I'm going to break up Part 12 into several components based on the conversations between Bishop Maximus and John Vervaeke that I have linked to here. In addition to watching these conversations between these two, I have watched the second half (25 lectures) of Vervaeke's Awakening to the Meaning Crisis, which has enabled me to better understand and appreciate what he's up to. (See Note 1.)
In any event, it took my watching his conversations with Bishop Maximus to get me see that Vervaeke is far more open to traditional religious thinking when he sees that it works, and clearly it's working for someone like Bishop Maximus. It has been one of my presuppositions that renaissance--if it's to come in the future--must come from a retrieval in a postmodern key of something understood by our premodern ancestors but forgotten by us, and that it must be integrated with science's practical approach to living in the world given to us by our rationality, i.e., our ability to figure things out and to understand them as they are and not as we wish them to be. I am committed to rationality, not to materialism. This is Vervaeke's project, too, or so it seems to me.
Vervaeke's cognitive science compliments the neuro-scientific work of Iain McGilchrist about whom I've written extensively. Both thinkers are deeply philosophically literate, and they both use philosophy as a tool to integrate knowledge in other domains--cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, biology--and the arts. And both use philosophy in what I illustrate in the diagram below to be the integration of Phronesis with Sophia. The goal for both is to point the way to the reestablish a Wisdom Tradition in the West--and elsewhere, but particularly the West. Wisdom is essential for any religion that might be described as 'good religion'--and I'd argue for any society that we can call a good society. (See Note 2)
That, too, is my central concern, and I see my task here as to function mostly as an intermediary to make the work of these and others working on these issues available to an audience that might otherwise find such a project inaccessible because they haven't the philosophical background to understand the significance of what they are doing. So that's the task for me with Vervaeke and McGilchrist going forward. Both are staking out a middle ground that integrates Sophia and Phronesis within 'Religio,' i.e., the experiential grounding of the human in the Living Real.
(See Note 3 below for explanation of this diagram. This is my way of conceptualizing what is needed using some of Vervaeke's language. I have no idea whether he would agree with it.)
I add content to this diagram in the Genealogy Series where I first introduce the critique of the contemporary metphysical imaginary as bereft of the vertical dimension depicted here, and about how the future of the human project requires its restoration in some way. I see both Vervaeke and McGilchrist as key contributors to this restorative task. Their work obviously depends on the work of many others, but what makes both so interesting to me is their ability to integrate and synthesize a broad range of work in ways that are so relevant to the meaning crisis for which late-modern Liberal thought has no remedy.
The first twenty-five of Vervaeke's lectures are designed to establish the historical developments that led to the meaning crisis we are currently undergoing, and the second 25 lectures are designed to show how Third Generation Cognitive Science is mapping some possible solutions. He says that all healthy societies have highly functioning Nomological, Normative, and Narrative Orders. All three of these have broken down in contemporary North Atlantic societies, and their breakdown needs to be addressed because we, unlike other societies that have preceded us in the West, have no broadly recognized 'psychotechnologies' to help people to deal with what he calls the "perennial problems"--the various human tendencies toward self-deception and self-destructive behaviors--otherwise known as foolishness.
'Nomological Breakdown' is the prevailing sense that the cosmos is random, cruel, impersonal, and purposeless. Humans did not think this was true two hundred years ago. But developments in science coupled with the culturally disruptive effects of industrialization have destroyed any collective sense that we live in a cosmos that is undergirded by a benevolent order. We see this reflected in prestige cultural work from Game of Thrones to The Sopranos and Succession. I think that one of the reasons that Everything Everywhere All at Once won so many Oscars this year is because it wants to depict the random, meaningless, cruel cosmos that for us has become "normative" while asserting the possibility for deep, human personal meaning achieved through persistent, agapic love. The fundamental intuition is correct, but deeply inadequate. It's a start, though. And there are other signs of a shift toward affirming meaning among our culture's elites who are becoming bored with all the cruelty and meaninglessness.
'Normative breakdown' is our experience of a social order that has come to emphasize the autonomous individual to such an extent that any idea of the common good has become impossible to ground politics, social norms/ethics, or any sense of living in a shared society. I've been arguing for years that this is leading us to disaster because of the way we are all divided and conquered in such a way as to be impotent to confront and push back against where techno-capitalism is dragging us.
