Worlding with the Creal: Autonomous Intelligence and Philosophical Practice

Abstract

Philosophical practice is guided by an ideal of autonomous intelligence: to think for oneself. But is a fully autonomous form of intelligence possible? Autonomy in thinking may be thought to be relative or absolute. First, one may imagine an asymptotic social process of self-ruling; in this case, to become philosophically healthy would then mean to become more virtuous and more autonomous cognitively, relative to others or to a previous version of ourselves. But there seems to be a contradiction here, as autonomy seems to imply, by definition, completeness rather than comparison or relativity, the latter being seen as a form of dependence. Hence, a second stance, absolute rather than relative: the idea that some humans can achieve a perfect state of philosophical health, implying full autonomous intelligence. This hypothesis was historically thought to imply a state of autarkia, self-divinization, or autotheosis: being divine by one’s own effort. Many have forgotten that most ancient philosophers, chief among them Epicurus, Plato, and Aristotle, thought this likeness to a god (homoiosis theoi) to be the reward of theoria, a theoretical life. I argue that we can reconcile relative and absolute cognition by understanding autonomous intelligence to be a cosmotheosis: a becoming divine not as an act of singular separation, but by welcoming the multiversal reality that we already are, and partaking in the universal creative worlding process referred to here as “Creal”. In this sense, philosophical practice calls for a pantheistic form of religiosity; a shared cosmology that compossibilizes all intercreative entities.

1. Introduction

The perennial ideal of “philosophical health”, in practice, involves a critical, creative, and embodied examination of one’s existence, beliefs, and values (de Miranda 2022), as well as the existence of others. It involves actively reflecting about integrity, self-consistency, ethics, the human condition, and beyond, such that one may be closer to living a meaningful and flourishing life. Philosophical practice has been guided by an ideal of autonomous thinking, the ancient and still very contemporary principle “think for yourself”. This philosophical horizon of autonomous intelligence is usually thought to align with the concept of intellectual virtue (Tanesini 2021; Pritchard 2022); it includes traits like open-mindedness, mental courage, critical creativity, deep orientation, and a capacity for deep listening, i.e., listening to the world and to oneself in ways that make sense and generate meaning (de Miranda 2021, 2023). These traits are expected to enable individuals to pursue truth and knowledge in a persistent yet virtuous manner (Zagzebski 1996).

Yet thinking autonomously is not only an ethical endeavor, nor is it self-explanatory. Too many philosophers or pedagogues encourage people or students to think autonomously as if this goal were unproblematic and, moreover, reachable via reasoning only. But autonomous intelligence is in fact the most serious epistemic challenge for the practice of philosophy as a way of living, and one may honestly ask: is a fully autonomous form of intelligence even possible for a human being? And if so, how?

2. Relative and Absolute Autonomous Intelligence

Autonomous intelligence is often praised. Kant insisted that autonomy is the foundation of rational beings; to be autonomous is to be self-legislating and free in the sense that one’s actions are determined by one’s own rational will, rather than by external forces or internal compulsions (Kant [1785] 2002; Hill 2014). This extremely ambitious vision of intellectual self-mastery not only supposes self-governance in thought; autonomous intelligence also means having the ability to structure one’s own cognitive processes independently. Autonomous intelligence implies that one is not unduly influenced by external pressures or internal biases, rather basing one’s beliefs and decisions on rational deliberation, personal conviction, or even the elaboration of one’s own system of concepts and way of thinking (Deleuze and Guattari 1996).

The question that we ask is important for the validity of philosophical practice. Thinking autonomously seems to be a perennial purpose of philosophy, often admired, but less often problematized or, for that matter, realized, in our secular societies. If we agree that the core ideal of philosophy as a process of thinking and being in the world is, at least in part, to achieve autonomous intelligence, then we may approach the latter in two principal ways: relative or absolute.

