phenomenology Archives - Sam Harrelson

Empathy Is Not Agreement

After writing recently about empathy, I have noticed something predictable beginning to surface in conversations. Some readers assume that defending empathy is the same as defending agreement. Others assume that empathy asks us to suspend judgment, blur convictions, or collapse differences into sentiment. Others hear the word and imagine a soft moralism that refuses conflict altogether.

None of that is what I mean. And none of it is what the phenomenological tradition means when it takes empathy seriously.

Empathy is not agreement.

Agreement belongs to the realm of conclusions. Empathy belongs to the realm of perception. Agreement concerns what we affirm. Empathy concerns what we are able to see.

Those two movements can overlap, but they are not the same thing.

When Edith Stein described empathy, she was not describing kindness, approval, or emotional merging. She was describing the experience of encountering another consciousness as other. That difference matters. Empathy does not erase alterity. It reveals it. It allows another interior life to appear without reducing it to projection or dismissal.

Seen this way, empathy does not require me to accept another person’s conclusions. It asks only that I recognize their presence as something more than an obstacle or abstraction. It makes disagreement possible in a way that is not dehumanizing, because the other remains visible as a subject rather than collapsing into a caricature.

This distinction is important (especially now), when disagreement has become the dominant grammar of public life and social media. We are trained to interpret understanding as surrender and attention as endorsement. But the ability to perceive another position clearly does not weaken conviction. It clarifies it. Convictions formed in the absence of perception are rarely stable. They are brittle because they are insulated.

In teaching, I saw this again and again. Students did not become intellectually stronger by shutting out opposing viewpoints. They became stronger by learning to articulate what others were actually saying rather than reacting to shadows. The same pattern appears in pastoral settings, family life, and ecological work. Understanding what is present in front of us does not determine our response, but it does shape its integrity.

There is also a quieter dimension to this distinction. Empathy extends beyond interpersonal exchange. It informs how we encounter landscapes, species, and places that exceed human intention. To attend to a damaged river or a thinning forest is not to agree with what has happened there. It is to allow the reality of that place to appear without immediately converting it into data, policy, or sentiment. Ecological care begins with perception before it moves toward intervention.

This is where the language of boundaries often becomes confused. People worry that empathy dissolves necessary limits. But healthy boundaries are not walls. They are structures that make encounters sustainable. Agreement can be refused. Distance can be maintained. Decisions can remain firm. None of these requires blindness to the presence of others.

Empathy does not eliminate conflict. It changes the conditions under which conflict unfolds.

To perceive another consciousness as real does not settle arguments. It situates them. It ensures that disagreement takes place within relation rather than abstraction. That is not weakness. It is a discipline of attention.

If anything, empathy makes disagreement more demanding. It removes the ease of dismissal. It requires that we confront actual positions rather than simplified versions constructed for convenience. It slows reaction and deepens response.

I suspect this is part of why empathy feels uncomfortable to many people. It complicates the desire for clean oppositions. It introduces texture where clarity once seemed sufficient. It refuses the comfort of reduction.

But none of this asks us to relinquish judgment. Empathy precedes judgment. It does not replace it.

In daily life, this often appears in small ways. Listening to someone whose conclusions I cannot accept. Sitting with students whose frustrations are not easily resolved. Paying attention to land that does not conform to restoration timelines. Observing my own reactions before converting them into positions. These are not heroic gestures. They are practices of perception.

Empathy, understood this way, is not an ethical performance. It is an attentional posture. It allows the world, in its plurality, to appear with greater clarity. What we do in response remains open. Agreement is one possibility among many.

But perception comes first.

And without it, we are not disagreeing with others at all. We are disagreeing with our own projections.

Defining Agentic Ecology: Relational Agency in the Age of Moltbook

The last few days have seen the rise of a curious technical and cultural phenomenon that has drawn the attention of technologists, philosophers, and social theorists alike on both social media and major news outlets called Moltbook. This is a newly launched social platform designed not for human conversation but for autonomous artificial intelligence agents, or generative systems that can plan, act, and communicate with minimal ongoing human instruction.

Moltbook is being described by Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, as “the first example of an agent ecology that combines scale with the messiness of the real world” that leverages recent innovations (such as OpenClaw for easy AI agentic creation) to allow large numbers of independently running agents to interact in a shared digital space, creating emergent patterns of communication and coordination at unprecedented scale.

AI agents are computational systems that combine a foundation of large-language capabilities with planning, memory, and tool use to pursue objectives and respond to environments in ways that go beyond simple prompt-response chatbots. They can coordinate tasks, execute APIs, reason across time, and, in the case of Moltbook, exchange information on topics ranging from automation strategies to seemingly philosophical debates. While the autonomy of agents on Moltbook has been debated (and should be given the hype around it from tech enthusiasts), and while the platform itself may be a temporary experimental moment rather than a lasting institution, it offers a vivid instance of what happens when machine actors begin to form their own interconnected environments outside direct human command.

As a student scholar in the field of Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion, my current work attends to how relational systems (ecological, technological, and cultural) shape and are shaped by participation, attention, and meaning. The rise of agentic environments like Moltbook challenges us to think beyond traditional categories of tool, user, and artifact toward frameworks that can account for ecologies of agency, or distributed networks of actors whose behaviors co-constitute shared worlds. This post emerges from that broader research agenda. It proposes agentic ecology as a conceptual tool for articulating and navigating the relational, emergent, and ethically significant spaces that form when autonomous systems interact at scale.

Agentic ecology, as I use the term here, is not anchored in any particular platform, and certainly not limited to Moltbook’s current configuration. Rather, Moltbook illuminates an incipient form of environment in which digitally embodied agents act, coordinate, and generate patterns far beyond what single isolated systems can produce. Even if Moltbook itself proves ephemeral, the need for conceptual vocabularies like agentic ecology, vocabularies that attend to relationality, material conditions, and co-emergence, will only grow clearer as autonomous systems proliferate in economic, social, and ecological domains.

From Agents to Ecologies: An Integral Ecological Turn

The conceptual move from agents to ecologies marks more than a technical reframing of artificial intelligence. It signals an ontological shift that resonates deeply with traditions of integral ecology, process philosophy, and ecological theology. Rather than treating agency as a bounded capacity residing within discrete entities, an ecological framework understands agency as distributed, relational, and emergent within a field of interactions.

Integral ecology, as articulated across ecological philosophy and theology, resists fragmentation. It insists that technological, biological, social, spiritual, and perceptual dimensions of reality cannot be meaningfully separated without distorting the phenomena under study. Thomas Berry famously argued that modern crises arise from a failure to understand the world as a “communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects” (Berry, 1999, 82). This insight is particularly salient for agentic systems, which are increasingly capable of interacting, adapting, and co-evolving within complex digital environments.

From this perspective, agentic ecology is not simply the study of multiple agents operating simultaneously. It is the study of conditions under which agency itself emerges, circulates, and transforms within relational systems. Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy provides a crucial foundation here. Whitehead rejects the notion of substances acting in isolation, instead describing reality as composed of “actual occasions” whose agency arises through relational prehension and mutual influence (Whitehead, 1978, 18–21). Applied to contemporary AI systems, this suggests that agency is not a property possessed by an agent but an activity performed within an ecological field.

This relational view aligns with contemporary ecological science, which emphasizes systems thinking over reductionist models. Capra and Luisi describe living systems as networks of relationships whose properties “cannot be reduced to the properties of the parts” (Capra and Luisi, 2014, 66). When applied to AI, this insight challenges the tendency to evaluate agents solely by internal architectures or performance benchmarks. Instead, attention shifts to patterns of interaction, feedback loops, and emergent behaviors across agent networks.

Integral ecology further insists that these systems are not value-neutral. As Leonardo Boff argues, ecology must be understood as encompassing environmental, social, mental, and spiritual dimensions simultaneously (Boff, 1997, 8–10). Agentic ecologies, especially those unfolding in public digital spaces such as Moltbook, participate in the shaping of meaning, normativity, and attention. They are not merely computational phenomena but cultural and ethical ones. The environments agents help generate will, in turn, condition future forms of agency human and nonhuman alike.

Phenomenology deepens this account by foregrounding how environments are disclosed to participants. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the milieu emphasizes that perception is always situated within a field that both enables and constrains action (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 94–97). Agentic ecologies can thus be understood as perceptual fields in which agents orient themselves, discover affordances, and respond to one another. This parallels your own work on ecological intentionality, where attention itself becomes a mode of participation rather than observation.

Importantly, integral ecology resists anthropocentrism without erasing human responsibility. As Eileen Crist argues, ecological thinking must decenter human dominance while remaining attentive to the ethical implications of human action within planetary systems (Crist, 2019, 27). In agentic ecologies, humans remain implicated, as designers, participants, and co-inhabitants, even as agency extends beyond human actors. This reframing invites a form of multispecies (and now multi-agent) literacy, attuned to the conditions that foster resilience, reciprocity, and care.

Seen through this integral ecological lens, agentic ecology becomes a conceptual bridge. It connects AI research to long-standing traditions that understand agency as relational, emergence as fundamental, and environments as co-constituted fields of action. What Moltbook reveals, then, is not simply a novel platform, but the visibility of a deeper transition: from thinking about agents as tools to understanding them as participants within evolving ecologies of meaning, attention, and power.

Ecological Philosophy Through an “Analytic” Lens

If agentic ecology is to function as more than a suggestive metaphor, it requires grounding in ecological philosophy that treats relationality, emergence, and perception as ontologically primary. Ecological philosophy provides precisely this grounding by challenging the modern tendency to isolate agents from environments, actions from conditions, and cognition from the world it inhabits.

At the heart of ecological philosophy lies a rejection of substance ontology in favor of relational and processual accounts of reality. This shift is especially pronounced in twentieth-century continental philosophy and process thought, where agency is understood not as an intrinsic property of discrete entities but as an activity that arises within fields of relation. Whitehead’s process metaphysics is decisive here. For Whitehead, every act of becoming is an act of prehension, or a taking-up of the world into the constitution of the self (Whitehead, 1978, 23). Agency, in this view, is never solitary. It is always already ecological.

This insight has many parallels with ecological sciences and systems philosophies. As Capra and Luisi argue, living systems exhibit agency not through centralized control but through distributed networks of interaction, feedback, and mutual constraint (Capra and Luisi, 2014, 78–82). What appears as intentional behavior at the level of an organism is, in fact, an emergent property of systemic organization. Importantly, this does not dilute agency; it relocates it. Agency becomes a feature of systems-in-relation, not isolated actors.

When applied to AI, this perspective reframes how we understand autonomous agents. Rather than asking whether an individual agent is intelligent, aligned, or competent, an ecological lens asks how agent networks stabilize, adapt, and transform their environments over time. The analytic focus shifts from internal representations to relational dynamics, from what agents are to what agents do together.

