being it seems important to show the coherence of this understanding of the mind.
I am also interested in how this more conceptual article would link to the experiential elements of Pantheism. Sjöstedt-Hughes mentions the links between Pantheism and mysticism or psychedelics but doesn’t go into detail on how the quality of unifying experiences vary. As a non-psychonaut, I wonder if it’s possible to experience the different forms of Pantheism that Sjöstedt-Hughes mentions, or if this article is more of a conceptual framework that sits in the abstract. Furthermore, even if a person could experience something that fell into one of the categories that Sjöstedt-Hughes discusses, if this experience was indescribable, how would we build a vocabulary to communicate the nature of these experiences?
The final thing I wonder about in relation to this article is how Sjöstedt-Hughes would classify an experience that relates to the ideas left out of the scope of Pantheism. He mentions that Physicalist Pantheism is closer to a Sentimental Scientism (p.13) and argues for the distinct nature of Panentheism (p.15). However, while the arguments against the coherence of these ideas are convincing, whether someone’s experience is logically coherent (particularly if they’re on psychedelics) doesn’t seem to be particularly important. Surely what this experience feels like or means to them is the most important thing. Therefore, while this is a very useful article on a conceptual level, I would be interested to see whether this framework is useful in understanding Pantheistic experiences themselves.
Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2025) ‘Pantheism: One and all’, Philosophical Psychology, pp.1-26. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2025.2499627.