'Narrative Breakdown' is our experience of living in a society that derives no sense of meaning or purpose from an overarching Mythos derived from what I've been calling a metaphysical imaginary. The best we can do, as in Everything Everywhere All at Once--itself a paradigm of narrative breakdown--is affirm the possibility of meaning through love. Otherwise narrative meaning--true mythopoeisis rooted in Religio--is impossible in a society where Rationalist Materialism dominates our metaphysical imaginary. We are still skeptical of embracing grand narratives. So we are ruled by default by narrative habits we can't shake, in the American case by Calvinist individualism and its Horatio Alger bootstraps narrative that justifies Neoliberal meritocracy. This is a narrative that makes no sense in a world that is quickly evolving into one where the machines will be doing most of the work, and where humans will have to obtain their sense of identity, dignity, and purpose, i.e., their sense of life's meaning, from something other than their activities in the economic sphere.
When I talk about the breakdown of the Liberal Order, this is basically what I mean--that Liberalism hasn't the resources within itself to solve the problems that Liberalism has created. That doesn't mean that Liberalism is or was wrong--it was enormously valuable and important for the human project--but Liberalism from the beginning has been structured in a tradeoff relationship between Phronesis and Sophia in which the former has crowded out the latter. Now it's time to reestablish a metaxis--a creative, balanced tension--between Phronesis and Sophia. More and more people are recognizing that this is necessary, but nobody knows how to do it. I certainly don't know how to do it, but I trust in the human project, and I believe that we can find a way to rebalance things one way or another.
So the new restoration that is called for is what Vervaeke calls 'Religio', which is what I've been calling the Living Real. For him and for me this requires getting a deeper grip on reality, and to do this requires a participative ontology and epistemology that Neoplatonism theorizes, (with a little help from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and 3rd Generation Cog Sci)--or so I want to argue.
Vervaeke uses this word 'transjective' (See Note 4) to describe our relationship to the world around us as alternative to the way our imaginary is still so profoundly influenced by Cartesian subject/object relationship. He references Martin Buber's talking about the same thing in his I-Thou relationships. This requires an ontology that is essentially different from the one we inherited from the Enlightenment, one that rejects the Cartesian I-It, and embraces a kind of intersubjectivity if we understand by that a deep, immersive interconnectedness that is in a very real sense a function of anagogic (self-transcending), expansive Love.
This is the deep truth at the heart of the cosmos, but it's a truth we have become oblivious of because of the breakdown of the three orders referenced above. And so the task is to "wake up" to it, not in some sentimental, superficial sense, but in a way that is profoundly restorative for true human flourishing. So this is not just an intellectual project, but it has an essential intellectual component. We must find a way as a society to get a grip on the world and our experience in it that our current Rationalistic-Materialistic imaginary makes extraordinarily difficult.
For Vervaeke, (and for me, and for Bishop Maximus) such a project is agapic and anagogic, by which he means driven by an understanding of the human being as self-transcending by virtue of his developing a deeper grip on reality that is empowered by a transcendent benevolence--if we can find a way as a culture to value this truth again. Obviously individuals "self-transcend" all the time, but it's not valued by the broader society in the way it needs to be. And I think that it goes to the restoration of Nomological, Normative, and Narrative Orders in ways that make sense, i.e., that are well adapted to the world that is emerging where machines will be playing an unprecedented role in shaping the world we all live in.
This is not a world that the Cultural Right has any real grasp on. They feel the disruption and the ontological dizziness it causes, but they have no creative solutions. Its project is if anything profoundly maladaptive because it refuses to deal with the world as it is and as it is changing. They want simply, to use the Bill Buckley phrase, to 'stand athwart history yelling stop', but that is no response adequate to the enormity of what's happening. As a result its best solution is to restore a nostalgic imaginary Normative order by top-down fiat. Such a Normative Order is necessary in any healthy society--they are right in that--but it must emerge bottom-up out of the 'self-organizing' energies of the Living Real.
So this being my first stab at trying to write about what Vervaeke is doing is tentative because I'm not sure I understand it fully yet, but I think it's important to have this background to understand why he's so interested to have these conversations with Bishop Maximus. About which I'll have more to say in the near future.
You might also want to watch this lecture Vervaeke gave in December that is his attempt to explain why Neoplatonism and Cognitive Science are doing the same thing.