If autonomous intelligence is a relative feature, then it may be thought of as an asymptotic social process. Relatively speaking, to become philosophically healthy would then mean to become more autonomous in thinking than others or than a previous version of our reasoning self. This relative view of autonomous intelligence would perhaps imply that, as human beings, we never become absolutely autonomous in our thought process, but simply relatively autonomous, i.e., capable of acting according to deliberately chosen principles. While this seems reasonable and realistic, there may be a logical fallacy in speaking of “relative autonomy”. Since autonomy, etymologically, means self-generated principles and the systematic and independent respect of these principles, one might infer that a relative notion of semi-autonomy would not make sense: either we have full autonomy, independent from the world, or no autonomy at all. In other words, autonomy seems to imply completeness; it is an absolute. This was, for instance, the Epicurean view in ancient Greek philosophy: labelling autarkeia this form of absolute autonomy; an ecstatic state only attainable by becoming like the gods (Piettre 1999). Epicurus, in the Letter to Menoeceus (§12), formulated this as the ultimate goal of philosophical practice: to “live as a god among men. For man loses all semblance of mortality by living in the midst of immortal blessings.” (Piettre 1999, p. 9).

Such is the second cognitive direction for the fulfilment of autonomous intelligence: to posit that some humans may achieve a perfect state of philosophical health via transcendence, implying absolute autonomy, at least in thinking. This is where philosophy remains a spirituality imbued with religiosity. Indeed, to be rigorous, this stance necessitates a process of self-divinization; an autotheosis: becoming divinely absolute by one’s own effort (from the ancient Greek theos (god) and theosis (becoming god)).

We will discuss this in more detail in what follows, but let us already note that self-theosis, even if it were possible, seems to imply a form of hybris and deep solipsism. Moreover, it may in fact be contradictory to the intersubjective definition of intelligence, according to which being intelligent means connecting elements together in a way that is understandable by at least a few happy others. If autonomous intelligence were a solipsistic process of becoming self-absolute in thinking, designating both cognitive singularity and a divine state of absolute realization, how could we distinguish intelligence from, say, paranoid psychoses? Intelligence is a collective process; it presupposes the ideal of reaching not so much a personal, singular, or absolutely felt truth, but rather a universal vision, as most philosophers have argued from Plato to Kant: we must be able to communicate epistemically with one another and achieve some intellectual recognition via argumentation between peers (Holyoak and Morrison 2012). One might say, half-jokingly, that given the constant egotistic antagonism between ancient Greek gods, becoming like a god in Epicurean autarchic fashion is not a guarantee of universality in thinking.

At this stage of our argument, it seems we have reached an aporic plateau: On the one hand, relative autonomous intelligence seems inconceivable; how can we be independent and relative at the same time? On the other hand, absolute autonomous intelligence also seems logically impossible; how can one be singular and universal at the same time? Should we then give up on the idea of autonomous intelligence, at the risk of undermining the very appeal of philosophical practice? Not necessarily.

In what follows, I will show that relative autonomous intelligence is not contradictory with absolute autonomous intelligence; they are made possible together, especially if one adopts a pantheistic perspective (i.e., the consideration that everything in the multiverse is part of an active divine principle). This should not surprise us; most of philosophy’s intellectual history, from Plato to Spinoza, from Leibniz to Hegel, tends to be pantheistic rather than atheistic (despite the efforts of contemporary philosophers to secularize the history of philosophy). And if we speak not only of Western philosophers but integrate Eastern philosophies—for instance, Daoism or Hinduism—then the pantheistic quality of philosophical thought is even more evident.

The fact that intelligence is a collective process does not mean that it is not related to the absolute as divine. Over time, and more so in the last two centuries of Western thought, scholars have forgotten that intellectual and even existential theosis, or human likeness to the divine in thinking and living, was thought to be the logical outcome of a theoretical life by not only Epicurus, but most ancient Greek philosophers, chief among them Plato and Aristotle.

Plato wrote in the Theaetetus (1921) that “we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God [homoiosis theoi]…” (176ab). This ideal was also expressed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle 1995): “If understanding is something divine in comparison with a human being, so also will the life that expresses understanding be divine in comparison with human life.” (X.7, 1177b26–34). Later, philosophers like Spinoza and Hegel also believed in philosophical practice as a way of becoming spiritually universal and divine-like (Soyarslan 2021). Philosophy, more often than not if we consider its global history, is in fact a form of philotheosis, the love of becoming divine, even if a pinch of self-critical salt is often added to temper the ambition with some wisdom and humility.

