After the Future

Genealogy Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project

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.

End of History?

Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a particular religion, moral doctrine, or cultural tradition, but at the preservation of life itself in conditions where populations could not agree on what the good life was. This leaves liberal orders with a spiritual vacuum: they allow individuals to go their own way, and create only a thin sense of community. Liberal political orders do require shared values like tolerance and openness to compromise and deliberation, but these are not the strong bonds of a tightly knit religious or ethno-nationalist community. Liberal societies have often fostered the aimless pursuit of material self-gratification, a consumer society that is both hungry for status but never satisfied with what any given individual is able to achieve.

Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, 2022, pp. 115-16

I thought this quote succinctly summarizes the problem I've been writing about over the last year, and it sets up my response to his question about whether there is an alternative. So fair warning: I'm going to indulge in a little utopian fantasizing here and see where it takes us. My answer to the question of alternatives lies in making a distinction between progress made in the cultural sphere and that made in the political sphere. We tend to think that the only progress that counts is political or technological, but from my pov it's far less important than cultural/moral progress. The importance of politics lies in that the wrong kind can impede cultural/moral progress, and the right kind creates the conditions for the possibility of it. A good society does not force people to be good; it make it easier for them to be. 

So the problem as I see it is not that we have a Liberal Democracy--that's an unqualified good. The problem lies in that most Americans don't have the kind of cultural maturity to be masters of themselves in the way that a healthy democracy demands. That's not the problem of Liberal Democracy; it's the problem of the kind of "desire culture" that rationalist materialism has created. Within it, there can be no consensus about how within a Liberal Democracy cultural progress or moral maturity might be achieved.

Most people are decent enough, but they are not inspired by any great moral project. There's nothing in the culture that models that. Their life purpose, insofar as they think about it, is to fulfill their desires and they are 'moral' if they do it in a way that doesn't hurt others. The goal is to be happy while being nice. Not much more to it than that. But worse, the desire culture that capitalism has created establishes conditions that actively work against anything deeper or more morally significant, and such an ethos impedes the broad development of moral maturity. A desire culture is either infantilizing or encourages desire behaviors that are "not nice", that are predatory. Most popular film and fiction is about nice people with acceptable desires becoming the prey of people who have unacceptable desires, and the latter are usually far more interesting because they are transgressive, and we all want to be transgressive; we all want to kill the Oedipal Father. 

The problem, therefore, is not that we have a void in our politics, but that we have a void in our cultural/moral life, and that void creates a destabilizing vacuum in our political life. The solution to the problem of political stability can only be found in a recovery of something lost in our cultural/moral life. 

In Fukuyama's most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, he defends the idea that there is a meaningful pattern in history and offers a quasi-defense of Kojeve/Hegel's proclamation that history has ended with the French Revolution. This marked the historical moment when political history replaced the 'megalothymic' with the 'isothymic', which in effect ended history driven by the master/slave dynamic that had been era primary driver. [See Note 1] This is not the place to deal with all the objections to such an idea, but there's an insight at the heart of it that has real validity: Liberal Democracy is as good as it's going to get, and any society that establishes a stable Liberal Democracy has come to the end of its political history. World history continues until every society achieves Liberal Democracy. [See Note 2] 

Now, if you haven't been exposed to this idea or have not had the time to think about it, it sounds pretty far-fetched, but I am inclined to believe that Liberal Democracy--if by 'liberal' we mean the freedom principle that protects the individual citizen from a coercive state, and if by 'democracy' we mean the equality principle that asserts that political sovereignty lies with its citizens--is the best possible form of political organization. And I have no problem with the idea that we will be at the end of "political" history when such a political regime has established itself stably throughout the world. But for such stability to be achieved, there must be significant cultural/moral progress that would enable the great majority of the world's population to be mature and free enough to be truly self-governing.

This requires that individuals become masters of themselves, and we've seen in recent years that even the stability of Liberal Democracy in the U.S. is more fragile than we have could ever imagined even twenty years ago. Huge swaths of the American population have demonstrated that they have no such self mastery in that they are too easily manipulated by demagogues. This is not the fault of Liberal Democracy, but of the nihilistic desire culture that rationalist materialism has created. I am arguing that it has eroded the customs and traditions that provided a trellis for souls to grow, expand, and mature. Those customs and traditions are gone, and the idea of restoring them is absurd. But it's not absurd to imagine a renaissance through which new culturally vital forms would be created if we could find a way to reconnect to the Living Real and its transcendentally founded ontonormative ideals in a way that all people of good will would acknowledge.

Clearly we're not as a society even remotely close to a thymotic culture of self mastery, so the achievement of Liberal Democracy in America and elsewhere remains unstable. It will remain so as long as there's no cultural/moral ballast to steady it and no trellis of living tradition to direct its citizens toward the moral achievement of euthymia [See Note 3]. We've got plenty of history ahead of us because the achievement of a Liberal Democracy here and elsewhere depends on developing a culture that grows humans capable of self-mastery. Freedom, yes. But freedom for what? A choice other than infantile fantasies should have robust purchase on the souls of all spirited Americans.  

But in the meanwhile, there is no evolution of the state that can get better than Liberal Democracy, even if an awful lot of people haven't the self-mastery that insures its stability. So far we've been able to muddle through. But even if we achieved a genuinely stable Liberal Democracy, that doesn't mean the end of human history. Political and human history are not the same. Liberal Democracy establishes the freedom and equality conditions for the more important evolutionary history of the human spirit in the cultural sphere. Politics recedes into the background, and cultural/moral quest becomes the main 'thymotic' activity.  

I think of this evolutionary process in ways that integrate Hegelian dialectic with his contemporary Schelling's ideas concerning how the human being is the site where the evolving earth (cosmos?) becomes aware of itself. For Schelling, all of nature is the human unconscious, and the human project is to gradually make it conscious in an evolutionary project that requires bringing the deep mysteries of Being, what I call the Living Real, into expanding human awareness. Humans need leisure in order to undertake such a project. Is that something the machines can give us? More on this in a future post. 

I think that Heidegger's idea concerning 'aletheia' and his defining 'Dasein is a clearing in the forest of being' is closer to Schelling than Hegel was, even if Heidegger had no interest in Schelling's evolutionary ideas. Hegel took Schelling's idea of consciousness evolution and emphasized the rational part of it rather than the irrational, and that's what people like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, and Nietzsche objected to in Hegel. His philsophy was perceived by them to be an abstraction, an empty shell. And Kierkegaard, et al., were right to object to Hegel's system-building rationality. It can be suffocating. What makes human life interesting is not rationality--if by that we mean instrumental reason and its analytical and problem-solving capabilities, but rather the human capacity to bring into consciousness the meaning-saturated depths and heights of the Living Real. [See Note 4]

The Living Real has both suprarational and subrational dimensions to it. Nietzsche emphasized the chaotic subrational, and Christianity and other post-Axial traditions emphasize the lawful, form-giving suprarational. I believe that the human spiritual-cultural evolutionary project is to gradually integrate the suprarational with the subrational. Both are fathomless in their depths and heights, and both are apprehended on the vertical axis or dimension of experience. Rationalist Materialism denies the existence of the vertical, except in some reductive psychologized sense that assumes that the brain is the precondition for mind rather than that mind is the precondition for the brain. 

So the human project through the centuries (but also within a given lifetime in whatever measure is appropriate for the individual human) is to discover and then integrate what lies hidden below with what lies hidden above. [See Note 5] Not easy, but this is the solution for the megalothymia problem that Fukuyama wrestles with and, imo, fails to resolve satisfactorily. This kind of thymotic project is not primarily driven by thinking; it's rather more a practice that comes closer to what artists and monks do. The thinking follows from what shows up in one's practice. The knock on Hegel was that he saw evolution as primarily an evolution of thought, whereas it is really an evolution of awareness, a series of awakenings to higher and deeper dimensions of the Living Real. Rationalist Materialist civilizations see evolution as an expansion of horizontal technical control. I'm ok with technical control, but we have to ask ourselves--who's in control? In the service of what ends?

Thinking, of course is important, but only in the way that McGilchrist presents it, which is a process subsequent to the rich data that our intuitive discoveries present to consciousness. Any "thinking" is about experience, and the richness of our experience on the vertical is equally if not more important than our experiences on the horizontal. The quality of our thinking, therefore, depends on the scope and richness of our experience. And so it follows that any thinking that a priori excludes experiences that derive from the vertical axis is poor-quality thinking. High-quality thinking integrates the broadest scope of experiences on both the horizontal and the vertical axes, keeps pushing to expand the scope on both those axes, and articulates what is uncovered there in a coherent way that integrates it with what is already known. This is basic Thomas Kuhn, but with the addition of embracing the expansion of knowledge on the vertical. 

This is a spiritual/artistic/philosophical project, not a political one, but the conditions in which such a project flourishes require a deeply achieved (anti-Oedipal in the Socratic not Deleuzian sense) human freedom which requires a political regime that won't interfere with its exploration and questing. Ideally a sapiential community, independent of any political or state control, will emerge that will discern and debate the significance of what the culture's best explorers uncover. [See Note 6]

I don't see that such a development requires confessional commitments to a particular faith tradition, but I would expect that it would be a project consonant with the deepest aspirations of all the great faith traditions, and that any faith tradition, if it is to retain (or recover) vitality, would have to in some way participate in and contribute to this larger cultural project in ways that are adaptable to its own traditions of thought and practice. A religious or faith tradition would be a particular way to practice what is embraced universally by all people of good will. Cross fertilization between such traditions will inevitably occur, and "best practices" will evolve that all will share. 

The sapiential community will not therefore be an official magisterium or rabbinate, but will comprise people who emerge who prove themselves capable of communicating to the broader culture the vital, soul-enriching significance of the new knowledge that comes into awareness from the vertical dimensions. They will have the capability to integrate it coherently with what is already known on the horizontal dimension. Their legitimacy will be recognized in much the same way that any relatively well-educated person recognizes that Shakespeare and Shelley are more disclosive of the Living Real than, say, Quentin Tarantino and Taylor Swift.

In other words, there will be a broad consensus that accepts that great art is different from entertainments. Nothing wrong with entertainments, but they shouldn't be thought of as anything more than that. Great Art is great by virtue of the scope and richness of what it discloses of the Living Real. I like the verbal challenges involved in solving a tough crossword puzzle, but it's not the same as the verbal challenge of uncovering what lies hidden in Yeats or Wordsworth. 

So, if the human project is to flourish, I hope for and expect such a sapiential tradition to emerge in tandem with great spirits and artists whose role it will be to awaken the rest of us to as yet undiscovered dimensions of the Living Real. It will enjoy a deeply felt legitimacy by the broader culture, which will support the reconstruction of a trellis that will expand the culture's knowledge both vertically and horizontally and that will pass on that knowledge from generation to generation.

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So I understand if you read this and think it's blathering, utopian nonsense. Maybe some even think that's it's no utopia they'd ever want to live in. Too much of the world's energies are directed in such a way that if they are not inimical to such a project, they are indifferent to it. As yet there is no a robust constituency of human beings who have progressed enough in this project to legitimate it to the broader culture, and until that happens what I'm describing seems, understandably, to be wishful thinking. I think of it as hopeful thinking, but hope based on intuitions I have had that have been tested over time and proved resilient.

I know that there is a hunger for what I'm describing here, and I know that there are enough people who recognize the deep reality of what I'm describing as the nourishment that will feed it. It remains to be seen whether those who share in this recognition will always remain on the culture's fringes or whether at some point they will find a way to play a more central cultural/moral role.

I, of course, don't know. As I've written in previous posts, all I see myself doing is as a dog barking up a tree, trying to call attention to something real up there--you can smell it, too, right?--but it's obscured by the branches and the the leaves. If you can smell it, you become interested and want to stick around to see if it emerges. But if you can't smell it, then it's understandable that you would think there's nothing there worth waiting for. But for people like me, there's no question that it's there, it just remains to be seen whether it can be brought to ground.

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Note 1: Fukuyama's book is really an extended reflection on the problem of thymos in shaping political life, Thymos is the spirited or soulful part of the human being according to Plato.(The other two are rationality/mind and bodily desire.) I used the phrase 'desire culture' in this essay because, as Fukuyama argues and I agree, that Anglo-American Liberalism is heir to the Hobbesian/Lockean tradition that wanted to neutralize a politics of thymos and replace it with a politics of desire. And it's not hard to understand how rationalist materialism follows from that. The thymotic part of the soul in a spirited human being is always striving to be the best it can be, and It's the basis for healthy self-respect. But in some people it manifests in what Fukuyama calls megalothymia, the compulsion to be  be recognized as superior to others. That's what Hobbes and Locke wanted to neutralize.

Hegel also recognized megalothymia as a problem but articulated a different solution. He saw megalothymia and its need to be recognized as superior as the driver of the master-slave dynamic which in turn is for him the primary social-psychological driver of history. Megalithymic humans need to dominate others and to derive therefrom glory. Megalothymic societies are usually aristocratic warrior societies. The whole point in such societies was to do glorious deeds in battle that the bards would sing songs about about through the ages. Hegel/Kojeve/Fukuyama solve the megalothymia problem by asserting that democratic societies are--or at least aspire to be--isothymic, which means that people in them want to be recognized as the equal of others. The end of history arrives when megalothymia is pushed out by isothymia. This happened symbolically with the French Revolution when the slavish lower ranks risked everything in rising up to overthrow the aristocratic warrior class that had been established since the beginning. 

There's a lot more to be said about this than is appropriate here, but I'd argue that isothymia is only a possibility in a society in which most of its citizens have achieved a level of maturity that few actually attain in late modern societies. You can't be recognized as a Self equal to others unless you have become one. That's not a given; it's a euthymic/eudaemonic achievement [See Note 3], And someone who achieves it has no need for glory or to dominate others or to be recognized as the best. The problem with isothymia in the political sphere is that it defines an equality that is an empty shell until it's substantively filled by humans who have realized to some degree their best Selves. In the abstract every human being has dignity, and that dignity is protected by law, but in reality, some people have more dignity than others because some people have more fully realized what is "original" in them. Some people squander rather than develop what is best in them. They are what Nietzsche calls Last Men.

I can envision a society in which superior and inferior are not important qualifiers, but instead 'realized' or 'unrealized' would be. The goal of a life well lived in such a society is to realize, to make substantively real, who one was created to become, and that's a unique achievement that is incommensurate with the parallel achievement of any other. And yet even now we recognize people who are more mature in this way and others that are not. You know them by their eudaemonian menschlichkeit, menschiness--their warmth and compassion, their magnanimity and down-to-earthness, their utter lack of phoniness, fanaticism, and fussiness. [See Note 3] Often they are flawled and fallible, but always intensely real human beings, and as I said, rare. Late modern societies don't produce many of them for reasons I discuss in this essay--there's no trellis anymore for them to grow on. 

Note 2: I think it's interesting also to note that Fukuyama wrote this book in 1992 when it looked like the world was entering a unipolar age dominated by the capitalistL iberal Democracies that won the Cold War. It's also interesting that Fukuyama was a signer of the 1997 Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, the Neocon group that was one of the most influential advocates for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I doubt Bush and Cheney read Hegel or his most influential 20th Century interpreter Alexandre Kojeve, but the idea of bringing democracy to a place like Iraq was understood by Neocons in this Hegelian key, which was to hasten the end of history in the places that most stubbornly resisted it. Fukuyama distanced himself from all that when it became clear what a fiasco American policy in the Middle East had become; clearly we got plenty of world history before us.

Fukuyama's teacher Samuel Huntington's idea of 'clash of civilizations' seems to be the prevailing model now, which traces back to another German Romantic, J. G. Herder. I don't think that Huntington is right in the long run. It explains Putin's Russia for the time being, but not Zelensky's Ukraine, which should by Huntington's account align with Russia rather than Western Europe. I think the dynamics in Ukraine will be more typical over the next century if we survive it. No morally mature human being wants to live Putin's Russia or Xi's China. And while I'm arguing in this essay that the desire culture of North Atlantic Liberal Democracies encourages a moral infantilism, it also provides the conditions of freedom for something more morally compelling to emerge. The bottom line is that all of us, East and West, have got to choose to grow up. A healthy culture offers models about how to do that. 

BTW, I'm not a proponent of a one-world government, but I can see a point when all the world's major societies have evolved into Liberal Democracies that work together in a loose confederation to solve global problems. The survival of the earth depends on it. 

Note 3: I use the term 'euthymia' in the present context with a meaning that comes close in my thinking about it to 'eudaemonia'. Both describes states of mature, self-actualized well being, but maybe eudaemonia is better because associated with an ethical project that involves the practice of the virtues. In either case, euthymia is the goal--

The term euthymia has a Greek origin and results from the combination of ‘eu' meaning ‘well' and ‘thymos' meaning ‘soul, emotion'. This latter term encompasses however four different meanings: life energy; feelings and passions; will, desire and inclination; thought and intelligence. Interestingly, its verb (euthymeo) means both I am happy, in good spirits and I make other people happy, I reassure and encourage. The definition of euthymia is generally ascribed to Democritus: one is satisfied with what is present and available, taking little heed of people who are envied and admired and observing the lives of those who suffer and yet endure. It is a state of quiet satisfaction, a balance of emotions that defeats fears. The Latin philosopher Seneca translated the Greek expression of euthymia with ‘tranquillitas animi' (a state of internal calm and contentment) and linked it to psychological well-being as a learning process. Happiness is not everything and what is required is ‘felicitatis intellectus', the awareness of well-being:

Happy is thus the life that is in accordance to its nature, and this is possible only when the mind, first of all, is healthy at any time; then, if it is strong and energetic, definitely patient, capable of mastering everything; concerned with the body and its belongings, but without anxiety; lover of what is life, but with detachment; willing to take advantage of the gifts of fortune, without being its slave. [Seneca: De Vita Beata, translation by G.A.F.]  (Source)

Perhaps  'eudaemonia' would work better to describe the moral project that I write about in this post, but we'll stick with euthymia in the present Fukuyamian context. 

Note 4: I've got my problems with Hegel, but it's not because I think he was too rationalistic. Hegelian philosophy is inspired and visionary in the best sense of those words, and his 'sublation' (or aufhebung) is not rational in the ordinary sense of the word as dealing with abstractions. See "Iain McGilchrist, Hegel, and the Coincidentia Oppositorum."

Note 5: Why some people are great artists & saints and others are criminals & psychopaths raises questions that are interesting but not relevant to what I'm saying here. The bottom line is that each of us has a life to live that is incommensurate with others, and all that is required of us is that we make the choices that move us toward becoming the deepest realization of ourselves. It's not for others to judge us by some tight-assed standard, but we rely on others for help and correction when clearly we are making self-destructive choices. I don't think this contradicts the idea of the trellis; it's just that each of us has to find our own place on it. There's no one best way to climb it, but our movement toward human maturity requires that we climb on our part of it. Hard to do if it doesn't exist.

Note 6: Such a sapiential community would not be officially sanctioned. It would be very similar to what we think of now as the role played by critics, but the culture will have shifted to a point where good criticism will be distinguished from bad by the quality of the critic's own capacities to intuit and articulate her own experiences of the Living Real. Nihilistic or shallow criticism will not go away, but it will be crowded out by a new kind of criticism that has a vitality and richness that anybody with a shred of soul life will recognize and welcome. And then, it should be hoped, this sapiential community will have a culture-wide influence on how children are acculturated into this renewed sapiential tradition. It would require that our educational curricula teach what is known from both the horizontal and the vertical--in other words, what it used to mean to get a good liberal education. 

 

Genealogy Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism

The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past, as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of Victory demonstrates. For the Greeks spirituality and rationality, muthos (mythos) and logos, could coexist without conflict. That muthoi could be ‘frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of “truth” (logoi)’ was alien to the Greeks. But, as Freeman admits, there was resistance to such formulations in early Christianity, as well, and Christians as much as pagans suffered under Theodosius’ decree. What Freeman takes to be the contrast between Greek and Christian thought might better be seen, according to some scholars, as the contrast between, on the one hand, the flexibility of a way of thinking which can be found in the rich tradition of the early Christian fathers as well as in the paganism with which it co-existed (where the hemispheres, too, co-operated), and, on the other, a culture marked by a concern with legalistic abstractions, with ‘correctness’, and the dogmatic certainties of the left hemisphere, whether Greek or Christian, which inexorably replaced them.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7951-7962). 

To better understand the context in which Christian Neoplatonism arose, you need to have a feel for how crazy was the proliferation of all kinds of religions and mystery cults during the 650 years between Alexander and Constantine within the Greek and Roman world. That's more or less a stretch of time from where we are now in the 2000s back to the mid 1300s. A lot can happen during that amount of time, and a lot did. But the big story was the exportation of Greek civilization to the East and South, and the importation of Egyptian, Persian, and Indian mythologies, philosophies, and religions to the West.

Right dab in the middle of that stretch is when Christianity arose, and I would argue that the practice and thinking of the wisest Christian fathers was the product of their sifting and integrating what was most fruitful and healthful from all that cross fertilization from so many Axial sources. More recent attempts, mostly by Protestant scholars, to sift out from all that what was genuinely Christian from what was imported from paganism (that's biblical--good; that's pagan--bad) has always struck me as fussily narrow. Other attempts to portray the free-wheeling Gnostic heretical sects as the underdog fighting against the Orthodox "man" also miss the point.  

What's particularly interesting about what became the Catholic or Apostolic tradition was the way it sifted through all that, kept what was helpful, and tossed what wasn't. Sure the Catholic Church in later times, with its inquisitions and indexes, is viewed for good reason through contemporary eyes as being overly rigid about correct doctrine. But the Church in the first three centuries was more truly catholic in its openness to anything that enriched their experience and understanding of their new faith. It's a fascinating, fertile moment in the development of Western civilization, and it needs to be understood better than it is. 

To be a philosopher in the ancient world meant not primarily to be someone involved in some theoretical enterprise, but rather to adopt a way of life, a habitus, that involved disciplines designed to transform one's soul. It's interesting from a history-of-ideas perspective to know what was taught in the various schools, but more important is to understand the way of life to which one committed when joining a school. Some of these schools became models for monastic life for Christians later. There were numerous Greek Schools that spun off from Socratism--Cynicism, Stoicism, Cyrenaic Hedonism, Megaran Monism, and later Pyrrhonistic Skepticism,  Epicureanism, Stoicism, eclectic Middle Platonism, and then Neopythagoreanism.  All this went through its own sifting process culminating in Plotinian Neoplatonism in the mid 200s CE, which integrated Plato, Aristotle, and Neopythagoreanism. It was in the 200s CE that the Christian integrative project was taken to a new level in the remarkable figures, Clement and Origen. 

Middle Platonism (90 BCE-mid 200s CE) influenced the Jewish Alexandrine thinker Philo (d. 50 CE) and  provided a matrix for the proliferation of Jewish Gnostic sects throughout the Roman Empire. Throw into the mix the Manichaeans, Orphics, Mithraists, and dozens of smaller mystery religions and cults. It was a crazy hodgepodge of utter wackiness mixed in with sober, morally serious thinkers like Cicero, Plutarch, Cato the Younger, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and others. But as now 'anything goes', so then 'anything went'--so long as you weren't seen as politically subversive. 

Of these the most significant influences on Christian thinking and practice were Gnosticism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism. Gnosticism, because of its Jewish provenance had a significant impact on early Christianity, most notably in Paul's epistles, the Gospel of John, and the Gospel of Thomas. The last isn't canonical, but there's little in it that I can see that makes it heretically Gnostic. 

Ah, that word "heretic". Let's take a moment to clarify the meaning of this radioactive word:

We tend to think of all the controversies surrounding who's a heretic or not through the lens of modern pluralistic tolerance for difference. We celebrate the heretic as the free thinker, the one who marches to the beat of a different drummer, the creative crazy whom stuffy conventional thinkers fail to understand. It's important to understand that as with any cross-section of humanity, there always have been and will be anal Christians, but the really soul-crushing rigidity in the Church and its obsession with suppressing heretics didn't set in until after Constantine when the Roman Empire became the official sponsor of the Christian Church. The Christians' counter-cultural identity dissolves as the Church now becomes part of the establishment. More and more serious Christians leave society for wilderness monastic communities.   

Fundamentalism and rigid Dogmatism are for Christianity--or for any religion--a disease that infects those who don't know better, and too often the people who rise into positions of power are among the diseased, or they just don't care one way or another about 'truth'--they only care about maintaining the social order and the prerogatives that they enjoy at the top of it. The Renaissance popes come to mind, as do figures like the defrocked Cardinal McCarrick or Jim and Tammy Bakker, just to name a few of the most egregious in recent memory. This kind of self-serving corruption is endemic in any human organization, religious or secular.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy is only rarely suspended in the life of human communities. That this is true should not prejudice us against the truly wise and inspired thinkers who were the real singers in this dynamic historically evolving opera. Too much attention is paid to the house managers, the lawyers, and the accountants, the people who have a role to play in keeping the house lights on. But too often they think they are more important than the singers. People come to be inspired by the music, not to be told moralistic platitudes or to check the books or hear learned disquisitions on Canon Law. My goal in this Genealogy series is to celebrate the singers. 

But it's important to distinguish the compulsion for order and conformity from the need to discern what's better and worse. It's important to understand that many of the early inspired singers saw in "pagan" Greek philosophy and other spiritual movements a song with which they could harmonize. They saw in them a parallel revelation and ways of thinking and ways of life that they could learn from and adapt to their own belief and praxis. They were right to do so. And it's important to understand that as much as these early Christians took from pagan thought, they sifted through it to adapt what fit and to reject what didn't in the light of what they found transformative and liberating in the Christian song. (See an outline of these criteria below.) And it's important to at least entertain the possibility that maybe they were mostly right--and when they were wrong it was an honest, correctable mistake.

I don't know whether later in this series I'm going to get into a more detailed examination of Gnosticism--there are many Gnosticisms--but I will say for now that there are two principal things that made parts of Gnosticism incompatible with the great Christian tradition that took shape in these centuries. First, its rejection of the body and the inherent goodness of creation; second, its obsession with knowing magical formulae as essential for salvation. To see the body and the material world as evil or at least as limitations to be transcended flows from Platonism, and this matter/spirit dualism was problematic for early Christian thinkers who wanted to adapt Plato and Neoplatonism to enrich Christian experience. But the whole point of Gnosticism was to escape Prison Earth, which is ruled by a Cruel demonic overlord that some Gnostics identified with, Yaweh, the God of the Jews. This is one of the ancient sources for anti-Semitism--the idea that the Jews don't worship the true God, but a Gnostic demon. Can we all agree that such an idea is worthy to be tossed out as 'heretical'? 

This more pernicious aspect of Gnosticism is somewhat reflected in the Gospel of John, which has a tendency to blame the Jews for everything. But while I can recognize why John's Gospel might be difficult for Jews to read, it does not cross the line into Gnostic 'heresy'. So when you read "the Jews" in John's Gospel, you need to understand it as a reference to a religious power establishment that worked hand in hand with the Romans to kill the best and wisest man in Jerusalem. Plato blamed democracy for killing the best and wisest man in Athens. You can understand why either might have an axe to grind with their respective poltical-cultural establishments. What was historically contingent for these writers cannot be extrapolated into some general principle, as alas, too many have done with evil effect. 

The Gnostics in the ancient world were known for their arrogance, their insistence that they knew better because they had the secret knowledge and formulas essential for salvation. A good example that illustrates how this persists even today appeared in the news last week. Some reactionary Catholics have their shorts all in a knot because a priest in Arizona when baptizing people throughout his career said "We baptize you..." instead of the prescribed "I baptize you...." If you accept the premise that the incorrect use of one word is consequential, then all kinds of chaos follows, which the article details. To obsess about exact wording like this is a characteristic of Gnosticism. It should be pointed out that most of the people in this priest's parish don't see this as a big deal and see their priest, now retired, as a beloved, warm, menschy guy. 

But there were (and are) all kinds of Gnosticisms, and while some of it is contrary to the originary genius of Christianity, much of it was and is consonant with it. Again we see this in John, Paul, and Thomas. Those centuries before Constantine were an important time for wise Christian thinkers to sift out what was harmful or nonsense from what was fruitful. And so before talking about what the most important of these early Christian thinkers contributed to the development of Christian Neoplatonism, I want to lay out what I see as key criteria that the early fathers used  to guide them in their sifting project. I am excerpting what follows from my summary of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age which covers the key criteria or what he calls "axes of significance":

Taylor argues that during the Patristic period, Christian thinkers wanted to use Greek ideas to help them to articulate their understanding of the significance of the Christian revelation. There were elements in Greek thinking, particularly from Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism that were helpful, and there were other elements that were distortive. Much of the arguing during this period focused on how much one gains or gives up in using Greek ideas to establish a Christian ontology and moral order. Taylor argues that the struggle was argued out on six axes of significance where Christian ideas using the Greek philosophical framework made significant alterations that were to have a significant shaping effect on the imaginaries of medieval Christendom:

1. The significance of the body. While Greek spirit/body dualism persisted in some Christian thought, the more significant dualism for Christians was the one articulated by Augustine's "two loves" (love of self vs. love of God), based on the Jewish dualism of the heart of stone versus the heart of flesh. It is not the body that presents a problem qua body. The problem rather is to determine what is worthy of our love, or to put it another way, what is worthy of our 'ultimate concern' and what obstructs or distracts us from loving that which is truly worthy. That is a function of the predisposition of the heart. The life in the body is validated for Christians by its havng been hallowed by the Incarnation and the resurrection. The body has been redeemed in a way impossible to embrace within the pure Greek scheme. The goal is not to escape from the body but to transform it, to sanctify it. 

2. The significance of history. The Incarnation gives history and the events that happen in it a significance not found in Greek thought. In addition, the Greek idea of eternity--the beginninglessness and endlessness of time--is replaced by the Jewish/Christian idea of creation and the idea of history's eschatological culmination at the end of time. History has a plot: it is  a story of falling away and return. For Christians the turning point in the plot is the Incarnation, and the end point is the eschatological gathering of all time together in the communion of the saints. The lives of the saints are the lives that depict the story of return--of alienation and reconciliation. The Prodigal Son is the archetype.

3. The significance of the individual person. Individuation was not particularly important for Greek thought. But for Christians the significance of history enhances the importance of the individual whose eternal destiny is worked out in time. This sense of the individual is not important in the Plotinian Neoplatonist ontology, for instance, for which the goal is rather Eastern in the sense of the individual overcoming the illusion of individuation and melting back into the cosmic pleroma. And while for Aristotle the physical body was important, the individual had particularity only insofar as it is secured by matter. No body, no individuation. The eternal desinty of the individuated immortal soul is a Christian preoccupation. There's a lot of murkiness about the status of the individual in Aristotle's post-death existence, but the ultimate destiny of the human person is to be bodily transformed as Christ's body was transformed in the resurrection. Individuation and the Body are linked in this very important sense. 

4. The significance of contingency. Stoic fatalism and Plotinian necessity requires that things are exactly as they should be because they could not be any other way because God could not have created any other world. The human task for classical Stoics and Neoplatonists is simply amor fati. The idea of changing anything for the better or that there there could be such a thing as human progress is futile and delusional. This idea is challenged by Christian ideas of freedom and grace--although Plotinian necessity is still echoed in Augustine's and later Calvin's bizarrely un-Christian doctrine of double predestination. The more authentically Christian position is that there is no total plan, God created a more interesting universe than that. Here's Taylor view: 

...the Christian eschaton is made up of paths, of stories. And these are shaped by contingencies. That the stories end well is sometimes seen as their having been rigorously scripted from the beginning. This is often what people call Providence, following the Stoics. God plans sins, so that he can script in some mercy. 

But a rather different model is suggested by the Bible. God's Providence is his ability to respond to whatever the universe and human agency throw up. God is like a skilled tennis player, who can always return the serve. We can see this mode, for instance, in the famous phrase of the Preface of [the] Easter Vigil:"O felix culpa" (happy fault), applied to Adam's sin; happy because it brought such a response from God to redeem it. . . .

[The Good Samaritan story] takes us beyond any established relation into the domain of accident or contingency: my neighbour is someone I come across, bleeding in the road. It was sheer accident that I came along at just that time; but this accident can be the occasion for rebuilding a skein of human relations animated by agape. The Samaritan's action is part of God's response to the skewed serve the robbers have lobbed into history. (SA p. 275)

5. The significance of the emotions. Life in the body is good, and it is humanity's eternal destiny to be embodied, so the challenge is not to suppress the emotions, but to transform them. Emotion and desire are affirmed, and Stoic apatheia is rejected. The idea of a compassionate, suffering God was an impossible idea for Greek thought, and a stumbling block for anyone whose thought was deeply embedded in the Greek imaginary. And unlike Buddhism, desire qua desire is not the problem so much as on what the human heart focuses its desire and its longing, on what it loves--see number 1 above. 

6. The significance of God as ‘person’ capable of ‘communion’. The Cappadocian formulation of the Trinity is of three persons in communion. God’s intervention in history, and in particular the Incarnation, was intended to transform us through making us partakers of the communion which God already lives, and so that we become what we were created to be, fully individuated persons in the image and likeness of Him who created us. It was, in this sense, an intervention meant to make possible our “deification” (theosis). Salvation is thwarted to the extent that we treat God as an impersonal being or as merely the creator of an impersonal order to which we have to adjust. Salvation is only effected by our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion with one another.

This understanding of communion as the telos of history is the central idea, the hermeneutic key, without which it is impossible to understand the animating spirit of the Christian revelation. If you want basic criteria to judge whether someone who claims to be Christian is truly animated by the spirit of the gospels, you can do so by evaluating to what degree he wants to include rather than exclude, to embrace rather than shun, to give the benefit of the doubt rather than to judge, to forgive rather than condemn, to converse with the enemy rather than to attack him, to obsess about rules rather than the quality of relationship. Yes, Christians are admonished to be wise as serpents and guileless as doves. This is a warning to be not foolish or naive, but while the dove and the serpent need to be talking to one another, the dove sets the agenda. Too much church history, especially the kind that has been motivated by concerns about institutional preservation, alas, has come from the serpent setting the agenda, and for this reason its spectacular failures and its loss of spiritual authority in the broader culture. 

These six themes will be central to the story I want to tell regarding the rise and fall of Christian Neoplatonism in the West, and also as to whether something like it is possible to provide a mythos dimension in a post-secular society.

But another theme central to the Neoplatonic tradition that I want explore in this series is its participatory epistemology. The important thing that Western civilization had through its Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary were assumptions that allowed for a knowledge born of wonder and of a need to deepen one's understanding of the world as an act of love. This idea of knowledge as eros was central to the pagan Neoplatonists and to the Christians who learned from them while inspired by the agapic ideals of the gospels.

We'll talk about how this way of knowing was lost during the late-medieval period and how its loss laid the groundwork for the rupture between science and religion in the modern period. I see that rupture as one that can be healed, and must be healed eventually if a metaphysical imaginary that includes a wisdom or vertical dimension is to be restored some time in the future.  

If an epistemology that is based on participatory knowledge becomes the new norm in philosophy and cognitive science, as I think it will, it changes the game. Heidegger and Scheler got the ball rolling, Buber and Merleau-Ponty were important figures in the last century that should have been paid more attention to than all the stuff that came out the squabble between Structuralists and Post-Structuralists. Owen Barfield is also important here in a way that is too much overlooked. We see more recently Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke picking up the baton, relating these thinkers to neuroscience and cognitive science in ways that are pregnant with possibilities for some future integration of Logos and Mythos. 

That's where I eventually want to wind up in this series, and we'll see if I have the energy and perseverance to get there. Even so, it might take a while.

Go to Part 10.

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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 December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Max Scheler on What Poetry Does

For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie ], fulfil a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognisable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of this kind. For by creating new forms of expression, the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see , for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by so doing they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind and make new discoveries, as it were, within that kingdom. It is they who open up new branches and channels in our apprehension of the stream and thereby show us for the first time what we are experiencing. That is indeed the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed. The history of art may be seen, therefore, as a series of expeditions against the intuitable world, within and without, to subdue it for our comprehension; and that for a kind of comprehension which no science could ever provide. An emotion, for example, which everyone can now perceive in himself, must once have been wrested by some ‘poet’ from the fearful inarticulacy of our inner life for this clear perception of it to be possible: just as in commerce things (such as tea, coffee, pepper, salt, etc.), which were once luxuries, are nowadays articles of everyday use in general supply.  (The Nature of Sympathy, p. 252-53. Quoted in McG, The Master and His Emissary, 341-42)

See also Originality and Novelty.

Genealogy Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic

Whether the goal was to convert, to console, to cure, or to exhort the audience, the point was always and above all not to communicate to them some ready-made knowledge but to form them. In other words, the goal was to learn a type of know-how; to develop a habitus, or new capacity to judge and to criticize; and to transform--that is, to change people's way of living and of seeing the world. If, then  we remember that philosophy's assertions are intended not to communicate knowledge but to form and to train, it will come as no surprise if we find aporiai in Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus in which thought seems to be enclosed--points at which there are reformulations, repetitions, and apparent incoherences. 

Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?  p. 274.

To lay the foundation for what I want to say about Christian Neoplatonism, we have to spend some time understanding what Plato was about. This includes correcting some rather entrenched misunderstandings about Plato as a rationalist obsessed with dessicated abstractions. This is the picture we get of him in the McGilchrist's Chapter 8: "The Ancient World" where he says talking about Plato and his impact--

The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses, but all our implicit knowledge. This was the grounds of Nietzsche’s view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability of the nobles to trust intuition: ‘Honest men, he wrote, ‘do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion.’‘What must first be proved is worth little,’ Nietzsche continues in The Twilight of the Idols : 'one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive.'

...

In this later Greek world, truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.

The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7731-52).

?!What Plato or Socrates is he talking about? Certainly not one that I'm acquainted with. Certainly not the Socrates of The Symposium or Phaedrus. The dialogues are teeming with metaphors, analogies, parables. I think McGilchrist is relying too much on Nietzsche's agenda-laden perspective and extrapolating in an unbalanced way from some unfortunate passages in The Republic, which are what they are. But Plato's political ruminations need to be understood in the context of what all his dialogs were--imaginative thought experiments, not doctrine. 

Rationality was important for Plato, but he was not first and foremost a rationalist;  he was rather a mystic and contemplative visionary. This side of Plato I think has been an embarrassment to most modern readers, and they either dismiss that aspect of his philosophizing as wink-wink-ironic or as his just using conventional phraseology of his time, the way atheists will say today, 'Oh my god', or that was a desperate 'Hail Mary' move. 

Both Hadot and McGinn correct this error, and McGinn points out that even if Plato were not a mystic or visionary, everybody in his time and in the centuries following thought he was. And the whole goal of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy in the schools that they founded was theoreia, a contemplative vision of the Divine One. The meaning of theoreia is very different from our 'theoretic' or theoretical', which suggests abstract thinking. There is nothing abstract about the contemplative vision of the One, which was for the visionary an overwhelming, ineffable, ecstatic experience of the Really Real, and to try to understand ancient philosophy without that experience as foundational to its project is to deeply misunderstand it. 

So the metaphysical speculations of the ancients were provisional attempts to articulate or make some sense about what the nature of the Real is in the light of such experiences. But isn't this true of all philosophers who are worth paying attention to? They have a foundational intuition, and their philosophy is their attempt to extrapolate from it. The quality of their philosophy depends on the quality and richness of their intuitions. You cannot understand any "original" philosopher unless you can grasp his or her foundational intuitions, which may or may not be foregrounded in his discursive explication of them. 

It's with this in mind that we must understand Plato's so-called doctrine of the Ideas: He's trying to give an account concerning how the world that we experience with the senses relates to this other transcendent realm that was disclosed to him in awakened visionary experience. There is no doctrine here--just metaphors, analogies, myths to make some attempt to give an account of his experience. Experience, not abstraction is the foundation here. I'm not going to belabor the argument. If you need more evidence read McGinn (Chapter 2, "The Greek Contemplative Ideal") and Hadot (chapters in Part 2: "Philosophy as a Way of Life").

A similar misunderstanding relates to the idea of the 'Intellect' in the Greek transcendental philosophy. It's not about intelligence in the IQ sense or about being an intellectual in the modern sense. It's about Nous (See Note 1), the the divine part of the human soul, which is a dormant faculty that when awakened is capable of contemplating the divine and divine things like the transcendentals. Nous is the divine faculty that inheres in the human mind that must be activated or "remembered" in order to be capable of cognizing the divine. (See Note 2) This is a different idea than the biblical assertion that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, but it's kissing cousins with it, and it will play a role in Patristic thinking about divinization or 'theosis'.

I want to spend some time here developing what I began in Part 3 about the Socratic elenchus. Hadot argues that Plato's dialogues were simply provisional training exercises, models for the kind of thing that students undertook in his Academy. The idea was to use dialectic discourse to see if thinking in this format could "birth" an insight. Tibetan Buddhist monks use dialectic for the same "training" purposes. The exercise often ended in aporia, without any conclusion, i.e., without any insight having been birthed.Theaetetus provides a good example. The goal is an attempt on Socrates' part to think out loud mostly with his young interlocutor Theaetetus, a budding math prodigy, to see if together they can come to some understanding about what 'knowledge' truly is.

The foil here is Protagoras's doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things', which in the context of this dialog is interpreted to mean that every human being determines for himself what is true or not true, what is knowledge or opinion. Clearly for Socrates that's not satisfactory. This is one of my favorite dialogues for the way it depicts Socrates' charming garrulity--his menschy warmth, his wit, his sincere desire to understand and to help others to fully realize what lies sleeping within them--and his ability to admit when a question cannot be answered. That's how this dialog ends up:

SOCRATES And are you still in labour and travail, my dear friend, or have you brought all that you have to say about knowledge to the birth?

THEAETETUS: I am sure, Socrates, that you have elicited from me a good deal more than ever was in me.

SOCRATES And does not my art show that you have brought forth wind, and that the offspring of your brain are not worth bringing up?

THEAETETUS: Very true.

SOCRATES But if, Theaetetus, you should ever conceive afresh, you will be all the better for the present investigation, and if not, you will be soberer and humbler and gentler to other men, and will be too modest to fancy that you know what you do not know. These are the limits of my art; I can no further go, nor do I know aught of the things which great and famous men know or have known in this or former ages. (Jowett translation)

Socrates earlier describes himself as a midwife to bring out of or to birth in his interlocutors something that is latent in their minds or souls. In this dialogue the exercise failed, insofar as he and Theaetetus were unable to develop a satisfactory explanation for what knowledge is. Socrates has spent most of the dialog excluding all the things that people, Theaetetus and others, wrongly think knowledge is, but after all that, they cannot develop any satisfactory idea about what it is. But the exercise was not in vain, because the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know.

But that doesn't close off the possibility of future insight--the possibility of "conceiving afresh" in the future. There is a timing or kairotic dimension to birthing in this sense. One can prepare for it, but it cannot be forced. It comes as a kind of gift. It is in this sense that habitus becomes heuristic. A constellation of practices--habitus--structure a salience landscape that is open to, indeed aspires to, transcend its constraints.

The heuristic aspect lies in the hunch that self-transcendence is a possibility. So one becomes a philosopher as a way of life is to adopt a habitus that engages practices as a heuristic exercise on a hunch that such self-transcendence is a possibility for oneself. Philosophy is not primarily rational exercise. It uses rationality to subvert rationality. One trusts in the efficacy of the practices because of the testimony of those living and dead who have proved their effectiveness. But that doesn't mean that these practices will be effective in any particular case. But because they often fail does not prove them invalid.

One of the consequences of inhabiting such a habitus is that you come to see the world around you as a provisional mental construct--what I've been calling an imaginary. An imaginary organizes our experience of the world in more or less adequate ways, but its adequacy is measured by its approximation to ontonormative truth--truths glimpsed in states of higher consciousness. This points to the insight Plato's Allegory of the Cave would have the reader understand--the world construct we live in is, relatively speaking, an illusion, at least in comparison to how we might understand it if we had minds whose 'divine' potential was fully realized. In the meanwhile, aporia is the beginning of wisdom. Aporia is a heuristic that opens up the possibility for true knowledge.

A similar arrival at aporia is the result at the end of Meno in which the question is whether virtue is teachable. At first glance, most of us would think it possible if one finds a person of true virtue from whom one could learn, but Socrates is interested here in the particular virtue or wisdom of statesmen like Pericles and Themistocles. Neither stinted in his children's education, and yet this education did not produce men of notable statesmen-like virtue. So it seems surprisingly evident that virtue is not teachable. But even more surprising is Socrates' saying that these prodigies of statesmen-like virtue were effective because they had right opinion, which means that they had no knowledge, and so no real clue why their judgments proved so consistently reliable. They made good judgments, but could not give an account of how they came to them, and so they were incapable of teaching others how to develop this particular capacity for statesmen-like virtue--

SOCRATES But if not by knowledge, the only alternative which remains is that statesmen must have guided states by right opinion, which is in politics what divination is in religion; for diviners and also prophets say many things truly, but they know not what they say.

MENEXENUS: So I believe.

SOCRATES And may we not, Meno, truly call those men "divine" who, having no understanding, yet succeed in many a grand deed and word?

MENEXENUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES Then we shall also be right in calling divine those whom we were just now speaking of as diviners and prophets, including the whole tribe of poets. Yes, and statesmen above all may be said to be divine and illumined, being inspired and possessed of God, in which condition they say many grand things, not knowing what they say.

MENEXENUS: Yes.

...

SOCRATES Then, Meno, the conclusion is that virtue comes to the virtuous by the gift of God. But we shall never know the certain truth until, before asking how virtue is given, we enquire into the actual nature of virtue. 

A few things interest me about this passage. First, that, as in Theaetetus, while there is no adequate insight birthed with regard to the question under discussion, that does not mean that this is the end of it. The question needs further thought, and perhaps before understanding whether virtue is teachable, one needs to understand what virtue itself is.

Second, clearly the Socrates depicted here near the end of his life is no enemy of poets, diviners, and prophets. To dismiss this as Socrates' being ironic is silly. Socrates often describes himself as being inspired by some god or muse, and I take him at his word. Nevertheless, this is not knowledge because individual human human agency has nothing to do with it--they are simply channeling the gods.

And third, following on this, his idea here of 'divine' strikes me as Homeric in its pre-Axiality. It's the kind of thing Dreyfus and Kelly are pointing to in All Things Shining, which is that the gods shine through certain people who are otherwise rather ordinary. It is not they as humans who have achieved any level of virtue by their own agency, but it is rather that they are virtuous because they are favored by the gods. Nothing is changed or transformed in them as a result of their being channels. There's no transformative self-transcendence involved.

The Socratic project--and the Axial project in general--is not about being a passive puppet of the gods, but about becoming an an autonomous, free, active moral agent, a fully realized Self who becomes such by the awakening/birthing/remembering of latent capacities of mind or soul. The goal is not just to do good, but to become formed by the Good. One adopts a habitus of virtue as a heuristic path of self-transformation. To act virtuously does not mean you are virtuous--the habitus is not virtue. It's a praxis that makes becoming truly formed by virtue more likely. 

Dreyfus and Kelly in their book want to retrieve this pre-Axial sense of the "moods" of Being as a strategy to deal with the contemporary meaning crisis. As with John Vervaeke, I admire them for taking this on and the risks that are attendant to their reputations in the way they go about it, but I am not satisfied with what they are doing, and neither do I think would be Socrates for reasons explained in the preceding paragraph. And because neither purely naturalistic explanations (Vervaeke) or pre-Axial/Heideggerian (Dreyfus & Kelly) explanations are fully adequate or satisfying, even though both are definitely important parts of a bigger picture.

Now my point here is simply to elaborate on what Hadot points out in the epigraph: in the case of Theaetetus or Meno, the goal was for Socrates to "not to communicate to them some ready-made knowledge but to form them". The task, in other words, for Socrates was to assist them with his midwife's art to become self-transformative by their awakening of an innate capacity to cognize transcendental truth, which from other dialogs we know to be the only real knowledge. Socrates' purpose in his conversation with them was to see if he could help "birth" in them their own realization about what real knowledge and virtue are. If successful they experience an awakening in some small degree of their Nous, and in doing so move toward becoming more authentically, deeply who they are, i.e., more conformed to the divine, not just channels for it. (Again, see Note 2) 

In both cases there were no births, but that doesn't mean that such a birth for either would not be possible in the future. Or maybe one or the other of them will wake up in the middle of the night with an insight or the kind of birth that Socrates is looking for. The point of using logic, with all due respect to Nietzsche, is not to deduce one's way to the truth, but to show the limits of logic, so as to open up a less constrained salience landscape that allows for a new insight--or perhaps even a visionary experience--to emerge. 

That's the point Hadot is making in the epigraph. The task isn't to argue about who's right or wrong about this theory or that, but to have a transformative experience in a disclosure of some kind that breaks into our ordinary, day-to-day consciousness from outside of it. The experience is what it is, and the evidence that lots of people have these experiences is well established. The only controversy is how to interpret them, and that depends on your metaphysical frame. The task for me in this Genealogy series is to make the case that the Christian Neoplatonic tradition has an interpretation that provides robust interpretations of experience if we accept the criteria laid out in previous posts--scope, coherence, richness, and adaptability. 

So there are certain practices--the use of Logos in dialectic is one of them and contemplation (theoreia) is another--that prepare the way insofar as they organize one's thinking and attention so that, first, one knows what he does not know (the use of dialectic), and second, that one does know when he has birthed genuine insight--in contemplation or in other contexts of awareness or attention. I like Vervaeke's explanation of 'insight' as the flash that occurs when we transcend the constraints of our current salience landscape. He talks about it as a 'transjective' process, and at some point I'll come back to explore that. 

The use of 'Logos' is a horizontal practice that prepares for insights on the vertical dimension, but is used also to test their validity and to make sense of the world in the light of them. And in a broader sense Logos is exercised by the sapiential community that has a role in determining whether an individual's insight on the vertical dimension is valid or delusional and how it ought to be interpreted in a way that is most fruitful for the individual as well as for the broader community.

Fruitfulness is measured by the way insights increase the scope, coherence, and richness of one's personal imaginary, but also in many cases to support, enrich, or expand the broader cultural imaginary. In other words, certain tried-and-true traditional practices--habitus--work heuristically to frame individual and community aspirations so that they lead to insights that enrich, support, and expand the tradition. All this depends on these practices actually working to connect the individual and his community to the Living Real. Once they stop performing this connective function for whatever reason, a society starts to reel in ontological dizziness. 

If I were not so prolix, I would stop here, but I wanted to say a word about Plato's dialogue Parmenides. When I first read it, I thought the second half was a spoof. It was rather like Colbert's mocking Sarah Palin or Kevin McCarthy for their abuse of language or stretching it beyond its usefulness. The conversation between Parmenides and Aristotles in the second half is an exercise in what Vervaeke calls combinatorial explosiveness in which the mind is either chased off or bludgeoned into submission by a superfluity of logic.

My first take was that Plato wrote this as a refutation of the monism propounded by a pompous Parmenides and his condescending student Zeno by allowing the man to condemn himself with his own bloviation, by the stupefying absurdity of his taking logic where it cannot go. This is a dialog that ends not in aporia but in dogma. And it is hard to believe that anyone is transformed by it unless being bruised and bloodied is what you mean by being transformed. If this is the use of logic or dialectic to which Nietzsche and McGilchrist are pointing, I couldn't agree more. But it should be pointed out that Socrates is not participating at all in this dialectical exercise. It has nothing to do with him. The young nineteen-year-old Socrates, if anything, is dubious about the monistic 'doctrine' of Parmenides and Zeno. 

But I don't know if it's so easy to dismiss Parmenides. Socrates says in Theaetetus referencing this meeting with Parmenides--

that I have a kind of reverence; not so much for Melissus and the others, who say that "All is one and at rest," as for the great leader himself, Parmenides, venerable and awful, as in Homeric language he may be called;--him I should be ashamed to approach in a spirit unworthy of him. I met him when he was an old man, and I was a mere youth, and he appeared to me to have a glorious depth of mind. And I am afraid that we may not understand his words, and may be still further from understanding his meaning;

And it's interesting to me that Ficino thought this dialog was profound. So I remain open to there being something in it I cannot yet grasp, and in future might yet be birthed in me. But I suspect that the real import of the dialog will be best understood in a broader discussion of apophaticism, which will be an important focus in future posts. (See Note 3)

Go to Part 9.

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Note 1: That McGilchrist misreads Plato, does not take away from the importance of his broader argument. He makes distinction between 'Reason' and 'Rationality' that is helpful in understanding the distinction between Nous and Logos.The distinction is rather like the one in German between Vernunft and Verstand:

Reality was not, as Goethe and the Romantics came to see, the fixed and unchanging state of affairs that the left hemisphere assumes. ‘The phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete’, Goethe wrote, ‘but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.’ Interestingly, in the light of the last chapter, he noted that ‘ Vernunft [reason] is concerned with what is becoming, Verstand [rationality] with what has already become … [Reason] rejoices in whatever evolves; [rationality] wants to hold everything still, so that it can utilise it’. That we take part in a changing world, and that the world evokes faculties, dimensions, and characteristics in us, just as we bring aspects of the world into existence, is perhaps the most profound perception of Romanticism. This was not an idea or theory, but, for the Romantics, an incarnate reality. One can see it in the paintings and feel it in the poetry of the period. It is related to the sense of depth which is everywhere conveyed in its art.

McGilchrist,  The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 9563-9569)

Reason/Nous/Vernunft operates on the vertical; Rationality/Logos/Verstand operates on the horizontal. The first is more the domain of the right hemisphere, the second the domain of the left. I hope I've made the case that McGilchrist ought to have understood that Socrates/Plato's use of dialectic was part of an unfinished, evolving quest of the mind for greater understanding in the sense that Goethe means it. 

Note 2: One of the analogies Socrates uses in his conversation with Theaetetus is to liken the memory function of the mind to a ball of wax on which impressions derived from the senses are made and thus retained in memory. And so we know something to be true from our empirical experience through the senses--for instance my recognizing a person I know approaching in the distance because the gestalt of the person correlates with the memory impression on my mind-wax.

I thought that he would take the analogy further by arguing that before birth the mind/wax received impressions of the transcendental forms, and that this gives us the innate cognitive capacity to grasp real knowledge, especially as the phenomena experienced in this world participate in transcendentals like truth, beauty, justice, et al. This would be consistent with his ideas about knowledge as anamnesis that he explores elsewhere.

But he does not go there. I think this is explained by what Hadot says in the epigraph. The task is not for Socrates to inform Theaetetus that he has a Nous, a divine part of his mind that is in a state of slumber, but to see if he can awaken it.

The impressions made on the mind-wax from our empirical experience are acquired in a different way from the impressions made on Nous, and so function in a less reliable way. But Nous impressions don't function at all until they are awakened, and that's the whole point of Platonic praxis in the Academy, according to Hadot.

And while it might seem that this kind of a priori-ism bears some relationship to Kant, it really doesn't because of the need to awaken the a priori categories. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but Kant's precluding any kind of thinking that embraces metaphysical speculation would exclude the kind of a priorism that Plato's anamnesis points to.

I don't want to get into the weeds on this, but I think it points to where Vervaeke and I diverge. Vervaeke describes himself as a Kantian who is interested in providing a naturalistic account for the awakening phenomenon, and I have no doubt that he and those he collaborates with can develop such an account, but in the end the question will be whether it can account for anomalies that transcend the Kantian a priori programming, so to say.

To analogize from The Matrix, the Kantian a prioris are like the way all the people and agents within the Matrix are programmed. That program defines the limits of what's possible within the Matrix no matter how much flex there is in the system for people to develop their capabilities. I think--I'm not sure--that Vervaeke is trying to understand the mechanics of cognitive development within the Matrix, i.e., within naturalistic constraints.

But to do so doesn't account for minds that operate outside the constraints of the Matrix.Well, Vervaeke would say that's ridiculous, that there is no outside the Matrix to account for, but isn't that really the big question? Who's to say? Even le Tellier's anti-relgious thought experiment in "The Anomaly" presupposes a mind outside the simulation that designed it.

And what gives Neo his superpower is that he is able to enter from outside the Matrix and to operate within it in a way not constrained by its code--i.e., the aprioris that determine the limits of everybody, including the agents, who operate within the Matrix. This is what enables him to defeat Agent Smith and the other agents who are still constrained by their code, even though their a prioris give them abilities the humans they police don't have.

Now of course I know that this is fiction, but it is a metaphor for what the Axial Revolution says about the nature of reality: There is the world down here, it runs according to certain rules explained by science, but there is a higher set of rules that Nous knows, and the whole point of human existence is to align one's life with those rules. And people like Teilhard and Barfield argue that the long-term evolutionary task is for humans to become agents through which the higher rules come gradually to supplant the lower ones. (Obviously the case for the evolution of consciousness needs to be made; it can't just be asserted, but that's for the future.) This idea of the evolution of consciousness superseding biological evolution is the basic heuristic that shapes the mythos dimension I'm arguing for in this series. I can't, of course, prove it, but I do think I can make a case for its plausibility using my scope, coherence, richness criteria.

And so from a Christian point of view, if Jesus of Nazareth is who Christians says he is, then it is at least conceivable that he could come from outside the world limited by naturalistic constraints and not be constrained by them. If people constrained within a naturalistic frame say that's impossible, well yeah, it is, if you choose to think within the constraints of a naturalistic frame. All I'm saying is why should we be constrained by naturalism? That's just a belief system like any other, and if people want to live in that kind of imaginary, that's fine. But I prefer to live in an bigger, more richrly imagined world than is possible within those constraints.

In the long run, the model that gets accepted will be judged plausible not only by criteria that are acceptable within the constraints of natural science, but by its power to create a mythos that works most robustly to improve the chances of the kind of self-transcendence that Vervaeke is so interested in explaining. Mythos has to take into account what natural science 'knows', but it needn't live scupulously within its limits. I'm not saying that you can just make stuff up, but I am saying is that the limits are "limits" that can themselves be transcended.

I will at some point come back around to epistemological issues that make more sense than appealing to a ball of wax, but there's something to start with there. McGilChrist's M&HE and Dreyfus and Taylor's Retrieving Realism' will be my primary provocations, which I think can be integrated with Vervaeke's cognitive science within the context of the kind of the Christian Neoplatonic imaginary I am arguing for. But first the genealogy.

Note 3: 4/24/23--In the last week I've been listening to Princeton's Michael Segrue's Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues in the Great Courses series available for free if you have an Audible subscription. His Lecture 11 is on Parmenides, and I was surprised that he too thinks that the second half of this dialogue is parody of the over-the-top use of logic to point out the absurdity and fundamental incoherence of Eleatic monism. It's similar in this sense to Euthydemus. Most of Segrue's lecture, though, is about how Parmenides, in talking to the 19-year-old Socrates, points out legitimate flaws in Socrates' theries about the Ideas.

I think that this reinforces my contention that the theory of the Ideas was never meant to be doctrine but rather an attempt to develop a plausible epistemology and ontology that provides an imaginal or mythopoetic framework to support the really important thing, which is his moral project of self-transcendence. This project is most explicitly articulated  in "The Allegory of the Cave" in The Republic, "Diotima's Discourse" in The Symposium, and the third speech on love in Phaedrus. I've found Segrue's lectures interesting, but they make no reference to Hadot and his intepretations seem to be developed more out of the Kantian and Analytic traditions. For that reason, Segrue seems to give too much importance to Socrates's use of logic as a tool to discover truth. I contend that the elenchus is primarily a tool to demonstrate the limits of logic, i.e., to deliver aporia.  Logic and definitions do not give you the truth--only experience does. Aporia clears the space for awakening to or remembering the truth. 

++++++++++

Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

 

 

Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

I don't see myself as doing anything particularly original, but I do see myself as part of a larger effort to get things rebalanced. When I talk about the "Living Real", that's real for me, but I am no prodigy in the scope of my experience of it. It's real enough for me that it provides a foothold to take a stand. It's real enough for me to push back against everything that exists in denial or rejection of it.

We're at a point where we find it quite understandable what God might have been thinking when he told Noah to build his ark. "This experiment has gone far enough," God thinks. "Time to reboot." I take some solace in that he promised not to do it again, at least not by flood. Tornados, hurricanes, wildfires, and plague? We'll see.

But imminent ecological catastrophe has nothing to do with the divine, unless we see our behavior as a disruption of the Tao of things, the deep law of ontological balance. Which is how I see it. So our predicament is really more the consequence of our blind stupidity, of our losing any decision-making capacity that has a wisdom dimension to it. If we destroy the earth and everything living on it, it will be our own doing--the result of our failures in justice, of our venal, blinkered way of operating on the horizontal. That's the point of Adam McKay's Netflix satire Don't Look Up.

In Part 3, I mentioned in passing that the country took a turn toward the simulacral in 1980 with the rejection of Carter for Reagan. So much fantastical nonsense flowed from that moment. The emergence of FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Iran Contra, Newt Gingrich's tribal bloodsport politics, the Democrats' giving up FDR and embracing Neoliberalism, the hysterical, petty moral crusade against Clinton, the oxycontin plague, the frequency of mass shootings, the invasion of Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of the Tea Party, the mainstreaming of white nationalism, the rise of Trump, and now tens of millions of people living in a MAGA bubble that prevents them from behaving sanely in response to a deadly virus or to accept the results of an election that wasn't even close.

Don't Look Up confronts us with the consequences forty years after the country chose Reagan, which is that we have become so captured by these trivial, tribal, interpretive frames that we've become incapable of dealing with reality as it is. I don't believe that if a comet were heading for the earth that people would react as depicted in the movie. We're not that far gone yet, but we're getting there. That's the point the point of the movie--to warn us that we're on our way if we don't find a way to course correct. 

All salience landscapes have constraints that limit what we are capable of seeing and understanding, but what is unique about our time lies in our having created "salience bubbles". As discussed in Part 4, a salience landscape helps us to organize our experience as humans so that we might navigate in and make sense of the living, real world in ways that are shaped by what is most relevant for them. A salience bubble organizes our experience in a way that is very similar to being in the virtual world of gamers, which is alienated from the living, real world, although it resembles it. The difference between a bubble and a landscape is that people in the latter are open to new information; people in the former are sealed off from it. Humans living in a real world are open to infinity, a virtual world is limited by the rules of its coders.

You can have two people from very different cultural backgrounds who have very different salience landscapes--let's say a Tibetan Buddhist monk conversing with a particle physicist. They have very different presuppositions about what is most salient in their understanding of reality, but if they are honest, curious, people who want to expand the scope of their salience landscapes, they enter into conversation with one another in the hopes of doing so. They must find within themselves a capacity for empathic understanding so that they can enter into the salience landscape of the other and see the world from the other's point of view.

This is not possible for someone who is in a salience bubble. The only new information that enters into the bubble is information that reinforces or thickens the bubble-defining membrane that filters out information that makes sense within the bubble. You can't have a conversation with someone who is inside a bubble unless you are inside the bubble with him. The only information or ideas that are relevant or salient for him are ideas that reinforce what he already "knows".

A bubble functions more viciously than confirmation bias: it's confirmation compulsion. Bias is normal, and we all have it no matter how objective we think we are. The goal is not to be unbiased, because that's impossible, but rather to be open to have one's biases challenged by new information. The goal is to have a salience landscape that continues to expand in its scope. [See Note 1]

So a bubble, instead of providing an interpretive frame that organizes our experience in a real world, creates frames that cut people within a bubble off from reality in any vital sense. They have become incapable of dealing with any information that lacks salience within the bubble because it makes no sense within the bubble. Contradictory facts are either filtered out, or when they are not in dispute, get interpreted in ways that are twisted to make sense within their bubble.

In our current situation, for instance, Liberals keep insisting on the fact that Trump's own AG Barr has said there is no evidence that the election was stolen. That Barr has said this is not in dispute for people in the MAGA bubble, but they interpret this fact as simply more evidence that supports their beliefs. Barr is just a sleeper agent for the Deep State, the evil system that seeks to destroy Trump's holy mission to save America from child-molesting elites. He's one of the elites, and he's simply protecting elite interests. It's the only logical explanation. And it makes sense if the only allowable facts are those that reinforce the presuppositions that structure the bubble. 

It's understandable that people should feel uncomfortable with a powerful technocratic state. I'm uncomfortable with it. But one's discomfort isn't a premise from which to deduce that it must be destroyed because anything else would be better. That is insane, and yet such an idea structures the salience bubble of tens of millions of Americans, and so because now so many people live inside such a bubble that sacrifices scope and richness for a narrowly defined coherence, it's hard to see how how you get them out. A pandemic couldn't do it, neither probably will a war with Russia, and maybe neither even a comet or asteroid hurtling toward earth. 

Facts matter, but how interpretive frames define what facts are salient matters more. Don't Look Up focuses less on the salience bubbles that capture the MAGA world, and more on the bubbles that capture the media, business, and political classes. They think themselves sophisticated about how the "real world" works, but really all they understand is how things work within their bubbles. That their world is going to be destroyed by a comet doesn't fit within their salience bubbles. It feels too weird, too anomalous, too abstract, too outside their patterned perceptions of normalcy to be actually true. It's not what they are used to because they too have become so acclimated and comfortable in a bubble that prevents them from seeing reality when it is looking them straight in the face. The only things that feel real are the elements that make sense within their virtual bubble worlds.

Don't Look Up presents exactly how it works in an exaggerated form to help us see it more clearly. And the president's calling off the one chance the earth had for survival was a perfect metaphor for how people within a bubble persuade themselves that what is relevant within their entrenched salience bubble gets priority consideration, and how they will seize any rationale to justify their dismissal of information that undermines what their salience bubble determines as most relevant. And besides, there is a Plan B for those who make the decisions. They always have a way to escape the consequences of their bad decisions. Elite decision makers very rarely suffer from their mistakes. It's the rest of us do, as in the financial crisis of 2008.

***

None of us knows the truth in any absolute sense, but we can evaluate individuals and societies as knowing more or less, better or worse, according to how effectively their metaphysical imaginaries operate according to four criteria:

(1) how coherent its integration of its knowledge on both vertical and horizontal  dimensions,

(2) how broad the scope of their knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions,

(3) how both the scope and coherence of our knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to our experience, and

(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in our experience of reality on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

Religious fundamentalism fails by these criteria, but so does a reductive scientism. But worse than either is the simulacral bubbles that for reasons explained above are cutting us off completely from our connection to the Living Real. 

So scope, coherence, richness, and adaptability are the criteria by which we measure a salience landscape and the broader metaphysical imaginary. A salience bubble lacks scope, but has coherence and a feeling of richness, even if it is delusional. A rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary has broad horizontal scope, coherence, and adaptability, but lacks vertical scope and richness. Religious subcultures like the Amish or Hasids have coherent, vertically rich metaphysical imaginaries that lack horizontal scope. What a vital, healthy civilization needs is a metaphysical imaginary that has both vertical and horizontal scope, coherence that integrates knowledge on both dimensions, and richness that comes from a sense of meaning and purpose that comes from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized. 

A lot of people in late modernity think that they have moral courage because they see themselves as capable of facing a bleak world that objectively lacks coherence and richness. Within their rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary, they understand the universe as meaningless, cruel, and impersonal, and yet life is worth living because they see themselves as creating their own meaning and coherence from within their own subjective resources. There is no meaning except the meaning they impose on their experience of their world, i.e., the meaning that they create ex nihilo. The problem does not lie in their disbelief in God, but in that they unwittingly are enacting a causa sui project in which they are playing his role. 

If there is some meaning that transcends what can be subjectively projected, they believe no one can know it, and so it's irrelevant. To ask why humans , unlike animals, need meaning and purpose would be for them an irrelevant question because it's excluded a priori. Their presuppositions make answers to such questions unanswerable. It's just the way it is; we are the way we are. And so when someone provides a coherent explanation for why meaning and purpose are built into the human condition, they don't want to hear it. They see it as someone selling snake oil. 

This kind of thinking, when it is genuinely agnostic, can be admirable for its honest humility, when it is in fact humble and honest. But often it's just a form of conformity to the groupthink about what's acceptable in secular intellectual circles. It's bubble-ish, if not completely so. There's no courage in it if it's just believing what's au courant. But even when it's honest and admirable, I think it's unnecessarily restricted in its scope because it doesn't realize how it is necessarily captured by the constraints of the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary.

It naively assumes that real knowledge isn't possible on the vertical dimension, or it dismisses that kind of knowledge as merely subjective and so having no real metaphysical heft--not enough, at least, to depose the seeming solidity of their Rationalist-Materialistic assumptions. They think that the only kind of knowledge that is reliable is knowledge that comes from science because science has a method for seeing the the broad scope of what's there and for providing a coherent explanation for what's there without illusion.

That's true about science, but science also operates within constraints discussed in Part 4. Good science is always an ongoing process of upgrading its salience landscapes. As the scope of the information made available to scientific inquiry expands, so does the need to revise the coherency of its explanations. This is basic Thomas Kuhn. The scientific saliency landscape for Einstein is very different from what it was for Newton, whose landscape was very different from that for Copernicus, and his from Ptolemy's.

There is continuity because solving one set of problems leads to the next, and so there is a feeling of expanding coherency as it keeps pace with the expanding scope of information, at least within a particular discipline. But is the saliency landscape of advanced physics coherent with the saliency landscape of biology and neuroscience? If anybody is doing work on integrating that, it certainly isn't breaking through to the larger culture. But maybe that's because it isn't work for scientists; it's work for philosophers. And when you are doing philosophy, everything depends on your metaphysical imaginary. And the metaphysical imaginary for most academic philosophers in the U.S. is Rationalist Materialism. 

Because scientific work is primarily oriented on the horizontal dimension, it is not constrained by its Rationalist-Materialist assumptions most of the time. But with physics since the Uncertainty Principle, we are getting into territory where it's getting more difficult not to see that the role of Mind is critical in shaping not just our interpretation of information but the actual experience of the information to begin with. And this raises challenging questions for the Rationalist-Materialist imaginary. What if Mind is primary, and Matter is a function of Mind? Does that offer a more coherent explanation than that now afforded by Rationalist-Materialism?  I think it does.

Nevertheless, the bias within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is to see Mind as somehow produced by matter, which makes no sense. Everything that mind does has zero to do with what matter does. It's clearer and clearer to anybody who thinks about it that there is no such thing as an objective, material world. Matter is a mental construct. Whatever material things are in themselves, they have more the qualities of mind than whatever we used to think was the mind-independent character of the material world after Galileo and Descartes.

And so one is forced to ask what the relationship between Matter and Mind is, and if you think about it with an open 'mind', it makes more sense that matter is a function of mind than that mind is a function of matter, and that to think the latter is simply a bias that comes from assuming that a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is the only one that has legitimacy. It's legitimacy is broadly accepted, but its incoherent with our broader experience is obvious to anybody who has a sense of the spiritual, which is most people, whether or not they churchgoers. This fundamental incoherency without our experience should disqualify it from the hegemonic legitimacy that it enjoys. 

And so it's astonishing to me that if 95% of Americans are at least open to the idea that there is a non-material spiritual dimension, why it is so hard for us to accept the idea that the fundamental stuff of the universe is Mind. Why? Because it's unscientifically provable? But that's like saying the game of chess doesn't exist because we're playing a game where the rules for checkers are the only ones that count. Says who? And if asserting the priority of Mind provides a more coherent explanation of things than the rationalist-materialist imaginary's assertion of the primacy of Matter, why is it so hard to take it seriously? "Well," sputter people captured within the Rationalist Materialist bubble, "that's religion, not science. And religion is irrational and ignorant because it believes in things that are not there, that people make up because they want to be comforted by beliefs that have no supportable evidence. It has nothing to do with real knowledge." This kind of blinkered stupidity is contributing nothing except to impede the the awakening of a spiritual potency that we will need to confront and push back against what's coming. 

Religion when it works in a healthy society, which ours is not, is about real knowledge that comes from experience on the vertical dimension. It's knowledge that plays by different rules that have deep legitimacy if you make the effort to understand them. Chess is possible even for people who think Checkers is the only game in town. Every great civilization until about 150 years ago had a vertical dimension. Do we really think we're smarter than everybody who lived before then? Look around you. What evidence is there that we are any wiser than our ancestors? Is it just because we have computers, antibiotics, and airplanes?

The problem is not about a dispute concerning what's really there, but with the efficacy--the scope, coherence, richness & adaptability--of different metaphysical imaginaries. It's not about what's there but about how our metaphysical imaginary interprets what's there, and, in fact, limits what we can see and experience. The problem is not that people don't believe that spirit/mind exists, but that they live in a metaphysical imaginary in which materialist explanations are the only ones that have legitimacy in our collective intellectual discourse. That spirit/mind exists is irrelevant for the decisions we make in the political and economic spheres. The problem is that our intellectual elites are so captured by Rationalist Materialism that they are in the predicament of the captives in the mirrored room described above. They, however, are not aware that they are imprisoned within it, and so feel no need to exit. 

The argument of this Genealogy series is that our refusal of the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical is the underlying cause of our current collective insanity. It might not matter if we were not facing ecological catastrophe on the one hand, and on the other, a "Metaverse" singularity that threatens to radically diminish, if not destroy, what it means to be human. The political foolishness we're living through now is just a distraction that keeps us from confronting where the real threats come from.

That's what exasperates me most about the delusional nonsense on the cultural Right. They are not wrong to believe that something is dreadfully wrong about what's happening to us, but their analysis of the causes of the problem is bonkers, and they are abetting the factions within American society that are the greatest impediments to finding solutions that might work. 

We desperately need to find a wisdom dimension to help orient us to face what's coming. It's not good enough for individuals here and there to find wisdom. We need a reboot. 

-----------

Note 1: Compulsion is a trap that imprisons those who are in its grip. People in the grip of cognitive compulsion are like a crowd of people who wake up gathered in a large police interrogation room but are not sure how they got there. The room has mirrors they believe their captors can look through to see them but prevent them from seeing their imagined captors. Nothing enters from outside; they see only themselves and hear only their own thoughts, but they imagine their captors as evil, because who else but someone evil would imprison them? But there's nobody on the other side of those mirrors. Nobody is watching them or cares.

No wonder they feel that they are the victims of a conspiracy, but it's a conspiracy of their own making. They have no recollection of it, but it's a room they designed and built for themselves and freely chose to inhabit. They live in it, whether they admit it to themselves or not, because it feels safer than living in the big, confusing, hostile world outside of it. And so because they built it, the lock is on the inside not outside. But they've forgotten that. They've forgotten that they can walk out any time they want.

Maybe one among them remembers and considers leaving, but he's afraid to. If he does, he will lose the companionship and safety he finds in this room, and he fears the hostility of the imagined captors outside whose malevolence he will not be able to defend himself against alone. But perhaps even a worse fate awaits him if he were to leave the room: What if he were to be proved wrong? What if there is no hostile enemy waiting for him outside? What if he were to discover that no one really cares enough about him to hate him in the way that he and the others assume they do? What will give his life meaning and purpose if there is no enemy?  

And so a part of me sympathizes with his predicament because I think that what he really wants is meaning and purpose, and having an enemy is the easiest way to get both. If he leaves the room, he'll find there is no enemy, but then neither is there anything else to give his life meaning and purpose. There's precious little in the world outside shaped by the rationalist-materialist imaginary that will provide that for him. It's understandable that he would want to stay with his friends. It might be a small world, but it's a safe and meaningful one. 

And that would be fine if they'd just stay in the room, but they want more than that. "Why should we live so confined?" they say among themselves. "Why don't we develop a plan to break out together?" But for the plan to succeed, they must capture and kill anyone who disagrees with them for fear of being captured and killed by them.

But nobody wants to capture or kill them. At worst there are those who laugh at them for their delusional stupidity, but they wish them no harm until they become a force that threatens harm to them. That all this has no relationship to reality outside their bubble or prison never enters into consideration. Within the bubble this plan possesses powerful coherence within its very limited scope, and it provides deeply felt sense of meaning, even if it has no basis in reality.

Everybody in the room believes it, but because deep down they know it's baseless, they must viciously reject anyone who raises doubts. "We're absolutely right," they think, "and anybody who doesn't think so cannot be trusted. Doubters are collaborators with our enemies. There's no other explanation. They are enemy infiltrators who seek to undermine our resolve." 

Go to Part 6.

++++++++++

Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Genealogy Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus

Rather than proceed in some linear fashion with the genealogy of the title, I want to explore first the claim made in Part 2 concerning the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical--or Wisdom--dimension. Without first having established that, I think it's very difficult to understand why the originary Mythos of the West--Christian Neoplatonism--worked for so long, why it eventually failed, and how something like it might be recovered. It's not Christian Neoplatonism as it functioned then that I'm concerned about so much as finding something like it that can function for us now in the way we need it. The goal here in Part 3 is to try to begin to understand what kind of work it did and why that's important. In future posts I'll attempt a more sustained attempt to understand why later it failed. The answer, btw, is not because science disproved it. But before getting to that, some thoughts about our current predicament and why such questions matter. Why should one care about things like the vertical dimension of a metaphysical imaginary, anyway?

My concern is not with individual religious belief. Individuals can believe whatever they want, but I do think that a society to flourish, it must have a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary that integrates a central vertical axis, or Mythos, that works in tension with the horizontal axis, or Logos. I make that case in Part 2.  Most contemporary Christians, especially if they are Protestants, don't think of their faith as a 'mythos' that fuses two post-axial traditions: Greek speculative transcendental philosophy and prophetic Judaism. It just isn't that Greek/Jewish synthesis anymore in any way that matters for contemporary Christian practice or understanding.

Most Christians believe what they believe without it having to make sense in terms that the broader culture recognizes as legitimate. They may have found a personal vertical dimension, but it has little or nothing to do with the way the broader society operates, and so at the heart of their experience of the world is a fundamental incoherency, that in extreme cases results in Ontological Dizziness, aka, the absurd. As I argued in Part 2, one common strategy to avoid Ontological Dizziness is to compartmentalize: Religion is about my private, spiritual life; work and career are about my public, material life. The two have little to do with one another, and for most the former has no impact on the latter. As Eagleton remarks in Culture and the Death of God, "...it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up." The children of the compartmentalized usually don't compartmentalize. Most just get absorbed into the great rationalist materialist metaphysical void, or they join a religious cult. 

But for the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era these two traditions lived together in what was often in somewhat simplistic terms rendered as a marriage between Athens and Jerusalem as metonyms for reason and faith. This might be understood as Athens/Reason = the horizontal, and Jerusalem/Faith = the vertical, but that would be wrong because it fails to recognize the central role that Axial verticality played in Greek philosophy, at least as it came to us from Plato and Aristotle. 

Of course the persistence of pre-Axial Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism continued to play a significant role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West, especially in shaping its local customary cultures. But the idea of the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem was more right than it's wrong in describing the post-Axial dimension of the Western metaphysical imaginary. The philosophical/theological framework for it was Christian Neoplatonism. It worked for those first 1500 years, with its last robust articulation in Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, and after that continued to be influential in the arts, if not in philosophy, science, or even the theology of the Reformers.¹ 

So the 19th Century after the fading of Romanticism becomes increasingly individualistic and materialistic, both undermining whatever relevance religion--or the vertical dimension however understood--had played in the social sphere. After Nietzsche, it becomes harder for anybody to think on the vertical dimension--at least publicly. Whatever trust there was in the testimony of people who attested to knowledge on the vertical dimension eroded with each passing generation after the mid-19th Century. Because with each generation those attestations were becoming increasingly incompatible with a materialist metaphysical imaginary whose hegemony among educated elites was becoming increasingly dominant after Darwin, the Industrial Revolution, and the intoxicating success of new technologies and discoveries in science.

What changes is not the validity and power of traditional vertical knowledge, but rather the incapacity of the growing numbers of the educated to understand it--or really, to even care about it. During this time there were plenty of religious charlatans and cranks of the televangelist or theosophical ilk, but there were also Christians and other religious figures who were still taken seriously as public intellectuals, even as late as the the decades immediately after WWII. Reinhold Niebuhr, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Ivan Illich come to mind. But by the 80s they were no longer taken seriously--or maybe more accurately, there was no new generation that arose to carry on where they left off. Desmond Tutu is the last of that kind of religious public intellectual, but most people born after 1980 were probably wondering what the fuss was about when he was eulogized after his death last week. He was a mensch--a great, wise spirit. 