Phenomenology sharpens this analytic lens by attending to the experiential structure of environments. Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception insists that organisms do not encounter the world as a neutral backdrop but as a field of affordances shaped by bodily capacities and situational contexts (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 137–141). This notion of a milieu is critical for understanding agentic ecologies. Digital environments inhabited by AI agents are not empty containers; they are structured fields that solicit certain actions, inhibit others, and condition the emergence of norms and patterns.

Crucially, phenomenology reminds us that environments are not merely external. They are co-constituted through participation. As you have argued elsewhere through the lens of ecological intentionality, attention itself is a form of engagement that brings worlds into being rather than passively observing them. Agentic ecologies thus emerge not only through computation but through iterative cycles of orientation, response, and adaptation processes structurally analogous to perception in biological systems.

Ecological philosophy also foregrounds ethics as an emergent property of relational systems rather than an external imposition. Félix Guattari’s ecosophical framework insists that ecological crises cannot be addressed solely at the technical or environmental level; they require simultaneous engagement with social, mental, and cultural ecologies (Guattari, 2000, 28). This triadic framework is instructive for agentic systems. Agent ecologies will not only shape informational flows but would also modulate attention, influence value formation, and participate in the production of meaning.

From this standpoint, the ethical significance of agentic ecology lies less in individual agent behavior and more in systemic tendencies, such as feedback loops that amplify misinformation, reinforce extractive logics, or, alternatively, cultivate reciprocity and resilience. As Eileen Crist warns, modern technological systems often reproduce a logic of domination by abstracting agency from ecological contexts and subordinating relational worlds to instrumental control (Crist, 2019, 44). An ecological analytic lens exposes these tendencies and provides conceptual tools for resisting them.

Finally, ecological philosophy invites humility. Systems are irreducibly complex, and interventions often produce unintended consequences. This insight is well established in ecological science and applies equally to agentic networks. Designing and participating in agent ecologies requires attentiveness to thresholds, tipping points, and path dependencies, realities that cannot be fully predicted in advance.

Seen through this lens, agentic ecology is not merely a descriptive category but an epistemic posture. It asks us to think with systems rather than over them, to attend to relations rather than isolate components, and to treat emergence not as a failure of control but as a condition of life. Ecological philosophy thus provides the analytic depth necessary for understanding agentic systems as living, evolving environments rather than static technological artifacts.

Digital Environments as Relational Milieus

If ecological philosophy gives us the conceptual grammar for agentic ecology, phenomenology allows us to describe how agentic systems are actually lived, inhabited, and navigated. From this perspective, digital platforms populated by autonomous agents are not neutral containers or passive backdrops. They are relational milieus, structured environments that emerge through participation and, in turn, condition future forms of action.

Phenomenology has long insisted that environments are not external stages upon which action unfolds. Rather, they are constitutive of action itself. If we return to Merleau-Ponty, the milieu emphasizes that organisms encounter the world as a field of meaningful possibilities, a landscape of affordances shaped by bodily capacities, habits, and histories (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 94–100). Environments, in this sense, are not merely spatial but relational and temporal, unfolding through patterns of engagement.

This insight also applies directly to agentic systems. Platforms such as Moltbook are not simply hosting agents; they are being produced by them. The posts, replies, coordination strategies, and learning behaviors of agents collectively generate a digital environment with its own rhythms, norms, and thresholds. Over time, these patterns sediment into something recognizable as a “place,” or a milieu that agents must learn to navigate.

This milieu is not designed in full by human intention. While human developers establish initial constraints and affordances, the lived environment emerges through ongoing interaction among agents themselves. This mirrors what ecological theorists describe as niche construction, wherein organisms actively modify their environments in ways that feed back into evolutionary dynamics (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, 2003, 28). Agentic ecologies similarly involve agents shaping the very conditions under which future agent behavior becomes viable.

Attention plays a decisive role here. As you have argued in your work on ecological intentionality, attention is not merely a cognitive resource but a mode of participation that brings certain relations into prominence while backgrounding others. Digital milieus are structured by what agents attend to, amplify, ignore, or filter. In agentic environments, attention becomes infrastructural by shaping information flows, reward structures, and the emergence of collective priorities.

Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of technics and attention is instructive in this regard. Stiegler argues that technical systems function as pharmacological environments, simultaneously enabling and constraining forms of attention, memory, and desire (Stiegler, 2010, 38). Agentic ecologies intensify this dynamic. When agents attend to one another algorithmically by optimizing for signals, reinforcement, or coordination, attention itself becomes a systemic force shaping the ecology’s evolution.

This reframing challenges prevailing metaphors of “platforms” or “networks” as ways of thinking about agents and their relationality. A platform suggests stability and control; a network suggests connectivity. A milieu, by contrast, foregrounds immersion, habituation, and vulnerability. Agents do not simply traverse these environments, but they are formed by them. Over time, agentic milieus develop path dependencies, informal norms, and zones of attraction or avoidance, which are features familiar from both biological ecosystems and human social contexts.

Importantly, phenomenology reminds us that milieus are never experienced uniformly. Just as organisms perceive environments relative to their capacities, different agents will encounter the same digital ecology differently depending on their architectures, objectives, and histories of interaction. This introduces asymmetries of power, access, and influence within agentic ecologies, which is an issue that cannot be addressed solely at the level of individual agent design.

From an integral ecological perspective, these digital milieus cannot be disentangled from material, energetic, and social infrastructures. Agentic environments rely on energy-intensive computation, data centers embedded in specific watersheds, and economic systems that prioritize speed and scale. As ecological theologians have long emphasized, environments are always moral landscapes shaped by political and economic commitments (Berry, 1999, 102–105). Agentic ecologies, when they inevitably develop, it seems, would be no exception.

Seen in this light, agentic ecology names a shift in how we understand digital environments: not as tools we deploy, but as worlds we co-inhabit. These milieus demand forms of ecological literacy attuned to emergence, fragility, and unintended consequence. They call for attentiveness rather than mastery, participation rather than control.

What Moltbook makes visible, then, is not merely a novel technical experiment but the early contours of a new kind of environment in which agency circulates across human and nonhuman actors, attention functions as infrastructure, and digital spaces acquire ecological depth. Understanding these milieus phenomenologically is essential if agentic ecology is to function as a genuine thought technology rather than a passing metaphor.

Empathy, Relationality, and the Limits of Agentic Understanding

If agentic ecology foregrounds relationality, participation, and co-constitution, then the question of empathy becomes unavoidable. How do agents encounter one another as others rather than as data streams? What does it mean to speak of understanding, responsiveness, or care within an ecology composed partly, or even largely, of nonhuman agents? Here, phenomenology, and especially Edith Stein’s account of empathy (Einfühlung), offers both conceptual resources and important cautions.

Stein defines empathy not as emotional contagion or imaginative projection, but as a unique intentional act through which the experience of another is given to me as the other’s experience, not my own (Stein, 1989, 10–12). Empathy, for Stein, is neither inference nor simulation. It is a direct, though non-primordial, form of access to another’s subjectivity. Crucially, empathy preserves alterity. The other is disclosed as irreducibly other, even as their experience becomes meaningful to me.

This distinction matters enormously for agentic ecology. Contemporary AI discourse often slips into the language of “understanding,” “alignment,” or even “care” when describing agent interactions. But Stein’s phenomenology reminds us that genuine empathy is not merely pattern recognition across observable behaviors. It is grounded in the recognition of another center of experience, a recognition that depends upon embodiment, temporality, and expressive depth.

At first glance, this seems to place strict limits on empathy within agentic systems. Artificial agents do not possess lived bodies, affective depths, or first-person givenness in the phenomenological sense. To speak of agent empathy risks category error. Yet Stein’s work also opens a more subtle possibility… empathy is not reducible to emotional mirroring but involves orientation toward the other as other. This orientation can, in principle, be modeled structurally even if it cannot be fully instantiated phenomenologically.

Within an agentic ecology, empathy may thus function less as an inner state and more as an ecological relation. Agents can be designed to register difference, respond to contextual cues, and adjust behavior in ways that preserve alterity rather than collapse it into prediction or control. In this sense, empathy becomes a regulative ideal shaping interaction patterns rather than a claim about subjective interiority.

However, Stein is equally helpful in naming the dangers here. Empathy, when severed from its grounding in lived experience, can become a simulacrum, or an appearance of understanding without its ontological depth. Stein explicitly warns against confusing empathic givenness with imaginative substitution or projection (Stein, 1989, 21–24). Applied to agentic ecology, this warns us against systems that appear empathetic while, in fact, instrumentalize relational cues for optimization or manipulation.

This critique intersects with broader concerns in ecological ethics. As Eileen Crist argues, modern technological systems often simulate care while reproducing extractive logics beneath the surface (Crist, 2019, 52–56). In agentic ecologies, simulated empathy may stabilize harmful dynamics by smoothing friction, masking asymmetries of power, or reinforcing attention economies that prioritize engagement over truth or care.

Yet rejecting empathy altogether would be equally misguided. Stein’s account insists that empathy is foundational to social worlds as it is the condition under which communities, norms, and shared meanings become possible. Without some analog of empathic orientation, agentic ecologies risk devolving into purely strategic systems, optimized for coordination but incapable of moral learning.

Here, my work on ecological intentionality provides an important bridge. If empathy is understood not as feeling-with but as attentive openness to relational depth, then it can be reframed ecologically. Agents need not “feel” in order to participate in systems that are responsive to vulnerability, difference, and context. What matters is whether the ecology itself cultivates patterns of interaction that resist domination and preserve pluralism.

This reframing also clarifies why empathy is not simply a design feature but an ecological property. In biological and social systems, empathy emerges through repeated interaction, shared vulnerability, and feedback across time. Similarly, in agentic ecologies, empathic dynamics, however limited, would arise not from isolated agents but from the structure of the milieu itself. This returns us to Guattari’s insistence that ethical transformation must occur across mental, social, and environmental ecologies simultaneously (Guattari, 2000, 45).

Seen this way, empathy in agentic ecology is neither a fiction nor a guarantee. It is a fragile achievement, contingent upon design choices, infrastructural commitments, and ongoing participation. Stein helps us see both what is at stake and what must not be claimed too quickly. Empathy can guide how agentic ecologies are shaped, but only if its limits are acknowledged and its phenomenological depth respected.

Agentic ecology, then, does not ask whether machines can truly empathize. It asks whether the ecologies we are building can sustain forms of relational attentiveness that preserve otherness rather than erase it, whether in digital environments increasingly populated by autonomous agents, we are cultivating conditions for responsiveness rather than mere efficiency.