To be sure, and this is an important nuance, humility in philosophical practice is important; philotheosis, the philosophical divinization allowed by the contemplative effort of theoria, rarely implied autotheosis for philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, or Hegel; it was not a solipsistic process of singular (the Greeks would say idiotic) separation from the rest of the universe; it was rather an understanding that became one with the cosmic universe, of which we are but a partial manifestation. This overview reveals that our previous distinction between relative and absolute is in fact less relevant than imagined. The universe is itself relative, because of the interconnectedness of its multiple aspects. But as a whole, as One, it is also absolute. Autonomous intelligence is a feature of the whole; it is absolute. Yet we humans, as partial aspects of the whole, may approach this absolute only relatively, by becoming more and more autonomous until we reach a certain state of cosmic participation in which we are both absolutely and relatively autonomous, inspired by and attuned to the Spirit (to use a Hegelian terminology for an entity that will hereafter be referred to as “Creal”).

Nevertheless, the reader might feel that our argument is still vague and complex to grasp. Let us step back: we need to better understand what is meant by autonomous intelligence as a philosophical practice.

3. Autonomous Intelligence as Core Concept of Philosophical Practice

Let us turn to one of the first written defenses of autonomous intelligence in the Western history of philosophy, Plato’s allegory of the cave in The Republic, notoriously narrated by Socrates (Plato 1991). Remember that the inhabitants of the cave, representing humanity, have their legs and necks fixed in bonds, which means that not even their body can move autonomously according to all of its natural degrees of liberty (VII–514b). Intellectually, the cave captives are not autonomous because they are made to believe that the shadows of artificial things are the true objects themselves. Their minds suffer various misconceptions, “silly nothings”, narrates Socrates (515d). Body and mind are equally subjugated. In the cave of our falsely entertaining societal existence, all spirit of initiative disappears. Even the one prisoner who is set free for the sake of the parable is described not as someone who spontaneously acts towards his own autonomy, but rather as someone who is forced to consider the artifacts in the cave and compelled to climb out of the cavern.

As is well known, Plato then compares the captive’s ascent out of the cave to the ascent of the soul to the intelligible world. Ultimately, what is reached is the sunny absolute Idea of the Good. The latter is perceived only with great difficulty and by “acts of divine contemplation” (517d). These acts of theoria need to be repeated over and over, via spiritual training; philosophical theosis is a pragmatheosis, a regular practice of invoking the absolute and the divine. In Plato’s view, autonomous intelligence is not the revelation of a singular world adjusted to the idiosyncratic personality of the knower, but rather the absolute manifestation of the eternal, which is universally one and the same for all those who can reach the goodness of truth and henceforth maintain some relationship with it via dialectic training.

In a similar spirit at first glance, and resorting to a metaphor of light that echoes Plato’s Sun, in 1784 Kant offered his almost equally notorious take on intellectual autonomy, in defining the essence of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment:

Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Self-incurred is this inability if its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but rather in the lack of the resolution and the courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.

(Kant 1996, p. 58)

A notable difference between Plato and Kant is that, for the latter, the lack of autonomy is due to some form of laziness and cowardice rather than coercion and imprisonment. But both insisted on philosophical practice as a way of thinking that is independent from false influences or emotional biases. Like Plato, Kant did not think that autonomous intelligence was a solipsistic state due to some form of absolute originality in thinking. Rather, it was a quest for universal principles—if not logical at least ethical—that could be shared with any other thinking mind in a spirit of mutual understanding. It was a higher form of common sense, one that was made rationally via a universalizing form of sense-making rather than inherited via unquestioned mores or produced by singular caprice.

In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant specified that the condition of possibility of philosophical practice and autonomous intelligence was intersubjective—implying the other as abstract but necessary other-than-I-ness. As such, it was a relativization of unbounded imagination, a limitation of solipsistic thinking. Thinking into the place of the other was not so much about particular empathy for such and such a person but, more importantly for Kant, about universal communion:

Wisdom, as the idea of a practical use of reason that is perfectly law-like, is no doubt too much to demand of human beings. But also, not even the slightest degree of wisdom can be poured into a man by others; rather he must bring it forth from himself. The precept for reaching it contains three leading maxims: (1) Think for oneself, (2) Think into the place of the other (in communication with human beings), (3) Always think consistently with oneself.

