Deriving the Spiritual from the Material: A Speculatively Realist Perspective

The existence of the spiritual can be deduced from knowledge of the material. There is an inherent affinity between speculation and spirituality: an embrace of gaps in knowledge. Speculative Realisms’ rejection of both existential anthropocentrism and correlationism in favor of more empathetic, a-, pan-, or metacentric perspectives, allows for a flat ontology where all objects equally exist and allow us to describe how the spiritual exists outside of thought. This perspective allows us to derive the existence of the spiritual via the examination of interactions between material objects. By showing how all objects, whether material or abstract, have a spiritual aspect, this paper advocates for a holistic understanding of reality that recognizes the interconnectedness of all objects.