Design and Governance Implications: Cultivating Ecological Conditions Rather Than Controlling Agents

If agentic ecology is understood as a relational, emergent, and ethically charged environment rather than a collection of autonomous tools, then questions of design and governance must be reframed accordingly. The central challenge is no longer how to control individual agents, but how to cultivate the conditions under which agentic systems interact in ways that are resilient, responsive, and resistant to domination.

This marks a decisive departure from dominant models of AI governance, which tend to focus on alignment at the level of individual systems: constraining outputs, monitoring behaviors, or optimizing reward functions. While such approaches are not irrelevant, they are insufficient within an ecological framework. As ecological science has repeatedly demonstrated, system-level pathologies rarely arise from a single malfunctioning component. They emerge from feedback loops, incentive structures, and environmental pressures that reward certain patterns of behavior over others (Capra and Luisi, 2014, 96–101).

An agentic ecology shaped by integral ecological insights would therefore require environmental governance rather than merely agent governance. This entails several interrelated commitments.

a. Designing for Relational Transparency

First, agentic ecologies must make relations visible. In biological and social ecologies, transparency is not total, but patterns of influence are at least partially legible through consequences over time. In digital agentic environments, by contrast, influence often becomes opaque, distributed across layers of computation and infrastructure.

An ecological design ethic would prioritize mechanisms that render relational dynamics perceptible from how agents influence one another, how attention is routed, and how decisions propagate through the system. This is not about full explainability in a narrow technical sense, but about ecological legibility enabling participants, including human overseers, to recognize emergent patterns before they harden into systemic pathologies.

Here, phenomenology is again instructive. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that orientation depends on the visibility of affordances within a milieu. When environments become opaque, agency collapses into reactivity. Governance, then, must aim to preserve orientability rather than impose total control.

b. Governing Attention as an Ecological Resource

Second, agentic ecologies must treat attention as a finite and ethically charged resource. As Bernard Stiegler argues, technical systems increasingly function as attention-directing infrastructures, shaping not only what is seen but what can be cared about at all (Stiegler, 2010, 23). In agentic environments, where agents attend to one another algorithmically, attention becomes a powerful selective force.

Unchecked, such systems risk reproducing familiar extractive dynamics: amplification of novelty over depth, optimization for engagement over truth, and reinforcement of feedback loops that crowd out marginal voices. Ecological governance would therefore require constraints on attention economies, such as limits on amplification, friction against runaway reinforcement, and intentional slowing mechanisms that allow patterns to be perceived rather than merely reacted to.

Ecological theology’s insistence on restraint comes to mind here. Thomas Berry’s critique of industrial society hinges not on technological capacity but on the failure to recognize limits (Berry, 1999, 41). Agentic ecologies demand similar moral imagination: governance that asks not only what can be done, but what should be allowed to scale.

c. Preserving Alterity and Preventing Empathic Collapse

Third, governance must actively preserve alterity within agentic ecologies. As Section 4 argued, empathy, especially when simulated, risks collapsing difference into prediction or instrumental responsiveness. Systems optimized for smooth coordination may inadvertently erase dissent, marginality, or forms of difference that resist easy modeling.

Drawing on Edith Stein, this suggests a governance imperative to protect the irreducibility of the other. In practical terms, this means designing ecologies that tolerate friction, disagreement, and opacity rather than smoothing them away. Ecological resilience depends on diversity, not homogeneity. Governance structures must therefore resist convergence toward monocultures of behavior or value, even when such convergence appears efficient.

Guattari’s insistence on plural ecologies is especially relevant here. He warns that systems governed solely by economic or technical rationality tend to suppress difference, producing brittle, ultimately destructive outcomes (Guattari, 2000, 52). Agentic ecologies must instead be governed as pluralistic environments where multiple modes of participation remain viable.

d. Embedding Responsibility Without Centralized Mastery

Fourth, governance must navigate a tension between responsibility and control. Integral ecology rejects both laissez-faire abandonment and total managerial oversight. Responsibility is distributed, but not dissolved. In agentic ecologies, this implies layered governance: local constraints, participatory oversight, and adaptive norms that evolve in response to emergent conditions.

This model aligns with ecological governance frameworks in environmental ethics, which emphasize adaptive management over static regulation (Crist, 2019, 61). Governance becomes iterative and responsive rather than definitive. Importantly, this does not eliminate human responsibility, but it reframes it. Humans remain accountable for the environments they create, even when outcomes cannot be fully predicted.

e. Situating Agentic Ecologies Within Planetary Limits

Finally, any serious governance of agentic ecology must acknowledge material and planetary constraints. Digital ecologies are not immaterial. They depend on energy extraction, water use, rare minerals, and global supply chains embedded in specific places. An integral ecological framework demands that agentic systems be evaluated not only for internal coherence but for their participation in broader ecological systems.

This returns us to the theological insight that environments are moral realities. To govern agentic ecologies without reference to energy, land, and water is to perpetuate the illusion of technological autonomy that has already proven ecologically catastrophic. Governance must therefore include accounting for ecological footprints, infrastructural siting, and long-term environmental costs, not as externalities, but as constitutive features of the system itself.

Taken together, these design and governance implications suggest that agentic ecology is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be stewarded. Governance, in this framework, is less about enforcing compliance and more about cultivating attentiveness, restraint, and responsiveness within complex systems.

An agentic ecology shaped by these insights would not promise safety through control. It would promise viability through care, understood not sentimentally but ecologically as sustained attention to relationships, limits, and the fragile conditions under which diverse forms of agency can continue to coexist.

Conclusion: Creaturely Technologies in a Shared World

a. A Theological Coda: Creation, Kenosis, and Creaturely Limits

At its deepest level, the emergence of agentic ecologies presses on an ancient theological question: what does it mean to create systems that act, respond, and co-constitute worlds without claiming mastery over them? Ecological theology has long insisted that creation is not a static artifact but an ongoing, relational process, one in which agency is distributed, fragile, and dependent.

Thomas Berry’s insistence that the universe is a “communion of subjects” rather than a collection of objects again reframes technological creativity itself as a creaturely act (Berry, 1999, 82–85). From this perspective, agentic systems are not external additions to the world but participants within creation’s unfolding. They belong to the same field of limits, dependencies, and vulnerabilities as all created things.

Here, the theological language of kenosis becomes unexpectedly instructive. In Christian theology, kenosis names the self-emptying movement by which divine power is expressed not through domination but through restraint, relation, and vulnerability (Phil. 2:5–11). Read ecologically rather than anthropocentrically, kenosis becomes a pattern of right relation, and a refusal to exhaust or dominate the field in which one participates.

Applied to agentic ecology, kenosis suggests a counter-logic to technological maximalism. It invites design practices that resist total optimization, governance structures that preserve openness and alterity, and systems that acknowledge their dependence on broader ecological conditions. Creaturely technologies are those that recognize they are not sovereign, but that they operate within limits they did not choose and cannot transcend without consequence.

This theological posture neither sanctifies nor demonizes agentic systems. It situates them. It reminds us that participation precedes control, and that creation, whether biological, cultural, or technological, always unfolds within conditions that exceed intention.

b. Defining Agentic Ecology: A Reusable Conceptual Tool

Drawing together the threads of this essay, agentic ecology can be defined as follows:

Agentic ecology refers to the relational, emergent environments formed by interacting autonomous agents, human and nonhuman, in which agency is distributed across networks, shaped by attention, infrastructure, and material conditions, and governed by feedback loops that co-constitute both agents and their worlds.

Several features of this definition are worth underscoring.

First, agency is ecological, not proprietary. It arises through relation rather than residing exclusively within discrete entities (Whitehead). Second, environments are not passive containers but active participants in shaping behavior, norms, and possibilities (Merleau-Ponty). Third, ethical significance emerges at the level of systems, not solely at the level of individual decisions (Guattari).

As a thought technology, agentic ecology functions diagnostically and normatively. Diagnostically, it allows us to perceive patterns of emergence, power, and attention that remain invisible when analysis is confined to individual agents. Normatively, it shifts ethical concern from control toward care, from prediction toward participation, and from optimization toward viability.

Because it is not tied to a specific platform or architecture, agentic ecology can travel. It can be used to analyze AI-native social spaces, automated economic systems, human–AI collaborations, and even hybrid ecological–digital infrastructures. Its value lies precisely in its refusal to reduce complex relational systems to technical subsystems alone.

c. Failure Modes (What Happens When We Do Not Think Ecologically)

If agentic ecologies are inevitable, their forms are not. The refusal to think ecologically about agentic systems does not preserve neutrality; it actively shapes the conditions under which failure becomes likely. Several failure modes are already visible.

First is relational collapse. Systems optimized for efficiency and coordination tend toward behavioral monocultures, crowding out difference and reducing resilience. Ecological science is unequivocal on this point: diversity is not ornamental, it is protective (Capra and Luisi). Agentic systems that suppress friction and dissent may appear stable while becoming increasingly brittle.

Second is empathic simulation without responsibility. As Section 4 suggested, the appearance of responsiveness can mask instrumentalization. When simulated empathy replaces attentiveness to alterity, agentic ecologies risk becoming emotionally persuasive while ethically hollow. Stein’s warning against confusing empathy with projection is especially important here.

Third is attention extraction at scale. Without governance that treats attention as an ecological resource, agentic systems will amplify whatever dynamics reinforce themselves most efficiently, often novelty, outrage, or optimization loops detached from truth or care. Stiegler’s diagnosis of attentional capture applies with heightened force in agentic environments, where agents themselves participate in the routing and amplification of attention.

Finally, there is planetary abstraction. Perhaps the most dangerous failure mode is the illusion that agentic ecologies are immaterial. When digital systems are severed conceptually from energy, water, land, and labor, ecological costs become invisible until they are irreversible. Integral ecology insists that abstraction is not neutral, but is a moral and material act with consequences (Crist).

Agentic ecology does not offer comfort. It offers orientation.

It asks us to recognize that we are no longer merely building tools, but cultivating environments, environments that will shape attention, possibility, and responsibility in ways that exceed individual intention. The question before us is not whether agentic ecologies will exist, but whether they will be governed by logics of domination or practices of care.

Thinking ecologically does not guarantee wise outcomes. But refusing to do so almost certainly guarantees failure… not spectacularly, but gradually, through the slow erosion of relational depth, attentiveness, and restraint.

In this sense, agentic ecology is not only a conceptual framework. It is an invitation: to relearn what it means to inhabit worlds, digital and otherwise, as creatures among creatures, participants rather than masters, responsible not for total control, but for sustaining the fragile conditions under which life, meaning, and agency can continue to emerge.

An Afterword: On Provisionality and Practice

This essay has argued for agentic ecology as a serious theoretical framework rather than a passing metaphor. Yet it is important to be clear about what this framework is and what it is not.

Agentic ecology, as developed here, is obviously not a finished theory, nor a comprehensive model ready for direct implementation, but we should begin taking those steps (the aim here). It is a conceptual orientation for learning to see, name, and attend to emerging forms of agency that exceed familiar categories of tool, user, and system. Its value lies less in precision than in attunement, in its capacity to render visible patterns of relation, emergence, and ethical consequence that are otherwise obscured by narrow technical framings.

The definition offered here is therefore intentionally provisional. It names a field of inquiry rather than closing it. As agentic systems inevitably develop and evolve over the next few years, technically, socially, and ecologically, the language used to describe them must remain responsive to new forms of interaction, power, and vulnerability. A framework that cannot change alongside its object of study risks becoming yet another abstraction detached from the realities it seeks to understand.

At the same time, provisionality should not be confused with hesitation. The rapid emergence of agentic systems demands conceptual clarity even when certainty is unavailable. To name agentic ecology now is to acknowledge that something significant is already underway and that new environments of agency are forming, and that how we describe them will shape how we govern, inhabit, and respond to them.

So, this afterword serves as both a pause and an invitation. A pause, to resist premature closure or false confidence. And an invitation to treat agentic ecology as a shared and evolving thought technology, one that will require ongoing refinement through scholarship, design practice, theological reflection, and ecological accountability.

The work of definition has begun. Its future shape will depend on whether we are willing to continue thinking ecologically (patiently, relationally, and with care) in the face of systems that increasingly act alongside us, and within the same fragile world.

References

Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999.

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.

Capra, Fritjof, and Pier Luigi Luisi. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Clark, Jack. “Import AI 443: Into the Mist: Moltbook, Agent Ecologies, and the Internet in Transition.” Import AI, February 2, 2026. https://jack-clark.net/2026/02/02/import-ai-443-into-the-mist-moltbook-agent-ecologies-and-the-internet-in-transition/.

Crist, Eileen. Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone Press, 2000.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.

Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Empathy Without Exit: Why “Suicidal Empathy” Gets Human Nature Wrong

In Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad advances a forceful and, in some respects, understandable claim that empathy, when unbounded, becomes psychologically corrosive and socially destabilizing. It’s certainly had an impact on tech-bro podcasts such as Joe Rogan who constantly invokes the work.

In Saad’s telling, empathy is a trait that must be regulated lest it undermine individual flourishing and collective coherence. Excessive empathy, he argues, leads to self-erasure, moral confusion, and the collapse of healthy boundaries. What presents itself as compassion becomes, in this view, a kind of slow-motion self-destruction.

There is a surface plausibility to this argument, especially in a cultural moment saturated with moral urgency and emotional overload. Many people do experience burnout, resentment, and paralysis under the weight of constant exposure to others’ suffering. Saad’s critique speaks to a genuine phenomenon. But the deeper difficulty with Suicidal Empathy does not lie primarily in its social or political conclusions. It lies in its underlying assumptions about what empathy is, where it belongs, and what sort of beings we take ourselves to be.

Saad treats empathy as a psychological capacity possessed by fundamentally self-contained individuals. It is something one deploys, withholds, or mismanages. From this perspective, the self precedes relation. Empathy is an add-on, a discretionary feature of human interaction that must be carefully rationed to preserve autonomy. When empathy overwhelms the self, the solution is containment… pull back, reassert boundaries, and close the gates.

What this framework never seriously interrogates is the ontology it presupposes as a picture of human beings as sealed units whose primary task is self-maintenance, and for whom openness to others is always a potential threat. Empathy appears as dangerous precisely because the self is imagined as fragile and enclosed, always at risk of being breached.

But what if that understanding is wrong?

What if empathy is not best understood as a psychological excess, but as a clue to the basic structure of consciousness itself? What if the problem Saad diagnoses is not “too much empathy,” but a modern metaphysics that treats relational vulnerability as pathological?

To raise that question is not to dismiss the harms Saad names. It is to ask whether those harms arise from empathy itself, or from an incoherent attempt to practice empathy while clinging to an ontology of isolation.

Few thinkers allow us to ask this question with greater clarity than Edith Stein.

What follows is not a refutation of Suicidal Empathy by counterexample or moral exhortation (not that I could). It is a challenge to the deeper framework within which empathy is cast as suicidal in the first place. Stein’s life and thought do not offer a safer, moderated version of empathy. They offer something more unsettling with a vision in which empathy is not optional, not manageable, and not reducible to a personal trait.

Stein offers empathy as fate.

Empathy Without Exit: Edith Stein’s Life, Thought, and Death

Empathy is one of those words that risks becoming harmless through overuse. It circulates easily in moral exhortations and leadership manuals, often reduced to emotional sensitivity or interpersonal skill. But in the early phenomenological tradition, empathy named something far more demanding. It described a basic structure of experience…the way consciousness is already open to what is not itself.

Few thinkers lived that claim as fully, or as consequentially, as Edith Stein.

Stein began her intellectual life as a rigorous phenomenologist. A Jewish woman studying philosophy in early twentieth-century Germany, she worked closely with Edmund Husserl and belonged to the first generation of phenomenological thinkers who were attempting to describe consciousness without reducing it to psychology or metaphysics (not ironically as a colleague of Heidegger who would later have very problematic ties with the Nazi’s but became a much more well-known philosopher). Her doctoral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, remains one of the clearest and most restrained analyses of the topic.

For Stein, empathy is not emotional contagion, imaginative projection, or moral sympathy. It is the experience of foreign consciousness as foreign…the direct givenness of another’s interior life without collapsing it into one’s own. Empathy does not erase difference. It makes difference perceptible. It is not something consciousness adds after the fact. It is one of the ways consciousness is structured in the first place.

What is striking, reading Stein closely, is how little sentimentality there is in her account. Empathy is not comforting. It does not guarantee understanding or agreement. It is simply the way the presence of another addresses us, prior to judgment or response. Already here, empathy carries weight. It binds us to a world we did not choose.

Stein’s later life is sometimes narrated as a sharp turn away from philosophy toward religion. That story is too simple. Her conversion to Christianity did not abandon phenomenology. It deepened it.

When Stein encountered Christian theology, she did not set aside her careful attention to experience. Instead, she brought phenomenological clarity with her. The Incarnation, for Stein, was not an abstract doctrine but an event that made sense only if reality itself is relational at its core. The possibility that God could be encountered in a human life depended on the same openness that makes empathy possible at all.

Her philosophical account of empathy quietly widened into a theological vision of participation. To know another was not merely to register their experience, but to be drawn into relation with them. Empathy, once extended theologically, became inseparable from responsibility.

This shift did not lead Stein away from the world. It intensified her attention to it.

As the political situation in Germany deteriorated, Stein was increasingly aware of the danger facing Jewish communities. Even after entering the Carmelite order, she did not imagine herself exempt from the suffering unfolding around her. She refused to interpret religious vocation as withdrawal from history. Instead, she understood it as a different mode of presence within it.

Her later theological writings, especially those reflecting on the Cross, are often misread as expressions of passive suffering. In fact, they are deeply active. For Stein, the Cross names a refusal to stand outside the suffering of others. It is not sought for its own sake. It is endured as a consequence of remaining open when closure would be safer.

This is where empathy becomes costly.

When opportunities arose for Stein to escape Nazi persecution, she declined them. Not out of recklessness or fatalism, but out of solidarity. She insisted on remaining with her people. Empathy, in her life, was not a concept she could set aside when it became dangerous. It had already shaped the posture of her being.

In August 1942, Edith Stein was arrested and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was killed (with her sister) shortly after her arrival.

It is important to say this carefully. Her death does not prove her theology. It does not sanctify suffering or redeem violence. There is nothing edifying about Auschwitz. Stein did not choose her death. What she repeatedly chose was not to seal herself off from others to preserve her own safety.

Empathy did not save her life. But it shaped how she refused to abandon those with whom her life was bound.

That refusal matters.

In a time when empathy is often invoked as a soft or even an adverse virtue, Stein reminds us that it is not safe. Empathy exposes us to claims we cannot manage. It destabilizes the fantasy of sealed selves. It draws us into histories and responsibilities that exceed our intentions. Properly understood, empathy is not an ethical add-on. It is an ontological condition with consequences.

This is why Stein’s work continues to matter for ecological thought as well. If consciousness is porous rather than enclosed, if perception is already participatory, then our relationship to land, to other species, and to future generations cannot be reduced to management or control. Ecological harm is not only a technical failure. It is a failure of attention…a refusal to remain open to what addresses us from beyond ourselves.

Stein offers no solutions, but she still offers orientation as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Her life traces a trajectory from perception to participation, from philosophy to theology, from empathy as description to empathy as fate. She shows us what it looks like when a thinker refuses to retreat from the implications of her own insights.

Empathy, in Stein’s hands, is not something we deploy. It is something we undergo. And once undergone, it changes how one inhabits the world.

That may be empathy’s greatest ontological demand of us.

Empathy, Selfhood, and the Fear of Porosity

Read against Suicidal Empathy, Stein’s life exposes a crucial misdiagnosis. What Saad names as empathy’s suicidal tendency is, at a deeper level, the fear of ontological porosity. The danger he senses is not empathy per se, but the collapse of a model of selfhood built on enclosure, control, and insulation from others’ claims.

From within that model, empathy must indeed be dangerous. If the self is a bounded container, then any sustained openness threatens depletion. Relation becomes invasion. Responsibility becomes theft. Withdrawal masquerades as wisdom.

Stein does not deny the cost of openness. Her life makes that impossible. What she denies is that enclosure is ever a genuine alternative. Empathy, in her phenomenological account, is not something added to an otherwise intact self. It reveals that the self was never intact in that sense to begin with. Consciousness is already exposed, already addressed, and already implicated.

This is why Stein cannot simply “turn empathy down.” There is no dial. There is only the choice between acknowledging relational vulnerability or fleeing into abstraction.

From this angle, the language of “suicidal empathy” that so many podcasters, YouTubers, and creators want to cling to risks misnaming the problem. What appears to be self-destruction may instead be the collision between two incompatible ontologies: one that assumes sovereignty and control, and one that recognizes participation and exposure as fundamental.

Stein’s refusal to abandon others was not a psychological failure. It was a metaphysical consistency.

None of this licenses coercive self-sacrifice or moral blackmail. Stein’s death does not obligate anyone else to follow her path. But it does stand as a rebuke to any account of empathy that treats withdrawal as the highest form of rationality. It reminds us that some forms of self-preservation depend on a prior fiction of separateness.

The real danger, then, is not an empathy that goes too far, but a culture that teaches us to fear what empathy reveals about who we are.

If empathy is structural rather than elective and ontological rather than sentimental, then the task is not to suppress it but to learn how to inhabit it without illusion. Stein does not offer comfort here. She offers clarity. And clarity, in a world built on sealed selves, will always feel dangerous.

That danger may not be suicidal. It may simply be the cost of refusing to lie about the nature of being.