(Kant 2007, p. 307).

Kant insisted on the heroic and superhuman ambition of coherence and systematic fidelity to personal principles, but only to the extent that one could, in theory at least, communicate them to another mind in a way that would presuppose mutual understanding—that is, intelligence in the sense of communal connection (etymologically, inter ligere in Latin, meaning to bind together).

Pragmatically speaking, autonomous intelligence is not about being strongly opinionated. Personal opinions, for Kant, and for most traditional philosophers, are unreliable bursts of egotism; they are based on contingent moods, partial information, a sanguine reaction of the mind, or our tendency to self-aggrandizement—the false autotheosis of hybris, as seen for instance in contemporary transhumanism. Philosophical wisdom is rather the capacity to make practical decisions that derive from universalizable judgements, optimal postulates and principles that an epistemic community consistently holds after much deliberation and rational dialogue, as good candidates for commonly shared truths.

Of course, this is easier said than done, and it is precisely this ambitious form of universalism that became suspicious with the advent of postmodernism a few decades ago. The universal drive of philosophy has been seen in recent decades as a form of cognitive colonialism, if not the totalitarian “epistemicide” of minoritarian modes of thinking (De Sousa Santos 2014). Today’s movement of “world philosophy” is an attempt to practice philosophy without universalizing. This is difficult, because thinking philosophically may necessarily imply a form of universalism, even when this universalism is critical—that is, aware that there are indeed many possible worlds of meaning.

For classical philosophers, universalism tends to mean the opposite of idiocy (Arendt 1958). Plato and Kant have in common that they remind us that philosophy should not be obsessed with the absolute singularity of thought and the mere cultivation of differences and diversity for the sake of diversity, because such a horizon is the feature of art, eccentricity, or chaos. Philosophy may want to be creative, but it is always at the same time preoccupied with truth—that is, the universal, cosmological, and cosmo-political quality of our ideas. While art and poetry arguably express subjective experiences and emotions (although they might also tend to the universal), often leaving their interpretation open to the audience, philosophy systematically seeks to uncover and articulate insights that are not merely personal or idiosyncratic but hold across different contexts, places, tribes, and private situations (Korsgaard 1996).

I argue here that philosophy is universalist precisely in the sense that it is a theoria, a contemplation of the divine. In Book X, Chapters 7 and 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (1995) presents a compelling defense of the contemplative life of theoria. On the one hand, there is the life that one leads by virtue of being prosaically human or animal and, on the other hand, the life that one leads thanks to the divine aspect within us. The latter is thought to be a loftier existence, one that aligns with the cosmic element of reason or spirit—the Greek Nous—which transcends our mortal amalgamation. Philosophically healthy humans practically engage in the state of theoria, the activity by which the divine itself is perpetually manifested (as will become clearer in what follows), and in this case, thinking is indeed an act of theosis—of becoming divine.

The focus on autonomy of thought in philosophy is also the freedom to explore new ideas and unknown arguments, and to recreate questions creatively without social or normative pressure. However, philosophy goes a step further by applying collectively shared methods of reasoning and critical examination to these thoughts, which are meant to be objectively valid for the largest possible epistemic community, or at least asymptotically tending towards objectivity. The idea of a shared world of rationality is as important in the history of philosophy as the idea of autonomy. Philosophers strive to develop arguments that are logically sound for a relatively large community of thought, and to debunk those that are not sound, with a strong emphasis on coherence, consistency, and the ability to withstand scrutiny from rational others. Philosophical truths or arguments aim to reveal something about the fundamental nature of reality, human existence, morality, knowledge, and the cosmos. This is less epistemic colonialism than it is cosmopoiesis (Mazotta 2001): the common creation of an inhabitable world of meaning.

For instance, when discussing ethics, philosophers do not merely ask what a wordless individual believes to be right or wrong; they ask what may be right or wrong, in itself, in a given shared world (Haidt 2013). When examining the nature of knowledge, they are not content to describe how people come to believe what they do in isolation or in the fantasy of their idiosyncratic imagination; they seek to understand what it means to know something cosmo-logically—that is, within a shared world—and how, in such a world, we can tell the difference between knowledge and belief.