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Note 1: Vervaeke's use of the term "naturalist imperative" is still not particularly clear to me, but it is not fatal from my pov because I'm willing for now to live with his understanding of 'self-transcendence' without insisting on extrapolating from it the metaphysical implications. But I'm still not crazy about his ideas about "Religion that is not Religion", because I think is impossible. The issue, as I see it, is not to give up on religion but to make distinctions between good religion and bad religion, and then to find ways of protect good religion from the forces--particularly the forms of idolatry that are associated with propositional tyranny--that persistently work to degrade it. What he's doing in 'Religion that isn't Religion', imo, is his trying to establish what's involved in good religion, and he's doing it in a way with which I am completely sympathetic. Good religion has vulnerabilities that often incline it to become a parody of good religion, to be sure. But even a 'Religion that is not Religion' must have its cult, code, and creed--or it just becomes another individualistic lifestyle choice, like choosing to undergo psychoanalysis. There is clearly a therapeutic dimension to what Vervaeke is doing, but his ambition is to find a remedy for a culture-wide meaning crisis, and so his proposals have broader aspirations than simply to be just another individualistic therapeutic technique. In article about him he's quoted:
How do we get from these disparate groups developing these new wisdom practices to an actual culture shift? Vervaeke’s answer surprised me. “I call it stealing the culture. What I mean is something analogous to what Christianity did in the ancient world where it stole the culture from the pagan worldview. There was no political revolution and no one was proposing how to reorganize the state. Instead, there were a bunch of communities of practice and transformation that rehomed people, teaching them through agape that they could be persons whereas the existing worldview said that they were not persons. The communities started networking together.”
I've thought for a while now that something like this is probably what's going to happen. As Christianity grew out of Hellenized Judaism, so will a restored vertical axis develop from within already existing post-axial religious traditions. In other words it will grow out of those traditions that have the infrastructure that predispose it to embrace self-transcendence. Vervaeke's conversations with Bishop Maximus demonstrate how this might happen. Eventually--not any time soon--a fusion metpahysical imaginary that integrates what's most valuable in all the great post-Axial traditions in concert with developments in Cognitive Science and philosophy will emerge that works best along the lines diagramed in the figure above. This needn't replace the great traditions, but it will provide a common framework that will allow for consensus to develop about what's important for the human future. I don't know that this will happen, but I hope it will.
Any religion becomes a parody of itself when the cult, creed, and code become ends in themselves rather than a means 'affording' self-transcending transformation--what Vervaeke calls anagoge. Because such 'means' have value only insofar as they "work", then when they stop working for whatever reason, the 'wise' have to be adaptive enough to find out what does work. Vervaeke looks around him and he sees religions mostly not working in that they don't produce self-transcending, wise human beings, but too often rather the opposite--self-deceptive, self-destructive fools.
So religion as it is broadly practiced understandably seems for him to be more a part of the problem than offering any real solutions. But on the other hand, he certainly doesn't want to see himself as trying to promote a new religion, so it makes sense that he should come up with a way of talking about 'Religion that is not Religion' as a non-inflated way of describing what he's trying to do. But in the final analysis, his 'Rellgion that is not Rellgion' has a cult, code, and creed, and clearly, whatever he calls it, he hopes it will be culturally ascendant.
Note 2. Lest there be any ambiguity, I support the secular state, and I believe that the restoration of a Sapiential Tradition is cultural project, not a political one, that can thrive in an open, democratic society. But as a cultural project, a sapiential tradition should have broad cultural legitimacy in the same way that Rationalist Materialism has legitimacy today. In my view there was no greater damage done to Christianity and its subversive call to self-transcendence than when Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Note 3. The diagram seeks to conceptualize what a healthy metaphysical imaginary comprises. Such an imaginary recognizes knowledge and truth on both the horizontal and vertical axes, and I'd argue prioritizes the Vertical in the sense that McGilchrist prioritizes the Master over the Emissary. Both are needed, and both keep the other honest, but wisdom is more important because more foundational, and wisdom is precisely what our current Rationalist-Materialist imaginary has no place for. Late modern societies are in turmoil because they have no vertical axis and so spin aimlessnessly with no center to stabilize them. They continue to expand on the horizontal axis but have only the most superficial utilitarian criteria to interpret what they learn. I think this is changing and it must change. Vervaeke's work is very encouraging to me for this reason insofar as he's seeking to restore a place for Wisdom within the framework of cognitive science. The science part of that is horizontal, but the 'congitive' part of it is very open to ideas about self-transcendence on the vertical.