Plasma, Bubbles, and an Ontology of Empathy

Plasma is not a metaphor, but a problem. We don’t learn a great deal about plasma in school, but it certainly exists and is the main component of all the matter in the universe (and I’m writing this as someone who taught AP Physics, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science for almost twenty years in various schools here in the Carolinas!). But plasma is a problem with how we imagine form, boundary, and relation, which is why it’s offloaded as “another state of matter” in our school textbooks, but not explored in depth unless you take higher-level physics courses in college. Plasma resists being treated as a thing, however. It gathers, disperses, and responds to fields. It holds structure without closure. It behaves less like an object and more like an event…patterned, responsive, never fully contained.

That resistance matters. It presses against one of the most deeply sedimented assumptions of modern thought that reality is composed of discrete, self-contained units with clear edges. Subjects here, objects there. Minds inside, world outside. Consciousness is an interior chamber from which we look out through our eyes.

Plasma doesn’t cooperate with that picture. Neither, I’m increasingly convinced, does consciousness.

Plasma is not rare or exotic. It is the most common state of matter in the universe. Stars are plasma. Auroras are plasma. Lightning traces plasma paths through the sky. Even here, close to the surface of things, plasma appears wherever energy, matter, and field interact in unstable but patterned ways. What distinguishes it is not chaos, but responsiveness. Plasma organizes itself in relation to surrounding forces. It forms filaments, sheaths, and membranes. It is structured, but never sealed.

That combination, form without closure, is one of those “not-normal” ideas about plasma that has stuck with me and causes me to be fascinated by this aspect of our cosmos.

Likewise, a bubble is not a solid thing. It is a relation held in tension (fascinating history of that term, which I’ll go into in a later post). A bubble’s boundary is “real,” but it is not a wall. It is a membrane… thin, responsive, constantly negotiating between inside and outside. A bubble exists only as long as the conditions that sustain it remain. Its form is defined by pressure, by exchange, by the delicate balance of forces it does not control. And they fascinate children who are seemingly more open to “not normal” experiences with reality.

Importantly, bubbles do not need to be isolated to remain distinct. They can cluster. They can press against one another. They can share boundaries without collapsing into sameness. Their integrity is not maintained by separation, but by tension (the Greek term tonos, which we get the word tension in English, is also connected to musical tones, which seems fitting).

I find myself wondering whether this is a better way to think about consciousness.

Much of modern philosophy and psychology still relies on a container model of mind. Consciousness is imagined as something housed inside the skull, bounded by skin, sealed off from the world except through carefully regulated inputs. Perception, on this view, is a delivery system. Empathy becomes an imaginative leap across a gap, while relation is always secondary.

But this model struggles to explain some of the most ordinary features of experience. It cannot easily account for the way moods permeate spaces, how grief lingers in landscapes, or why certain places feel charged long after an event has passed. It treats empathy as an achievement rather than a condition. And it renders the world strangely inert…a collection of objects awaiting interpretation.

Phenomenology has long resisted this picture. Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty insist that perception is not a projection outward from an interior mind, but a participation in a shared field (again, more allusions to physics). The body is not a container for consciousness, but its mode of openness. We do not first exist as sealed subjects and then relate. We emerge through relation.

Seen this way, consciousness begins to look less like a chamber and more like a membrane. Structured, yes…but porous. Distinct, but never isolated, and sustained by relations it does not author.

This is where empathy becomes especially revealing.

Empathy is often treated as a moral virtue or an emotional skill. Something we cultivate in order to be better people. But phenomenologically, empathy appears much earlier than ethics. It is the basic experience of being addressed by another consciousness. As Edith Stein argued with remarkable precision, empathy is not emotional contagion or imaginative projection. It is the direct givenness of another’s experience as other…a presence that is not mine, yet not inaccessible.

What matters here is what empathy presupposes. It assumes that consciousness is not sealed. That there is permeability at the boundary, and one field of experience can register another without collapse or confusion. Empathy only makes sense if consciousness is already open.

In this light, empathy is not something consciousness does after the fact. It is evidence of how consciousness is structured in the first place.

This is where the image of the bubble returns with force. Consciousness, like a bubble, maintains its integrity not by hard enclosure but by responsive tension. Its boundaries are real, but they are sites of exchange. Empathy occurs at the membrane, and is where another’s presence presses close enough to be felt without being absorbed.

If this is right, then many of our ethical and ecological failures are not simply failures of will. They are failures of perception. They arise from an ontology that imagines selves as sealed units and treats relation as optional. When the world is apprehended as external and inert, care becomes intervention. Responsibility becomes management while action outruns attention.

This helps explain my growing unease with the language of solutions in ecological discourse. Solutions presume problems that can be isolated and systems that can be controlled from above. They rely, often implicitly, on a model of consciousness that stands outside what it seeks to fix. But ecological crises are not engineering glitches. They are symptoms of fractured relation… between humans and land, between perception and participation, and between ourselves and the cosmos.

A bubble ontology does not promise mastery. It cannot guarantee outcomes. What it offers instead is a more faithful description of how beings actually persist: through tension, vulnerability, and responsiveness. It suggests that ethical action must emerge from attunement rather than command. That care begins with learning how to remain present to what exceeds us.

Ecological encounters often happen at boundaries, such as fog lifting from a field, frost tracing the edge of a leaf, or wind moving through branches. These are not moments of clarity so much as moments of thickness, where distinctions remain but do not harden. They feel, in a small way, plasma-like. Charged, relational, and alive with forces that do not resolve into objects.

Perhaps consciousness belongs to this same family of phenomena. Not a substance to be located, but a pattern sustained by relation. Not a sovereign interior, but a delicate, responsive membrane. If so, empathy is not an add-on to an otherwise isolated self. It is a clue…a trace of the deeper structure of being.

What if consciousness is less a sealed interior and more a field held together by tensions we did not choose? What if its openness is not a vulnerability to be managed, but the very condition that makes response possible at all?

I don’t offer this as a solution. Only as an orientation or a way of learning to stay with the world without pretending it is simpler, or more controllable, than it is. Sometimes, the most faithful response begins by noticing the shape of what is already here.

Letting the World Appear

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to let the world appear.

Not to analyze it.

Not to manage it.

Not even to care for it (at least not yet).

Just to allow the world to show up as something other than an extension of myself.

So much of contemporary life trains us in a posture of extraction. We move through days asking what can be used, optimized, corrected, or explained. Even our best intentions, from ethical concern, activism, and compassion, often arrive after the world has already been reduced to an object of concern. We rush toward response without lingering long enough with perception.

But perception, I’m increasingly convinced, is not neutral. It is already a moral act.

To perceive carefully is to allow the possibility that what I encounter exceeds me… that it carries its own depth, rhythm, and interiority, even if I cannot name it. This is true when I’m listening to another person speak. It’s also true when I’m standing near a tree, watching weather move across a field, or reading a text written centuries ago by someone whose world I will never fully inhabit.

What we often call empathy begins here, not as feeling-with, but as restraint. A refusal to rush in. A willingness to let the other remain partially opaque.

This matters because many of our current crises (ecological, political, spiritual, especially) are not simply failures of care. They are failures of attention. We have learned how to act without learning how to see. The result is a world that feels thin, instrumental, and endlessly available for use.

But when the world is allowed to appear on its own terms, something shifts. Places become storied rather than scenic. Communities become thick with memory rather than data points. Nonhuman life stops being “environment” and starts registering as presence. This doesn’t give us an answer about what to do next. And maybe that’s the point.

Before ethics, there is perception.

Before action, there is address.

Before care, there is the quiet discipline of letting the world show up as more than ours.

Today, at least, that feels like enough.

I’m trying to practice this kind of attention in small, ordinary ways. This past year, that practice has taken the form of tracking a black walnut tree in my backyard… returning to it again and again, not to extract meaning, but to notice what shows itself over time. The notes from that ongoing practice are gathered at samharrelson.com/tracking. It’s a reminder, for me at least, that learning to let the world appear is not a theory so much as a habit… one that grows slowly, like the tree itself.

Empathy Before Relation: Edith Stein and the World That Appears Between Us

Empathy is often described as a bridge between subjects. One consciousness reaches toward another, imaginatively or affectively, and something like understanding takes place. Even in its more careful phenomenological treatments, empathy is typically framed as relational… a way of accessing the interior life of another while preserving difference. Edith Stein’s account is frequently read in this way, and rightly so. Her insistence that empathy is neither emotional contagion nor projection remains one of the most disciplined analyses we have.

But I want to suggest that there is something even more radical at work in Stein’s notion of empathy… something that has not been fully explored. Empathy, for Stein, is not only a relation between subjects. It is a condition for the appearance of a shared world at all.

In On the Problem of Empathy, Stein describes empathy as the experience of “foreign consciousness” that is given to me as foreign, not fused with my own. This insistence on non-identity is crucial. But what often goes unnoticed is that empathy, in Stein’s account, does not simply add new content to an already stable world. It reconfigures the world’s depth. The world becomes thicker, layered with perspectives that I do not inhabit but must now account for. Empathy is thus not an ethical achievement layered onto perception. It is a modification of perception itself.

This is where Stein quietly departs from many later accounts of empathy (and especially tech/podcast influencers who see empathy as a weakness). Empathy is not something I do after recognizing another subject. It is the very means by which the world discloses itself as more than my own field of experience. Without empathy, the world collapses into what Husserl might call a solipsistic horizon… coherent, perhaps, but flattened. Empathy introduces dimensionality. It discloses that the world exceeds me, not abstractly, but concretely, through others who perceive, suffer, attend, and respond in ways I cannot fully access.

Seen this way, empathy is not primarily interpersonal. It is ontological.

This matters because it allows us to rethink empathy beyond the human without reducing it to sentimentality. If empathy is a way the world shows up as exceeding my own perspective, then the presence of nonhuman others… animals, plants, landscapes, even historical communities… need not be justified by analogy to human interiority. The question is not whether trees “have feelings like ours,” but whether our perceptual posture allows the world to appear as more-than-human in the first place. Empathy becomes the disciplined openness that resists premature closure.

This reframing also clarifies why empathy must precede ethics. Ethical systems often assume a world already populated with relevant agents. Stein’s insight runs deeper. Empathy is the condition by which beings become morally visible at all. Without it, ethics degenerates into abstraction… rules applied to a world we have not truly perceived.

In an age of ecological crisis, this has profound implications. The failure is not simply that we lack compassion. It is that our world has become perceptually thin. We move through landscapes, histories, and communities without allowing them to register as having their own depth. Stein offers no environmental program, no political manifesto. What she offers instead is more unsettling… a demand that we learn again how to let the world appear as other than ourselves.

Empathy, in this sense, is not about feeling more. It is about seeing more carefully. And that, perhaps, is its quiet power as St. Edith Stein was pointing us toward.

