Integral Plasma Ecologies
An ecological philosophy of plasma as luminous medium… showing how filaments, fields, and membranes can retool ecology, consciousness, and story from Earth’s ionosphere to the cosmic web.
I want to think with a medium that conducts, stores, and releases relation... to write a philosophy adequate to a world where the most prevalent state of baryonic matter is neither solid, liquid, nor gas, but charged and luminous. Plasma is not just a category of physics; it is a discipline for attention. It forces our concepts to move with fields and thresholds rather than with isolated things. Thomas Berry’s old sentence comes back to me as a methodological demand rather than a slogan... the universe is “a communion of subjects,” so our ontology must learn how currents braid subjects, how membranes transact rather than wall off, how patterns persist as filaments rather than as points.[1] Plasma is one way the communion shows its hand.
Long before Faraday and Alfvén, philosophers named a world that was tensional and light suffused. Heraclitus describes an order that “always was and is and will be... an ever-living fire, kindling in measure and going out in measure,” a remarkably apt phenomenology of energy storage and release in a medium that never stops reconfiguring itself.[2] Plato’s Timaeus speaks of a chōra, the “receptacle” and “nurse of becoming,” a place-that-is-no-place which receives and conducts the impress of forms... conceptually closer to a field than to a brick of stuff.[3] Aristotle, straining to account for celestial regularity, invokes a fifth body, aither, exempt from terrestrial corruption... a gesture toward a differentiated medium above; however, we now push back on that physics post-Einstein.[4] The Stoics give the most explicit physics of relation in antiquity, calling pneuma a warm, tensile fire that pervades bodies and confers their coherence... not a ghostly vapor but a graded, causally efficacious continuum of tension in matter.[5] Late antique and medieval theologians fold light into the grammar of causality. Pseudo-Dionysius figures procession and return as a diffusion and return of light; names are “rays” from and back to the hidden source.[6] Robert Grosseteste’s De luceimagines the first corporeal form as light multiplying itself, expanding and folding into the layered world we inhabit... a medieval cosmogenesis by radiance.[7] Islamic Illuminationists further the metaphor: Suhrawardī writes of graded realities as ranks of light descending from the “Light of Lights,” a structured luminosity that organizes beings by degree rather than by kind.[8] Ibn Arabi breathes the cosmos into speech... creation as the nafas al‑Raḥmān or “Breath of the All-Merciful,” a rhythmic exhalation and return, more a dynamic field than a static decree.[9]
None of these are our “plasma” in the laboratory sense… yet each names a participatory medium that conducts form, agency, and information. They teach me to look again at aurora curtains and radio‑bright nebulae not as inert scenery but as liturgies of a world that moves by relation and tension.
These are also not “plasma physics” as we currently use the term. They are disciplined intuitions of a conductive, graded, more-than-particulate world... intuitions that modern electrodynamics renders precise. Faraday’s lines of force, Maxwell’s equations, the electrodynamics I taught for years… they disclose that matter is never simply “there.” It is a choreography in fields, a dance of charges and flows. Faraday draws lines of (invisible to us humans) attraction and force, refusing to reduce action to occult pushes at a distance; the field becomes a concrete, manipulable object of experiment.[10] Maxwell compresses the grammar into four coupled equations that I demonstrated to students for almost two decades as a classroom physics teacher myself... terse poems of curls and divergences that reveal how electricity and magnetism co-inhere and propagate.[11] The twentieth century unfolded the consequences in the laboratory and the sky. Hannes Alfvén warns that cosmology forgets the laboratory at its peril; plasmas do non-linear, filamentary, self-organizing things that equations alone can sanitize.[12] Reconnection events rearrange magnetic topology and dump stored energy with suddenness; Birkeland currents thread magnetospheres and auroral ovals; double layers form quasi-membranes across which potentials are held and discharged.[13]
Where entropy often frames our imagination as universal decay, plasma insists on the local surprise of order emerging in and through dissipation. Ilya Prigogine called such things “dissipative structures.” Plasma is a master of that pedagogy. It teaches me that becoming is not the erosion of being… becoming is the way being keeps promises to novelty and imagination.[14]
A process metaphysics can track this without forcing it back into substance talk. Whitehead’s occasionalism gives us the proper verbs: reality is composed of becomings that inherit, concresce, and pass themselves on; endurance is achieved by repetition with difference rather than by a hidden marble core.[15] Plasmas bring the grammar into view. They store influences, prehend fields, and decide pathways under constraint; the identity of a filament is its maintained current, not a pellet of stuff that persists beneath change. Entropy still governs, yet far from equilibrium we see Prigogine’s order-out-of-chaos... structures that arise because energy is being dissipated through them, not despite it.[16]The analytic point is not that “everything is electricity”... it is that the best physics of the most common state of matter makes relation, tension, and membrane the primary operators. That ontology scales.
Keeping with the trouble, as Haraway urges, means we practice this analytic in the near field, not just in the radio sky.[17] Earth is a plasma body too... sheathed in a magnetosphere that deflects and channels the solar wind, wrapped in an ionosphere whose diurnal chemistry makes a conductive layer that our radios learn to bounce from and through.[18]Lightning writes transient conductive rivers between cloud and ground. Birds and other animals evolve sensitivities to geomagnetic cues, weaving their migrations into planetary fields... not “using the ionosphere” in any simple way, but participating in a geospace that is charged and variable.[19] Once you start to see membranes and thresholds rather than walls, ecological thinking changes. Edges become dynamic interfaces where gradients are held and transacted. Boundaries become capacitive... storing differences until conditions open a path for release.