That kind of public figure no longer exists, and one has to wonder why. I'd argue that we experienced a shift in the country after the failure of the sixties to rebalance things. The shift was symbolized by the country's choosing Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980. Whatever Carter's limitations as a politician, he was a morally serious person in a way his successor was not. I'll argue this in a future post, but I think the country's choosing Reagan and the way he was lionized on Main Street America marked the beginning of what I believe was an irreversible shift into a simulacral culture and in doing so left behind any possibility that American society might be led by relatively sane grownups.

Since Reagan, the country has progressively slipped into greater and more intense alienation from reality. I'm not saying Reagan is the cause, but he symbolizes it, just as Trump is not the cause of our current collective insanity, but the symbol of it. It has become increasingly difficult for people to hear or see the truth; it's become much easier to live in a world where you can customize it to meet your preferences. This is particularly acute on the cultural Right where since Reagan it looks for shallow performance artists to lead them by playing to their fantasies. Reagan, a remarkably talented political performance artist, was at least recognizably "normal" in a way that Trump is not, the difference between them is the measure of how deeply the Red zones of this country has descended into ontological dizziness.

So, while the crisis became particularly acute after the 80s, it has been a long time coming--for around a thousand years. But in its current acute stage, it traces back to the mid-19th century when the truth claims of the old Mythos started to seem for many dubious or, even worse, irrelevant. Life on the horizontal was where it was at for mid- and late-20th-century Americans on the make, and considerations concerning the vertical could be postponed to end-of-life anxieties about what comes next. The young have no time for that, or at best they give a tip of the hat on Sundays to such concerns.

Life otherwise for any red-blooded American was to be lived on the horizontal.That's where all the energy and action was. Religion was for most primarily a transactional technology that was supposed to enhance one's flourishing on the horizontal. If I mind my Ps and Qs, I will prosper. That kind of horizontal religiosity simply cannot withstand any kind of stress test. The sense of the vertical in that kind of thinking about God was already very weak, and so no need to depend on him when one has the use of his wits and the strength of his will to succeed.

That is the Protestant work ethic. It derives from the Calvinist vertical mythos, but it was something that found it could live very well without the vertical. Conservatives praise middle-class values, but there is no need for a God or vertical axis to practice them because there is no presence of the vertical in them. Prosperity and success are its primary motivators. Christianity ceases to be itself to the degree that it loses its ability to mediate the Living Real. If Christianity only does its work on the horizontal, it becomes Christianity in name only. It's a pseudo-Christianity that functions in the same way that Catholicism functioned for the IRA in Ireland or Orthodoxy for the Christians Serbs in the Balkans. It easily slips into becoming a tribal cult. 

But increasingly for the larger post-WWII population, the horizontal became the only thing that mattered--that's where a full life was to be found and lived. The vertical was only for people who hated life, who hated sex and pleasure and life's bounty. A kind of superficial, pop-Nietzcheanism emerges for the sophisticated to justify and celebrate the hedonism that the post-WWII consumer society not only made available, but demanded of citizens in fulflilment of their patriotic duty. As people become increasingly absorbed in their pleasures and their stuff, they become increasingly incapable of responding or hearkening to the vertical. New Age spirituality emerges to provide a religiosity designed for consumer capitalist society, where one can dabble and indulge one's egoism for a lifetime and think oneself profound.

So the dimension of depth became increasingly irrelevant with each passing generation from the mid-19th Century to the present day. And so starting in the late-19th Century, the most important thinkers understood the significance of the loss of depth and its consequences in diminishing the human. They started scrambling to find an alternative for what had been the vertical dimension heretofore occupied by the God of Jewish revelation. For Nietzsche it was the Dionysian, for Heidegger it was the unfathomable depths Being, for Sartre it was this idea of the human as having a godlike, boundless freedom.

All in their different ways generated a God replacement after his death some time in the middle of the 19th Century, and the plausibility or legitimacy of these new gods was measured by the degree to which they solved the problem of modern alienation. They were in their different ways trying to find a way back to a connection to the vertical--however that might be conceptualized. For people who were attracted to these thinkers, the last place they'd look for a cure for what was ailing them was the Churches, which, in their view, were alienation factories. And to a large extent, they were not wrong. Kierkegaard certainly thought so of the church in 19th Century Copenhagen. His experience was not exceptional then or now. The churches in their obsession to make sure that Christianity is correctly understood and practiced too often have made Christianity into something that is misunderstood and wrongly practiced. 

The one thing that united all existentialists, following Nietzsche, was the rejection of Greek transcendental "essentialism", for which they blamed Socrates'--through whom, for Nietzsche, emerged the beginning of Western decadence. Socrates' overly rational dialectic and Plato's notions of an otherworldly world of ideas or essences were where all our problems started. Nietzsche and those who followed him were in effect rejecting the entire post-Axial project and its assertion of a transcendent, vertical dimension in reality that impinged on and sustained an immanent world. That rejection became axiomatic afterwards. It's something that is hardly ever challenged these days if you want to be an intellectual in good standing.

But if solving the alienation problem was the primary concern, Nietzsche's real villains should have been Democritus and Protagoras, not Socrates and Plato. It's astonishing to me that Socrates of all people should be considered a "decadent", and the only reason I can think of is that the intellectual avant-garde after Nietzsche became so captured by a form of Rationalist Materialism by the late 19th Century that they became incapable of responding to Plato's mythos. It would be like admitting you really like watching It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. Intellectuals in good standing don't take such sentimental rubbish seriously. But really what they're saying is that they've become incapable of responding to truth that comes in the form of parables. They've lost the imagination for it, the vertical capacity for it. 

The Socratic/Platonic program was adamantly opposed to the tendencies in Greek thought that Democritus, the proto-scientist, and Protagoras, the Sophist, represented, which was truth on the horizontal without reference to the dimension of depth. The vertical dimension in Plato is essential to his post-Axial project--for him it is all about overcoming alienation by becoming connected to the transcendent Living Real, but late-modern, educated elites captured by a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary must reject the vertical in Plato as nonsense.The Greek proto-scientists--Thales, Anaxagoras, Democritus, et al--are the only Greeks that matter for contemporary Rationalist Materialists. Of course the Sophists like Protagoras matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers.

Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. Most thinkers in the ancient world who were influenced by them thought so.² Nevertheless, I hesitate to use the word, because of its connotations of flakiness or associations with the New Age within contemporary discourse. But all I mean by it is  experience of the Living Real on the vertical dimension. People have such experiences all the time that they used to recognize as experiences of the transcendent dimension breaking into ordinary consciousness in subtle or dramatic ways. The current fashion is to call them "aesthetic" rather than mystical experiences because that is more compatible with the hegemonic Rationalist Materialist imaginary.

But when Socrates talks about Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as transcendentals, he is not talking about abstract concepts, but about an encounter with the sacred. They are transcendentals because they, operating on the vertical dimension, intersect with the everyday horizontal experience. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved, perhaps even to tears, by an encounter with beauty or justice or someone speaking from a deep intuitive sense of the Truth in an inhospitable environment, you've had a mystical experience, an experience that comes from the vertical dimension. There are all kinds of mystical experiences, but the experience of these transcendental archetypes is entry level for most people.

So such experiences are common enough, but less so in a culture that has become increasingly simulacral. And obviously there are different ways of understanding or interpreting their provenance. The Heideggerians, Dreyfus and Kelly, try to make the case for a retrieval of a pre-Axial sense of the sacred in their All Things Shining, and I am sympathetic to what they are trying to do, but they bend over backwards to avoid any reference to the vertical in the post-Axial sense I'm trying to articulate here.³ 

But the point I want to make now is that the experience of the divine or the sacred is something that is rather common. The interpretation of their meaning or significance is where it gets tricky, and this is where a wisdom tradition becomes critical, because while clearly some experiences might 'feel' sacred, many are not. They are delusional. If they are genuine, they are disclosive at varying levels of depth of the Living Real, while others are just counterfeit. I think that many, if not most, of the people storming the Capitol last year sincerely experienced it as a participation in a sacred event. Clearly it was not.

How do we tell the difference? Well, assuming we have good moral instincts and a modicum of intellectual honesty, we can all find out for ourselves by trial and error. But while you can teach yourself the violin, your chances of becoming a good violinist are significantly increased if you have a teacher or a tradition as a resource that makes learning more efficient. It helps to have someone in your life who "knows", who can say to the student, "No, that's not it. Try again." The aspiring violinist is more likely to make progress if there is a trellis on which his development as a violinist can climb and a "gardener" who checks things from time to time to prune what otherwise drains vitality. The same is true in moral development or In the life of the spirit in general. To have such a teacher/gardener can save time, and it might even save your soul. 

Our situation now as late moderns after the collapse of the vertical is that there are no longer any teachers--at least any that are public facing. No more Desmond Tutus. None that break through all the noise, anyway. That along with the destruction/disappearance of customary culture means that there is no cultural trellis to climb. We're all on our own. And mostly we're not doing very well. If we're lucky we find someone along the way who is a little farther along in his or her learning how to navigate on the vertical, but even so, this has no significant impact on our larger cultural, political, and economic life. It just keeps doing its rationalist-materialist thing, and dragging us all along with it whether we want to go or not. 

***

We can learn from Socrates how to teach ourselves and one another. There have been--and still are--extraordinary people like Socrates who were/are able to find their own way. And we need to learn from them as best we can. Such people search out those who have some wisdom and learn what they can from them, but when push comes to shove, they find their own way insofar as they have activated an interior moral compass that guides them. For Socrates his teacher was his daemon, and I suspect it's the same for many people today, whether they think of their inner teacher as a daemon or not. For Socrates his daemon had an apophatic or negative influence. It was an inner voice that warned him when he was going off path, when he was being seduced. His daemon only said No, it had nothing to say about how to proceed positively. Socrates had to find within himself a positive way forward, and he had to choose it. (Apparently in the early-'30s Heidegger had no such daemon. Similarly self-proclaimed Christians like Josh Hawley haven't one either.)

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

Logic is used not to reveal what's true, but what cannot be true. As Socrates' daemon doesn't tell him what to do, it tells him only that that's not it--don't go there. That's what all good teachers should do. Wisdom on the vertical dimension comes from learning, first, what to say No to, and then, second, saying Yes to what emerges or discloses itself when a space is cleared for it. This is why the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know. The biggest problem that we have in truly knowing is that we think we already know when we just don't. This is the problem for people who are attracted to theocracy. They lack humility; they think they know better, and they just don't  And the biggest problem for people who live captured within a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is that they think their knowledge on the horizontal is the only  knowledge that's truly worthing knowing, and that's why they lack wisdom. 

If you don't have this disclosive experience, and you only just believe what others tell you what the truth is, you remain in a state of alienation from the Living Real. At best, believing in the testimony of others who have vertical knowledge predisposes you to obtain such knowledge for yourself. You're unlikely to do the preparatory work if you don't believe there's anything that will emerge once you've cleared a space for it. But if you knock, the door will be opened; if you ask in good faith, you will be answered. But you have to develop the vertical capacity to hear the answer. A 'mystic' is someone who simply has developed some measure of vertical capacity, some level of discernment made possible by the acquisition of some degree of wisdom. That vertical capacity was something one encountered in prominent public figures quite frequently before forty years ago. It's very, very rare to encounter it anywhere these days.  

***

Back to the Christian Mythos: The originators of the Christian Neoplatonic mythos, the early Church Fathers, were mystics in this sense--their greatness lies in their capacity to have cleared a space for something divinely originary to fill it. Among the earliest of them were those who fled into the emptiness of the Egyptian desert where they could create for themselves more easily an interior emptiness, that aporia, that was the precondition for their encounter with the divine. The quality of their theology depended on this vertical capacity to have been emptied so as to be open to be filled in this sense.

The greatest of them were inspired and illumined by their experience of the Christian revelation, and they used Greek philosophy to make sense of their experience of the world in the light of it. The trick was to stay grounded in the vertical experience and to make philosophy, or Logos, work to serve its explication on the horizontal. Trouble sets in when philosophy/Logos is used by people detached from the vertical. That's when the Emissary usurps the Master. The task is to hold the two--Logos and Mythos, the horizontal and vertical together, but the vertical is more important because its what grounds or roots you in the Living Real. I think the early Church Fathers did it in a way that is very difficult for us to understand now, but not impossible. I'll try to make their project more relatable in posts in the future. 

--------------

1. One of the most concise and accessible renderings of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is provided in the still very readable Irrational Man by William Barrett. (See Chapter 4 "Hebraism and Hellenism".) Barrett understands Continental existentialism as the heir of the Hebrew part of this marriage, and scientific rationalism as heir to the Greek part. Yes and no. He's wrong about the Hellenic insofar as he sees the Greek contribution as significant only on the rationalist, horizontal dimension. The verticality of Greek philosophy was essential for the role in played in the Christian Mythos in its premodern form.

But he's right insofar as he sees the Hebraic as the down-to-earth, gritty, menschy, experiential dimension of faith, a faith that cares about the depth dimension regarding moral issues, if not so much about metaphysical ones. The fathers of existentialism are, after all, the Danish, Tertullianesque, anti-Hegelian gadfly Soren Kierkegaard and the Russian irrationalist Fyodor Dostoyevski. Both were deeply Christian in their commitments. But then again they still lived in societies before the disappearance of the vertical pole, aka, the death of God.

For these existentialists, the attitude was to hell with metaphysics and its systems, of the whole futile effort to make sense of things that are beyond our capacity to make sense of them. The only thing that matters is one's moral commitments. Yes, every individual human being's life is a drama that needs to be lived in this particularist, existentialist sense, but existentialism in its radical individualism gives up on the societal (civilizational?) sphere leaving it to go its merry way, and that's the sphere that is in crisis right now because the deep meaning axis in our lives has become so privatized in this existentialist sense. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoyevski could assume the vertical dimension, i.e., a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary as a backdrop for their thinking in a way that we no longer can. 

2. See Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, Harvard University Press, 2004.

3. Even in their description of the most intensely vertical, i.e., mystical, of the gospels, that of St. John, Dreyfus and Kelly reduce Christianity to a "mood" of agape. They see no reason to explain what the origin of this mood is, or whether it has more validity than any other mood or whim. It's just part of a smorgasbord of moods that you can choose from those that call to you on a menu on which all choices are equal. I think their book also makes it clear, if unintentionally, why Heidegger was seduced by the "mood" of early Nazism, and why without a transcendental or vertical dimension to ground our ideas of the Good, there's no real reason to say he was wrong. They try to, but fail, imo. Heidegger is an important, corrective thinker who must be taken seriously, but he is an incomplete, and to say the least, flawed one. The same is true for Dreyfus and Kelly--important and incomplete.

Ed. Note For more on the importance of Greek transcendentalism, see also "Part 8: Plato: Habitus as Heuristic".

Go to Part 4A.

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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.

Genealogy Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West

Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth?  The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond....

What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth.  Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value.  And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere.

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), p. 214

What Roszak calls myth, I call a metaphysical imaginary. I use the word 'mythos' in a way similar to the way Roszak uses 'myth', but I do not think it's possible to have a materialist or rationalist 'mythos', because a mythos works on the dimension of spiritual depth. Roszak points out that rationalist materialists think they know the truth as opposed to those who believe in myths, but that they, too, live circumscribed within myth. Point taken, but I still prefer to make a distinction between myth and metaphysical imaginary.

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.

Religion and poetry have become consumer choices, like buying a new car. They serve our needs or they don't, and mostly they don't because religion and poetry fail to be relevant to the way the larger society actually operates. People don't feel a need for either because the larger society feels no need for either. Being irreligious has become as conventional as being a sports fan. Is this the problem of religion, or is it the problem of the society that has made religion so irrelevant? Well the answer depends on whether you think there is a problem with a society whose cultural forms no longer connect the people in it to the Living Real. Lots of people (most?) are like Cypher in The Matrix--they would prefer to live in a virtual reality, a Metaverse, which is both the pinnacle and the reductio ad absurdum of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. 

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

Roszak says that myth is so critical for the operation of a society that "it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond". Well, in my terms, he's talking about a metaphysical imaginary, and in our case it's a metaphysical imaginary that's missing one of its two dimensions. This creates incoherence despite even if until recently it provided the appearance of it. Our current crisis of incoherence lies not in that we lack a metaphysical imaginary, but in that the one we have lacks a vertical dimension, the having of which provides what Roszak calls the "mythological bond" that holds things together. Rationalist materialism fails to provide that bond, even if it is our dominant metaphysical imaginary. That's why it feels like the world is falling apart. 

This loss of Mythos, the vertical dimension, in Western societies is also known as the death of God. It spawned a backlash that was simmering for a while, but it flared into public awareness in the U.S. at the time of the Scopes trial. Since then, American evangelical Christianity, which had been the custodian of the American version of the Western mythos, became more rigidly fundamentalistic and increasingly hostile to knowledge on the horizontal dimension. But its growing fundamentalism also made its already rather weak hold on the vertical dimension even weaker. We're in a situation now where neither rationalist materialism nor American Christianity provides American society with any vitality on the dimension of depth. We are a society that completely lacks wisdom in the conduct of its affairs. Expediency is all. 

Roszak is saying that Rationalist Materialism is a myth and doesn't realize it, but I'm saying that Rationalist Materialism has come to so dominate our metaphysical imaginary that we operate no longer with a Mythos or vertical pole around which to spin, and so we spin erratically and meaninglessly. Without the vertical pole to orient activity on the horizontal, we reel in ontological dizziness. Because neither a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary and its religious fundamentalist antithesis has a vertical dimension, neither can be called Mythos. The civilizational crisis we face today, I'm arguing, is the direct consequence of a society whose metaphysical imaginary has lost its vertical dimension. This loss of Mythos has produced a society that lacks wisdom because it lacks broadly accepted cultural forms that connect it to the Living Real. 

A functional metaphysical imaginary 'works' on both the horizontal and vertical. It integrates facts and wisdom. It fails to the degree that one or the other fails to balance the other. The difference between premoderns and moderns is that premoderns privileged the vertical; moderns the horizontal. Most premodern metaphysical imaginaries worked because the vertical and the horizontal reinforced one another. In other words, the everyday world of experience made sense in the context of its mythos. Modern societies have evolved in a way where its everyday experience became increasingly divorced from what had been its vertical dimension until eventually the vertical became irrelevant for the way in which people conducted their everyday lives.

This diagram maps what I think would be the underlying structure and function of an healthy metaphysical imaginary: 

A metaphysical imaginary should not be judged as inadequate by what it affirms but by what it leaves out. And so for that reason I would say that the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary fails us, not because of what it affirms as knowledge on the horizontal, but because of what it leaves out the dimension of depth and its wisdom. But any religious system that seeks to play a vital role in a society fails if it rejects knowledge on the horizontal. Fundamentalism fails twice over because it rejects knowledge on both the vertical and the horizontal--it lacks factuality and wisdom. Biblicism is a reductive metaphysical imaginary that provides no real knowledge on either the horizontal or vertical dimensions. Fideism, which for some people has a genuine spiritual depth, rejects knowledge whether derived vertically or horizontally. Biblicism and Fideism cannot work on a social or civilizational level because both in their different ways reject real knowledge on the horizontal dimension as irrelevant for the individual's salvation, which is the only thing humans should be concerned about. I think Christians should be concerned about the redemption of history, but that's a topic for another day. 

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being, as well as a healthy, integrated society, "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. 

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their religious beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. More often than not, those religious concerns become directed toward a supernatural world that has little relationship with the immanent, sublunar everyday, common-sense world of their daily experience.

Their mythos must necessarily alienate them from life in a world that is dominated by a Rationalist Materialist imaginary. Rather than for them to think of their lives as entwined with the destiny of the earth, they see the earth as a place of exile or as illusion from which they must be freed by getting off-planet and into the supernatural dimension, which is their true home.

This leads to a quietism that leaves the earth open to be dominated by the sociopaths. A quietist mythos that assumes that the earth is dominated by evil, delusional, and depraved human beings has robust explanatory power--isn't this an apt description of the world we live in? But it also functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But better that kind of otherworldly, quietistic fideism, like that, for instance, practiced by the Amish, than the kind of militant fundamentalism that seeks holy war to impose a wisdomless theocracy on the rest of us. That would simply replace a wisdomless Liberal horizontality with a wisdomless Illiberal one. Theocrats on the American cultural right crave to live in a "godly" society, but what they really crave is a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. 

We all crave it, whether we recognize it or not, because we all crave the Living Real, whether we recognize it or not. As I said above, a felt connection to the Living Real is the only cure for alienation, and there is no society in the history of the world that is experiencing alienation with greater intensity than American society. American society craves a restoration of Mythos to balance out a suffocating, alienating, overweening horizontality. Lots of people live in communities that attempt to live lives aligned on the vertical dimension, but as I argued in Part I, it is hard for such communities to flourish. They are running a cultural program on a cultural OS that has become incompatible with it. I believe that eventually, if we are to find health again, we must find a way for the entire society to restore the dimension of depth while respecting the freedom of every individual to find his or her way on it.

I realize that such an idea is an affront to the postmodern, cosmopolitan ethos in which most the culture's elite swim, but I think that most also recognize that something's got to give. I also realize that I have to make a more compelling case than I've done so far that at the root of our crisis is this loss of the vertical. See Part 3 for that. People have lived so long without it that they have no sense of its loss. It's just disappeared without a trace, and so we assume it never existed. The ancestors who report their connection with the Living Real, we think, were delusional; they didn't have science to set them straight.  

In a future posts, I will make the case that there is a Living Real, and that we live in a society that has lost any sense of its importance. But even without having made that case yet, I think anybody who is half awake realizes that we cannot continue on the course we're on. Something radically different is called for. At the root of our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and meaning comes from the vertical dimension. 

Part 2B: Random Reflections on This Theme

On Christmas, I posted "A Reflection on the Incarnation" in which I laid out in rough outline a way of synthesizing the vertical with the horizontal. The challenge is to recover the Mythos that roots Western civilization within the context of what evolutionary science and modern cosmology tell us about reality on the horizontal dimension. I think that the core mythos of Western civilization can be accurately described as Christian Neoplatonism, which is an integration of two post-Axial traditions--Greek transcendental speculative philosophy and Jewish revelation. Of course, I recognize how implausible what I wrote there sounds both to Christians of a certain stripe and to secularists of another. But my goal is not to persuade people I am right that the Christian Neoplatonic mythos is the only one that's possible for the West--or the world. I do, however, insist that something like it is called for. My goal is not to argue by marshaling evidence and logic so much as it is to evoke a memory of something long forgotten. 

And in any event, I suspect that Christianity is its best version of itself when it is countercultural rather than providing a civilization's central mythos. In all likelihood, at least in the next hundred or so years, I think that something other than the Christian mythos will play the primary role if we find a way to restore the vertical pole to our collective metaphysical imaginary. But in its main outlines such a mythos should be compatible with the Christian mythos as well as with the mythoi of the other great post-Axial religions. All I'm saying is that the broader society needs an alternative to the Rationalist Materialist cultural OS if they are to run effectively, i.e., run in a way that provides a way for the broader society to reconnect to the Living Real. 

I think there needs to be room for the vertical knowledge that comes from pre-axial 'shamanic' religions, as well. This was the case in medieval Christendom and in Buddhist societies, where a system of hierarchical complementarity allowed for a whole range of religious practices within one social system. The goal in restoring  the vertical dimension would be to embrace a religious integrated pluralism. I'll explore what this means in a future post, but the way I think about it now is that a future Mythos has its own vertical and horizontal dimensions--a transcendent, theistic vertical, and an immanent, polytheistic horizontal.

As suggested in Part 1, something like a metaxis that defines a centering Perennial Philosophy as the colorless light in tension with many colors refracted in particular traditions, local variations, orders, and sects is probably what is called for. Again, this is for a later post, but I"m not talking about Bellah's "civil religion". There's not enough of the vertical in that, but there must be a civil dimension to whatever mythos we come to embrace.

My goal in writing these essays is to bark up a tree that needs to be barked up. For those of us who live in societies shaped by the Christian mythos, it's important to understand why that Mythos "worked" for so long and then why it didn't. To do so requires that we think very differently than we think now, that we entertain the plausibility of a metaphysical imaginary that is not dominated by Rationalist Materialism.

All I see myself doing, is barking out loud to draw attention in whatever modest way to something that's missing but not gone--it's up there in that tree. We need to bring it to ground one way or another. And the best way I know how to do that is to talk about what I see hiding among the leaves and branches when I look up into them. Perhaps others will see more clearly something quite different than what I see. And clearly, bringing it to ground is a task for the future. We're not ready for it yet. The important thing is that people start looking, and then that they find some way to bring it back into our collective lives. I make no pretension to know anything more than to say that there's something up in that tree, and that we need to coax it out of hiding. 

In the posts to come in this 'genealogy" series, I want to bark a little more. I want to spend some time to understand how the originary mythos of the West collapsed, what the implications of that collapse were, and then how to imagine a robust Mythos for the future. We're at a juncture now where we've lost any sense that the vertical matters--that wisdom matters--that spiritual concerns should play any role in shaping life in our collective public life. They are not even relevant in defining our collective moral commitments. We've bent over backwards to find ways of affirming moral goods that have no reference to a transcendental foundation, to the Good. We find utilitarianism, social contract theory, abstract deontological rules or some bizarre form of sociobiology as preferable alternatives to ground our moral thinking. These are all moral programs that might work compatibly on the rationalist materialist cultural OS, but that doesn't mean they are adequate or come even close to what is called for to meet our civilizational crisis. They confuse a practical expediency for wisdom. 

As I said above, people who actually take the great post-Axial metaphysical imaginary of the West seriously still exist, but they have no influence. What they have to say does not scan in the broader culture. It's a tradition that isn't even taught anymore (mostly) as part of an educated person's understanding of what it means to be educated. At best, matters of the spirit are concerns that might be allowed for people to muse about in private, but mostly they are entertainments to be indulged by children and adults who have nothing more interesting to do with their leisure. Reading Plato has the same status as reading a Michael Crichton novel, but more boring. But I think that nothing is more important than for those who will be most influential in shaping future civilization to recover that great tradition. [See Note 2]

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So I'm arguing that the deep roots of our crisis are causally linked to the failure of our current metaphysical imaginary. That being said, who among us with any cultural legitimacy thinks metaphysically anymore? The intellectual class just blithely accepts that Rationalist Materialism is the only game in town. There are the religious people and then there are people who accept science. Sometimes there are people who have a foot in both worlds, but even if religious people accept science, the metaphysical imaginary in which they live is dominated by Rationalist Materialist assumptions.

How that jibes with their religious beliefs is not something most people fret about--at least until recently. But whether they fret or not, they have been living in a disjointed world where one set of assumptions is at odds with the other. Most compartmentalize: this is my private life where I read the Bible or Cabbala; that is my public life where I enact ruthless tactics to enrich my company's shareholders. It is never good to compartmentalize, even if doing so was a strategy that provided some temporary social stability. That stability is gone, and so therefore is the utility of compartmentalizing. 