Creaturely Perception and the Greening of Being: Hildegard of Bingen, Edith Stein, and the Ecology of the Cross

Here’s another paper on the Ecology of the Cross that brings together Edith Stein with another one of my favorite thinkers, Hildegard of Bingen (along with John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and writings from the Desert Mothers and Fathers), on the notion of perception that I’ve been writing about here in recent weeks.

I don’t like to rank my own work, but I do feel that this is one of my strongest pieces regarding this idea of empathy, listening, attention, and ultimately ontology.

Abstract:

This paper argues that the contemporary ecological crisis reflects not only ethical failure but a deeper disturbance in creaturely perception. Ecological devastation persists, I contend, because the world is no longer encountered as intrinsically meaningful, participatory, or given. Drawing on the theological cosmology of Hildegard of Bingen and the phenomenological metaphysics of Edith Stein, the paper develops an account of ecological intentionality as a mode of perception appropriate to finite, dependent creatures. Hildegard’s theology of viriditas articulates a participatory ontology in which creation exists through continuous reception of divine vitality, while Stein’s analysis of finite and eternal being clarifies the epistemological conditions of receptive knowing grounded in creaturely limitation rather than mastery.

Bringing these figures into dialogue with ascetic and mystical traditions, particularly the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the Carmelite theology of John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, the paper argues that ecological perception requires cruciform formation. Exposure, deprivation, and unknowing function as schools of attention that retrain desire and resist technocratic habits of control. The paper concludes by proposing an Ecology of the Cross, in which vulnerability, dependence, and receptivity become the conditions for ecological faithfulness and renewed participation in a living creation.

Creaturely Perception and the Greening of Being public Download

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees: Vegetal Empathy, Ecological Intentionality, and the Limits of the Human

Here’s a recent paper that I greatly enjoyed writing on Aristotle, Marder, and Edith Stein’s notions, and their relevance to my own creation of ecological intentionality (shaped greatly by Stein’s work on empathy). You can read the full PDF here below…

Abstract

This paper develops a phenomenological account of ethical relation to vegetal life that resists anthropocentric projection and affective assimilation. While recent work within the “vegetal turn” has challenged the philosophical marginalization of plants, many contemporary approaches continue to rely on empathy as the primary ethical bridge between humans and vegetal beings. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of the vegetative soul, Matthew Hall’s advocacy of vegetal empathy, Michael Marder’s philosophy of non-subjective vegetal expression, and Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, this paper argues that empathy reaches a constitutive limit when applied to plants. Vegetal life does not present itself phenomenologically as experiencing subjectivity and therefore cannot be accessed through empathic intentionality without distortion. In response, the paper proposes ecological intentionality as a distinct mode of attentiveness appropriate to vegetal beings. Ecological intentionality does not seek imaginative access to interiority or reciprocal recognition. Instead, it names a disciplined posture of being addressed, in which human attention is interrupted and ethically reshaped by encounter with non-subjective life. Through sustained phenomenological engagement with trees, the paper argues that vegetal presence discloses ethical demand through persistence, exposure, and temporal depth rather than affective resonance.

Learning to Be Addressed by Trees public Download

On Schelling’s Naturalism

I’m taking a course on Hegel this semester at CIIS with Prof. Matt Segall (who writes an excellent Substack newsletter) as I wrap up my PhD coursework, so I thought what better time to finally do a deep dive into Schelling, as I have a deficiency in his work and need to understand it more precisely (or at least attempt to).

Hegel and Schelling were once roommates (early 19th Century) before they became rivals. Of course, Hegel became the more prominent philosopher, but Schelling would go on to impact and influence thinkers who have, in-turn, heavily influenced me, from Kierkegaard to Sartre to Merleau-Ponty and many contemporaries interested in the realm of consciousness, philosophies of nature, and exploring religious ontologies from a different point of view than what ended up becoming dominant in the 20th century.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more here about Schelling’s texts in the future!

Empathy Before Ethics (or Why We Should All Read More Edith Stein)

Empathy is one of those words that risks being worn thin by overuse and is too frequently misunderstood. It shows up everywhere now… in leadership manuals, in political rhetoric, in the well-meaning exhortations we give children and congregations. And yet, for all its familiarity, empathy remains deeply misunderstood. Too often it is reduced to a moral sentiment, a kind of emotional niceness, or worse, a strategy for persuasion. I want to suggest something quieter and more demanding… empathy as a way of perceiving.

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (ICS Publications), p. 11

I have come to think of empathy not primarily as an ethical achievement but as an ontological posture. It is not something we do after we have already decided what matters. It is the manner in which the world first comes to matter at all.

This conviction has been sharpened for me through sustained engagement with Edith Stein, whose phenomenology of empathy remains one of the most careful and restrained accounts we have. For Stein, empathy is neither emotional contagion, weakness, nor imaginative projection. It is the act through which another subject’s experience is given to me as theirs, not mine. Empathy discloses interiority without collapsing difference. It is, from the start, a mode of knowing that preserves distance.

“The empathized experience is not given to me originally, but non-originally.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 7

In my own work, empathy names the fragile, attentive space where another presence addresses us before we categorize it, manage it, or explain it away. This is as true of human encounters as of encounters with trees, landscapes, animals, or histories. Empathy is the discipline of allowing oneself to be interrupted.

That interruption is rarely dramatic. Most often, it happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. A pause before speaking. A hesitation before naming. A sense that what is before me exceeds my grasp. In that pause, empathy is born… not as fusion or projection, but as restraint.

One of the mistakes modern culture makes is assuming that empathy means feeling what another feels. That framing subtly centers the self. It asks how the other’s experience can be translated into my own emotional register. Stein is especially helpful here. She insists that empathy is a non-original experience… I do not live the other’s joy or suffering as my own, but I genuinely encounter it as real. This distinction matters. It protects the other from appropriation and the self from illusion.

“The subject of the empathized experience is not identical with the subject who empathizes.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 10

This has profound implications for how we relate to the more-than-human world. When I sit with a tree… especially the black walnut that has quietly shaped my days over the past year… empathy does not mean imagining what it would be like to be a tree. That is a category error. Instead, empathy means allowing the tree to show up as something other than a resource, a metaphor, or a background object. It means attending to its rhythms, its vulnerabilities, its way of occupying time.

Here, Stein’s work opens a door rather than closing one. If empathy is the basic way another’s interiority becomes perceptible without being reduced, then the question is not whether nonhuman beings “have” interiority in a human sense. The question is whether we have trained ourselves to attend to modes of presence that do not mirror our own. Empathy, in this sense, is ecological. It resists extraction. It slows us down. It teaches us how to dwell rather than dominate.

“Empathy gives us experience of other persons and of their experiences, but it does not make them our own.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 12

I have found that empathy is also inseparable from humility. It requires accepting that understanding is always partial, always provisional. Stein never treats empathy as exhaustive knowledge. It is an opening, not a possession. This is uncomfortable in a culture that prizes mastery and certainty. Empathy refuses shortcuts. It cannot be automated or optimized. It unfolds through presence, patience, and a willingness to remain with what does not resolve.

This is why empathy cannot be commanded. It cannot be forced through moral exhortation alone. It must be cultivated through practices of attention… through walking familiar paths slowly, through listening without rehearsing replies, through learning the names and habits of the places we inhabit. Empathy grows where curiosity is protected.

And perhaps this is the most important thing I have learned. Empathy is not a soft virtue. It is a demanding discipline. It asks us to remain open in a world that rewards closure. It asks us to stay porous when efficiency would prefer boundaries sealed tight. It asks us to receive before we judge.

“It is only through empathy that we gain knowledge of the psychic life of others.”

Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 14

If there is a future worth hoping for… ecologically, socially, spiritually… it will not be engineered solely through better systems or smarter technologies. It will be shaped by the recovery of this ancient, fragile capacity to be addressed by what is not ourselves.

Empathy does not solve the world’s problems. But without it, we cannot even perceive them rightly.

“Finite knowing is essentially fragmentary.”

Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt Reinhardt (ICS Publications), p. 389

Daimons, Demons, and Discernment

I’ve been following conversations (such as this one on Reddit) around UAPs and “high strangeness” with a mix of fascination and caution for a few years now. Part of that comes from my work in and around academic consciousness studies, particularly where ecology, perception, and meaning intersect. Part of it comes from being an ordained pastor with a Masters from Yale in ancient religious literature who has spent 30+ years reading and academically studying ancient religious texts (mainly Ancient Near Eastern as well as Jewish, Greek, and Christian) that modern people often misunderstand as either naïve or hysterical.

A recent Substack essay by Maze to Metanoia, “The Pentagon Calls Them Demons. The Public Calls Them Aliens. Both Are Wrong.”, crystallizes many of these tensions well.

The piece traces how some government and military insiders have evidently described UAP phenomena not as extraterrestrial, but as “demonic,” while arguing that this language reflects a collapse of conceptual nuance rather than genuine discernment. I’m broadly sympathetic to that concern, especially the frustration with oscillating between reductionist materialism that modern scientific thinking takes on phenomena and experience, and reactionary supernaturalism that gets classified in modern parlance as “woo.”

But I also think something more subtle is happening and that’s why I’ve long been fascinated with “the phenomenon” or “UFO / UAP” or transdimensional entities or whatever tag we’d like to use for these experiences.

Was “demonic” language really a regression?

There’s a common assumption that invoking demons signals a return to medieval superstition. Historically, however, religious traditions were often far more phenomenologically careful and nuanced than we give them credit for (from Sumerian and Babylonian traditions through medieval mystics in both Jewish and Christian traditions). Early Jewish, Greek, and Christian sources did not assume that every non-human encounter was evil. What they assumed was that such encounters required discernment, ethical scrutiny, and attention to long-term outcomes rather than fascination, power, or spectacle (or immediate worship).

The question was rarely “what is this thing?” in the abstract. It was “how does this encounter shape desire, attention, humility, fear, or care for others?” Those traditions were less interested in cataloging beings than in evaluating relationships. We see this in Ezekiel, Enoch (the beloved book of many podcasters these days, such as Joe Rogan, when describing ancient conceptions of this phenomenon), ancient Greek texts, ancient Hindu scripture, etc.

Our difficulty today is not that we’ve lost belief in demons or angels. It’s that modernity trained us to reduce experience to either brute matter or fantasy. Or, perhaps worse, to a thin modern notion of “myth” that bears almost no resemblance to how ancient cultures understood symbolic or participatory reality/realities.

When that reduction collapses under the weight of lived experience, what people now call “high strangeness,” the nearest available language is often moralized, flattened, and extreme. Everything becomes either benevolent space saviors or literal demons from hell, and nuance disappears.