Ursula K. Le Guin helps me hold the narrative form of that realization. The hero tale wants a spear; integral plasma asks for a bag. “The proper, fitting shape of the novel might be... a sack, a bag,” Le Guin writes... something woven to carry, to gather and keep.[20] Ionospheres and magnetopauses are carrier bags, not battlements... they cradle gradients and make room for a slower work of exchange. Haraway’s string figures take the other side of the image... patterns that appear only because tension is distributed across knots and fingers. Plasmas literally draw such strings in auroral curtains and coronal loops. The lesson is analytic, not ornamental. Where we once treated identity as a point, integral plasma suggests threads; where we once thought of causality as collision, integral plasma teaches tension and release; where we once pictured limits as walls, integral plasma shows membranes that transact.
This is why the ancient lights matter. They keep us from pretending that our field language arrived without genealogy. They remind us that concept-work is always also training perception. When I stand with my kids under an August thunderhead in Spartanburg and feel the charged air vibrate before the first crack, I am not spiritualizing physics. I am letting physics educate my metaphysics. I am allowing a world of gradients to tutor my sense of how selves hold together, how communities persist, how thought conducts rather than hoards. The old names... pneuma, chora, aither, lux... and the new names... sheath, double layer, reconnection... can collaborate without confusion if we keep our measures careful. This emphasis on careful measures in integrating old and new concepts is not just a cautionary note, but a call to action to uphold the highest standards of precision and accuracy in our great work.
Consciousness enters here by way of method rather than metaphysical short-cuts. A process view treats mindedness as relational articulation... the universe noticing itself locally through patterns of inheritance and decision. On a charged planet under a variable star, with bodies evolved as exquisite transducers of fields and flows, consciousness is apprenticed to gradients. Plasma ecologies offer pedagogy... how to couple without capture, how to hold difference in tension, how to release stored potential without tearing the fabric that carries it. Let's speak of artificial intelligence in this register. It is another way matter learns patterns... a carrier bag that can be trained to notice and carry larger ecological strings, as long as we do not forget who is training whom and to what ends.[21]
The wager, then, is not mystical. It is analytical being pushed by ecological. A philosophy that takes plasma seriously will widen ecology’s field of view from creek to magnetosphere to heliosphere to cosmic web without losing the hand-feel of thresholds. It will refurbish metaphysics so that continuity does not mean sameness, and identity does not mean stasis. It will repair imagination by letting instrument and story train one another... the curl of an equation tightening a paragraph, the flutter of an aurora disciplining a concept. And it will do the slow work of attention that Le Guin and Haraway both commend... staying with the luminous matter of this world until it teaches us how to belong.
[1] Berry, 1999
[2] Heraclitus, DK B30
[3] Plato 2000, 49a–52d
[4] Aristotle 1939, I.3
[5] Long and Sedley, 1987
[6] Pseudo-Dionysius, 1987
[7] Grosseteste, 1974
[8] Suhrawardī, 1999
[9] Chittick, 1989
[10] Faraday, 1852
[11] Maxwell, 1865
[12] Alfvén, 1970
[13] Chen, 2016; Zweibel and Yamada, 2009
[14] Prigogine and Stengers, 1984
[15] Whitehead, 1978; Whitehead, 1925
[16] Prigogine and Stengers, 1984
[17] Haraway, 2016
[18] Kivelson and Russell, 1995; Davies, 1990
[19] Wiltschko and Wiltschko, 2005
[20] Le Guin 1989, 152–59
[21] Haraway, 2016; Le Guin, 1989
References
Alfvén, Hannes. 1970. “Nobel Lecture: Cosmical Electrodynamics.” NobelPrize.org.
Aristotle. 1939. On the Heavens (De Caelo). Translated by W. K. C. Guthrie. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Berry, Thomas. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower.
Chen, Francis F. 2016. Introduction to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. 3rd ed. Cham: Springer.
Chittick, William C. 1989. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany: SUNY Press.
Davies, Kenneth. 1990. Ionospheric Radio. London: Peter Peregrinus.
Diels, Hermann, and Walther Kranz, eds. 1951. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Berlin: Weidmann.
Faraday, Michael. 1852. “On the Physical Lines of Force.” Philosophical Magazine, 3rd ser., 4: 401–28.
Grosseteste, Robert. 1974. “On Light.” In A Source Book in Medieval Science, edited by Edward Grant, 13–16. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kivelson, Margaret G., and Christopher T. Russell, eds. 1995. Introduction to Space Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World, 152–59. New York: Grove.
Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Parker, Eugene N. 1958. “Dynamics of the Interplanetary Gas and Magnetic Fields.” The Astrophysical Journal 128: 664–76.
Plato. 2000. Timaeus. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 1224–1291. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. 1987. The Complete Works. Translated by Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press.
Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din. 1999. The Philosophy of Illumination. Translated by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed., edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press.
Wiltschko, R., and W. Wiltschko. 2005. Magnetic Orientation and Magnetoreception in Birds and Other Animals. Berlin: Springer.
Zweibel, Ellen G., and Masaaki Yamada. 2009. “Magnetic Reconnection in Astrophysical and Laboratory Plasmas.” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 47: 291–332.