Because this is a blog and not a book, a certain amount of repetition is necessary to remind people among all the other stuff they're consuming, what's going on here and what makes it different. Clearly it's not for everyone, but I've got enough encouragement from readers to keep it going.
There are plenty of other writers for you to consult if your interested in understanding better what's happening now in the world. I read them too and learn from them. But when I comment on current affairs it's mainly to show how they relate to the themes that I'm developing here which are primarily about how in the long run we need to reshape the metaphysical imaginary of Western societies. It sounds grandiose, I know. But I have no illusions of grandeur, especially about the influence of what I do here.
Nevertheless,I have a perspective, and the value of what I write here depends on the value you put into that perspective, or perhaps in your just having some curiosity about looking at the world from a pov that isn't the same old, same old. But I can assure you that I'm not interested in being different or novel for the sake of being different or novel. There's very little original in what I write here. It's mostly derivative; it's just not a perspective that you're going to see mirrored in the broader mainstream culture mainly because it is very self-consciously an effort to subvert the presuppositions that govern the mainstream culture.
So does that just make me another RFK Jr.? I hope not, but I do believe that people like RFK Jr. and others are as popular as they are because there's a sense that something is deeply wrong, that the people in control, the best and the brightest in our mainstream institutions, are arrogant, out of touch, don't really know what they're doing, and that something better is needed.
The question is what that better might be, and who is there to deliver it. And my answer is the ancestors. My assumption is that they knew about things that we've forgotten and need to remember, and that the only way to truly subvert the mind-prison of the TCM is to take a standpoint outside of it, and then become an infusion point within the beast where energies alien to it can be brought in to grow something new, something that eventually displaces the old. This, I would argue, is how all moral/cultural progress in the history of humanity is effected. If enough people East and West, North and South, become such infusion points over the next several decades, there's some hope for advancing the human project.
I think the key phrase in the previous paragraph is "advancing the human project" because our retrieval of the wisdom of the ancestors is not something I see as an exercise in nostalgia, but as essential for moving forward. The key is to understand what moving forward entails. Within the TCM, we understand progress in purely materialistic technological terms, and that's why we're on a path to disaster. Progress, human evolution, has to be reframed first and foremost as moral progress. In McGilchrist's metaphor, moral progress must be the wise master, and technological advances must be in service of the goals set by the wise master. Right now the technological emissaries have usurped the authority of the master, and we are, as a result, spinning in a frenzied ontolgoical dizziness that cannot be sustained.
The TCM as a social system is utterly amoral. It celebrates freedom and innovation as its only values, but freedom and innovation in the service of what ends? That's kinda the problem. There are no ends, there is no sense of where we want to go, there is no collective imagination of what a better human society might look like, except in the way that these morally moronic Silicon Valley nerds envision it.
The last political philosophy that had a collective sense of a telos, of an end to history, was Marxism, and for all kinds of reasons Marxism failed miserably. And one of the consequences has been a rejection of any kind of teleological understanding of history, that, for instance, any ideal of Justice has anything to do with where history is headed or should be. Capitalism won the Cold War, and so now it's axiomatic that History is an open-ended process that is driven primarily by human desires, desires that are best met by the market. We are not to judge other people's desires, no matter how vulgar and obscene, because each person is free to determine for him or herself what happiness means for them. Who are we to judge what is vulgar or obscene, anyway? That's just morally arrogant. Right?
The cosmopolitan Liberal elite in the country think that's a sustainable ethos for American democracy, and it just isn't. But educated people of good will lean toward this open-ended, non-judgmental ethos because they see fundamentalism and dogmatism as the only alternative, and they should be feared as indeed they are articulated by fundamentalist Protestants and reactionary Catholics who bizarrely have deluded themselves that Trump is the one to deliver for them.
But cosmopolitan Liberals don't understand how this ethic isn't an ethic at all because (1) it mirrors the open-ended, amoral process that shapes biological evolution and as such justifies the fundamental amoral energies that drive the TCM. It feels truth-y because it's science-y in an evolutionary theoretical way, and alternatives sound unserious because un-science-y. And (2), as I discussed the dilemma of Manvir Singh in my last post, this is no ethic because it cannot believe that there is any such thing as a transcendent Good. At best this is a transactional ethic of scared people who set rules for themselves about how to get along without tearing one another to pieces. The "good" is safety and "being nice". These are Last Man values, and there is no nobility of spirit in them. It's better, of course, than the cruelty and savagery that threatens us from the right, but we can do better. Our ancestors did better.