I argued in Part 1 that it was possible for American society to maintain some level of stability so long as the customary culture that shaped the lives of most people in Main Street America still had some vitality. The persistence of customary culture until last mid-century provided the social ballast that insured a level of stability that just isn't there anymore. American customary culture used to provide a grounding, humanizing character for exurban America, but it has lost its vitality. It has become a simulacral.

Norman Rockwell's depiction of that customary world in the mid 20th century was the earliest sign that it was already achieving museum status rather than doing anything vital. This loss of WASP, exurban customary culture is coupled with the loss of the customary cultures of the ethnic minorities in the urban areas--Irish, Italian, Jews, Germans, and other European traditions that carried the Western originary mythos and its customs with them from the old country. With the destruction of all those customary cultures has died whatever vestiges of vitality were left of the Western originary mythos in American society. 

There is still some customary vitality in Black and Hispanic communities, and I'm sure there are other communities I'm unaware of where some customary vitality persists, but the pressures to erode what's left of them are terrific. Many people still go through the motions in communities where the originary mythos has lost its vitality. But it doesn't work, and it can't be passed to the next generation. But without even the zombie forms of customary culture, people are now being thrust into ontological dizziness in a way that is unprecedented.

These are the people who are attracted to Trump or to cargo cults like Qanon who show up in the hundreds at Dealey Plaza. It gives them an unhealthy parody of community because the healthy real thing is no longer available. Better such collective fantasies than oxycontin or meth, but these are simple folk dealing with the loss of a cultural heritage that is making them crazy, and as such they are vulnerable to be seduced by anything that promises a cure or even just a temporary respite.

***

As I argued in Part I, the Western originary mythos came to English North America in a deeply attenuated form with Calvinism, which means that its metaphysics were univocal/nominalist and voluntarist. If you're unfamiliar with these terms, i'll explain them in a future post, but the upshot is this: Ideas have consequences, and by the time Europeans, especially the English, came to America, they carried with them a metaphysical imaginary that profoundly alienated them from the Living Real. And it was for this reason that the native Americans who encountered them thought they were crazy. And as Benjamin Franklin observed (see epigraph for Part 1), the English who lived among the Native Americans never wanted to go back to live among their own people. Why choose to live in a cold, soul-shriveling social world if you could live in a rich, warm, deeply symbolic one. 

So before the reader rolls his eyes dismissing me as a naive Rousseauan who celebrates the noble savage, let me assert quite adamantly that, yes, Rousseau was mostly right in some very important respects. I would just frame the noble savage issue differently. It wasn't that there was anything special about native American culture that was not true of most premodern, pre-literate customary societies. Such societies lived close to nature and felt deep communal bonds that are essential for the flourishing of any human life. And they had a richly deep metaphysical imaginary that provided a symbolic world that reinforced their experience of the world as deeply participative with it. They had societies with a mythos axis and so had societies in which wisdom played an essential role in shaping their societies, a wisdom that most of the white settlers had no capacity to recognize. 

What was really different and weird was what elite European society had become by the 1600s, which was one deeply alienated from the Living Real, and so the European metaphysical imaginary came to reflect that profound alienation. Descartes was the miners' canary. With him we get the first strong indicator that the European educated elite had become so alienated from the Living Real that they could actually conduct a thought experiment that started with the assumption that no extra-mental Real even existed.

A century later, Rousseau looked at the people he hung out with, especially in the courtier class, and it was clear to him that these people were just strange, because so deeply estranged. There's got to be a better way to live, he thought, and so it's not surprising that he embraced the idea of the nobility of a people who were as different from the French courtier class as could be imagined. They had a dignity and a wisdom that was simply unavailable to Rousseau's elite contemporaries.  And in fact, as Franklin pointed out, so many of the English who emigrated to America found in their encounter with the Native Americans something that proved Rousseau correct.

But we all know the story that follows. The other more deeply alienated English who stayed proudly English in their deep alienation from the Living Real, responded to their encounter with Native Americans by essentially wiping them out by force of arms. An aboriginal, richly human, symbolic society is destroyed by a deeply alienated, anti-symbolic society, and we Americans have inherited the winners' violence and their deep alienation from the Living Real. We've had two hundred and fifty years to become even more alienated from it. And we wonder why everybody around us now is losing their minds. 

***

And so the question follows: If our deepest problem lies in that we live within a metaphysical imaginary that is profoundly spiritually impoverishing, how do we find our way to a remedy? Well, it's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. Does our metaphysical imaginary shape our experience, or does our experience shape our metaphysical imaginary? I'd argue that experience is primary and then our thinking about the implications of our experience follow from it. But it's reverberative, to use a McGilchrist term. A society reaches a tipping point where the one reinforces the other for better or worse. I'll come back to McGilchrist in a future post to explore how this might work in a positive way, but in the meanwhile, an examination of a society's underlying metaphysical imaginary is a strong indicator of the relative sanity or insanity of the social world in which its people live. We are insane now largely because our metaphysical imaginary is so deeply alienating, and our insanity is reinforced by our metaphysical imaginary precisely because it lacks a vertical dimension. 

And so, any reader of this blog should not be surprised to learn that I think that the secular materialism/positivism defines the contemporary metaphysical imaginary of the global north and pretty much everywhere capitalism defines a society's central priorities. My critique here owes more to Baudrillard's ideas about disappearance, symbolic exchange, commodification, and seduction than to Marx. Marx assumed that humans would stay relatively rational in thinking about their political interests, and it's there where's he's been proved most wrong. He had important things to say about alienation, but he had no idea how bad it was going to get. 

What we have is too insane for a Marxist critique. Because Marxism suffers from the same problem that the capitalist materialism does--no vertical dimension--it provides no cure for ontological dizziness. That's why Soviet Society failed and why now Capitalist democracy is failing. Both in their ontological vertigo are ripe to be exploited by someone like Putin over there and Trump over here. These demagogues present themselves as figures who are selling sanity and metaphysical realignment with the vertical dimension when in fact they are promoting a counterfeit of them. They represent a reversion to oligarchical warlordism in a postmodern, hi-tech key.

Even if they have a really bad solution, they, at least, understand the problem. Not Trump of course: he's a big, dumb, dark channel for an egregore whose energy someone like Bannon and the Claremonsters, who do understand it, seek to exploit. But unless the "good guys" come up with a better solution to our collective loss of verticality, then there's a very good chance the dark, violent forces Bannon seeks to exploit will win. He understands the hunger for the vertical dimension can be exploited with a snake-oil version of it. Secular Liberals correctly see the snake oil, but then incorrectly conclude that anything that comes from the vertical dimension must be snake oil. 

***

And so then the next question is this: what happened in Europe that set it apart from every other society that existed in the world around five hundred years ago? The causes are complex, of course, but chief among them is Gutenberg's printing press and the Reformation. Both together magnified what had been an incipient trend among some of Europe's elite toward alienation and disenchantment, and while I have laid out a summary for what I believe is the most coherent explanation for what comes next in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age here, in posts to come, I want to emphasize key parts of Taylor's story and add a layer of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and the Emissary to provide the thousand-year genealogy of our current insanity. Both these books are essential reading for anybody whose hair is on fire as mine is and who wants a deeper understanding about what we're truly dealing with and how we might find a way forward.

Go to Part 3.

----------------

Note 1: My use of Logos here as knowledge on the horizontal axis carries a different meaning from what I understand as the Johannine Logos, which is foundational for intelligibility on the horizontal axis, but also the intelligibility of revelations that disclose themselves from the depths of of the Living Real on the vertical axis. The Johannine Logos is in my Christian epistemology foundational for both Logos and Mythos. 

Note 2: After writing Part I, I learned about David Brooks's interviewing Leon Kass on Ezra Klein's podcast. I see Kass as struggling with the same issues I am, and while I'm uncomfortable with any thinking that originates from within the University of Chicago's Straussian milieu, Kass is an interesting, morally serious man, and I intend to read his Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2021). I am interested to learn whether he is barking up the same tree as I am. 

At first glance, it would appear that he is. In the podcast he says that there are three things a 'nation' needs to flourish, (1) a story of origins, (2) a covenant/law, or broadly accepted moral ethos, and (3) a tabernacle, a cult that defines a nation's highest spiritual aspirations. Ok--he's talking mythos here, restoring the vertical dimension--and I'm listening with interest to learn where he's going to take this, and then he blows it by saying American society had such a mythos until the sixties. There's no bigger turn off for me than to blame our current turmoil on the sixties.

The sixties were a failed attempt to correct the deeper problem. Read Roszak. The Making of a Counterculture is still very, very relevant and remarkably prescient. That the counterculture failed then has more to do with the power of technocapitalism to absorb and coopt almost every vital attempt to subvert it. There was no mention in the conversation between Brooks and Kass about how technocapitalism might be playing a role in our current crisis. This is a blatant refusal or blindness that affects so many American Conservatives. It renders whatever of value they have to share, if not irrelevant, at least as something incapable of influencing the broader cultural ethos. Nevertheless, I'll read Kass's book in the hope that his arguments will be more nuanced, but I fear it won't get past much of what's acceptable at the American Enterprise Institute where Kass is a fellow.

But even so, there might be common ground here. I'm just not sure that Exodus provides the originary mythos that is going to do the job for us now, even if it was the mythos of the Puritans who came to New England. If you read Part I, you know what I think about Calvinism. The Canaan they founded was no land of milk and honey I'd ever want to live in. But the basic problem with the Puritans was that while indeed they had a vital mythos, it was too colorless and too deeply implicated with the emergence of capitalism and its materialist metaphysical imaginary. I'll argue this assertion in a future post, but the point to make here is that you can't solve a problem from within the frame of the metaphysical imaginary whose contradictions are the cause of the problem.

We are living in a time where the problem needs desperately to be resolved, and the Calvinist mythos does not have the resources to do it. And yet Exodus could work as a contemporary mythical lens if we understand it not as our having arrived in Canaan as those first Puritans believed they did, but as our still wandering in the wilderness. It's precisely the the obsoletized metaphysical imaginary of the Calvinists that we must leave behind as we wander in the wilderness for a few generations during which we unlearn its soul-crushing habits of mind. But to what land of milk and honey are we headed? Again, considerations for a future post. 

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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.

A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part I

[This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post]

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”

 --Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (pp. 2-3). 

And I confess that I’ve come to wonder if the tension between “America” and “conservatism” is just too great. Maybe it’s impossible to hold together a movement that is both backward-looking and forward-looking, both in love with stability and addicted to change, both go-go materialist and morally rooted. Maybe the postwar American conservatism we all knew—a collection of intellectuals, activists, politicians, journalists, and others aligned with the Republican Party—was just a parenthesis in history, a parenthesis that is now closing.          --David Brooks

David Brooks, qua America's spokesperson for a principled conservatism, looks himself in the mirror in the most recent issue of The Atlantic. It's a companion piece to Gellman's and Packer's essays about the coming demise of American democracy, about which I've written in the last few weeks. I started writing this post to parse Brooks's quote excerpted above about why I think of his American Conservatism is oxymoronic, as clearly he seems to recognize by his listing of all its antinomies.

But before coming to that, I wanted to reflect a bit on how the current crisis has pushed me to appreciate in a way I did not before how a society's dominant metaphysical imaginary unconsciously shapes its experience about what is most important, what is most deeply true, and what is worthy of its aspirations--no matter what the conscious individual beliefs of the people in it. For us that metaphysical imaginary derives from Rationalist Materialism. Whatever our individual beliefs, we live in a world whose basic assumptions about reality are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. 

I believed before, or rather my basic world view was shaped by the belief, that pluralism is a good thing, that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking, that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded by our being confronted by others who see things differently.

And so it follows that ideally a pluralistic society embraces a plurality of metaphysical imaginaries. There are realists and idealists, theists and atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, pagans and polytheists, materialists and transcendentalists. And various combinations of all the above. And ideally all should live together in a society where at the very least they tolerate one another and where at best they actually engage with one another in an honest, empathic attempt to understand the other, to walk in his or her shoes, to come to appreciate what's best rather than to demonize what's worst.

Of course, that idea of pluralism in the abstract I still value, but I think the hard truth is that in our particular historical/cultural context our differences keep us divided and conquered. Few of us actually engage in good faith with the differences others present to us; rather we at best tolerate others, but mostly we'd rather not deal with them. So the default is to think of the Other as quasi-barbarians, and to support whatever efforts are afoot to promote one's own group's interests and to suppress the interests of everyone else. And this natural tendency in human beings is exaggerated if they are acculturated into, as we are, the One Metaphysical Imaginary that Rules Us All, which is  Rationalist Materialism, its capitalist social-economic dynamics, its media, and with both of those a crude, Social-Darwinist ethos that shapes our bloodsport politics.

I hesitate to use a mechanistic metaphor, but it's perhaps never more appropriate for our current predicament: Rationalist Materialism and its capitalist utilitarian moral frame is the the developed world's metaphysical operating system--all other beliefs are programs that must run on it. We don't have any choice about that because whatever our individual beliefs, we have to live in a world whose fundamental presuppositions are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. The problem for people with religious commitments lies in that that most of the world's great religions originated in societies that ran quite different, premodern metaphysical operating systems that were compatible with them. And the way those religions have been patched in to work with our current, late-modern OS makes them very buggy, if not unusable.

Does the problem lie with these older religious "programs" or with the late-modern operating system on which they are forced to run? I rather think the latter, and I argue why in Part 2. But that's extremely hard to accept by anybody who has been acculturated into a society that runs a Rationalist-Materialist OS. We're all in the Matrix created by that system, and extricating yourself from it is not easy for those who want to--and impossible for people who don't feel a need to do it the first place because they're quite comfortably well adapted to life within it. 

And so people who are well-adapted to materialist metaphysical matrix naively believe that everybody is free to think or believe whatever they want. But in fact, you're not free if your personal beliefs are incompatible with the cultural OS. The cultural OS--not one's personal beliefs--plays the dominant role in shaping his experience of the world--even for people with religious commitments.

The idea of a sacrament, for instance, depends on an imagined participative ontology which supports and interprets the knower's experience of herself in a participative relationship with the mystery of Being. That's not how we think about or experience the world in a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Rather, we see and experience the world as just containing stuff to be used. Nothing sacred or sacramental about anything in it. Just so many atoms and empty spaces. Some environmentalists, like the ones celebrated by Richard Powers in Overstory, are trying to restore an animist sense of the sacred, but they are considered by the mainstream culture as flakey nuisances. 

But hardly anybody in the world--East, West, North, or South--experienced the world that way until about five hundred years ago. Some religious people today might believe in sacraments, but they cannot, with some rare exceptions, experience their power in the way our ancestors did. It feels forced, so much "hocus pocus", and it's understandable why people nowadays think it's nonsense. But it's not nonsense. It's that we've been culturally programmed to be insensible to their significance. The problem lies not with what's there but with our ability to see or experience it. 

So if one has non-materialist personal beliefs, they are circumscribed or cramped by the dominant materialist metaphysical imaginary--unless we live like the Amish or in monastic communities off the grid. To use a less mechanistic metaphor, we are dyed yellow in our acculturation into the rationalist materialist imaginary, and so most people see a yellow-colored world, but even if some entertain religious thoughts that were in their original form green, they come out looking blue. It might look ok, but it is a distortion. And so no matter what your individual beliefs might be, they are always yellow-tainted, if not yellow-dominant. It's possible, but it takes an extraordinary effort to cleanse that yellow taint. 

And I would argue that while not all cultural operating systems have this soul-deadening effect, our yellow one is killing us as a society, whether or not we as individuals have found a way to purge its taint. But the task isn't just an individual one, because our well being as individuals depends on the health of the whole society. We need an infusion of something that promises a different kind of life, a life that might actually help the best among us to transcend our differences and unite us at a level where we might actually have the strength to fight against what's coming.

Our fundamental metaphysical imaginary should be a colorless, radiant light that comprises the full color spectrum and allows for a range of possibilities that are all in their different ways aimed at the same goal, which is an imagined future possibility for human flourishing that simply is not possible within the current materialist imaginary.

So let there be pluralism, but let it run on a cultural OS that has a spiritual dimension. What that might look like, I don't know, but I can imagine a trans-cultural system of symbols that opens up such possibilities unavailable to us now. Otherwise our pluralism within our current spiritually impoverished metaphysical imaginary promotes divisions that will continue to keep the best of us preoccupied with clickbait--all the stupid, superficial stuff--and so distracts us from the real threat that is posed by techno-capitalism and the simulacra of culture that it is creating. 

***

So back to Brooks. I think he's grappling with a fundamental truth concerning American Conservatism that most American Conservatives don't understand, which is that it is oxymoronic. I want to explore this a little more deeply within the broader context outlined above. I see the primary historically positive function of Conservatism, whether here in America or in Europe, as its mission to 'conserve' the cultural ballast that customary culture, especially in its towns and rural areas, provided to the larger society. Liberals, generally speaking, see customary culture as oppressive, unless it's someone else's, which then they find charming. 

A healthy society needs that ballast, especially if it has healthy communities that pass from generation to generation a cultural vitality that works for most ordinary people. Local musical and dance traditions, oral histories, local heroes, local lore and legends, a vital communal religious life and reverence for things that are worthy of reverence. A healthy customary culture is rich with symbols and close to nature. A healthy conservatism cherishes these things, and seeks to push back against whatever works to undermine them. I think that Brooks would see himself as a defender of this kind of conservatism, and it would be worth defending--if in America it still existed.

I would argue American customary culture was rather weak to begin with since it was so deeply Calvinist in its origins. Calvinism was already a movement grounded in the rejection of old European symbolic customary culture, which it perceived as papishly exotic and paganly exuberant. Which it was. The old Christendom was an extravagant symbolic world that Calvinists wanted no truck with, and so they did what they could to strip out all that symbolism and exuberance and to remake society from scratch based on their stern, spare, rather colorless imagination of what was most important. Absolute Spirit might be colorless, but our life on earth cannot be. It needs to refract that light into its many colors. The problem with the Calvinists was they wanted to live in a pure colorlessness that is not meant for humans, and their attempt to do so created negative, unintended consequences I'll lay out in a future post. A few, rare individuals can live in thin, unshaded, mountaintop air, but not whole societies. 

And so frustrated in their inability to impose their spare, colorless vision in Geneva, they tried it in New England. This eventually failed. And as Ben Franklin notes in the quote excerpted above from Tribe, the descendants of those stern Puritans couldn't stand the society they created, and once they had a taste of truly rich customary culture in the Native American societies of their time, they had no desire to go back to the life of the English. Many Northern Europeans in the 19th Century had the same experience when they went to Italy: Yikes! What have I been missing all of my life?!

They found there what was still a vital customary culture in the old pre-Reformation European sense, something that had been all but purged in Protestant northern Europe, which had by then become quite smugly superior about its having traded cultural vitality for prosperity--at least for the few who prospered. Contemporary American Conservatism is ironically largely heir to the mentality that saw it as its mission to destroy the two principal customary cultures they encountered at the time--first, that of old Europe and then that of the Native Americans.

In the U.S. today, if there are American Conservatives who have anything interesting to say, they are mostly Catholics and Jews, people who draw on intellectual traditions that have deep premodern roots. WASP America hated both when they started arriving in droves starting in the mid-19th Century because they represented a worldview, a metaphysical imaginary, that they saw as deeply incompatible with theirs. They were seen as unassimilable. Well, in the decades after WWII, consumer capitalism and its media has bleached out most Catholics and Jews so that they left behind the old customs to become nice, upstanding work-a-holic Calvinists. Now, if we are mainstream Americans, we're all Calvinists whether we realize it or not--either the Woke kind on the Left or the gun-and-bible-toting kind on the Right. 

American Calvinism has always been more interested in vilifying what was not compatible with its tight-assed vision rather than understanding or preserving what was vital in anything that did not fit within it. And so after the founding, most of New England's intellectuals couldn't stand Calvinism either, so they became Unitarians and Transcendentalists, the latter basically an import from German Romanticism and idealism. I know this is oversimplifying Calvinism in this pejorative sense, and in future posts I'll add some nuance. There is a positive side to Calvinism (despite itself). MLK came out of it, after all. There are many good, decent, spiritually vital Calvinists. But Calvinism as an idea system and cultural movement has done more harm than good overall. 

So American conservatism, insofar as it had a "tradition" to conserve, had a tradition that was symbolically weak to begin with in its rejection of the old Catholic, sacramental religion and with it the old European folkways, festivals, and quasi-heathen customs. And yet there was a customary culture in Yankee America, symbolically spare though it might have been, which before the Civil War retained a basic decency and public spiritedness that Toqueville writes about.

And then there was the South, which also had a vital customary culture, but its society was dominated by thugs living out a poor-man's fantasy about what it would be like to be an aristocrat. And so they made a society based on chattel slavery that was rotten at its core, and so whatever was vital in Southern customary culture was the warp to the chattel slavery woof that wove the Southern social fabric. We're still suffering from that rot--not just in the South now but everywhere. And whatever little was healthful in either Yankee and Southern customary cultures is gone now because post-war consumer capitalism and its information technologies has hollowed out whatever was vital and humanizing in them. The old customs have become museum pieces preserved by cultural societies of different sorts. 

In future posts I want to lay out the genealogy of the death of culture, if by culture we mean a vibrant symbolic system that mediates the Living Real for a civilization. I'll draw on both Jean Baudrillard and Iain McGilchrist who in their different ways make a compelling argument that we are living now in the aforementioned simulacra of culture, i.e, a parody of culture, and we're suffocating because of it. Baudrillard is pessimistic that there's any way out, but McGilchrist sees one. Whether we'll find a way to choose it remains to be seen. More on that in a future post. But what we're living together as Americans now is insane, and we need to understand its genealogy if we are to find a cure. 

Anyway, this is why Brooks's American Conservatism was always oxymoronic because it wanted simultaneously to preserve customary culture while embracing the capitalist dynamics that have been most responsible for destroying it. American Conservatism was never a movement to preserve what was vital, but rather only a movement to slow down the inevitable decay of a pre-Industrial way of life.

But the upshot is that America never had a richly vital tradition to preserve. Ask the "English" who went native in Franklin's account quoted in the epigraph. And for that reason it never had the spiritual or cultural resources to push back against the materialist flood that industrial capitalism brought to it in the decades following the American founding. The desire to preserve local community values and their customary cultures while at the same time celebrating the disruptive, creative-destructive energies of capitalism was at best a naive fantasy and always intellectually incoherent. 

American society was founded on some important ideals, but those ideals were never rooted in a metaphysical imaginary in which they might have been cultivated and sustained. Certainly the contemporary American cultural Left, the primary defender of those ideals now, does so with an unattractive moralistic priggishness that lacks the metaphysical heft to sustain them. These ideals were doomed from the start to be smothered by far more powerful cultural energies that accompanied the emergence of the industrial bourgeoisie as a dominant social class.

The new imaginary legitimated greed and the will to power and came to see it as the engine that drove material progress, and indeed it did. Nevertheless, while people have always lusted for power and wealth, no civilized society had before embraced these vices as admirable. That we live in such a society is in large part what makes us so crazy, and no such society has a vital human future.

Materialist capitalism's negative effects are not primarily about the inevitable gross social inequities it produces, but about the way it impoverishes the human spirit of everyone it taints. It creates the conditions that make it extraordinarily difficult to deal humanely with its excesses. BTW, American socialism suffers from the same metaphysical imaginal limitations. I lean socialist in my politics because the system needs some constituency to mitigate the worst excesses of the private-sector sociopaths American society lionizes. But in the long run, socialism does not solve the deeper problem. 

So that's why 'American Conservatism' is oxymoronic. You can't have both vital local communities and their customary cultures in a larger society shaped by the unchecked energies of a capitalist economy. The flourishing of the latter leads invevitably to the destruction of the former. 

I want to take some time over the next year or so to reflect on how the 'death or disappearance of culture' presents some opportunities as well as dangers, but I want to state as clearly as I can now my conviction that our current collective metaphysical imaginary is no longer sustainable if we want to secure a positive future for humanity. And so long as we are culturally divided and conquered, culture-killing energies will remain unchecked, and with the death of culture inevitably comes the death of the human.

A respect for and celebration of pluralism is a good thing, but there needs to be an overarching commitment to which all the parties in a pluralistic society submit, and the argument that I want to make is that this commitment needs to be grounded in an imagined future, a cultural OS if you will, of positive human flourishing. Such a future is simply beyond the resources of our current Rationalist Materialist OS, and so people for want of something better turn to toxic fantasies of a lost past. 

See also "Dying Traditions"and "Tthe Baymen and Farmers of New York before World War II".

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This is the first in a series that is still in process. The parts posted so far are summarized below with links to each: 

Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West argues that the prestige of science and the material benefits of capitalism and its technological advancements has led to the development of metaphysical imaginary that is unique in the history of the world for its lacking a wisdom dimension, and that this accounts for the ontological dizziness that is at the heart of our current collective insanity. And I argue that because  technocapitalism and its rationalist, materialist, utilitarian imaginary reigns unopposed by any coherent wisdom tradition, the human project is at risk to be dragged off the cliff. For this reason, the only way to prevent disaster in the long term is to find a way not just as individuals but as a society to restore the vertical dimension to our metaphysical imaginary. 

Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus argues why some recovery of the vertical or wisdom dimension is necessary for us as a society, not just on an individual level. I try to make, at least in a preliminary way, the case for Axial verticality, and I defend Socrates as an essential model for us now--the opposite of what Nietzsche and Heidegger thought of him. Socrates should be for us now a model of both acquiring and teaching wisdom. All of us should be in a continuous process of clearing away what we think in order to create a space for what is true to emerge. This is true especially for Christians who think they know what Christianity is but really don't.

Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries points to the work of John Vervaeke and others who are trying to establish a cognitive-science basis for understanding and legitimating knowledge on the vertical dimension since the Axial Revolution. I see their work as supporting and enriching my argument. Vervaeke's presentation of a "salience landscape" and how cognitive development as the growth in wisdom is really about the transformation of one's salience landscape is a key for understanding how I think the metaphysical imaginary might eventually flip in such a way that the vertical dimension could be restored.

Part 4B takes Vervaeke's 'salience landscape' concept further in arguing that it provides a model for how people and societies make real progress, which requires not just progress on the horizontal axis, but on the vertical as well. I talk about how some salience landscapes can be evaluated as better or worse according to three criteria--coherency, scope, and richness. I talk about how Kohlberg's six stages of moral development are examples of how children through adulthood self-transcend in their moral development by having moral insights at progressively higher levels of coherency, scope, and richness. The "moral" is one dimension of self-transcendence on the vertical axis that does not get enough attention in a lot of New Age spirituality, which is more interested in developing cognitive scope rather than moral richness. 

