philosophy

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was an American cultural anthropologist who changed how scholars think about religion, ritual, and meaning. Trained at Harvard and shaped by fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco, he built his career on a conviction that culture is not a set of behaviors to be measured but a web of significance to be read, the way one reads a text. He taught at the University of Chicago before settling at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he spent the latter half of his career writing some of the most widely cited books in the social sciences. Geertz called his method “thick description”: rather than explain a Balinese cockfight or a Javanese funeral by reducing it to biology or economics, he asked what the practice meant to the people inside it, and what it revealed about how they organized their sense of reality. This approach ran through his major works, including The Religion of Java , The Interpretation of Cultures , and Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali . His most quoted formulation defined religion as a system of symbols that establishes durable moods and motivations in people by framing a general order of existence and making that framing feel simply real. The definition is spare on purpose, and its reach turns out to exceed anything Geertz set out to catalogue. Because it locates religion in function rather than in a list of approved doctrines or institutions, it travels easily to commitments that never call themselves religious at all. Researchers who study what has come to be called implicit religion have used exactly this move to read nationalism, therapeutic self-help, environmentalism, and various strands of secular humanism as systems that generate the same durable moods and motivations, the same felt sense of a general order of existence, that Geertz found in Java and Bali. Even certain critiques of religion turn out to run on the pattern they attack: a conviction that history bends toward a certain outcome, a set of rituals of dissent, a community bound by shared moral certainty. None of this requires supernatural claims. It only requires that a symbol system do the work religion has always done, which is to make an account of reality feel like the account of reality. That insight matters for anyone thinking about religion as something people build and inhabit rather than only something they are handed. Geertz kept his own account descriptive, declining to adjudicate whether any given order of existence is true. But a tradition that treats faith as trust translated into action, and treats every serious human commitment as evidence of something worth taking seriously about how people orient toward transformation, finds in Geertz’s account not a rival theory but a working description of the machinery, machinery that operates whether the community calls its ultimate concern God, history, nature, or humanity’s own unrealized potential.

Dr. Emile Alexandrov is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and visiting scholar at Waseda University, Tokyo. His research focuses on metaphysics across Eastern and Western traditions. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame Australia, and has extensive research and teaching experience in areas ranging from contemporary American and post-Kantian German philosophy to classical metaphysical traditions in the Graeco-Arabic world, Buddhism, and Daoism. Dr. Alexandrov has held academic appointments at the University of Erfurt in Germany, Novosibirsk State University and the University of Tyumen in Russia, and National Taiwan University in Taiwan. He is the author of The Other Platonist Beginning — Heidegger and Neoplatonism and the forthcoming Metaphysics and Ineffable . With Dr O’Neill, he co-directs the biennial International Symposium on Buddhism and Neoplatonism . Alongside Dr. Steve Stakland, he also co-leads the American Philosophy Series at Routledge.

Forrest Landry is a philosopher, writer, researcher, scientist, engineer, craftsman, and teacher whose work centers on metaphysics, the design of very large scale complex systems, and the thriving of all forms of life on this planet. He is also the founder and CEO of Magic Flight, a company known for introducing the portable vaporizer, and a third-generation master woodworker who found that his hands-on training in craft carried directly into skill in software systems design, governance architecture, and community process. Landry grew up in rural Maine, working wood alongside his father from early childhood and building, in his words, a felt sense that “nature doesn’t negotiate”: a discipline learned through the body before it was learned through mathematics. At sixteen he made a vow to go into the forest alone and meet the natural world unaided, without expectation or projection, a rite of passage he later described as an encounter with the world unmasked. That experience convinced him that no existing spiritual or religious tradition offered the rigor he was looking for: real depth of feeling, real formal precision, and a clear bridge between the two. Rather than search further, he set out to build that bridge himself, a decades-long project that became his book An Immanent Metaphysics , an attempt to restore legitimacy to metaphysics through a coherent, precise account of what is, what it is to know, and why we are here. That same combination of craft discipline and formal ambition carried Landry into large-scale systems work, including federal classified and unclassified projects for the FBI, DARPA, and the Library of Congress Congressional Records System, and later into collaboration with Daniel Schmachtenberger’s Consilience Project on sensemaking, governance, and existential risk. Across all of it runs a single ethical claim he states plainly: love is what enables choice, love is stronger than fear, and one should always choose on the basis of love. That claim, and the larger project behind it, sits close to convictions a Mormon transhumanist sensibility already holds: that rigor and reverence are not competitors, that the architecture of our systems is a moral question and not merely a technical one, and that compassion is the standard against which any exercise of power, human or artificial, should be measured. Landry’s insistence on building the bridge himself when no tradition supplied one, and his instinct to treat both feeling and formalism as trustworthy sources of understanding, gives his work a natural kinship with a theology that asks its adherents to do the same kind of integrative labor toward the thriving of all life.