So this is a long way around to my arguing, following Hart, that we need to retrieve Aristotelian causality, which if you took a Philosophy 101 course you probably learned are Efficient, Material, Formal, and Final. It's the last two that are most important for my purposes and that are represented in my diagram of Utopia below--final causality indicated by the arrows on both axes (the transformation of chaos into form on the vertical, and of ignorance into knowledge on the horizontal). Formal causality is depicted as the downward energies from top to bottom on the vertical axis that effect the transformation of Chaos into Form. I know. This needs to be explained and defended, but that is coming.
Hart argues that moderns have no concept about what causation meant for ancient and medieval thinkers. And it's unfortunate to call them 'causes', because the word for us is almost completely circumscribed by the meaning of efficient causality, i.e., one billiard ball mechanically hits another billiard ball, and consequences ensue. That's not what Aristotle means by causality.
As Hart has his avatar Psyche say about Formal Causation in the context of quantum physics--
Formal causation isn’t a horizontal relation between two physical things, or a physical transfer of energy that has to cross space, but is instead a rational specification that’s transcendent of time and space, an immediate translation of potency into actuality—which is an event both logical and ontological—and so would be simultaneous for any quantum entanglement as a whole. It would have seemed perfectly obvious that the shared wave function of the two entities would instantly collapse from the indeterminacy of the possible into the specificity of the actual, even if the whole universe should occupy the interval between them; the form determining them would be something from outside the extension of space and time.
Nor would a good late antique Neoplatonist have recoiled from the thought that the instant of formal determination and the instant of conscious observation might be one and the same event. Mind and nature, for him or her, would not have been strictly separate orders. And, of course, it shouldn’t be inconceivable to us now that consciousness operates at an oblique angle, so to speak, to the texture of spacetime—whatever that very ambiguous mathematical reality might happen to be—or that mind acts like a formal cause impressing itself instantaneously on the “fabric” of spacetime in a way that would have no temporal, “horizontal” physical history. Since form’s a principle that seamlessly unites the ontic and the epistemic—that is, one and the same form actualizes both matter’s and mind’s potencies—it’s not all that mystifying that observation might be the real occasion of the collapse of the possible into the actual. (97)
This is dense and needs to be unpacked, and I plan to do so. My point in pasting this excerpt here is to suggest in a preliminary way what Hart is about, which is to show how Aristotle and this updating of a Neoplatonic metaphysics opens up possibilities for philosophy and a richer understanding of the world in which we find ourselves. As my previous excerpts from Hart suggest, this is a path toward the re-enchantment of the world, which is really what he (and I) care most about. But for humans once again to live in a genuinely re-enchanted world, they need to reprogram their metaphysical imaginaries. That's the project here.
Science brings to light certain facts regarding the mechanics of the natural world. But these facts must be interpreted in the light of what we know from other domains of knowledge. This is a philosophical task, not a scientific one. No one is challenging the facts, only the interpretation of the facts, which, within the TCM, are profoundly shaped by its materialistic presuppositions. I want to argue that there are better interpretations if measured not only by the criterion of factuality and utility, the only ones that matter in the TCM, but also by other criteria--scope, coherence, richness, and adaptability.
As Hart points out--
Modern “naturalists” are no less dogmatic than their ancestors; they merely have far fewer clear reasons for the dogmas they embrace. The older, pre-modern physical logic was coherent, even if it was putatively speculative; the newer, modern logic is incoherent, even though it’s allegedly empirical....
Nothing in the modern sciences obliges us to think of form or finality as logically superfluous concepts or to believe in a physical nature that’s really thoroughly mechanical. Standard evolutionary theory tells us that the semblance of purpose in nature is the accidental result of ages of phylogenic attrition and selection; an older vision of things might tell us instead that the process of attrition and selection is the actualization of a certain purposiveness in the structure of things, a certain tendency toward the fullest realization and expression of potentialities inherent within nature and its laws. Logically, neither claim can be proved over against the other purely from the observable physical evidence, and in fact neither actually excludes the other; either might be a licit perspective on the whole of things as interpreted from one vantage or its opposite. The issue then becomes which perspective can accommodate all the phenomena better, including the various phenomena of mental agency. (89-90)
Again, this needs to be argued rather than just asserted, but I wanted in this post simply to indicate where I want to take things.