Part 5: Salience Landscapes and Salience Bubbles explores the distinction between the two. It draws upon the Adam McKay film Don't Look Up as a case study in how salience bubbles work. It argues that the goal is not to be unbiased because that is impossible, but rather to always be open to have our biases challenged by new information. That's possible for people who live in a flexible salience landscape, not possible for those who live in saliency bubbles. It argues that real science proceeds from within evolving salience landscapes on the horizontal level which deserves the legitimacy that it enjoys, but the problem for the rest of us is the way that the criteria for what makes knowledge legitimate on the horizontal dimension is used to evaluate the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension. Hopefully sooner, but probably later, we will develop a metaphysical imaginary that restores the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension in such a way that it can be integrated with knowledge on the horizontal dimension. 

Part 6: Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series discusses how what this series is trying to achieve supplements Vervaeke's Awakening series. If his goal is to do a genealogy that explains why his psychotechnologies are a needed solution for our contemporary meaning crisis as it affects individual in crisis, my series runs on a parallel track that focuses more on the need for a broader societal solution insofar as it is the root cause of the experience of crisis on the individual level. 

Part 7: The Bigger Picture lays out, in a sense, the map for where this Genealogy series is heading. The goal is to make plausible--not to prove; proof is impossible--a Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary that integrates an evolution of consciousness mythopoesis with developments in science and a progressive politics. The heavy lifting to establish plausibility lies in the future after retracing the evolutionary pattern from the past. I think that while there is much overlap with the claims that I want to make with other religious traditions and with contemporary science, there are two things that Christianity emphasizes that are less important in these other traditions: One, history has meaning because it has a telos. This has practical implications because no progressive politics is possible without an eschatology. Marxism was an eschatological cult, and MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" assumes a deep eschatology. The second thing Christianity emphasizes is the importance of the individual person who is destined for communion, for deep connectedness with God, with other humans, with the cosmos. 

Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic is the first post to begin at the beginning of this Genealogy. The goal now, with some digressions here and there is to understand the origin and evolution of Christian Neoplatonism, the premodern Western metaphysical imaginary. The focus of this post is to demonstrate that Plato's philosophy was based on visionary experience from contemplation of the Divine One. This experience of transcendence is not common, but it's hardly exceptional. The whole post-Axial tradition is essentially the attempts of various societies to make sense of the world in the light of such experiences of transcendence. I further argue, following Pierre Hadot, that you can't understand either Plato or Aristotle if you don't see their philosophies as practices in their schools as promoting a habitus that orients its students toward this experience of the transcendent One.  

Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism makes the case that early Christian thinking was open and fluid in its development and took from Judaism, Greek philosophy, and mystery religions what fit within a framework of criteria that were shaped by the Christian revelation. While Christianity after Constantine became more obsessed with correct doctrine for political and social reasons, this earlier sifting process needs to be understood as an honest attempt to understand what was valuable from non-Christian sources and to integrate them into a broad "catholic" synthesis.

Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation surveys the importance of late Second Temple Jewish literary forms that arose from the cross-fertilization of Jewish belief and practice with Hellenic philosophy and practice. Relying heavily on Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Christian Mysticism, I focus particularly on the significance of the Apocalypses and the Song of Songs. And then we spend quite a bit of time understanding the significant contribution of the great Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria. I also make some distinctions between the Mysticism of the Heath and the Mysticism of Transcendence. This Genealogy series is mostly concerned with the second, but it's important to understand how it co-existed in a cultural milieu in which the first played a significant if not dominant role in the broader society. I emphasize the role of Love in both Greek and Jewish itineraries of spiritual ascent and the importance of the personalist dimension that Jewish thinking added to Greek ideas. 

Part 11: The Christian Synthesis 

Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project.   

Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West  

 

il n'y a pas de hors-texte

I'm no Derridean, but I've read enough of him and about him to know he was no nihilist. Neither was Nietzsche. But many nihilist have read both and appropriated what they think they've found in their texts for their cause.

Both D. and N. grapple with the problem of truth and interpretation. Both have good enough b.s. detectors to recognize that what most people claim to be truth is some soulless idol that they worship in place of it. What most people call truth has the stink of death about it. Both wanted to find a method of inquiry and way of living that avoided that kind of idolatry, which is the tendency in all human beings when they let their relationship to the Living Real to rigidify. So Nietzsche undertook philosophy with a hammer, and Derrida took Heidegger's idea of 'deconstruction' to perform a similar kind of philosophy whose goal was to free up our relationship to the truth. This was for them a necessary task because In a Positivist age truth had come into the death grip of what McGilchrist calls the hegemony of the values of the usurping Left Brain. 

D. and N.'s goal was not to destroy or to debunk for the sake of debunking, but to free the  living from its entombment. They take a hammer to walls that imprison truth to liberate it, to make it available again in the lives of those who would love it if they could have any kind of living relationship with it. 

There are different interpretations of Derrida's statement that il n'y a pas de hors-texte, which is usually interpreted as 'there is nothing outside of the text'. Derrida was a punster, and I don't want to go down the rabbit hole that follows all the possible allusions. But I think a fair reading of it is that he was emphasizing how every encounter with the truth is one determined by its con-text. I think this is common sense, and it owes a lot to phenomenology, which with people like Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Stein sought to liberate philosophy from Positivism. Truth after phenomenology becomes focused on experience rather than on abstractions. And experience and our interpretation of it is always first and foremost contextual. 

There is the dictionary definition of a tree, and then there is our experience of a tree, which is different for the botanist or the lumberjack or for a Druid priest in a primeval Irish forest. For each of these the truth of the tree is what shows up for them in their experience of it. The least important thing is its dictionary definition. That tells us nothing vitally important about trees. Phenomenology opens up the possibility to experience the truth of the tree in a living way, it allows us to take seriously what the tree in its inexhaustible meanings might reveal to us. It affirms the importance of the subjective in what a tree actually means. 

The tree is in this sense a text, and the text as such is vulnerable to limitless interpretations, and that limitlessness, when taken seriously by anybody who is serious about knowing truth, tells us more about the nature of the truth than any statement about the genus and species of a tree can begin to uncover. To say that nothing exists outside the text is not to relativize what we know but to open up new possibilities for knowing. 

This limitlessness is akin to what Buddhism and the apophatic tradition in Christianity affirm about God, which is nothing. There is nothing that can be said that is THE truth about God, and analogously there is nothing that can be said that is THE truth about a tree--or of ourselves or one another. But that does not mean that the effort to say something truthful is futile or that our attempts to say something true have no value.

Because we can never know THE truth does not mean there is no truth. It only means that whatever we can know of it is perspectival, culturally mediated, and always incomplete, and so therefore provisional. That's the human condition, and many sane humans throughout history have been able to live rich, truthful lives within those limitations.

Nevertheless there is always somebody who is tempted to idolatry, someone who wants to put the truth in a straitjacket and keep it locked up in the attic. They are usually the kind of people whose obsessive need for control leads them into positions of power in a society's political and religious institutions. They're the ones who freak out when someone challenges their rigid ideas about what is true or not. They're the ones who close themselves off from the truth because it scares them. 

Language makes the uncommon common, Nietzsche says somewhere. Yes, mostly that's true, but not always. And in that statement, he affirms the possibility of experiencing the "uncommon". Cliches once weren't stale even if whatever vitality was first in them is doomed to become stale over time. Religious language is like that, too. But there is always in any text the possibility to take a hammer to it, to crack open what entombs it, and to discover the living thing in it to which such texts first gave utterance. But the utterance isn't the truth; it's just a provisional attempt to articulate some experience of the Living Real that is always inadequate to whatever the experience of it might have been. 

And for this reason language--and other symbolic forms--can work as a portal to the uncommon. It is not what is actually literally said in the symbolic forms, but rather what we come to see through them into something uncommonly bigger and more vital. Some statements are more adequate than others because they articulate more effectively something uncommon in a way that has the fresh smell of truth about it.That's why we still read--or should--Homer and the Bible and Plato and Shakespeare. Because the language we find there has this enormous potential to surprise us. We think we know already what we will find in these texts, but if we have an openness to them, we will be refreshed by something unexpected, something living. We have to cultivate a mood that Heidegger called, following Meister Eckhart, gelassenheit, which is similar to Keat's negative capability. Look it up. 

This approach leads often to an awakening of something dormant, to a memory of something forgotten. Heidegger says we moderns suffer from a forgetfulness of Being, and one way to remember what has been forgotten is to spend time with important texts. The disclosures that come if one makes the effort have the freshness of life about them, and we are refreshed by it. That is the kind of truth that is worth knowing about. It is not THE truth, but it points to it as an inexhaustible spring of vitality. 

This kind of remembering is something no AI will ever be able to do because machine memory cannot forget. It's the forgetting and then the remembering that is the peculiar human thing. And for that reason human memory is capable of resurrecting the dead. 

And so, while it might be that the symbolic forms that once articulated something living no longer live for us, it does not mean that what once lived is now dead. It's just gone underground. It can be remembered, resurrected. Those forms once steeped in uncommonness have become stale and common because of the human proclivity to be distracted by other shiny objects--in our case the produce of techno-capitalism. Nevertheless we still live in a society shaped by symbolic forms that retain their potency even if it is not something we have easy access to. A tradition dies because people let something die within themselves, and this is how I take what Nietzsche means when he says that God is dead. It is not really God who is dead, but we who are. 

And this is the value of Derrida's deconstruction--to break open the sarcophagi in which these once living texts lie because nobody who plays a significant role in shaping the culture reads them anymore--texts like those of Plato and Augustine, for instance, that D spends a good chunk of time with--and to find again what's living in them, and to critique what is not. What's important is not what Derrida finds there, although you might be surprised to learn what he does find. Rather what's important is to follow his method, to interrogate the great texts, and like Jacob wrestling with the angel to derive therefrom a blessing.

See also "Deconstructing God". 

What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

[I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable breadth of concern, to this day memorialised in the concept of the Renaissance man, of this period.

As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere, in which a more atomistic individuality characterised by ambition and competition becomes more salient; and originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World  (Kindle Location 8766-8783). Yale University Press.

McGilchrist's book is astonishing on so many levels. It is a prodigious feat of synthesis drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literature, psychiatry and so much more. It, imo, is one of the most important efforts at thinking published in the last decade or so. I believe it gives us the resources to find a way forward. For if the shift from the stale, abstract, left-brainy, rigid intellectualism of late medieval scholasticism could morph into the the rich, lively, right/left balanced celebration of life of the Renaissance, perhaps we can find a way forward toward our own Renaissance. Because now in our "postmodern" condition, we are living the reductio ad absurdum of the hubristic Enlightenment Age of Reason, which was until mid last century the consensus spirit animating the Liberal Order. And as the Liberal Order decays, a revanchist, regressive irrational Right arises to provide some atavistic fantasy of a bygone Golden Age. This has come to a head in the Age of Whatever, which set the stage for the Age of Trump. 

In the Age of Whatever, what remains of the old Liberal Order is in one prominent aspect a Neo-puritan, moralistic priggery that at best parodies a serious moral outlook for want of something better. At the same time, a Social Darwinist Neoliberalism dominates in the most woke of workplaces, a Liberalism that paradoxically celebrates diversity, equality, individualism, and freedom while too-often imposing a soul-deadening technocratic organization and a managerial culture of compulsive surveillance and control. But that's all cool because management tacked up a Black Lives Matter poster in the lunchroom.

In the Age of Whatever, there is no consensus about anything. Anything is permissible so long as you don't hurt others. Outside of a depressingly Social Darwinian Ayn Randian framework, there is no longer any imagination for what might be noble individual aspiration, much less noble collective aspiration. Depressing because so many of my most spirited students are attracted to it for, again, want of something better. So everybody is as free to be as good or bad as they wish in theory, but in reality most people are constrained by tribal Liberal or Conservative moralistic groupthinks.

De Toqueville pointed this out about Americans almost two hundred years ago. There is something about Anglo-American and French culture that makes true independent or original thinking very rare and hard to come by. What passes for original is really just novel, a clever variation along lines accepted by Right or Left groupthinks. {See Note 1 in the comments section.] Nobody sane wants to live in the Age of Whatever--except maybe a handful of wannabe Nietzsches in the academy and in pop culture who have persuaded themselves it's edgier or braver to live in some realm beyond Good and Evil. But there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum.

So the culture must move through this awkward phase, and it will. The Age of Whatever is the Age of Whatever Comes Next. The only question is whether it will do it in a healthy or unhealthy way. Healthy means an open society in which its citizens are provided a cultural framework, a trellis, on which they as individuals can become their best selves.

Unhealthy means a rigid, autocratic, closing down of any possibilities except those that are sanctioned by elites on the theocratic Right or on the technocratic Left who think they know best. That's why the individualistic liberation agenda of the Cutltural Left is inadequate. There is in it no vision of possibility for a better human future except to say No to traditional constraints. That's fine so far as it goes, but it has the unintended consequence of clearing the ground for technocratic Social Darwinians to take the field unopposed. We need an imagination of a human future to which all people of good will can say Yes. We need them to be inspired enough by such a vision to be willing to fight for it. 

The culture can move through the Age of Whatever to something better only if it finds a way to synthesize its contradictions on a higher level. That is the coincidentia oppositorum, or the Hegelian aufhebung or what I have stressed repeatedly on this blog as the Platonic metaxis--a practice by which we stand between polarities, identifying with neither, but allowing what is healthy or positive in both to marry, so to say, to create a new moment of integration at a higher level. That is the formula for Renaissance and for true moral development. We all, if we are sane, want to live in Renaissance. We will need a little help from the zeitgeist for such a thing to happen, but there will have to be enough people awake enough to its possibility to work with it when it shifts. [BTW, I don't think this is a task for philosophers. They're the last ones to look to. I think someone like Dolly Parton is a better model to emulate.]

I am an advocate for Renaissance, not nostalgia. Renaissance means 'rebirth', and while it involves a retrieval of things lost or forgotten, it does not involve a nostalgia for former social orders, or the fantasy of so many conservatives to go native in the past imagined as some Tolkienesque golden age or some darker, Evola-esque autarchy. In this rather long post, I want to lay out in one place some of the meta issues that define us at this moment. We are most of us looking at things from the worm's eye view, and it's helpful sometimes to take a look at things from 30,000 feet up.

Part of the mission of this blog is to help cosmopolitan educated types to understand the forces driving the Right but also the limitations of their own presuppositions. The Right and Left are two poles of the same system, and they work dynamically together, but they no longer do so creatively because there's no deep vitality in either. So the task is to transcend both their contradictions in a new synthesis. In previous posts here and here, I've made as sympathetic a case as I can muster to understand what I call Bannonism, whether or not he personally plays any future role in it. His critique of the contemporary Liberal Order is incisive, and his strategy for overturning it could have worked if Trump were not such a self-absorbed fool. But it may work still with a less feral, more strategic fuerher in the future. So I take Bannonism very seriously. 

The most intelligent advocates for Bannonism see themselves as redressing an imbalance in the Liberal Order, which clearly is needed, but they have no real positive, healthy alternative. Their movement is mostly animated by an impassioned NO to the soullessness of the secular materialist and technocratic ethos that shapes mainstream society. So they understand something that most Liberals do not, because to be a Liberal means that you are more or less well adapted to the secular, materialist technocracy. So the No to traditional restraints that animates the Left is matched by the No to Liberal technocracy that animates the Right, and both Nos lead not to resolution, but to impasse. You need something positive in one pole to interact with something positive in the other to move forward--and neither has it at any level of meaningful vitality. 

Bannonism, in realizing that there is no longer anything of real value for conservatives to conserve in the Liberal Order, seeks to tear it down in the hope that something better might arise from the ashes. That, of course, is crazy. But so is Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinism & Nazism, Maoism, and any number of collective delusions that justify themselves as pushing back against what they see as an evil, corrupt status quo. The insane have a way of taking control because they are willing to cross lines the sane won't. And the sane tend to give the insane the benefit of the doubt, and when they realize that they were mistaken, it's too late.

So Bannonism offers nothing positive; it certainly does not offer Renaissance, only a substitution of one deeply inadequate negating ideology for another. If the Bannonites succeed in their tearing down the Liberal Order--and they just might--they will only bring us more intense pain and broader suffering. Some Bannonites are naive because they honestly think anything is better than the current Liberal Order; others simply don't care how many people suffer after the Liberal Order's collapse so long as they're in power. 

The Meta-Historical Context

I don't have views that flow easily in the mainstream, but I persist in thinking I can make compelling arguments for some alternative to the current Left/Right impasse. There are primarily two resistant audiences I need to persuade. The first would be people with a conventional, secular, scientific worldview who see evolution, and therefore human evolution, as driven primarily as a random, meaningless process; the second would be people with religious convictions who believe life on earth is a prison, a vale of tears to be escaped. Both of these constituencies have grounding intuitions that are valid, but both for reasons that I will try to explain are wrong in the way they extrapolate from these intuitions.  

My own mythopoetic framework, which I believe is completely consistent with a Nicene Christianity in a Christian Neoplatonic key is tersely summarized here. I think something along these lines is necessary to provide a future framework for Renaissance. It need not be Christian, but should be post-Axial along the lines of the Philosophia Perennis. My framework is also shaped by a combination of non-theological sources, but probably the main one is what I call "The German Story". Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jung, Gebser, and the Englishman Owen Barfield are all different articulators of a basic intuition about the meaning of history as the evolution of consciousness. The French thinkers Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin add a dimension to this story that I have deep sympathies with. 

This German story can be briefly summarized like this: The human being is the place where the cosmos becomes aware of itself, or to use Heidegger's phrase, a "clearing in the forest of Being". This is a human centered, progressive, evolutionary process extending over millennia. The health of the earth matters because the earth is where the sacred human project unfolds. 

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud are also contributors to this "German story". They would dissent about their being a collective progressive dimension to the evolution of consciousness, but they are important because, like the others, they emphasize that the human being has fathomless depths, depths that are as deep as the mystery of Being itself. It is human openness to this dimension of depth that I see as threatened by the new technologies, particularly the seductions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These technologies need not be malign, but they are and will be to the degree that they close off human possibilities more than they open them up. They might open possibilities up on the horizontal dimension--like the superpowers celebrated in the movies--but it's hard for me to see how they might open them up more than close them down on the vertical dimension, the dimension of depth. We'll see.

Insofar as they are closing off the human being from the dimension of depth, they are obstructing what I believe central to the human project. To put it in McGilchrist's terms, the new technologies insofar as they mechanomorphize the human being, are working from the imbalanced, closed-off perspective of the Left hemisphere of the brain. This may sound simplistic, but it will not appear so after you've read the book. If you've not seen it, the RSA animate video will give you a better feel for the sophistication and nuance that McG brings to this subject. But, really, you've got to read the book. 

I know the computer science folks have great hopes that machine learning will find a way to replicate human consciousness, but it is hard for me to believe that machines can have the special thing that humans have, which is this openness to the dimension of depth mediated to them by the Right hemisphere of the brain. I wonder how many in CS folks actually believe that there are depths in human consciousness that they need bother to try to replicate. Machines can mimic left-brain thinking, but do not have access to the "data" which is only mediated through the right brain, because that data comes from having a soul and with it the capacity for cognitions on the dimension of originary depth.

The peculiarly modern condition of alienation from Being began to take hold in the West among the Voluntarists and Nominalists in the late medieval period, and it is chiefly characterized by a mindset in which the values of the Left brain have usurped and crowded out the richness and soulfulness given to us by the Right. Occam's razor became a justification for cutting away more of the richness of thinking and imagination than the pious Occam ever intended. Why? The left brain is all about seizing power and imposing order. "I just want to keep people safe" is the most common justification for all control zealots, and safety and control are dominant themes in the cultural ethos of the military in one way and of the bourgeois Cultural Left in another. 

The Right brain opens humans up to the depths, the messy domain of everything beyond human control, while the Left Brain is all about grasping, controlling, and ordering what is given to it from the right. Ideally, as McG explains above, they work together--that's the formula for true creativity and Renaissance--but when they do the Right Brain is the Master and the Left the Emissary and servant. Societies get into big trouble when the Emissary usurps control from the Master, much as Antonio usurped Milan from Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. We're in that trouble now. 

The Tempest is the story that hinges on the coincidentia oppositorum. I would argue that most of Shakespeare's plays work with its archetypal power. The basic structure of the comedies starts with conflict between two dramatic polarities, then proceeds with a serious effort by the protagonist to effect a reconciliation at a higher moral level, and if successful, culminates in the final act with a scene that celebrates the expansive joy of an achieved communion--weddings, feasts, circle dances.

In The Tempest, the basic dramatic conflict is between Prospero and his usurping brother, Antonio. The moral question at the heart of the play is to avenge or not to avenge. Prospero refuses revenge and its endless cycle of counter-revenge, which is "natural" in its following logic of evolution without grace. His refusal allows for the possibility to achieve integration at a higher level, a restorative, expansive aufhebung, that reestablishes him in Milan with the expansion of his realm with the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand to include Naples. 

Something like that has to happen to resolve the sterile conflict between the Left and Right in American society; otherwise our future will be an infinite, irresolvable series of Left/Right backlashes. Aufhebung is not the same as compromise. It's about synthesis and communion at a higher level. This is how real moral progress happens, but it requires leaders who are mature moral agents. Is the Cultural/Religious Right capable of producing such leaders? I'm sure there are mature moral agents on the Right, but will they be listened to by the rank and file they would lead? 

And on the Cultural Left, are there leaders there with the spiritual or moral resources to say No to the ways the Enlightenment project leads to the end of the human project? Is there any capacity there to push back against those who are advocating for a mechanomorphized transhuman or posthuman future? Are they capable of seeing how this is the reductio ad absurdum of Left Brain cultural hegemony? Is it within their resources to see it as the parodic apotheosis of the Enlightenment project to liberate the humans from the irrational by liberating them from their bodies? 

Left Braininess is something Liberals value in a way that Conservatives do not, and for this reason, elite Liberals in the universities, the media, in pop culture either celebrate or are otherwise blind to, complacent about, or resigned to the threats posed to the human project by mechanomorphizing it. Technocratic Neoliberalism and the postmodern liberation ethos of anything goes are symptoms of Left-braininess on steroids. Are Liberal elites able to transcend such limitations? We'll see. but I don't see much sign of it at this juncture. 

The Current Crisis

I believe that the shrunken capacity of humans to cognize levels of Being on the dimension of depth is the greatest threat to humanity in this moment. All the other problems, whether environmental degradation, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, immiseration of the masses, the trend toward authoritarianism, are one way or another symptoms of our historically unprecedented Left-brainy shallowness in the West--and increasingly everywhere else as well. Anybody with a shred of a soul feels it. They might identify it as a feeling that their lives are being choked by a suffocating 'inauthenticity'. And so many people feel increasingly alienated, anxious, angry, depressed.

The world around them seems unreal, a kind shadow theater, a virtual simulation, with little in it that resonates meaningfully. People are going through the motions because what else is there to do? But they are starved for authenticity, and it's in very short supply. People will seize on almost anything that gives them an antidote to their alienation. The easiest remedy is to lose oneself one way or another--in a surrender to Tribal identity or to sterile, instinct-driven pleasures. These are deeper forms of alienation from which it is more difficult to recover because they require a refusal of what Tillich called 'the courage to be'. The Liberal model with all the best intentions frames existential failures of courage in this sense as disease, which hygienizes it in ways that rob people of their spiritual dignity. 

Nevertheless, Cultural Conservatives are wrong to blame liberals for creating this shallow, alienated shadow world. Liberals didn't create it, but they are better adapted to it. They don't feel as uncomfortable in it as cultural conservatives do, at least the affluent, educated Liberals don't. Religious conservatives look at these shallow, happy Liberals--Hillary Clinton being their exemplar--and are disgusted by their smug complacency. What's the matter with these Liberals? How can they be so glib, so self-righteous? Have they no souls? How can they be so comfortable in such a flat, spiritually eviscerated culture? Well, most Liberals are not soulless; the best among them feel as alienated as conservatives, but they certainly don't think that the people on the religious right have any real remedies. And they're not wrong.

And hardly any Liberal I know is a hard-core secularist. There are some, but they are far fewer than most conservative ideologues believe. They are secular but not necessarily unspiritual; they are mostly agnostic when it comes to religious questions, because when they look at the churches, unless they're lucky enough to live in a place with an exceptional local church community, they rightly see that there's nothing special or challenging there either intellectually, morally, or socially. Joining a bicycle or hiking club would be more edifying than attending a local church services. They certainly don't care or even know about the pronouncements of Church bodies like the National Council of Churches, or the various Catholic, Lutheran, or other denominational synods. And even if these bodies make pronouncements that they agree with, why should they care? They have no political clout, and Liberals don't need the churches to tell them what common sense and common decency easily recognize without them. 

Their views on liberal policies, in my experience, are not rigid. I live in Seattle, a very culturally liberal place. I had a conversation recently with a very Liberal, very secularized, non-observant Jewish friend who knew that I was a practicing Catholic. This perplexed him because I otherwise seemed so sane. He wanted to know what my position on abortion was. I usually avoid conversations on tribal shibboleth issues like abortion. Most Liberals, like most Conservatives, don't have strongly thought out or deeply held convictions. They just go along with whoever in their tribe shouts the loudest, and so when it comes to having a conversation about such a topic, most Liberals and Conservatives just mouth the tribal talking points. And I don't want any part of the kind of moronic conversations that operate on that level. 

But my friend is an honest, morally serious person. He's someone you can have a frank conversation about a radioactive topic like this. So he asked and I answered frankly. I told him I thought it was wrong, and that there is something soul-dead about a society that has come to see abortion as a banal surgical practice which is the moral equivalent of an appendectomy.

I see it as consonant with the deeply alienating and perverse extreme aspects of the modern liberation project toward a posthumanism that seeks to liberate what it means to be human from what it means to have a body. Having a body is the whole point of being human. It is only in our bodies that we can renew the face of the earth. 

I don't think this because I'm a Catholic, and that's what Catholics believe. But I do think that my being a Catholic gives me a way to stand outside the Liberal Groupthink and to determine for myself what is truly good or a counterfeit of it. My life as a Catholic is largely defined as a metaxis between its rich tradition of thinkers, prophets, and saints and the Liberal social imaginary, which is the world into which I was born and in which I live my day to day life. Striving to live in the space between them rather than to be circumscribed by either is not easy, and I may not do it well, but it's my understanding about how to live authentically in a world that has lost its mind. It enables one to find a foothold in a place that is foundational for both but which also transcends both.

