Several factors have stalled my continuing my Genealogy of Our Current Insanity project, but it's something I've always planned to return to. I've mentioned the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke in several of the earlier posts here, and I just came across this video in which he interviews the Greek Orthodox Bishop Maximus. This starts out slow, but I hope you'll stick with it. It's an excellent articulation of themes I'm grappling with in my larger project of retrieving Christian Neoplatonism in a Postmodern key. This conversation is important for the way it demonstrates the relevancy of the practice and thought of the early Christian Fathers is relevant for trends in cognitive science and Philosophy of Mind.
I'm at the end of the quarter in a course I'm teaching right now so don't have time to comment, but I hope to do so when my plate is clear. But a couple of quick things: There is a certain amount of theological distinction making in this conversation that seems to emphasize why the West went wrong, and I largely agree. I wouldn't say that Eastern Orthodoxy has "unique" resources, but I do believe that it has resources that enrich and enhance the Western Tradition, and indeed this was recognized in Catholic scholarly circles in the Nouvelle Theologie in the early 20th Century. Its focus was to retrieve the Greek Patristic patrimony that Bishop Maximus draws upon in this conversation. I am not interested in East vs. West polemics, but rather to retrieve what's best in a rich and diverse tradition that comprises both East and West.
I blame western Nominalism and Voluntarism for what became in the West the "propositional tyranny" discussed in this video. These trends in Western thought gradually closed off a more participatory way of thinking that was the dominant "Realist" mode in the West until the 1300s. Nominalism and Voluntarism provided the theological framework that was adopted by most of the Reformers, and that in turn provided the framework for western capitalism and its technological advancement. But at what price? This is all laid out in my summary of Taylor's A Secular Age. so I'm not going to rehearse all that now. But why those ideas took hold in the West and not the East is something I'd like to explore some time. I suspect there was a time bomb in St. Augustine that didn't detonate until the late medieval period. But I'm not ready yet to make that argument.
Bishop Maximus is quite right when he says that so much of that Eastern patristic tradition was unavailable in the West because so few in the West knew Greek and so little of it was translated into Latin--and wouldn't be until centuries later. So any discussion of the Christian Neoplaontic tradition in the West usually starts with Augustine, and goes through Pseudo-Dionysos, John Eriugena, the Cathedral Schools, and then culminating in the great Thomistic synthesis. My original plan was to follow that track emphasizing what is, if not unique, at least more emphasized in the West. But I have always thought that it's important to bring the Greek fathers into the story, and I haven't been clear about how to do that without overburdening the reader's patience.
The Genealogy Series is not meant to be a scholarly project but rather the far less ambitious telling of a story that talks about the trajectory of the post-Axial Revolution in the West to the present day in the hope of our understanding better what resources are available for us in shaping a more richly human future. Such a future is in jeopardy as it becomes increasingly clear that Liberal Order and its hegemonic rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary hasn't the resources to deal with the crises and challenges that humanity faces in the next hundred years.
The idea that Christian Neoplatonism might provide such resources might seem far-fetched to almost everyone, but that's why I think watching this conversation is important. Clearly a guy like John Vervaeke sees its relevance. That's why I found this conversation so interesting. It boils things down to essentials in a way that I think any interested, reasonably well educated person might understand. But it still needs some unpacking.
After writing what's above I learned that there are subsequent conversations. Here's Part 2 that just went up about two weeks ago:
Part 3
Part 4 added 3/13/23: