On the Unnoticed Ontological Parenthesis in Gustav Fechner’s Psychophysical Panzoism
In the annals of philosophical thought, where the bright constellations of Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel dominate the firmament, lesser-known luminaries such as Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) hang like overlooked satellites, spinning in elliptical obscurity. Most conventionally thought to belong to the scientific pioneer ranks of experimental psychology, Fechner’s deeper metaphysical engagements—particularly his doctrine of psychophysical panzoism—have remained marginal to mainstream inquiry, mistaken either for whimsical natural mysticism or proto-phenomenological speculation. Yet, within the dense folds of his writings, especially in “Zend-Avesta” (1851), lies a metaphysical subtlety deserving of studied attention: namely, what I shall term the “ontological parenthesis.”
This ontological parenthesis is not a formal notation nor an overt argumentative clause. Rather, it lurks as a metaphysical hesitation—an interstitial pause Fechner embeds silently but essentially between the material and the mental, veiling the absolute substratum of reality within a tertium quid that serves to reconcile his binarism without adopting classical dualism. Distinct from the Cartesian cogito and its desperate attempt to sew unity across substance, this parenthesis is neither bridge nor barrier. Instead, it plays the quietly monumental role of a breathing-space in the structure of world-being: a suspended metaphysical breath.
Fechner’s psychophysical panzoism posits that every material manifestation possesses a concomitant inner life, meaning there is no thing, however minute, that is bereft of interiority. Here, he neither asserts crude animism nor descends into solipsistic idealism; rather, he articulates a universal vitalism in which sensation is coextensive with matter. To the untrained reader this may seem akin to Leibniz’s monadology, and indeed, Fechner pays tribute to the Monadist in spirit; but he shifts the discourse upon one crucial axis: for Leibniz, monads lack windows, and the communication between them is orchestrated via pre-established harmony; for Fechner, there exists no such closure to the subjectivity of things—rather, he imagines nature as translucent, intercommunicating, and fluid in its phenomenality.
It is in his treatment of the Earth itself as a living being—a soul with perceptions, dreams, and indeed, a life-cycle—that Fechner inserts his ontological parenthesis most sharply. Discussing our planet not merely as a metaphorical organism, but as a true subject of experiences, he suggests that the Earth has day-consciousness and night-unconsciousness; rotation itself becomes the physiological rhythm by which perception occurs. But—and here lies the crux—Fechner refrains from attributing to the Earth the kind of ego or selfhood that we reserve for sentient beings. He neither anthropomorphizes it directly nor assigns to it any articulate interior monologue. This hesitation, or perhaps reverent reluctance, constitutes the parenthesis I seek to illuminate: a metaphysical pause in which the otherness of the Earth’s subjectivity cannot be reduced nor fully comprehended in human terms. The Earth is alive—but not as we are alive. It thinks—but not in thoughts we can transcribe.
Fechner’s method of psychophysical parallelism is key to unfolding this. The assertion that mental and physical events run in correspondence does not commit him to a strict dualism, because for him the two are different expressions—upper and lower aspects—of the same underlying substrate, which he calls das Weltallleben, the cosmic life. This notion is, however, neither explained nor defined with ontological certainty. The concept of Weltallleben hovers between metaphor and theory, between hymn and hypothesis. The parenthesis becomes evident here not in what Fechner says, but in what he silently refuses to systematize. Is the cosmic life a third realm, of which mind and matter are modalities? Or is it simply a conceptual convergence adopted to lubricate the Machiavellian friction between substance-ontologies? Fechner’s decision to forego ontological closure on this point evinces less an oversight than the deliberate placement of an ambiguous breathing-space within his metaphysics—a place where being may retreat from logos.
In modern philosophical terminology, one could liken this to a proto-processual metaphysics wherein becoming precedes being, and awareness is co-constitutive with the material unfolding of the universe. Indeed, Fechner’s insistence on nature’s gradated continuum of inner-life gestures toward a phenomenological ontology avant la lettre. He stands therefore as a precursor—not to Husserl, whose emphasis on egoic structures opposes much of Fechner’s impersonal cosmicism—but to Whitehead and Bergson, whose cosmologies of becoming reflect similarly dynamic intuitions. Yet even these more celebrated thinkers fall short of articulating the peculiar metaphysical punctuation that Fechner bequeaths us.
The ontological parenthesis also performs an ethical function. Fechner draws from this metaphysics a doctrine of universal respect toward all forms of life—a doctrine not grounded in sentimentality, but in a rigorous metaphysical equality of inner-being. To harm a tree is not only ecologically unsound; it is a diminishment of the universe’s sensibility. Yet Fechner refrains from elaborating a deontic moral system. Again, the parenthesis is sustained: instead of conclusions, we have gestures; instead of laws, sympathies. That is to say, ethics emerges not as a coded deduction from metaphysics but as a concomitant response to ontological intimacy.
The implications of this neglected ontological syntax are considerable. In a time where ontological discourse has become increasingly obsessional over the distinction between human and non-human agency, Fechner’s quietly posited breath-space functions as a rebuke to all pretensions of conceptual totality. He reminds us—though too subtly for contemporary attentions—that the world need not be reduced in order to be respected, nor exorcised of myth to be made intelligible. His parenthesis invites us to pause—not in ignorance but in quietude—in acknowledgment that being, in its true ambidexterity, transcends both intellect and sensation.
In conclusion, it is the very unclarity of Fechner’s ontological centerpiece that gives it its profound depth. Where philosophical systems tend to overbuild, concealing the abyss with ornamental lattices of reason, Fechner deploys reverent ambiguity to mark the limits of cognition. His ontological parenthesis is not a mark of vagueness, but of perceptive restraint, a symbol of intellectual humility before the macro-psyche of the cosmos. If we would understand him rightly, we must read not only what he wrote, but what he left unsaid—not as gaps bereft of intention, but as spaces where metaphysical echolalia, the rhythmic underpulse of the world’s interior selfhood, may yet resound.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
panzoism, psychophysical parallelism, Fechner, ontology, metaphysics, cosmic consciousness, phenomenology