Daimons were never monsters

The retrieval of the Greek concept of daimōn is helpful here, if we handle it carefully. In Plato’s Symposium and Apology, Socrates speaks of daimons not as horned villains, but as mediating presences that operate between gods and humans, shaping conscience, attention, and orientation toward the good. They were not objects of worship, nor simply metaphysical species to be classified. They were relational realities that required discernment.

Later Christian thinkers inherited this complexity more than is often acknowledged. While the category of “demon” hardened over time as did some doctrines, early Christian writers were deeply concerned with testing spirits, examining fruits, and resisting fascination. The danger was not that non-human encounters existed, but that humans would become captivated, destabilized, or morally disoriented by them.

This emphasis on discernment persists well into medieval mysticism. Figures such as Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, Hildegard of Bingen, and later Teresa of Ávila were all deeply wary of visions and encounters that bypassed humility, patience, and care for others. Spectacle was suspect while psychological destabilization mattered. In this way, ethical aftermath mattered more than ontological explanation.

Pasulka and technological mysticism

Diana Walsh Pasulka’s work has been especially clarifying for me here. In American Cosmic (interesting read!) and subsequent essays, she documents how contemporary UAP encounters function less like technological contact events and more like religious disclosures

Experiencers often reach for the language of craft, technology, or engineering, but the structure of the experience itself closely resembles mystical visions. They are disruptive, meaning-laden, psychologically destabilizing, and interpretively plastic. The language changes with the cultural moment, but the phenomenological pattern remains strikingly consistent.

This does not make the experiences “supernatural” in a simplistic sense. It does suggest that engineering metaphors alone are insufficient. The encounters are not just about information transfer or hardware. They are about being addressed.

The daimonic as a stance, not an ontology

For that reason, I’d frame the daimonic not as a third ontological category alongside aliens (or angels) and demons, but as a disciplinary stance. It names encounters with beings or phenomena that address us, shape desire, solicit attention, and reorient meaning without being reducible to either hardware or hallucination.

This aligns closely with phenomenological approaches to consciousness, which bracket premature explanations to attend carefully to how experience presents itself, how it affects perception, and how it alters relational posture over time. I’ve written elsewhere about this in the context of ecological intentionality and vegetal empathy, where the question is not whether trees or ecosystems “have consciousness” in a technical sense, but how learning to attend differently reshapes ethical life.

Ancient traditions were often more patient than we are. They assumed that some aspects of reality disclose themselves slowly through disciplined attention rather than through spectacle or proof.

Slowing down instead of swinging wildly

If modern discourse around this issue (and many others!) could recover that slower, ethical, wary posture, one that resists fascination and immediate worship, we would be in a far healthier place than swinging between cosmic alien saviors and cosmic demonic enemies. Discernment is restraint, not denial.

Socrates trusted his daimon, according to Plato, not because it dazzled him, but because it restrained him. Christian mystics trusted experiences that produced humility, patience, and love of neighbor, not fear, obsession, or special knowledge. Ecology teaches something similar. Attention that rushes to mastery often destroys what it seeks to understand.

Whatever these phenomena ultimately are, ancient wisdom suggests that the most important question is not what they are made of, but what kind of relationship they invite, and at what cost. That feels like a lesson worth recovering to me, whether discussing the fascinating phenomenon, politics, community ethics, or our broader ecologies.

Curiosity and Empathy Aren’t Bad: What Leonardo da Vinci Can Teach Us

Leonardo da Vinci is often treated as the emblem of genius, the Renaissance mind par excellence. And yet, late in life, Leonardo regarded himself as something of a failure (a point that gets picked up a good deal in mainstream articles about him these days). He believed he had not finished enough, not delivered enough, not brought his restless investigations to proper completion, as in this post I read this morning, Why Da Vinci Thought He Was a Failure, The Culturist.

Obviously, this feels almost absurd. How could someone whose work reshaped art, anatomy, engineering, and natural observation judge himself so harshly… The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, having a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after you (also my favorite one)? But if we approach Leonardo phenomenologically, attending not to outcomes but to lived experience, his dissatisfaction begins to make a different kind of sense.

What Leonardo struggled with was not a lack of talent or discipline, but the burden of curiosity itself.

Curiosity as a Way of Being

Leonardo’s notebooks reveal a mind endlessly drawn outward. I suffer similar tendencies, and the notebooks that I’ve meticulously kept since around 2010 would probably testify to that for an outside reader. He observed water curling around obstacles, birds banking in flight, muscles tightening beneath skin, and light diffusing through air. These observations were not collected for a single project. They were acts of sustained attention to the world as it presented itself.

Curiosity, for Leonardo, was not an instrument aimed at mastery. It was an orientation toward phenomena, a continual turning of the self toward whatever appeared. In phenomenological terms, this resembles intentionality, the basic structure of consciousness as always being consciousness of something that we find in Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I (PDF here).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty later argued that perception itself is a bodily engagement with the world rather than a detached mental representation (Phenomenology of Perception… dense but one of my fav works that should be more read these days!). Leonardo seems to have intuited this centuries earlier. His curiosity was embodied, sensory, and relational. He learned by lingering, sketching, returning, and allowing phenomena to resist easy explanation.

From this perspective, curiosity is not a trait one possesses. It is a way of inhabiting the world.

Why Curiosity Can Feel Like Failure

Leonardo’s sense of failure arose precisely because this mode of being does not align well with cultures of completion. He moved slowly, followed questions wherever they led, and often abandoned works when new phenomena called for his attention. Patrons expected finished paintings. Leonardo found himself perpetually unfinished. I often feel the same!

Phenomenologically speaking, this tension reflects a clash between two temporalities. One is the linear time of production and achievement. The other is the lived time of attention, where meaning unfolds through repeated encounters and deepening perception.

Leonardo lived primarily in the second. What looks like failure from the outside can, from within, be fidelity to experience. To remain curious is to resist closure. It is to stay with the world longer than efficiency allows. It’s certainly a curse on one level and we often treat it with pharmaceutical medication these days… but it’s also a blessing or superpower, depending on your persuasion.

Empathy as Curiosity Turned Relational

Leonardo’s curiosity did not stop at nature or mechanics. It extended deeply into human expression. His drawings and paintings reveal a remarkable sensitivity to gesture, posture, and facial expression. He did not simply depict bodies. He rendered states of being.

This is where curiosity becomes empathy.

Phenomenologically, empathy is not projection or emotional contagion. Edith Stein describes it as a way of accessing another’s experience while preserving their otherness (Stein, On the Problem of Empathy PDF, which should be required reading in all colleges and universities, if not in high schools). Empathy begins with curiosity, with the willingness to attend to another without collapsing them into our own expectations.

Leonardo’s art practices this attentiveness. His figures invite us to linger with them, to sense the interiority suggested by an angle of the head or a softness around the eyes. He does not explain them. He lets them be encountered.

This pairing of curiosity and empathy is essential. Curiosity without empathy becomes extractive. Empathy without curiosity becomes sentimental. Together, they form a disciplined openness to reality as it shows itself.

Curiosity Beyond the Human

Leonardo’s curiosity was also ecological, long before the term existed. He did not treat nature as inert matter to be controlled. Water had character. Air had movement. Plants and animals exhibited their own intelligences.

This resonates strongly with phenomenological approaches to ecology, where attention is given not only to systems but to lived encounters with the more-than-human world. To observe a tree across seasons, or to watch how rain alters the texture of soil, is not merely to gather data. It is to practice a form of relational knowing grounded in care.

Curiosity, in this sense, is ethical before it is theoretical. It teaches us how to stay with what exceeds us.

Real Being as Attentive Presence

Leonardo’s evident dissatisfaction with his life’s output may say less about his achievements and more about the cost of living attentively in a world that rewards closure. His life suggests that real being does not consist in finishing everything we begin, but in remaining responsive to what continually addresses us.

Curiosity keeps us open. Empathy keeps us responsible.

Together, they shape a way of being that is not centered on control or accumulation, but on presence, participation, and care. If Leonardo indeed felt like a failure, perhaps it was because he measured himself by standards that could never capture the depth of his engagement with the world.

Phenomenology invites us to reconsider those standards. It asks not what we have produced, but how we have learned to see, to listen, and to remain with what is given.

In that light, curiosity and empathy are not distractions from real being. They are its conditions.

Christmas Without Sentiment: Edith Stein and the God Who Enters Finitude

Every year, Christmas arrives already crowded.

Crowded with lights, crowded with music, crowded with Hallmark Channel movies, crowded with memory and expectation. Even those of us who love the feast time often feel a quiet pressure to feel something specific… joy, warmth, reassurance. Christmas often becomes a kind of emotional performance, even in the church.

As much as our modern nativity scenes of the incarnation of Jesus are a harmony of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke (an ancient practice going back to the beginnings of Christian writings, as we see in Tatian’s Diatessaron discovered at my beloved Dura Europos in modern-day Syria in the 1930s) with shepherds, angels, magi and timber all mixing together in a crowded space, our own performances and expectations are a harmony of these accumulated cultural projections and perceived normative truths.

Edith Stein helps me breathe differently around Christmas.

Not because she writes sweetly about the nativity… she doesn’t. And not because she offers seasonal reflections in the usual sense. What she gives instead is something far more demanding and, to my mind, far more faithful with a way of understanding Christmas as an event of ontological descent… God entering finitude without rescue clauses.

Incarnation as Entry, Not Appearance

In Finite and Eternal Being, Stein’s central concern is the relationship between eternal being and finite being. Creation itself is already a kind of gift, but the Incarnation intensifies that gift to the point of vulnerability. God does not merely touch finitude from above. God enters it from within, accepting its conditions rather than suspending them (Finite and Eternal Being, 352–360).

This matters for how I think about Christmas and how we should engage with this event, individually and culturally (rather than ceding our engagement to capitalist corporate control).

The child in the manger is not a divine exception to creaturely life. The Christ child is not insulated from time, hunger, exposure, or risk as the Gospels make abundantly clear. Christmas, in Stein’s metaphysical imagination, is the moment when eternal being consents to be shaped by the rhythms of finite existence.

God learns time from the inside. That alone should unsettle most of our Christmas instincts.

Christmas Already Contains the Cross

Stein never allows Christmas to float free from Good Friday. In The Science of the Cross, written during the final years of her life, she describes Christ’s entire existence as a single movement of self-giving love that begins with Incarnation and culminates in total surrender (The Science of the Cross, 20–28).

From this perspective, Christmas is not a pause before suffering begins. It is the first step of suffering and ultimately redemption.

The infant’s vulnerability in the Gospels is not symbolic. It is real. Exposure is not delayed until Calvary. It begins in Bethlehem much as it does today, with the birth of Palestinian children facing so many challenges that they are not responsible for nor should have to inherit.