In any event, I didn't say all this to my friend, but I explained to him that I'm not interested in criminalizing abortion, but I am truly dismayed by Liberals' glib, technocratic-utilitarian approval for what is a fundamentally a dehumanizing act. It says something very damning about us as a society, but it's just one among many symptoms of a deeper disease because so does the dehumanization of criminals with the death penalty, our enthusiastic support for the vengeance-driven invasion and destruction of Iraq, our dehumanizing of political prisoners with torture, and our dehumanizing treatment of immigrants and refugees. We are a  sick society, which is losing its grip on its humanity, and our hygienizing of abortion is one symptom of the way the way the utilitarian-technocratic ethos has dehumanized us among many others. I know--life is messy. Nothing in a life seriously lived is determined by binary black-and-white thinking. There are situations where having abortion is a defensible choice. But the exception should not be the rule. At some time in the future, I hope most people will look back on our contemporary mainstream attitudes toward abortion and think of them as barbaric as we now see genital mutilation. 

My friend's reaction was interesting. I think my answer to his question gave him permission to express his own moral discomfort with the knee-jerk cultural legitimacy that abortion has achieved in his cosmopolitan culture world. Deep down he feels it's wrong because it really is, whatever clever utilitarian or ideologically driven reasons might be used to justify it. But he never heard anybody explain why in language that was not ideologically motivated. 

Authenticity and Morality

Any moral position is inauthentic to the degree that is determined primarily by outside-in factors. People who have an outside-in morality generally have no strongly held convictions. They just do what people expect them to do, whether it's contribute to a group-approved charity or show up at church--or whether to wear a mask or not to wear a mask. Too many of the same people who do nice things if that's what expected of them will also do horrible things if that's what expected of them. If their neighbors are part of a lynch mob, they'll join in. If they're working at Enron, they'll come up with creative ideas to cheat the elderly poor. If they're sitting in Trump's cabinet room, they will kiss his ass when he demands it because everyone else is doing it. Whatever.

There are degrees of inauthenticity, of course. But the defining essence of inauthenticity is that "you" don't really decide; "you" just do what somebody else thinks is best. You just go along to get along. It's what's expected. There is no moral agent working from the inside-out struggling to know what the right thing is and then finding the courage to do it. No authenticity is required if moral questions are decided for you outside-in, by the authorities or cultural bullies. No matter how much you might appear to others as a model citizen, there is no virtue in it when it requires no courage or moral conviction to just go along. 

Mature moral judgments are always inside-out, and any kind of authentic moral development must have some degree of inside-out. But the way the inside-out moral agent emerges initially is almost always in conversation with people who have themselves achieved some level of inside-out, authentic moral development. So of course, there is some outside-in triggering event of some kind--a conversation, a lecture, a book--but this is completely different from just downloading someone else's or one's tribe's moral code and following it mainly for fear of being caught and shamed.

That was Socrates' project, right? He was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, but all he was trying to do was to have honest conversations and through through them to awaken them, to have them go deeper to see that their cultural download was shallow, that there was in fact a Good that transcends custom and culture. He wanted to awaken them to the existence of this culture-transcending Good so that they might live lives that are aligned with it rather than simply to mindlessly goose step to the tribal code. This is the essence of "Axiality", this awakening to the transcendent Good.

So a healthy "Axial" culture's customs and traditions are important because of the role they play in awakening individuals in each generation to this transcendent Good. Any culture is healthy to the degree that it awakens the people born into it to their best possibilities as human beings, to their blossoming inside-out. A culture becomes decadent to the degree that it no longer produces this kind of authentic moral development. It is unhealthy to the degree that it imposes a rigid outside-in code and demands a rigid obedience to that code or risk ostracism. A shame culture is not a truly moral culture. It looks like Islamic fundamentalism over there, but like the Republican Party or Woke political correctness over here. A shame culture functions merely as a social constructions whose concerns are for social utility and order, not on what is truly, deeply Good.

But the problem I have with cultural conservatives is that their traditions and customs are more what I have called elsewhere Zombie Traditions: their traditions and codes maintain a cadaverous form, but they no longer carry the spiritual Life that originally gave them shape. They are animated by a kind of undead energy that masquerades as but really parodies the transcendent inspiration--the Good--that originally gave them their form.

Zombie traditionalists show themselves in their anger and resentment because they feel that they don't get enough outside-in respect in a society dominated by Liberal values. But if their tradition was a healthy, living one, it would produce enough people who have that interior sense of dignity that always awakens in others when they encounter it the same inner dignity. If people feel this sense of inner dignity, they don't feel anger and resentment at being slighted by people that don't "get it". Instead they try to share with them the Good that they have come to know.

Why are so many cultural and religious conservatives attracted to Trump? Because he articulates the anger of profoundly alienated people on the cultural Right and channels their resentment. If they really cared about and aspired to the Good, they could only be disgusted by him and by the dark impulses he evokes in their souls. One of the most common symptoms of stunted moral development is the urge in the immature to blame others for their own failures, and to project onto them their own shortcomings that they fail to see in themselves. 

Everybody does this--me included--but there is a peculiarly toxic way that this is endorsed and legitimated on right-wing media. It blames Liberals for everything rather than even entertaining the possibility that its own mindset reinforces and rigidifies a mentality that is morally stunting precisely because it refuses to do the hard work of becoming a mature moral agent. Trump, Rush, Alex, and others give them permission to be their worst selves, and it must be ok because everybody they know thinks and feels the same. So it's just so satisfying to join the mob and blame the Liberals. That feeling that they get, that rush, substitutes for and crowds out any possibility for authentic moral, inside-out development.

Zombie Traditionalists are aggressively outside-in in their moral program. Their sense of identity is something that depends on the propping up of a fragile structure that no longer awakens an authentic, calming, interior dignity. And so it produces another form of alienation that is just as toxic, and I'd argue more dangerous, than the kind of alienation that typifies the anything-goes ethos of secular Liberals.

You can have a conversation with most Liberals, you can't with fanatic, right-wing tribalists. Are there fanatic, Liberal tribalists? Yes, of course, and you can't have a conversation with them either. But they are the exception, in my experience, rather than the rule. If the primary negative characteristic of Cultural Conservatives is their outside-in moral rigidity, the primary negative characteristic of Liberals is their moral diffidence and tolerance for any individual's thinking so long as they are tolerant of others.

Cultural Conservatives value loyalty more than reason. Cultural Liberals value reason (usually in a rather attenuated, left-brainy form) more than loyalty, but that makes it possible for Liberals to be open to arguments that lay outside the Liberal Groupthink. That's much, much harder for conservatives because their sense of integrity lies in keeping faith with others in the Tribe no matter whether there are really, really good reasons to doubt the validity or the goodness of their tribal norms. 

Cultural conservatives see Liberals as morally lax and unprincipled, but most Liberals don't see themselves that way. They have deeply felt moral commitments, even if they are agnostic about the metaphysical foundations that ground those commitments. And they don't "hate" cultural conservatives. The only thing most rank-and-file Liberals really hate about the cultural Right is its rigid intolerance. Cultural Liberals are quite tolerant of all kinds of conservative values and practices so long as they who hold them do not seek to impose them on others. But since intolerance is at the core of the Cultural Conservative identity, the Cultural Left's hatred of the Cultural Right's intolerance feels like a complete rejection of everything that conservatives believe. 

I think there is an analogy presented in the gospels that illuminates the difference between the cultural Right and Left. Jesus had more problems with the religious professionals, the culturally conservative Pharisees and Saducees who were so obsessed regarding their moral rectitude. Every religion produces this class of meathead. These people, so 'righteous' in their imaginations of themselves, were closed to having a conversation that might open them up to new moral possibilities. So Jesus spent most of his time with the local sinners, i.e., the morally lax cultural liberals of his day, who were quite open to having a conversation. Zacchaeus (Luke 19) is the classic affluent liberal of his time, as was the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well (John 4). 

Despite these sinners' code-breaking, they had supple enough hearts that made them de facto morally superior to the rigidly moral Pharisees. Jesus described the latter as 'whited sepulchers', clean outside, but rotting inside, a vivid image of an inauthentic, alienating morality that is outside-in. The worst kind of sin is hardness of heart because it's the disposition of soul that makes you invulnerable to the influences of Goodness and Truth when it is standing there right in front of you. They couldn't see who Jesus was because he didn't fit their morally rigid template for what was acceptable. This is the source of the kind of intolerance that is central the cultural conservative's identity. They think they know what is moral, when in fact they are remarkably clueless about what is truly Good. 

Not a problem for the Zachaeuses and Photines of the world, morally lax though they might be. It is better to be the improvident, morally lax prodigal son than the older son, righteous but tight-assed and full of resentment. The point of the parable is not to endorse an antinomian moral laxity but rather to point out that the prodigal son is open to new moral possibilities in a way that the older brother is not. Whether he realizes those possibilities in becoming an authentically inside-out moral agent is another question. But the chances are better for him than for his resentment-driven, rotted-on-the-inside brother. 

***

Thoughtful cultural conservatives have a legitimate critique of the Liberal Order, but they have no realistic, healthy remedy. They don't understand what a real cure requires. They are understandably frustrated, but they channel their anger toward the wrong enemy. They should instead focus their energies at the greater threat posed by unbridled techno-capitalism. It's a place where they could find many allies on the Progressive Left. But even here, saying No is not enough. The issue is not to put a halt to what Silicon Valley is doing, but rather to offer an alternative imagination for a human future where machines serve human purposes rather than to let the machines and the logic of techno-capitalism set the agenda, which is currently the default. You can't do that if you believe that humans are talking animals that have no more significance for the cosmos than slime molds. But neither can you if you think the earth is a prison from which we must escape. 

So it is extraordinarily difficult for secular Liberals, especially the Neoliberal elite who dominate the media, pop culture, and the Democratic Party, to push back against the hubristic techno-capitalist agenda because most Liberals don't have strong convictions about what it means to be a human being, and even frequently believe that the earth would be better without humans. That kind of thinking is truly, deeply crazy as anything the Cultural Right puts out there. But it is also extremely difficult for the Cultural Right to push back because, if they think about it at all, which most don't, they are Libertarians in the Goldwater/Norquist mode, and the idea of using government power to impinge in any way on private-sector freedoms shorts out their thinking and makes their heads explode. 

So this is why I think that both Liberals and Conservatives are both right and wrong, but in the short term I side with the Liberals because they are the true conservatives insofar as they are committed to the rule of law and to finding practical solutions in a complex, pluralistic, globalizing world. In other words, the real world. Conservatives just want to say No to all that complexity and to live bunkered in their traditionalists hidey-holes and media bubbles and in doing so make themselves unavailable for honest conversation with Liberals of good will.

I see Cultural Conservatives as like people in a burning house, a house that they co-own with Liberals, but would just as soon let it burn if they have to share management responsibilities with the Liberals. Anyway, their real home is in heaven, not in this house, so, yeah, let it burn. We will die with the Liberals, but we go to a better place where we won't have to deal with them anymore because there won't be any of them there.

Is it really more complicated than that? If so, not by much. 

Liberals might be blind to things that the most thoughtful conservatives know and understand, but conservatives in the political sphere have proved themselves over and over again to have nothing positive to contribute. They just say No and then find convoluted ways to justify their support for a sociopath like Donald Trump. Conservatives in America have become more a part of the problem than partners with sane Liberals who are seeking in good faith to find solutions to the most pressing problems we are facing. 

In the long term, I believe what I described above as the German story will continue to play out. And this moves forward through successive moments of Renaissance, moral leaps forward, a la the Iain McGilchrist epigraph. So in future posts, I want to continue to think out loud about this, and I'm interested in anybody wanting to join in to think with me. It's not as if I have any clear program, except to strongly believe that humanity is a sacred project and that humans have within themselves everything they need to transcend their ignorance and delusional thinking if somehow they find the will to do it. 

[A version of this essay originally appeared here in 2019 under a different title.]

Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Bugs Me

I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.

H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1925-29

 

Most educated people share a cosmic imaginary that is shaped more by Newton than by relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and quantum mechanics. While a lot of the freakier things like multiverses, black matter, and worm holes make it into popular science fiction, those ideas don't make it into the everyday way educated people imagine their place in the cosmos. We are taught to see it the way Lovecraft describes it. If you accept the description as he presents it as "factual", the conclusions follow--the cosmos is meaningless and absurd. He's just following the evidence.

I don't mean what I write below to be a personal attack on Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but rather on how his attitude typifies a conventional mindset among many (most?) American cultural elites. From all appearances, he seems to be a great guy, someone you'd enjoy conversing with. But I also know enough about him from his public appearances on Colbert's show (See Note 1) that his view of the cosmos, insofar as such a view follows from the material evidence, aligns with Lovecraft's. It follows, therefore, that for him the cosmos is "a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity". To think anything else is to go beyond the evidence. 

But from my pov his evidence-based rationalist materialism is as naive as the Christian fundamentalist who tells you his religious ideas are absolutely true it follows from what's plainly written in the Bible. The same kind of naiveté affects the Originalists on the Supreme Court. The Originalist and the Fundamentalist both say,  "Just read the words in the text". Rationalist materialists like Tyson say, "Just look at the evidence."

As if it were that simple. All three are naive because they don't understand how their unconscious presuppositions organize and filter the "evidence" or the "words", or how they foreground and privilege some evidence and some words, and background or just plain disregard others that don't fit their interpretations. The problem with grasping the truth is not just to see what's there, but to interpret what's there in the most humanly profound way. Both the fundamentalists, Originalists, and rational materialists fail in that regard miserably. 

Part of what I do here is try to deconstruct what I see as incoherent intellectual positions. It's easy to do with most conservatives, but it's done less frequently with rationalist materialists, who tend to be Liberals. I want to argue that Tyson's ontological presuppositions don't fit with what I'm sure are his sincere feelings of awe when contemplating the cosmos. I'm not arguing that his exuberance is fake, but that his feelings are not adequately accounted for by his rationalist materialism. His mistake is to start with the material facts rather than starting with the wonder. Because he starts with the material facts, he cannot give a satisfying account for the source of the wonder. 

Science studies the the husks and mechanics of the cosmos. What science affirms about them is true until new evidence proves them not to be. I have no quarrel with material facts and evidence. My quarrel is with how an obsessive focus on them crowds out other kinds of knowing that are much more important. 

Science has always been a child of instrumental reason, i.e., more interested in utility than awe, in getting results than contemplating in wonder. And instrumental reason has always been the practical, debunking, snarky cousin who thinks he knows better and who delights to make you feel like a naive idiot if you insist there's anything more. "Prove it", he says. And yet to prove it requires proving the existence of 'red' to someone who sees only in black and white. I'm fine with the kind of scientist who is agnostic about matters of the spirit; it's those who aggressively reject the spiritual--like Tyson--who bug me. There is an honest humility in the first, but a smug condescension in the second. 

Do some rationalist materialists nevertheless feel a genuine sense of awe when beholding the cosmos? Of course, and this capacity for wonder points to something about the human spirit that rationalist materialists like Tyson, because of their presuppositions, are unwilling to acknowledge--that the very possibility for awe requires something that cannot be explained in purely materialistic terms. A sack of chemicals is not capable of awe; one needs a mind and a soul to feel them. 

Neither the Mind nor the soul is a material thing, and all attempts to explain their existence in materialist terms fail miserably. As soon as you flip the sequence from matter preceding mind to mind preceding matter, everything makes much more sense. Why is that so difficult for so many among the educated elite? It wasn't the case even 150 years ago. There's no logical reason for anyone to think that Mind is not anterior to matter even now. It's difficult because of how educated elites--especially those who are most influential in our cultural institutions--are acculturated to privilege scientific knowing in a way that delegitimates any other kind of knowing. 

This priority of mind is what every great civilization took for granted until about the middle of the 19th Century in Europe. Hegel, the last of the German Idealists, died in the 1830s. The great early 19th century English Romantic poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelly and figures like R.W. Emerson were all Platonists. These are people whose attempt to make sense of the world began in wonder. They were the cultural elite of their day. 

What changed in the second half of the 19th century? The causes are hard to adequately explain because overdetermined. But clearly one massive reason obtrudes: Western societies at that time were caught up in an infatuation with how technological innovations got material results. Within a few generations concerns of the spirit or the experience of wonder came to appear squishy and trivial. These were concerns that had no robust relationship to the "real world". They were not the concerns of serious men of action with dreams of making a fortune and shaping a brave new world in their mechanomorphic image.

People have always been greedy and lustful for power. But now the machines magnified their wealth and power and made robust resistance to them extraordinarily difficult. And people who might otherwise resist were seduced: "Look at the results! Don't we all benefit from their greed and powerlust?" We became the first great civilization in the history of the world that could actually take seriously the idea that "Greed is good." There was resistance, but it was always relatively powerless and so easily pushed to the Left Bank, so to say. Not a neighborhood where good citizens careful of their reputations dare to wander. 

But few Americans of good will understood then that in allowing the greedy to have their way, they were trading cultural vitality for material prosperity. Americans are optimists, so it was difficult for them to anticipate how with each passing decade since the mid 19th century American society would become a soulless, hollowed-out shell, and so we have no problem electing soulless, hollowed out human beings to represent us politically.  And even now most don't understand what we've lost--even Liberals. They just adapt, and still they marvel at our technology and about how great the machines are going to make our lives. It's gonna be awesome. What's next? Flying cars and vacations on the moon. Can't wait.

Rationalist materialism is not science; it is a particular kind of metaphysics that follows from a particular interpretation of human experience that has been impoverished by the hypertrophying of instrumental reason. The real question is whether other metaphysical presuppositions that would lead us to a deeper, richer understanding of the cosmos and of humanity's place in it is possible for us in the future. For me, it's obvious where the development of such an alternative metaphysical imaginary should begin--by retrieving the ontological anteriority of mind before matter. 

In the meanwhile, the attempt to rhapsodize about what we know from science has always been to me an attempt to make the best of a fundamentally bad situation. It's akin to marveling  about how beautiful or clever the work of a taxidermist or the cosmetic work of the undertaker. There’s skill in it, and even a kind of beauty, but we're marveling at something that is not so marvelous as the thing was when it was alive. It lacks other deeper possibilities for the cognition of beauty because in the end its object is something abstract and dead, and as such a simulacrum, a faded memory of a living Real no longer believed in. 

So any meaning we see in it beyond the engineering practicality of it seems forced at best and perverse at worst. It feels to me like an attempt to make more of something than is really there to make of it: I want to be entertained and to be in a good mood, so by the gods I’m going to enjoy this unfunny movie no matter what, and laugh at its vulgar, unfunny jokes. Similarly regarding the cosmos, I'm going to feel the awe no matter that it is meaningless, purposeless, random arrangement of atoms. It’s an attempt to force some distant memory of beauty, from a time when humans had a profound capacity for apprehending the sacred, onto something that provides no evidence to justify our feelings of awe. Maybe it's unfair to accuse Tyson of this kind of thing, but I can't help but feel there's a forced, performative qualiity to his cosmic ebullience. 

***

Here's another way of getting at what I'm trying to point to: I'm reminded of the story from Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, where the author describes his having achieved a certain archery skill, which he demonstrates it to his teacher. But the teacher is outraged at the fraud because while he might have got the result that indicates mastery, he achieved that result in a non-Zen, mechanistic way. He took mastering the mechanics as the end rather than understanding that the goal was the transformation of his soul. He did not understand that the mechanical result was a secondary effect. He got the result, but getting the result wasn't the point--an expansion of the soul was. He had the appearance--the husks--of the master archer but not the soul of one. Such a distinction is beyond the scope of our contemporary materialistic imaginary, even for most people who profess to be religious.

Something like that is at the bottom of what I’m trying to get at here. The scientistic cosmologists are technically right about the mechanics, but the soul of their excitement isn’t "right". Their experience of awe should call them to seek for a deeper interpretation of its significance. Their excitement by their own presuppositions is the "illusion of significance", to use Lovecraft's phrase. They're not wrong because what they assert about the facts of the cosmos are wrong so far as it goes; they are wrong because the immaterial they insist cannot exist is the source of their capacity for awe. 

So I’m trying to make the point that scientific truth, which is real, and does in fact have a kind of beauty, nevetheless has gradually come to crowd out another kind of experience of truth, and in fact has come to delegitimate it. That's what happens if you start with facts rather than starting with awe and wonder. The rationalist materialist does not see the legitimacy of this other way of understanding the deep source of truth and beauty, so people who retain some level of soul life--and Tyson is clearly among them--try to eke out what juice they can from an unyielding rock because the rock is all they've got. But it doesn’t work. 

I exaggerate, perhaps unfairly, to make a point. A less exaggerated way of saying it might be that there is something inherent in the human spirit that rightly longs for beauty and to participate deeply in the mystery of Being, but we live in a world whose primary imaginary is shaped by engineering utility and capitalist expediency. This imaginary has progressively crowded out our capacity to experience real beauty and real mystery. If you experienced the real thing, it wouldn't be possible to be a rationalist materialist. 

And It becomes a vicious circle--the more our spiritual capacity diminishes, the more jejeune becomes the most frequent articulations of spiritual experience. Serious people see those who claim to be spiritual as jejeune, and so they reject any kind of spiritual reality as unserious--even if they have had such experiences themselves. Such experiences are for them embarrassing, or are dismissed as merely aesthetic. And so because rejected as unserious, the implications of such experiences are not developed, and because they are undeveloped, there are fewer and fewer people who achieve any substantive level of spiritual maturity. The last place one would expect to find such maturity these days is the churches. It's there, but you have to look hard to find it.

So this is not a personal knock on Tyson; it's about the limitations of his cosmic imaginary. I'm sure his enthusiasm and love of science are sincere. But there is, it seems to me, a mismatch between his very conventional, scientistic-materialist worldview and his understandable need to find a mysterious beauty in it. He connects them in a way that seems fraudulent to me--there's an inherent contradiction in it that most people--including Tyson--are oblivious of, and accept without thinking it through. In the end, I'm just saying that If he took the second impulse--his capacity for awe--more seriously, it would lead to his undermining of the first--his materialist presuppositions. 

----------

Note 1: I'm thinking in particular about one of his appearances on Stephen Colbert. In the clip below you'll see how incredulous Tyson is when he asks Colbert how the "urges of a believer" are compatible with following the evidence.  I've queued this to the point in the video that's most relevant, but watch from beginning if you're unfamiliar with Tyson and his cosmic enthusiasm.  

America's Religious Future

No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to fill the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive. They are meant to be divisive. On the left, the “woke” take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism see themselves as challenging the long-dominant narrative that emphasized the exceptionalism of the nation’s founding. Whereas religion sees the promised land as being above, in God’s kingdom, the utopian left sees it as being ahead, in the realization of a just society here on Earth. After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September, droves of mourners gathered outside the Supreme Court—some kneeling, some holding candles—as though they were at the Western Wall.

On the right, adherents of a Trump-centric ethno-nationalism still drape themselves in some of the trappings of organized religion, but the result is a movement that often looks like a tent revival stripped of Christian witness. Donald Trump’s boisterous rallies were more focused on blood and soil than on the son of God. Trump himself played both savior and martyr, and it is easy to marvel at the hold that a man so imperfect can have on his soldiers. Many on the right find solace in conspiracy cults, such as QAnon, that tell a religious story of earthly corruption redeemed by a godlike force.

Shadi Hamid, "America without God"

I would argue that Christianity has for almost five hundred years had a very serious Calvinism problem. And that Christianity in societies shaped so deeply by Calvinism as America has been needs to be purged of it before its deeper, archetypal humanizing mythos might actually make sense to people of genuine good will. What is reflected in the first two excerpts above are first the left and then the right wing forms of Calvinism, both of which are in their different ways parodies of Christianity. All cultural phenomena at some point become distorted parodies of themselves, but that doesn't mean that the original thing they parody is beyond retrieval. 

But with Calvinism, which is in itself something born of a kind of theological reductionism, a compulsive need for stripping out the metaphorical, the mystery, the depths of human religious experience has more in common with the spirit of Capitalism; with ideas of material progress more than with the spirit of the gospels. Calvinism has reduced Christianity from a deeply moral response to human life to a priggish moralistic, judgmental distortion of it. Catholicism has done it in another way--its legalism and dogmatism share the same fundamental reductionistic neurosis.

So it is no wonder that after the Thirty Years war in the early 17th Century when Catholics and mostly Calvinists went after one another with a brutal violence, unprecedented until the the world wars of the 20th Century, that  many decent and thoughtful people said a pox on both your houses. We don't need the kind of fanaticism that follows from confessional theism. The Enlightenment rationalists were not atheists or anti-religion, but they were anti clerical and anti-fanaticism.

But with each successive decade the God who revealed himself in the gospels became evermore remote. He became the deus absconditus that was eventually better understood in impersonal deistic terms rather than theistic or personalist terms. At best he was a clockmaker god who set the world machine a running, and then left it to us to reverse engineer the thing to see if we could improve upon it, and what followed was a remarkable transformation of the material conditions driven by capitalism, scientific discovery, and technological innovation.

Educated elites still believed that there was some kind of ontological foundation, some underlying transcendentally grounded Logos to insure the intelligibility of the cosmos, but there was no personal God, no God that intervened in human affairs, no God who cared, and so there was very little reason to believe in or care about God. Then after Darwin and Nietzsche, even the idea of a foundation fell away. 

The whole poststructuralist project, insofar as it emphasizes the surface, talks about language and the text as a prison, i.e.,  insofar as it justifies the way language becomes a closed, self-referential system capable of only an ironic snigger at even the mention of things like God or truth or goodness or beauty has run its course. This is less true in the halls of some university humanities departments where it's more important to be edgy than to actually care about what is most deeply true. How can they care about such things when their careers depend on their believing there is no such thing as depth?  

But such edginess, imo, is no longer au courant or avant garde; it's a spent force, and I think that even academics in the humanities are open to a retrieval of mythos. So that's where we have come from, but clearly change is in the air. Even among the educated elite, there's a growing awareness that religion is just not going to go away, and the question is not when we are going to "outgrow" it, but how can its energies be channeled in a way that promotes true human flourishing. For Being religious is baked into the human condition, and the questions is not whether you are religious but whether your religion is healthy or unhealthy.

Here's McGilcrist on the subject:

I have tried to convey in this book that we need metaphor or mythos in order to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not dispensable luxuries, or ‘optional extras’, still less the means of obfuscation: they are fundamental and essential to the process. We are not given the option not to choose one, and the myth we choose is important: in the absence of anything better, we revert to the metaphor or myth of the machine. But we cannot, I believe, get far in understanding the world, or in deriving values that will help us live well in it, by likening it to the bike in the garage. 

The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence.

Iain McGilchrist,  The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11562-11569).

If the country ever recovers from its Calvinism, it might be able to entertain the possibility for such a mythos playing a role in shaping it public discourse. I'm not saying that it should be the dominant voice, but one that has something worthwhile to contribute. I grew up in a world where the Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Daniel Berrigan, Thomas Merton, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, and other Christians played such a role in shaping public discourse. They were respected because of their confessional commitments. There is nobody on the American scene who plays such a role today. Maybe Marilynne Robinson, but while I respect her intelligence and seriousness, I find it impossible to finish any essay or book she's written, and I've tried. Maybe that's on me, but I think it's her Calvinist austerity--and it bears too much of a resemblance to what's described in the first paragraph of the opening epigraph. It's not bloodless, but it lacks elan. There's no mythos in it. 