In essence, philosophy is characterized by a dual commitment: to the autonomy of thought, which it partly shares with art and poetry, and to the pursuit of cosmological truths that are valid in the best of all worlds, if not universal. This adds a (cosmo)political aspect to philosophy, well known since Socrates and Plato. Contrary to science, philosophy is rarely materialistic in the secular sense and is in fact almost always pantheistic or spiritual. Philosophical practice is often person-centered, and it tends to be a theosis under disguise, an endeavor that strives to embody a more divine way of being. However, the kind of theosis that philosophical practice advocates is not autotheotic (i.e., tending to institute a personal divinity of self-creation) but, rather, cosmotheotic: it tends to embrace the divine aspect of being part of and co-creating the world (cosmos in ancient Greek).

Yet, at this stage, the reader might still not be convinced that philosophy is a form of cosmotheosis interested in the practice of world-making. In what follows, I will try to clarify my argument with the help of Spinoza and Heidegger.

4. Philosophical Health as Pragmatic Theosis

Beyond Plato and Aristotle, another good example to illustrate the pantheistic drive of most philosophical systems is Spinoza. In his Ethics (Spinoza 1985), Spinoza delineates a tripartite model of cognition that presupposes the existence of a pantheistic divinity, equated with universal nature, and accessible via philosophical intuition.

The first Spinozian mode of cognition, rooted in opinion or imagination, emerges from a fragmented and murky apprehension of individual entities conveyed by the physical senses—a process that Spinoza identifies with knowledge from random experience or cognition from signs, such as the recollection of memories or the conjurations of our peculiar imagination (Soyarslan 2021). The second mode, reason, is the product of shared concepts and precise notions of the inherent traits of things. This rational faculty allows for the formation of some universal ideas—for example, in the fields of mathematics, physics, and other geometric approaches.

But, for Spinoza, experimental science is in fact not the pinnacle of cognition. Autonomous intelligence can be better approached via intuitive knowledge. This third and most profound form of understanding is pantheistic; it evolves from a direct and complete conception of the divine nature, leading to an intrinsic comprehension of the essence of things:

It is clear that we perceive many things and form universal notions […] from the fact that we have common notions and adequate ideas of properties of things. This I shall call reason (rationem) and the second kind of knowledge. In addition […] there is […] another, third kind, which we shall call intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva). And this kind of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the […] essence of things.

(EIIP40S2)

For Spinoza, both reason and intuitive knowledge are manifestations of the absolute autonomous intelligence of our universal cosmic world, i.e., nature. These healthy modes of thinking invite us to view existence sub specie aeternitatis, from the vantage point of eternity, untethered from temporal constraints. Seeing autonomous intelligence as participation in divine intelligence is reminiscent of what Aristotle called Nous or Spirit (Wedin 1993).

From the two examples of Spinoza and Aristotle, one might infer that theoria and scientia intuitiva are intellectual and abstract endeavors rather than practical ones. This is a common popular misconception regarding what philosophers do (or rather, do not). Given that I have argued that real philosophy (and not mere logical engineering) is by nature pantheistic or spiritualist, I will show that the solution to the misconception that the philosopher is not pragmatic lies in understanding that the divine is not an immobile being, but an active process.

The god of philosophers, since Heraclitus and all the way to Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, Bergson, Whitehead, et al., is usually not detached from the world and petrified in otherworldly eternity; it is active, immanent, and not necessarily omniscient but at least continuously creating our cosmos via its laws or tendencies. In other words, the philosophical divinity is world-making or worlding—that is, making things compossible, a Leibnizian term, of which more can be found below, which roughly means actualized in more or less compatible connection with one another. Hence, practical philosophy is always a thought embodied in worldly consideration, contrary for example to mathematics. If abstraction were more important than reality, then God would be a pure mathematician, not a worlder.

