Knotting and Unknotting Spirituality: Mining and Mingling Objects
摘要
This chapter proposes “Object Spirituality” as a framework that transcends both premodern onto-theology and modern onto-consciousness approaches to spiritual phenomena. The author traces their scholarly journey from initially conceptualizing spirituality as a public force through complexity theory to recognizing the limitations of anthropocentric models. Object Spirituality emerges as an alternative that acknowledges objects as fundamentally unknowable yet communicative through mediating “angels” or messengers that translate between entities. Neither returning to supernatural metaphysics nor remaining trapped in human projection, this approach understands spirituality as emerging through relations between objects rather than being imposed from above or projected from within. The framework is applied to contemporary challenges, including artificial general intelligence ethics and climate change, ultimately advocating for a “terrestrial” orientation that recognizes humans as “living rocks” already inscribing themselves into geological history. This perspective fosters a spirituality grounded in material reality while maintaining openness to mystery—one that replaces the pursuit of absolute truth with justified belief and careful accounting of our embeddedness in networks of objects that exceed our full comprehension.