Metamorphosis

This five-session course with author Jeremy Johnson (Seeing Through the World, Fragments of an Integral Future) invites students into a journey of ecological self-fashioning.

What happens when we compost our old civilizational narratives about human exceptionalism? What new images of the human are possible—even affirming—in a relational worldview?

So many of modernity’s cherished conceptions of self and world, past and future, have experienced a fundamental rupture. There is no ‘going back,’ but in a world beyond progress, new relationships with ecological futures are called for. If modernity has become a ‘ruin,’ as Anna Tsing evocatively describes, then are signs of life in these ruins.

New forms of ecological thinking and relating have already begun to reshape our cultural imagination. Histories are being re-visioned, and with them, different possible futures shift into view.

It is as if our warming planet has become an alembic, or forcing function, for the evolution of consciousness: we must become. Metamorphosis is now a civilizational imperative.

In times of catastrophe, life seeks out new possibilities for relation.

Since the Western Renaissance, modernity has championed the idea of self-fashioning. Amidst all of creation, the story goes, the human and only the human is free to recreate themselves. But new views of nature continue to de-center such human exceptionalism. Even the notion of the individual has exploded into a strange pluralism. “We are societies, made of societies,” author Kim Stanley Robinson memorably states, “this is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view.”

Enter the self-as-holobiont.

What happens when the modern image of the human is nudged from its privileged center and brought back to the ecological middle?

Can we ecologize our philosophies of human exceptionalism—like Pico Mirandola’s Renaissance notion of self-fashioning—in the service of ecological futuring?

This course is an exercise in reimagining the ‘human as middle.’

We begin through a re-visioning of human origins without the need for linear narratives or progressive ‘stages’ of history. We then leap through time, wrestling with some of the core tenants of humanism in order to bring about a more “tentacular” reading of the Western Renaissance.

Pico’s elevation of the human is de-centered as we meet our ancient planetary kin. Flower, insect, and the teeming microcosm—each become our teachers and exemplars, embodying the secret life of metamorphosis par excellence.

Finally, our class completes its temporal wanderlust and takes us back to our present moment of meta-crisis.

We will draw from the works of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, Jean Gebser and Gloria Anzaldua to help us arrive at ecological images of the human.

True self-fashioning, we will come to see, does not place the human outside of nature, nor does it make us the center of this nature.

We find that human nature, and therefore nature as a whole, constitutes a middle which is always in the making.

Gaia is the great self-fashioner, and so each of us becomes a zone of relation, a site of metamorphosis.

When we begin to perceive ourselves as ecological beings—always making and in the making in radical relation with the more than-human—then we have already begun go beyond the foreclosure of the future.

We have already begun to live an ecological worldview in the present.

This is, after all, a philosophy of metamorphosis, where we find that what makes our species so exceptional is precisely what finds us most at home, in unthinkable continuity with the living Earth.

Metamorphosis has been designed to be lively, engaging, and open to everyone. Familiarity with the course materials will not be needed in order to enjoy the class.

About Your Host

Jeremy Johnson is an author (Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness), publisher (Integral Imprint), podcaster (Mutations), senior research associate at Perspectiva, and integral philosopher.

His academic research, writing, and publishing advocates new forays into integrative thinking and praxis—aligning the scholastic, poetic, and spiritual—as existentially crucial work for pathfinding in a time of planetary crisis.

Jeremy is attending a doctoral program in Philosophy at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His new book, Fragments of an Integral Future: Essays on Time, Ecology, and a New World View is nearing completion, and due for publication in late 2025.

Class Outline

This is a pre-recorded class. Upon registering, all course materials are made available on the Metamorphosis class portal, hosted on the Mutations Mighty Networks platform (if you’re a new student, you should receive an automatic invitation to create an account).

Participants are encouraged to move through each lesson at their own pacing.

This course includes a class discussion forum. Students are encouraged to discuss lesson materials with each other. The instructor is also glad to respond to questions and comments as they are posted.

Lecture 1: Paleolithic Retrievals

Lecture 2: The Renaissance Goes Tentacular

Lecture 3: Shapeshifting Selves

Lecture 4: Homo Ludens, or Homo Integer?

Lecture 5: Metamorphosis, or Towards a Philosophy of the Future

Student Learning Outcomes

Students will:

• be exposed to a variety of philosophical, artistic, and esoteric ideas that have shaped modern ideas of nature and human nature

• become familiar with a rich field of “posthumanist” and eco-philosophical thought: from early thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Gilbert Simondon to more contemporary scholars like Donna Haraway, Gloria Anzaldua and Emanuele Coccia

• appreciate the insights of modern biology, in particular Gaia Theory, and its application to their way of seeing

• develop an ‘ecological’ interpretation of certain integrative’ philosophers, like Jean Gebser and Sri Aurobindo, and their relevance to present day civilizational challenges

• renew their sense of wonder by contemplating metamorphosis as a principle replete in both the human and more-than-human world

• have the opportunity to share and exchange with the instructor and fellow students on their own experience, interpretations, and ideas

• join a community of seekers concerned with the direction our world is taking and convinced that a different way of seeing the world is possible.

Registration: $100

Student/Pay-what-you-can rates:
Send us a note to receive a pay-what-you-can registration link: info (at) nuralearning (dot) com

Thank you, and welcome to class!

Returning student on the Mutations platform? Use this button to register.

Featured image: Maria Sybilla, Banana Flower and Fruit, 1705.