But here, the reader may ask: what is in fact worlding? Heidegger introduced a similar concept (Weltbildung) in texts like “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Heidegger 2002). Worlding refers to the process by which the world comes into being as a meaningful whole for existence. It is not only about the physical creation of the world, to which all beings do contribute, but also about how the world becomes disclosed or revealed to us in our experiences and interactions. The world is a dynamic interplay of meanings, differentiations, implicit ideas, and explicit discourse or behavior. Creativity is seen as a process that brings forth this interplay, revealing aspects of the world while also leaving parts of the Earth concealed. The world is always a world for a living agent, coming into being by engaging with and interpreting its surroundings, enacting values and beliefs. This is a fundamental shift from understanding the world as just a collection of concrete objects or so-called eternal facts—a spacetime of manipulable objects and laws, which is the domain of science.

Heidegger also emphasizes the historical and temporal aspects of worlding. The world is not static but is partially being shaped and reshaped over time through practices, language, and shared semiotic contexts—autonomous thinking can be manifested pragmatically in the actions that may regenerate our shared space of meaning. On the renewal side, neologisms and the creation of concepts, for instance, manifest a form of cognitive regeneration that can be equated with philosophical autonomy (Deleuze and Guattari 1996). This philosophical creativity is not so much about freedom in the sense of artistic arbitrariness but, rather, the product of an intellectual drive for infra-practical coherence.

This concept of worlding challenges traditional metaphysical notions of the world as an eternal container or immutable backdrop for human activities. It rather suggests a more dynamic and interdependent relationship between humans and their world, emphasizing the active role of human beings in continually bringing forth and shaping their world. Worlding or world-making does not primarily mean building technological environments in which everything is socially constructed. Worlds are not made out of atheistic nothingness, but the divine must also be worlding with us, as I will now describe in more detail with the help of process philosophers—thinkers who have believed since Heraclitus that humans are becoming because cosmic being is itself becoming out of a flux of possibility.

5. Worlding as Processual Cosmotheosis

It is time to problematize what we have previously said of the universal drive of philosophy. Our presupposition is that the Real is a creative advance—a becoming that is performative and generative rather than universally static. This Creative Real, or Creal, is the condition of possibility of the Real, an ultimate processual flux of possibilizing, a creatio continua—an ongoing and immanent creation (de Miranda 2021). This dynamic view of the universal is shared by process philosophies, both Western and Eastern (Holm-Hadulla 2013)—for example, in the works of Heraclitus, Daoism, Bergson, or Whitehead, for whom “creativity is the ultimate behind all forms”, “the universal of universals”. (Whitehead 1978, pp. 20–21).

Process philosophies are ontologies for which becoming is more authentic than substantial being, despite the appearances or perceptive habits that make us believe that concrete objects and matter or data are the real, ultimate stuff. From the process philosophy perspective, the mathematical Real of science or engineering is not the ultimate reality, but simply a reality expressing some rules of compossibility or compatibility of phenomena; a more fundamental creative flux is the condition of possibility of all phenomena.

Creativity is not an anthropocentric process manifesting the freedom of the human species to tame a chaotic nothingness but, rather, the essential feature of the multiverse of which we humans are one local manifestation among others. So, we are not talking here about the creative freedom of anthropocentric constructivism, but rather claiming, to use Aristotelian language, that the cosmic prime mover—the Creal—is a flow of creative potential, of which only a small proportion is actualized via worlding. This article is about autonomous intelligence and not about autonomous freedom, because not even the ultimate divine principle, the Creal, is believed here to be free to do anything possible, since even the Creal is making worlds as per the constraint of the compossibility principle, as we will see below.

As argued by Whitehead (1978), the cosmic creative advance is internal to the real as an immanent phenomenon, not something added on top of matter a posteriori. How this advance generates worlds, experiences, stories, thoughts, and effects of exteriorization or realities is via a compossible actualization of the universal generative flux. A central ontological postulate of crealectics (the discourse of the Creal) is that the essential engine, matter, or energy of the universe is a process of intercreations. If the cosmos is a Creal—a Creative Real—then autonomous intelligence must indeed be a creative dialectic, or a crealectic. Crealectic intelligence is the practice of intercreating diverse and harmonious realities out of an embodied sense of possibility and compossibility. Leibniz established that, even if everything is possible, not everything is “compossible” in the same world—that is, possible together. Compossibles are simply realities that are compatible rather than ontologically contradictory. If a given event or state is compatible with another event or state in the same world, then it is compossible (Leibniz 1992). Our laws of physics, for instance, express part of what is compossible in our given material world of bodies in interconnected movement. Realities are compossible expressions of worlded structures emerging from the creative play of intercreating forces.

