Beyond Idealism

Three Roads to a Post-Materialist Philosophy

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

In the recent essays Idealism Isn't a Revolution—It's a Regression and The Spiritual Temptation of Idealism, I critiqued the allure and metaphysical overreach of consciousness-first worldviews. Idealism, I argued, seduces through coherence and comfort but fails to offer explanatory traction or epistemic discipline.

Yet we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The reductionist materialism that idealism reacts against is itself insufficient. It cannot account for the intrinsic features of mind, the directionality of complex systems, or the normative depth of experience.

What we need is not a return to premodern metaphysics, but a mature, post-materialist naturalism—one that takes consciousness and value seriously, without collapsing into ontological monism centered on Mind.

Three of the most promising frameworks in this space are:

• Panpsychism
• Neutral Monism
• Process Philosophy

Each offers a path beyond both materialism and idealism—a way to preserve the insights of both without falling into the excesses of either. This essay compares these three alternatives and explores how they may contribute to an enriched philosophical worldview.

1. Panpsychism: Mind All the Way Down?

What is it?

Panpsychism holds that consciousness or experience is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It does not say that everything is conscious in a human sense, but that even the simplest entities have some form of “proto-experience” .

Why it matters

Panpsychism avoids the “hard problem” of consciousness (how mind arises from matter) by rejecting the idea that mind emerges out of non-conscious stuff. Instead, mind is baked into the cake of existence from the start.

Thinkers like Galileo, Leibniz, William James, and more recently Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, and Christof Koch have explored versions of this view.

Strengths

• Preserves the continuity between mind and nature.
• Avoids dualism and brute emergence.
• Resonates with some Eastern and indigenous cosmologies.

Challenges

• Combination problem: how do micro-conscious experiences combine into unified macro-consciousness?
• Risk of animism by stealth—projecting subjective interiority onto electrons or quarks.
• Still lacks clear empirical implications or explanatory models.

2. Neutral Monism: Beyond Mind and Matter

What is it?

Neutral monism proposes that mind and matter are two aspects of a more fundamental “neutral” substance or reality. Neither mind nor matter is primary; both are derivative appearances or expressions of a deeper, underlying base.

This idea can be traced back to Spinoza, and was developed in modern terms by Bertrand Russell, Ernst Mach, and William James.

Why it matters

Neutral monism avoids the mind-matter binary altogether. Instead of asking whether consciousness reduces to brain states, or brain states reduce to consciousness, it asks: what common reality gives rise to both?

Strengths

• Conceptually parsimonious: avoids metaphysical inflation.
• Provides a symmetrical ontology that doesn't privilege either pole.
• Opens space for a non-dual, non-idealistic framework compatible with science.

Challenges

• The “neutral stuff” remains mysterious and under-defined.
• Risks collapsing into idealism or physicalism depending on interpretation.
• Still lacks a formalized explanatory framework.

3. Process Philosophy: Reality as Becoming

What is it?

Originating with Alfred North Whitehead, process philosophy holds that reality is fundamentally composed of events, processes, or relations—not static substances.

Everything, including matter and mind, is a moment of becoming—a process of interaction and self-actualization. Consciousness is one mode of complex processual organization.

Why it matters

Process thought integrates development, creativity, and relationality into the structure of being. It moves beyond both substance metaphysics and static idealism, offering a dynamical, evolutionary ontology.

Thinkers like Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin, and Ilya Prigogine have extended process thinking into theology, physics, and biology.

Strengths

• Compatible with evolutionary biology and systems theory.
• Emphasizes relation over isolation, change over stasis.
• Can accommodate mind, value, and emergence without resorting to top-down metaphysics.

Challenges

• Complex and abstract metaphysical system.
• Less well known or mainstream.
• Struggles to gain traction in analytic philosophy or hard sciences.

Ken Wilber's Neutral Monism: An Integral Middle Path?

Among contemporary thinkers attempting to transcend both materialism and idealism, Ken Wilber's Integral Theory offers a distinctive approach—one that resonates with the framework of neutral monism, the idea that both mind and matter are expressions of a more fundamental, nondual “Suchness” or “Spirit.”

Wilber rejects both classical materialism (which reduces consciousness to brain states) and subjective idealism (which makes the world a projection of mind). Instead, he proposes that reality is composed of four irreducible dimensions—subjective, objective, intersubjective, and interobjective (the quadrants)—all of which co-arise from a deeper ground he variously labels Spirit, emptiness, or the nondual.

In this sense, Wilber's metaphysics resembles neutral monism:

• Like William James, he denies the primacy of either mental or physical substance.
• Like Spinoza, he affirms a unified reality with dual aspects (though Wilber expands this to four).
• And like Whitehead, he interprets this unity as a dynamic unfolding, not a static substance.

However, Wilber's version of neutral monism is not philosophically minimal. His model is highly structured, developmental, and teleological—guided by an inner Eros or Spirit-in-action driving evolution toward increasing complexity and consciousness. This is where Wilber departs from more cautious forms of neutral monism like Bertrand Russell's or Thomas Nagel's, which resist metaphysical grand narratives.

Wilber's ontology of holons (part-wholes) further universalizes the subject-object polarity to all levels of reality, suggesting that even atoms or molecules have proto-subjective and proto-objective dimensions. While conceptually elegant, this often veers into speculative metaphysics, and sometimes risks slipping back into spiritual idealism, especially when his language shifts from “neutral Suchness” to overt theological terms like “the Divine.”

In short, Wilber offers a spiritually charged version of neutral monism, one that's appealing to those seeking a synthesis of science, spirituality, and developmental psychology. But its teleological commitments and mystical vocabulary make it a problematic candidate for a robust post-materialist naturalism.

If we are to develop a post-materialist philosophy grounded in ontological humility, we may need to decouple neutral monism from cosmic narratives of ascent. Wilber's integral vision is rich and encompassing—but it may say more about our existential longings than the metaphysical structure of reality itself.

Conclusion: Toward a Post-Idealist Synthesis

Idealism, for all its poetic coherence, ultimately collapses under its own metaphysical weight. But materialist reductionism is not the only alternative.

These three frameworks—panpsychism, neutral monism, and process philosophy—offer credible, non-reductive alternatives that retain realism, embrace subjectivity, and honor complexity.

They don't deny consciousness or mystify it. They embed it into the fabric of reality without needing to make it the whole.

These views are still developing. None offer the final word. But together they point to a future philosophy of mind and nature that is:

• Post-materialist but not anti-scientific
• Spiritually resonant but not metaphysically bloated
• Committed to truth, not comfort

This is the real work ahead: not choosing between mechanism and mysticism, but building a new metaphysical architecture—one that can host both rigor and reverence.