In Geneaology Part 5 I introduce the criteria listed in the lower left of the chart above in an a preliminary attempt to evaluate what from my pov the health of any society's metaphysical imaginary requires. The argument to support such criteria is laid out in the development of the various parts of the series, but the crux of it is that any healthy society must have a metaphysical imaginary that comprises both a vertical and horizontal dimension as depicted in the diagram. The vertical and the horizontal map different domains of knowledge and have their own criteria of legitimacy, but they must remain in metaxic, creative tension, what Vervaeke calls an opponent or trade-off relationship. They both constrain and enable one another to produce deeper levels of knowledge and wisdom. Because knowledge on the horizontal and vertical proceed in a way that is interactive--we, i.e., our cognitive capabilities, are transformed/expanded as our knowledge of the world is transformed/expanded. When that interaction breaks down, when one or the other operates without being in a dynamic interrelationship with the other, as is our current condition, the whole system becomes impoverished and dysfunctional.
The criteria that define this metaxic relationship are as follows:
Scope: The best metaphysical imaginary has the broadest scope on both the horizontal and vertical axes. Premodern societies have more scope on the vertical axis and less scope on the horizontal, but it could be argued that premoderns had a better grip on reality than moderns because they were not as profoundly alienated from the world as moderns are. We moderns know more "about" the world, but we are at the same time more disconnected from its vitality, and in that sense have less of a grip on it. A remedy for us now is to restore the individual's ability to get a better grip on reality, or in Neoplatonic terms, to participate in it. This requires self-transformation in both a psychological-therapeutic sense and in a spiritual sense. We need to expand our scope on both the horizontal and the vertical, but it's more important now that we expand on the vertical because we desperately need more wisdom to deal with the crises looming on the horizontal as it expands especially in the domain of information technologies--AI and VR.
Coherence: The best metaphysical imaginary therefore integrates in a coherent way what it knows on both the vertical and the horizontal. This is the task of philosophy. As we learn more on the horizontal, we need to integrate it on the vertical. As more people take seriously the importance of growing in wisdom, i.e., as a new participatory epistemology and ontology becomes increasingly legitimated, humans will find ways to understand and interpret what we know as knowledge expands on the horizontal in ways that help us to get a healthier grip on the world. We need science, but we need its findings now more than ever to be wisely interpreted in such a way that it serves the deepest human needs, not the needs of shareholders.
Adaptability: The best metaphysical imaginary is in a continuous process of expanding and deepening our grip on reality. Coherence requires the development of the ability to adapt what is known on the horizontal to what has broad consensus on a restored vertical, and vice versa. As new knowledge becomes legitimated on either axis, it is likely to challenge existing imaginal models on either the vertical or horizontal, and so the Wise celebrate as progress (rather than resist as disruption) the need to revise the models because our doing so effects the expansion and deepening of our grip on reality. Self-transcendence on the Vertical axis means that our model of reality is continuously developing as we become wiser, and analogously our expansion of knowledge on the horizontal requires a continuous adaptability in our thinking and knowing on both horizontal and vertical axes. The best metaphysical imaginary is a dynamic, evolving system. But such evolution is healthy only so long as it retains a creative tension between the horizontal and the vertical.
Richness: The best metaphysical imaginary enriches, complexifies, and deepens our experience of the mystery of Being--or what I call the Living Real. When a society loses touch with the Living Real, it sickens and it must find a remedy. It should be obvious to anyone--even those who are best adapted to living in a late-modern milieu, i.e., educated, affluent cosmopolitans, that late Modernity has produced a sick, spiritually impoverished society for most people who are living in it. The problem of spiritual poverty cannot be addressed from within Liberalism because Liberalism has created the problem, but neither can it be addressed by the Religious Conservatives because while they want to restore the vertical axis, their solutions are incoherent and maladapted to the reality on the horizontal axis. An important task for 'richness' is to develop some consensus about what a rich, deeply human life comprises. Right now, as a matter of cultural consensus, we haven't a clue.
Note 4: 'Transjective' is his term to identify the relationship between subjects and objects. There is no subject-object relationship; there are only transjective relationships. I'm not crazy about the term. I think maybe 'interjective' would work better in the sense that in the word understanding the prefix 'under' is etymologically closer in meaning to 'inter'. This emphasizes a way of experiencing the process of "understanding' as involving a cognitive subject standing between or in the midst of two poles of of knowledge and integrating them in the way that metaphor and analogy integrate two different things to produce insight.
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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in early December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.
For "Genealogy Part 12 B: Propositional Tyranny in the West", go here.