Beyond analytics and dialectics, although acknowledging them as complementary, crealectic consciousness—our term for autonomous intelligence—is one for which the abundance of the possible is constantly given to us a priori, in the Creal, through continuous relative intercreations and via our absolute belonging to primal becoming, defined as an originary creative flow of possibles. This matters for practical philosophy, because the cultivation of a relationship with the philosophical possible is generative, i.e., performative; it has real consequences and encourages us to see the world in which we act as a synergic living whole rather than as analytically separated parts or cogs in randomly produced machines.

From a crealectic perspective, the Creal is worlding by nature, because the Multiple and the One are in constant interplay within it, thus producing a movement of compossibilization that tends to be world-building (de Miranda 2019). The identity between the One and the Multiple was a core belief in Platonic philosophies. This universal multiplicity upon which situations tend to unfold towards unity is what Plato called “khora” in the Timaeus (Plato 2001). The crealectic process is not just one of de-multiplication of possibles, but these possibles tend to form compossible sets, or worlds. Hence, the idea that the cosmic process is a process of cosmotheosis. The creative advance always favors the flourishing of local worlds, which are temporary plateaus of shared realities—temporary because the very essence of the Creal is dual, promoting both oneness and change, as demonstrated in more detail in Chapter 8 of Being and Neonness (de Miranda 2019).

If we accept that the divine is simply a dynamic dance between the Multiple and the One, then worlding is a divine process, and a philosophically healthy practice, in this context, is the production of the best of compossible worlds, to use a Leibnizian formula. This is a cosmo-political endeavor because the divine can be manifested here and now in the ordered, semi-secular world that we may call polis (Plato 1991). Autonomous intelligence is the active and self-reflexive participation in the cosmotheosis that is happening all around us, cosmo-politically, affecting our societal practices. This is why philosophical practice is both spiritual and pragmatic, religious or pantheistic and secular at the same time.

6. Conclusions: Becoming a Conscious Worlder

The metaphysical discussions about autonomy have usually distinguished between two fundamental aspects: “autonomy as autarkeia” and “autonomy as self rule” (May 1994). Autarkeia tends to propose an absolute or separated view of autonomy, in which external and relational factors are incompatible with autonomy sensu stricto. This may lead to an ideal of autonomous intelligence that is akin to a form of autotheosis—the self-creation of a singular and ultimately solipsistic demigod, abstracted from the full worlding power of the intercreative Creal.

Autonomy as self-rule, a more immanent form of autonomy, allows for the external world to influence the determination of thought and, therefore, action. Real autonomous intelligence, or crealectic consciousness, is the active understanding that we belong to the Creal and, as such, are by nature divinely creative and empowered with the agency of compossibility.

Absolute and relative autonomy, at least in the cognitive realm, need not be opposed if we understand the dynamic essence of the multiverse as creative. In this view, autonomous intelligence is a form of cosmotheosis; a common divination in which togetherness with the divine is not seen as deprivation of freedom of thought but, rather, as the very condition for authentic intelligence, which presupposes intercreation rather than isolation.

A human can feel worldless, especially in phases of prolonged solitude, isolation, and depleted sense of the possible. But, whether they feel it or not, most humans belong to a world and, ultimately, to the divine world of the Creal. We all engage in some co-creation of worlds, sometimes simply by perpetuating values and beliefs unconsciously. Opposing a world is still a creative gesture, the sketch or suggestion of another possible world. To engage in healthy philosophical practice means becoming a conscious “worlder”; a crealectician—that is, someone who is aware of our intercreative agency with the help of the Creal.

As a cosmotheotic agent, a crealectician, one should continuously ask oneself: is this the best of all compossible worlds? Our collective answer, in the 21st century, can be of the kind that Leibniz proposed: one that is aware that the secular worlds of mathematics, ethics, engineering, and social or artistic commerce are not incompatible with the religion of philosophers, which proposes to approximate harmony theoretically and practically: to world with the Creal, here and now.