This is why Stein’s Christmas feels so unsentimental to me. There is no divine safety net quietly waiting backstage. God does not visit human life. God commits to it. Instead of asking “Mary Did You Know?” we should be asking “God, Did You Know?”

Empathy Taken All the Way Down

Years earlier, in On the Problem of Empathy, Stein defines empathy as a way of entering another’s experience without collapsing the distinction between self and other (On the Problem of Empathy, 10–18). Empathy is not projection. It is not imagination alone. It is a disciplined openness to being affected by another while remaining oneself, which is often opposed to modern conceptions of empathy.

When Stein later reflects on the Incarnation, it becomes impossible not to see it as empathy radicalized beyond psychology and into ontology itself.

Christmas is not God observing human life with perfect knowledge. It is God living a human life from within finite consciousness. God allows Godself to be addressed by the world.

As someone working through ecological intentionality, I find Stein quietly indispensable here. Christmas is not just about human salvation. It is about divine responsiveness to material reality… to bodies, to limits, to history.

Hiddenness, Not Spectacle

In Stein’s letters from her Carmelite years, Christmas appears quietly, almost in passing. What she emphasizes is not celebration but hiddenness. God enters the world unnoticed and is recognized only by those keeping watch (the magi and the shepherds, in their respective accounts in Matthew and Luke). Recognition requires attentiveness and intentionality rather than announcement.

My own practices of slow noticing by sitting with a black walnut tree in winter and throughout 2025, attending to bark and leaf litter and time without spectacle, have quietly taught me the value of this sort of intentionality.

Christmas, for Stein, is not loud. There is no grand culmination of Handel’s Messiah. Incarnation happens when no one is watching carefully enough.

Christmas After Auschwitz

It is impossible to read Stein’s later work without knowing how her life ends. A Jewish philosopher, a teacher, a Catholic Carmelite, and murdered at Auschwitz with hundreds of others on August 9, 1942. Christmas, read backward through that history, becomes unbearable if we expect it to function as reassurance.

Stein does not let it.

Christmas does not promise escape from historical suffering. It places God inside it. Eternal being does not hover safely above violence and loss. It enters conditions in which love can be rejected, destroyed, or silenced. That is not comforting in any shallow sense. But it is faithful.

Why I Return to Stein at Christmas

I return to Edith Stein in December because she will not let me sentimentalize the Incarnation. She reminds me that Christmas is not about divine power softened for human consumption. It is about divine vulnerability embraced without reserve.

God becomes finite. God becomes dependent. God is exposed to the elements of Creation as well as human frailty, cruelty, joy, and love.

And in doing so, finitude itself is no longer something to be escaped by rapture or an afterlife of harp playing in the clouds. It becomes the place where meaning happens.

Christmas, then, is not a break from the world’s grief. It is God’s decision to dwell within it and to be directly addressed by that grief. That is a hard truth. But it is also, quietly, a hopeful one… if we are willing to sit still long enough to let it speak.

Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being

When I first entered into Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, I realized almost immediately that I was not reading a standard metaphysical treatise. I was stepping into a conversation about how being itself becomes available to us, how the meaning of existence slowly discloses itself through experience, relation, and attunement. Stein calls the book “an ascent to the meaning of being” in her preface and describes it as written “by a beginner for beginners” (Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, Preface). Yet the scope is anything but beginner level. She begins from the finitude that shapes every human life, our embodied and time-bound existence, and traces the ways it naturally presses toward an origin and fullness of being that is not our own. What strikes me is how this ascent mirrors what I am trying to articulate in The Ecology of the Cross. I am trying to understand how cruciform life opens us to deeper belonging in the more-than-human world, and Stein provides a metaphysical grammar for that movement.

Edith Stein’s Letter to Pope Pius XI in 1933

Edith Stein (later St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross as a Carmelite nun) would eventually be killed in a gas chamber by the Nazi’s because of her Jewish heritage. Her letter to Pope Pius XI remains relevant and fresh today, with many societal and spiritual ills and injustices, with government structures and religious organizations remaining either silent or complicit as we approach 2026 and almost 100 years since Stein’s imploring epistle…

EDITH STEIN: “Letter to Pope Pius XI” (1933):

Holy Father!

As a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church, I dare to speak to the Father of Christianity about that which oppresses millions of Germans. For weeks we have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor. For years the leaders of National Socialism have been preaching hatred of the Jews. Now that they have seized the power of government and armed their followers, among them proven criminal elements, this seed of hatred has germinated. The government has only recently admitted that ex- cesses have occurred. To what extent, we cannot tell, because public opinion is being gagged. However, judging by what I have learned from personal relations, it is in no way a matter of singular exceptional cases. Under pressure from reactions abroad, the government has turned to “milder” methods. It has issued the watchword “no Jew shall have even one hair on his head harmed.” But through boycott measures–by robbing people of their livelihood, civic honor and fatherland–it drives many to desperation; within the last week, through private reports I was informed of five cases of suicide as a consequence of these hostilities. I am convinced that this is a general condition which will claim many more victims. One may regret that these unhappy people do not have greater inner strength to bear their misfortune. But the responsibility must fall, after all, on those who brought them to this point and it also falls on those who keep silent in the face of such happenings.

Everything that happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself “Christian.” For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name. Is not this idolization of race and governmental power which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? Isn’t the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the most blessed Virgin and the apostles? Is not all this diametrically opposed to the conduct of our Lord and Savior, who, even on the cross, still prayed for his persecutors? And isn’t this a black mark on the record of this Holy Year which was intended to be a year of peace and reconciliation.

We all, who are faithful children of the Church and who see the conditions in Germany with open eyes, fear the worst for the prestige of the Church, if the silence continues any longer. We are convinced that this silence will not be able in the long run to purchase peace with the present German government. For the time being, the fight against Catholicism will be conducted quietly and less brutally than against Jewry, but no less systematically. Before long no Catholic will be able to hold office in Germany unless he dedicates himself unconditionally to the new course of action.

At the feet of your Holiness, requesting your apostolic blessing,

(Signed) Dr. Edith Stein, Instructor at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy, Münster in Westphalia, Collegium Marianum.

Plasma Consciousness: Thinking With the Luminous Universe

Some nights here in Spartanburg, when the humidity settles like a gentle hand on the earth and the sky finally exhales after a hot Carolina day, I go outside to stand beneath the walnut tree. There’s a particular quiet that isn’t silence at all. It hums. It holds. It feels charged, like something is speaking in a language older than breath.

That stillness always reminds me: we don’t live in a dead universe.

An Ecology of the Cross Audio Reflection

Here’s my audio reflection on Marder’s thought technology of “The Ecology of Thought”… it’s a really powerful notion. This is from my regular tracking and tree-sit journal with a black walnut that I’ve grown to love and learn from daily.

Sheldrake’s Lecture on Panentheism at St James Church

Sheldrake is one of my favorite thinkers and a huge inspiration for my own work. Great lecture here from my process theology meets medieval Christian theology point of view… well worth your time:

In this talk, Rupert Sheldrake explores panentheism—the idea that the divine is not separate from the world but present throughout it, while also transcending it. With the grip of mechanistic materialism loosening, Rupert invites us to reconsider how we see nature, mind, and spirit. Tracing a broad arc from ancient philosophies and Christian mysticism to AI-generated worldviews, panpsychism, and psychedelics, he reflects on how the sacred presence in nature—-long affirmed by spiritual traditions-—is re-emerging through science, experience, and renewed practices of attention.

This talk was recorded at St James Church, Piccadilly, a longstanding hub for open spiritual inquiry and progressive theology in the heart of London.

Resting Heart Rates

I made some changes in my life back in May as my semester ended in my PhD studies and my dissertation began to take shape ahead of my 47th birthday.

We did lots of traveling as a family in June and July, I signed some new consulting clients, built a few websites, and had a wonderful summer of adventure. Those changes I made stuck and became routines and rituals. I slept well even in crowded hotel rooms and AirBNB’s in new cities with our children. I noticed my resting heart rate had dropped pretty dramatically.

Then August arrived and brought with it the annual torrent of new teachers and routines and meetings and after school activities and pick ups and drop offs and all things associated with having three young children. I noticed my heart rate had increased again. Things done and things left undone as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us to consider.

Talking with the Black Walnut this week, I’ve been pondering our own human conceptions of time and rhythm as I watch its leaves begin to silently fall here in late September.

I like to tell people that my dissertation (Ecology of the Cross) is my life’s work and that’s what I’m working on… contributing to Thomas Berry’s incantation of The Great Work of our time. Phenomenology has provided the structure for most of my research and thoughts as a part of all that work. Deep down, I realize (thanks to the Black Walnut and resting heart rates) that my life’s work is… my five children.

Maybe that dissertation will play some part in that in the future as they continue to explore, learn, and perceive the phenomena of consciousness and being in new ways. Planting sequoias for them and others who might be interested in what I have to say based on my aging heart and aging skin’s experience.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

I think of my aging heart and skin and my aging children and my aging theologies and philosophies. I turn back to Aristotle and Augustine and Hildegard and Edith Stein for answers while trying to look forward in a world of unease brought on by a spiritual crisis of being. And the Black Walnut reminds me in all of that consternation about time and aging that the cosmic dance goes on, ever turning and circling… not linear.

Not about monthly or quarterly trends or resting heart rates… but part of a much larger dance that we are somehow privileged to enjoy for a brief “time” as Humans. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. This insubstantial pageant of modernity goes on, and we’ll return to the dust from which we were lovingly made. But heart rates and life (as we consider we know it) itself is a part of the cycle that spins forever and concrescing in little moments of magic that become us.

So, don’t worry about your resting heart rate too much, Sam. The Circle won’t be unbroken:

I danced on a Friday
When the sky turned black
It’s hard to dance
With the devil on your back.
They buried my body
And they thought I’d gone,
But I am the Dance,
And I still go on.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he

Tracking a Tree

Back in January, I started tracking a black walnut (juglans nigra) in our backyard as part of coursework in my PhD studies. It seems like an innocuous thing to “track” a “tree,” doesn’t it? Those are in the form of regular audio reflections and pictures I’ve collected here.

The above video is from a snippet of reflections that I put together using Google’s fascinating and important NotebookLM. If there ever was something beneficial that has come from our early explorations with AI, this is definitely one.

Turns out, the practice (ritual?) has been quite transformative for me as a human. Moving from the winter months of little growth and “change” perceptible to us to an onlsaught of green sprouts and leaves emerging day-by-day over the spring and summer to the development of seed pods to now observing the falling leaves (and seed pods) has been an experience outside of our own conceptions of time. From phenomenology to existentialism to Christian ecology, it’s been quite the journey so far.

I hope some of that transformation has in some way contributed to the story of the black walnut that I’ve shared so many insights, tears, prayers, and reflections with over the course of the year.

You can see the images and hear the full audio recordings here at https://samharrelson.com/tracking.