Something else is called for.

 

Belief and Cash Value

I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately. I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because of its open-endedness, its aptness for the way we actually live and think about the world. It's somewhat simplistic to say that for James 'truth' is what works, but it points us in the right direction. Truth is what has 'cash value'; it's what you have confidence enough in to act on. It's never identical to the Real. At best it gives us a working model for or a map of the 'Real'.

But there is a Real--even if our models of it are only better or worse approximations. There is an ontological foundation behind the models. aka, the "appearances". There's a difference between saying that we cannot know the Real and that there is no Real. There's a difference between saying that all our models about the Real are social constructions on one hand, and that all our constructions of the Real are ontologically groundless or arbitrary or merely serve ideological purposes on the other. Some models are better than others, and what makes them better is the degree to which they align with the Real or are out of alignment with it. 

We are acculturated into working models for how the world around us works, but we should never assume that the model is the Real. It's just something that allows us to navigate in the Real. And over time we individually or collectively make revisions in the model, or we replace it with another one because it works better or because it delivers benefits the older one did not. This is the way science works, but it's also the way we  live our lives if we're sane. Delusion is persistence in the use of a model that no longer works. 

We humans have the understandable tendency to persist in the habits of mind formed by the model we grew up with and got comfortable with. We fear change and we often fear losing something that is precious to us. The mistake fear makes is to think that the 'model' and the 'Real' are the same thing, that to lose the first is to lose the second. But it's liberating when you come to understand that's just not true, that our loss of one model does not mean the rejection of what it modeled, but that we have a need for a better model, one that accounts for the data--for our experience--in a richer more robust way. It is only important that we strive to be in the best possible alignment with the Real. When the old model becomes an obstacle to that, it must be discarded. 

The problem with modern materialistic Liberalism is not that it is misaligned with the Real, but that it filters out too much of it. It privileges the objective and what is given to the senses, and it dismisses as "subjective" what is given to the heart and to the spirit. It scoffs at the idea that the poets, not flat-souled technocrats, should be the true legislators of humanity, because they are the flat-souled technocrats who have no idea how spiritually impoverished their worldview is.

Our culture is in deep need of renewal, and that will only happen when, to use Iain McGilchrist's analogy from Nietzsche, the "Emissary"--the technocracy--once again serves the "Master"--the artists, prophets, and philosophers through whom the depths of Real are disclosed. If human beings are both angels and beasts, the problem with Liberalism is its hypertrophying of what is real about the second and hypotrophying the first. This leads to the kind of imbalances that we are suffering in the U.S. today, but also in every developed society in which the spiritual dimension of our humanity has become hypotrophied and trivialized, i.e., as having no 'cash value'. 

But materialist Liberals are better aligned with the Real than reactionary conservatives. Materialist Liberals navigate in a world that is shaped by the materialist presuppositions, as inadequate as those might be, that shape our dominant and now rather rickety social imaginary. Materialist Liberalism's social imaginary is our model of the Real, whether we feel comfortable within its constraints or not. And so it's what we use until something better replaces it. Reactionary conservatives are right in their critique of the spiritual poverty of a materialist social imaginary, but they fail to persuade because they don't provide a model that works better, if by working better we mean balances the spiritual with the material, the angel with the beast.  

It's this pragmatic view of truth that has been at the heart of my critique of Conservatism. Conservatives too often persist in habits of mind that are no longer adapted to the world that we live in. Liberals are not the cause of the changes that conservatives lament. They are not to blame. They are not bad people. They are people who simply went with the flow rather than to have resisted it. And most live perfectly decent lives within its limitations.

Early Liberals saw that the old premodern model wasn't working very well, and it really wasn't. The Thirty Years War de-legitimated for good reason confessional allegiances. Something better needed to be found. And they developed a new model that brought us levels of material property and technological advancement unimaginable within the premodern social imaginary. But it left behind much that was valuable, and, as I've been writing here for years, the task for us going forward is to retrieve much of what has been left behind. But retrieval in not reaction. Retrieval accepts the world given to us by materialistic Liberalism, and seeks now to spiritually enrich it. 

So thoughtful conservatives were not wrong in recognizing that important dimensions of human experience were lost in the shift to modernity. If there are aspects of the Real that they know about and which are not part of the contemporary social imaginary, they must work to develop a model that delivers a robust account that has advantages the materialist Liberal model lacks. I don't see anybody on the Right who is doing that in a way that maps a way forward. I think a big part of that is because those who are temperamentally inclined toward the Right don't believe there is a way forward; they believe "progress" is a liberal delusion. Nevertheless, my challenge to religious conservatives is hold fast to the Real that has been filtered out by modern habits of thinking, but to trust in their belief that God is Good, and that because he is our movement in history is toward the Good. 

For this reason I think of myself as a political progressive. I believe that there is a movement in history toward the Good, that the arc of history does in fact bend toward justice. Nevertheless I do not consider myself a Liberal because I think that Liberalism no longer works. Look around you. Is the world given to us by liberalism working?  It brought some short-term advantages, and it's understandable that some of the West's best minds explored its possibilities, but that Liberal model no longer works. It is deeply, profoundly inadequate. 

As I've written here frequently before, the Liberalism that was the child of the Enlightenment and the source of the optimistic republicanism of 1776, 1789, 1848, the revolutionism of the Paris Commune, and so many others died in Western Europe after by World War I. Bolshevism in Russia morphed into an authoritarianism that had nothing to do with the spirit of '89. This progressive idealism died in the U.S. during the 1960s, (when we said Bye Bye to Miss American Pie). And it died officially during the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China, and everywhere else where the Jacobin spirit of 1789 was its inspiration. It had a good two-hundred year run, but now we're at a very interesting point in history. We're in a cultural/historical slack tide.

Neoliberal ideology has filled the political vacuum for want of anything better, but anything goes and who knows where it's going. It's going to be a rocky ride, and we have to trust in our ability to adapt, and to realize that to cling to habits of mind that no longer work will not preserve order, but rather lead to more suffering and to a more destructive collapse. Better to adapt, to go with the flow, and try to manage things to mitigate the inevitable transitional suffering as best we can. We need to be prudent, but not fearful. Fear almost always inclines us to make the wrong choice. 

***

We take for granted the solidity of world around us, and yet we also understand, even if only abstractly, that the way we experience it is profoundly shaped by our acculturation. Our experience of the world is shaped by habits of perception and thinking that enhance or filter out aspects of the Real. At any given moment, we only experience and understand what our acculturation has programed us to see or understand. Our habits change when we are forced to adapt to changes in our environment. We resist the change, but sooner or later we make it when we come to understand that we receive benefits from the change that our current habits prevent. This is Pragamtism 101.

We change our habits because we discover the benefit of the change on our own or because we imitate those whom we notice are thriving because they have already made the change. And when our habits change, as they did when the medieval model broke down to make way for the modern, our experience changes. This is not a process that moves quickly. It happens slowly from generation to generation. But the world given to the French peasant in the 18th Century has more in common with his contemporary in China than it does to the French bourgeois information worker employed in a glass tower in Paris.

The biggest cultural gulf is not defined by whether one is Asian or European, Christian or Hindu, but by whether one's habits of mind are modern or premodern. We are now moving into another transition in which the differences will be defined by whether one's mind continues to be shaped by modern habits or by whatever the New Thing, the no-longer-modern modeling of the Real will be. Many are living intensely aware of our being in this slack tide, and it's not easy to flourish in such a time, but it's interesting.

And so because we are now living at a time when the modern model has broken down, we live with modern habits of mind for want of better ones. And so those of us who recognize this, especially if we are Christians, have a special opportunity and responsibility to develop new habits of mind that are both inspired by the spirit of the gospel but which also have  "cash value" in the Jamesian sense, that model the Real in a way that works. The biblical term for cash value  is "fruits".

Jamesian Pragmatism brackets questions about metaphysics, but it recognizes the central role that belief plays in shaping the world we work in and think about. So I consider myself a Jamesian Pragmatist when it comes to understanding the real world we live in, but I combine that with a Christian Neoplatonic metaphyisics concerning the ontological grounding of the Real. The Real is real, and while it transcends our models of it, it provides an ontological foundation for those models.

If the test for any belief system is its 'cash value', the burden on Christians is to prove that its beliefs deliver. It has to deliver meaning that makes sense in the real world that we live in, and it also must help us to be productive in the world in a way that has advantages that others would notice and imitate. It happened in the Roman world as that world slowly disintegrated; it could happen in the modern Liberal world as it continues its disintegration. I accept, in a Jamesian key, that the best we can do is develop working models that map reality in ways that work. Do we have enough faith in our model to actually live by it and shape our life by it? Can we be ruthlessly honest about whether it is working for us or not?

***

If the 19th Century was a time when the Western social imaginary--its model of the real shifted from mind-dominated model to a matter-dominated model, we've been undergoing a shift, at least in some precincts of the culture from matter to mind. We see it in popular culture in the way that “believing” no longer has the pejorative connotations it once had. It’s possible now to entertain metaphysical questions in a way that it was not even thirty years ago. That much of it feeds a spiritual narcissism that is hard to take seriously because it just isn't is beside the point. There's an openness to a new story, a new grand narrative, a new Jamesian model if it can deliver cash value. 

Since Kant, metaphysics has been suspect; it was perceived by the mainstream of western thought to be about believing something rather than really knowing it, and “believing” until recently was considered a weakness of mind. And for lots of people whose habits of mind are still modern, it still is. But one of the pillars of the postmodern critique of modern rationality has been that most of what we think we know is really only what we believe. Our truths—even scientific facts like our model for the atom—are just provisional maps that have meaning only insofar as they work, i.e., have  explanatory power that allows you to work with them, but they make no pretense of understanding the 'thisness' of the atom. That's open to different interpretations, and I would say the same is true for biological evolution. It's for now a provisional map; it works, but no one can claim to know with certainty the 'thisness' of evolution. What we know about it is open to different interpretations. 

The postmodern thinkers recognize this, and while I don't buy into the nihilism that many of them think is the ineluctable consequence of their critique, I find what they say interesting because their mood of "deconstruction" reflects accurately the spirit of our decomposing age. I have the same relation with Marxism. I find much value in its critique of capital, but I reject the materialistic metaphysics and its prescription for a cure. Marxism gives us a good map for understanding how capital works; it gives us a deeply inadequate model for something better. 

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said. Can we show that there is more 'cash value' in our model?  And such a project starts by acknowledging the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture. 

‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another. And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

Now I don’t want to equate this popular idea of believing with the deeper and more mysterious phenomenon we recognize as religious faith, which has a cognitive dimension that the popular idea of believing does not, but it bears a family relationship to it. It can have heuristic value. The practical benefits of belief have a long heritage from St. Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, to Pascal’s “wager” to the pragmatism of William James, to the prescriptions of our current health care professionals who have noticed that people who have religious practices live happier, healthier lives. 

This is just another way of saying that the metanarrative precedes the ethical. What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. Whatever narrative we ultimately choose to model the Real for us opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to. But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply long for. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. Even nihilism. If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals. 

So I hope  I can count on the flexibility and adaptability of my readers as I try to make my case for the plausibility of my beliefs. And I hope I've made the  case today for the idea that there are worse things that you can do than to believe something.  And if 'belief' is where it's at, why not loosen it up a little, get wild and crazy and see if it works. The worst that can happen is that it won't, and then we'll make the necessary adjustment. But anything is better than the thing we have now, which just isn't working. The bottom line is whether your beliefs lead you to  live a fruitful life or one that is sterile and puerile.

[Ed. This is a revised version of a post of the same title from 2014. ]

Iain McGilchrist, Hegel, and the Coincidentia Oppositorum

Ultimately the principle of division (that of the left hemisphere) and the principle of union (that of the right hemisphere) need to be unified: in Hegel’s terms, the thesis and antithesis must be enabled to achieve a synthesis on a higher level. Split-brain patients can tell us a little about this level from their experiences outside the lab, in their encounters with life; for they appear to have problems with dreaming and imagination. In the case of dreaming, it may be that it takes place but that the difficulty lies in the left hemisphere having access to it, and therefore being able to report it. But one can see that the generation of the greatest feats of the human spirit require integration of both hemispheric worlds, and split-brain patients do appear to have an impoverished level of imagination and creativity, suggesting, as I believe to be clearly the case, that integrated functioning of both hemispheres is needed for such activity. The form that that integration takes may be far from straightforward, of course. It may be that, in the absence of the intact corpus callosum, it is impossible for either hemisphere to inhibit the other adequately and stop it from interfering for critical periods. Or it may be a failure of reintegration once the separate business is done.

If the left hemisphere vision predominates, its world becomes denatured (in Heidegger’s terms, there is ‘unworlding’ of the world). Then the left hemisphere senses that something is wrong, something lacking--nothing less than life, in fact. It tries to make its productions live again by appealing to what it sees as the attributes of a living thing: novelty, excitement, stimulation. It is the faculty of imagination, however, which comes into being between the two hemispheres, which enables us to take things back from the world of the left hemisphere and make them live again in the right. It is in this way, not by meretricious novelty, that things are made truly new once again.

The right hemisphere needs the left hemisphere in order to be able to ‘unpack’ experience. Without its distance and structure, certainly, there could be, for example, no art, only experience--Wordsworth’s description of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is just one famous reflection of this. But, just as importantly, if the process ends with the left hemisphere, one has only concepts--abstractions and conceptions, not art at all. Similarly the immediate pre-conceptual sense of awe can evolve into religion only with the help of the left hemisphere: though, if the process stops there, all one has is theology, or sociology, or empty ritual: something else. It seems that, the work of division having been done by the left hemisphere, a new union must be sought, and for this to happen the process needs to be returned to the right hemisphere, so that it can live. This is why Nietzsche held that ‘in contrast to all those who are determined to derive the arts from a single principle, as the necessary source of life for every work of art, I have kept my gaze fixed on these two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysos.’ 

According to Nietzsche, these two gods represented the two fundamentally opposed artistic drives (Kunsttriebe): one towards order, rationality, clarity, the sort of beauty that comes with perfection, human control of nature, and the celebration of masks, representations or appearances; the other towards intuition, the over-riding of all humanly contrived boundaries, a sense of oneness or wholeness, physical pleasure and pain, and the celebration of nature beyond human control, as she really is.

It will be appreciated that this contrast does not correspond neatly to the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere--more, in neuropsychological terms, to the frontal lobes versus the more ancient, subcortical regions of the limbic system; but since, as I have emphasised, such distinctions carry with them implications for the division of the hemispheres (in that the right hemisphere is more in touch with these ancient and ‘primitive’ forces, though modulating them importantly in many respects), they have a relevance to the subject of this book.

The left hemisphere knows things the right hemisphere does not know, just as the right knows things of which the left hemisphere is ignorant. But it is only, as I have tried to suggest in earlier chapters, the right hemisphere that is in direct contact with the embodied lived world: the left hemisphere world is, by comparison, a virtual, bloodless affair. In this sense, the left hemisphere is ‘parasitic’ on the right. It does not itself have life: its life comes from the right hemisphere, to which it can only say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’.

...the relationship between the hemispheres entails more than an equal and symmetrical participation of the two: there is an asymmetry between the principles of division (left hemisphere) and unification (right hemisphere), ultimately in favour of union. Heidegger was not alone in seeing that beauty lies in the coming to rest of opposites, that have been sharply distinguished, in the connectedness of a harmonious unity. The need for ultimate unification of division with union is an important principle in all areas of life; it reflects the need not just for two opposing principles, but for their opposition ultimately to be harmonised. The relation between union and division is not in this sense, once again, equal or symmetrical.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 5568-5611). Yale University Press.

I know--that's a long excerpt. But read it again after reading what I've written below.

So this is meant to be a companion piece to "Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum". I should mention here that in the same way that Apollo and Dionysos do not neatly correlate with left and right hemispheres as McG stipulates above, neither do Serpent and Dove. My interest here is not primarily neuroscience, but if you are interested in how this larger theme of the coincidentia oppositorum is grounded in neuroscience, read the rest of McG's book.

This book is itself an act of imaginative synthesis, an enacting of the coincidentia oppositorum in its own right, using philosophy, primarily drawing from German philosophy from Fichte through Heidegger, with an occasional tip of the hat to Wittgenstein and Merleu-Ponty--to effect a synthesis between science and art by helping us understand how both hemispheres play an essential role in producing both.

The excerpt above is from Chapter 5, "The Primacy of the Right Hemisphere", and in subsequent pages in that chapter he explains Hegel's concept of aufhebung with a clarity that you won't find in Hegel. The German word is usually translated as sublation in English, which of course means nothing that any normal human could find helpful, so I'll stick with the German, 'aufhebung'.

I will probably have more to say about this in future posts in a more nuanced way, but McG tries to show that Hegel understood essentially what is described in the excerpt above, which is a three-phase movement starting from a state of slumbering, undifferentiated unity, to a moment of negation that says "no" to aspects of the undifferentiated unity. This No is required so that parts of that unity recede, become grayed out so to say, into the background so that something might disembed (in the Charles Taylor sense) and stand out vividly and distinctly in the foreground. This saying No is like the sculptor who cuts away the stone so that an imagined figure might come forth. Or as in The Karate Kid when Mr. Miyagi instructs Daniel in how to prune--negate--the the bonsai tree.

Think only tree.  Make perfect picture down to last pine needle. Nothing exist whole world. Only tree.  You got it?”

Daniel nods.

“Remember picture?”, says Miyagi.  

“Yeah.”

“Make like picture.  Just trust picture.”, Miyagi instructs.

Still hesitant, Daniel asks, “How do I know if my picture is the right one?”

Miyagi confirms, “If come from inside you, always the right one.”

Is Mr. Miyagi talking about the same thing here that Goethe was in his assertion that he was able to see the urpflanze? I think they're barking up the same tree, because otherwise how do we know whether what we think is inside us is the real thing, or is just the bric-brac that have infected our minds from other sources? In other words, what is the difference between Coleridge's distinction between primary imagination and fantasy? Knowing the difference is fundamental.

Miyagi, of course, is pointing to the existence of archetypes, archetypes--in this case the urpflanze--within our mind that must be awakened in order to see the way it manifests in the particularity of this tree. I don't think the pruning--the act of negation--if done correctly, is the artist's projecting his own view of what the tree should look like so much as it is an awakening within his mind to the best possibility for this tree to realize its own inherent beauty. If he were given another tree to work on, a completely different possibility is there to be realized.

So there must be a conversation between the tree and the pruner, and when that conversation is genuine, there is no possibility of a mistake. Or perhaps more accurately, the difference between a great artist and a mediocre one has to do with the quality, i.e., the depth of genuineness, of that conversation, of his or her ability to work from the energy in the archetype in time and space. And so the process of saying Yes--the preconceptual state of awe in which I see a slumbering possibility that wants to be realized--is followed by a saying No, which is to cut away the parts that don't belong or fit.  

This negation is what Nietzsche describes as the Apollonian, and it is in McG's terms the task primarily assigned to the left hemisphere. But the act of negation is 'right' only if it is informed by what the right hemisphere delivers to it, which is the slumbering, i.e., preconceptual, archetype. [See Note 1](

But then there must be a third moment, which is the negation of the negation, the aufhebung, which is the reintegration of the individual thing standing out from the blurred background back into the original life context from which it disembedded. But it just doesn't sink back into the embedded, undifferentiated unity; it returns to the right hemisphere and to its living connection to the whole, but now it lives there with its own differentiated identity and in doing so brings a dimension of heightened awareness to the whole. This is how humans will renew the face of the earth. The left hemisphere in having come to know something in disembedding it from the whole, still knows it, but now experiences it as reintegrated with--in communion with--the life world.

McG says later--

In each [step] there is a progress from an intuitive apprehension of whatever it may be, via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytic understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it has undergone.

So the first mistake is either to remain in a state of slumber; the second, to remain in a state defined by the first negation. The second mistake leads to another kind of slumber that Hegel calls the "unhappy consciousness", when consciousness lives in a world of lifeless objects alienated from their origins in the lifeworld of Being, what I call the Living Real. This was Heidegger's big insight--that in privileging what lies in the foreground, we become captured in a world that in negating the lifeworld in the background becomes forgetful of it, i.e., forgets Being.

The first negation--the disembedding--is essential but to stay in it is a kind of living death. It is consciousness, but the unhappiest kind of it. One of the primary symptoms of the unhappy consciousness from Hume through to many of the postmoderns is to assert that the Self is a fiction. This has always struck me as parodic of the older apophatic tradition in Christianity that knows that everything it says about God is untrue, but that doesn't mean that there is no God. The same can be said of the human Self--almost everything we can say about it is untrue, but that does not mean it doesn't exist. If the human self is created in the image and likeness of God, then it follows that if you can't say anything meaningful about one, you can't say it about the other. But that doesn't mean that we ought not to make the attempt to articulate what we can know even if it is dwarfed by what we don't. We can say true things, but always with a humility that is open to what is still unknown disclosing itself. 

And so McGilchrist does a very interesting thing at the end of the chapter in illustrating the aufhebung as "negation of negation" in explaining what he understand the annihilation of Self to mean in Christian and Buddhist terms:

This idea explains the apparently paradoxical attempt according to the spiritual practices of all traditions to ‘annihilate’ the self. Why would one want to do such a thing, if the point of creation was to produce the infinite variety embodied in the myriad selves of all the unique existing beings in the created world? Would this not be just to strive to reverse the creative process, and return from Being to Nothing? Instead what I understand by this miscalled ‘annihilation’ of the self is a sacrifice of the boundaries which once defined the self, not in vitiation of the self, but in its kenosis, a transformation whereby it is emptied out into a whole which is larger than itself. So it is that neither the bud nor the blossom is repudiated by, but rather aufgehoben in, the fruit.

As I have suggested above, all apparently ‘complete’ systems, such as the left hemisphere creates, show themselves ultimately, not just by the standards or values of the right hemisphere, but even in their own terms, to be incomplete. In addition, whether or not the superstructure holds up, their foundations lie in, and are ‘bootstrapped’ on, intuition: the premises from which the rational system building begins, and even the rational mode of operation itself, that of the value of reason, cannot be confirmed by the process of rationalistic systematisation, but need ultimately to be intuited.

That does not invalidate our intuition in favour of reason, of course, any more than it invalidates other of our intuitions, such as the value of goodness, or of beauty, or of truthfulness, or the existence of God. (Wittgenstein in the Tractatus describes each of logic, ethics and aesthetics as transcendental.) But it does mean that they take their origin from the right hemisphere, and cannot transcend their origins except by reverting to the right hemisphere in a process of sublation or Aufhebung. However much rationalistic systems give the illusion of completeness--and they can be very hard to escape for those who cannot see their weaknesses--they do in fact conceal within themselves the clue of thread that leads out of the maze.

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 5782-5798). Yale University Press. 

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that there is no more important task than to find that thread and to pull on it until it leads us out of this maze. This is not just a task for us as individuals, but it must start with individuals.

I spent so much time with Dolly Parton earlier in the week because I think she points to how aufhebung works in a particular life. This is not a task just for philosophers--it's for everyone. It's the eudaemonic, integrating process by which the human being achieves integrity. People from all walks of life accomplish this. It's not an intellectual project but a moral one. Perhaps in fact philosophers are at a disadvantage because of their tendency to get trapped in the unhappy consciousness and the lifeless abstractions of the first negation. And the two dominant moral philosophies--consequentialism and deontology are more impediments than help. In the end, good people do good things, and so the fundamental moral question is not what is the right thing to do, but how do we become good? Dolly Parton is a better model for us than someone, say, like Immanuel Kant.  

But philosophers like McG help us to understand the nature of the problem and where effective solutions might lie. And a big part of that is pointing to the everyday places where solutions are already being lived so that we might learn from them and adapt what we learn in whatever way is appropriate in our own lives.

None of this matters if it doesn't help us in a deeply existential way to effect a deeper personal sense of integration however imagined--as Serpent and Dove, as Apollo and Dionysos, as Division and Union, or as left and right hemispheres. But the experience of the aufhebung, the coincidentia oppositorum, whether in modest, day-to-day ways or in some ultimate eschatological sense is the only antidote for the alienation and estrangement that we late moderns have come to accept as normative.

We know an aufhebung moment when  we experience it as true Communion--the merging of two or more while retaining their individuality--and as true Beauty, which is the response of the soul when it cognizes the how the archetypes, i.e., the transcendent elements in the mind of God, manifest in a dynamic relationship with the particularity of individual beings in time and space. Sometimes these moments come spontaneously as gifts in little or big ways. At other times they are achieved, as, for instance, the becoming of an integrated self is achieved through a life lived faithfully in response to the myriad ways grace works in our lives. A satori moment is in this sense an expansive aufhebung moment.

'Unhappy consciousness' is the basic graceless condition for most of us, especially the educated late-moderns in North Atlantic societies who don't believe in such things. Our grace detector, in McG's terms, is very much a right-brain thing. Our only collective way out is 'renaissance', which would be to effect on a social-cultural level this aufhebung. This would in part require the re-integration of what most philosophy and science have abstracted from the original life world back into that life world. [See Note 2] This would provide a path toward far richer possibilities for genuine human flourishing than science by itself and its mechanomorphic imagination of the human can ever provide.

There has to be some catalytic moment that effects this. I'm not sure how this happens, but it would be similar to what Jaspers describes as what happened during the Axial Age, but in reverse. If the original Axial impulse was to dis-embed, the Axial impulse to come would require us to re-embed, without losing what was gained in the disembedding.  

++++++++++

Note 1: This idea of archetype and how it operates epistemologically needs more unpacking, but that's for another day. It's enough for our purposes here to say that there is something in the mind that correlates to something in the world, and one's coming into awareness of the extramental reality (percept) requires the stimulation or awakening of an intramental reality (concept). Both participate in an archetypal dimension that provides the transcendental foundation for the possibility of the world's intelligibility. We make progress in knowing more about the world by gradually awakening to it by activating slumbering, unconscious dimensions of our own minds. We call the awakening experience 'having an insight'. But there are insights, and there are INSIGHTS. As the mind awakens, it awakes to what was before unknown in the world in a reverberative dynamic that McGilchrist talks about elsewhere. Also, Coleridge's idea of primary imagination is helpful for how I think about this kind of 'neo-realism'. 

Note 2: My problem with Nietzsche, Heidegger and even with McGilchrist [see "McGilchrist's Reading of Nietzsche's Misreading of Socrates"] is that they think of the post-Socratic philosophical traditions as a mistake, something that permanently damaged us as human beings because of the way that it created an alienation from Being. I see it as a necessary disembedding step in the evolution of consciousness. It's the first negation that enables to individual human being to step out from the collective.  The task before us now is to find a way as individuals and as a collective cultural project to negate the negation, i.e., to reintegrate with the Living Real what we have come to know as disembedded, buffered selves. Science can't do this. It's an artistic, spiritual/moral project. This is the formula for Renaissance.