The gods present their arguments

David Bentley Hart—an American Goethe who declared a few years ago that fiction writing is his greatest love—would likely prefer to see a review of his Prisms, Veils: A Book of Fables, which was published last year by the University of Notre Dame Press. Philosophy of mind is the main subject of Hart’s most recent book, All Things Are Full of Gods, a literary Platonic dialog between four Greek deities who spend six days in debate over many contemporary philosophy and science topics while reclining on benches amid the vast gardens of the two who are hosting, Eros and Psyche.

The title comes from a Thales of Miletus quote brought up early in the conversations. From comfortable retirements on vast intermundane estates, these Greek deities, although no longer worshiped by us, clearly maintain a keen interest in our story and delight to read up on modern physics, biology, philosophy, computer science, religion, and literature. We first encounter Psyche selecting and plucking a rose after a contemplative search. Her claims about the stages of desire and introspection involved in selecting one rose from such abundance spark an argument with her guest, Hephaistos, over the realities of mind versus matter. They agree on six days of systematic discussion, during which Hephaistos maintains a lonely defense of modern mechanistic materialism against three antagonists, led by the confident yet kindhearted Psyche. Evidently, Psyche—who started life as human before choosing immortality with Eros—is more down-to-earth than her two supporters, the doting Eros and the haughty Hermes.

Psyche despises Cartesian dualism and considers mechanistic materialism as well as most varieties of idealism in the last several centuries to each be idiotic inheritors of only half of this dualism. In place of these three dead contemporary categories of thought, Psyche advocates a more ancient form of idealism that understands the material realm as a substantial manifestation and shared experience of mind and life. This is a holistic and commonsense vision, Psyche claims, that would have been familiar to the ancient schools of Vedantic philosophy as well as Neoplatonists more recently.