Part 1: Why Our Society Isn’t Pluralistic

“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 about parsing Brook’s quote excerpted above about why I think of Brooks’s 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 individual beliefs of the people in it. For us that metaphysical imaginary is 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, I still value that idea of pluralism in the abstract, 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. 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 a crude, Social Darwinist public ethos that shapes our bloodsport politics. We think we live in a pluralistic society, but we really don’t. We live in a society that is dominated by Rationalist Materialism.

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 must 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. 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 the mainstream culture considers them mostly as flaky nuisances. 

But hardly anybody on earth–East, West, North, or South–experienced the world that way until about five hundred years ago. 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 capitalist 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 are, 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 their 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 principal, 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 seeks 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 Calvinists 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 England, 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 English and Germans 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 bleached out in Protestant northern Europe, who had by then become quite smugly superior about their 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 both customary cultures, 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 are mostly Catholics and Jews, people who draw on older premodern traditions. 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, consumer capitalism and its media bleached them all out so that they left behind the old customs to become nice, upstanding work-a-holic Calvinists after WWII. Now 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 it either, so they became Unitarians and Transcendentalists, the latter basically an import from German idealism. I know this is oversimplifying, 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 in its Yankee precincts 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. But whatever little was healthful in either Yankee and Southern customary cultures is gone now because post-war consumer capitalism and its information technologies destroyed 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-capitalist 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. 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 defenders of those ideals now, do 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 month 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 in our pluralism, culture-killing energies will remain unchecked, and with the death of culture inevitably comes the death of the human. 

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

 

Part 2: What is a Metaphysical Imaginary & Adding the Vertical Dimension to Ours

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 dimension. Religion, poetry, and other art forms work on the vertical dimension, 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 what inevitably happens to any society that has lost its vertical dimension, which connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no vital culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not “culture” as it has been experienced by humans 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 religious 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.

Religion and poetry are consumer choices, like buying a new car. It serves our needs or it doesn’t, and mostly it doesn’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 it 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 would prefer to live in 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 factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. The current crisis we are undergoing derives from the metaphysical imaginary of the West, and other societies influenced by the West, having developed in such a way that it rejects the legitimacy of knowledge in its public sphere from the vertical dimension. We are a society, therefore, 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 legs, which creates incoherence despite until recently its giving 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, 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 custodians 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 have 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 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.

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 because 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 in some 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.

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. Religions get out over theirs when they try 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. 

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 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 without understanding it 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 America 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 educated swim–suspicions of all grand narratives and all that–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 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 or that the Christian Neoplatonic mythos is the only one that’s possible for the West–or the world. But I do think something like it is called for.

And in any event, I suspect that Christianity is its best version of itself when it is subversive and 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 broad, culture-wide operating system should be able to run compatibly with the Christian mythos as well as with the mythoi of the other great post-Axial religions.

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 culture-wide Mythos would have 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.

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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 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 main 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 the collective public lives.

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 more 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 utilitarian 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 Tolkien, 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.

***

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 sounds like 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 generation or two 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. 

***

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. That 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 last mid-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 admit quite frankly 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.

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 Living 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. 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 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 seeking 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, who does understand it, seeks 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 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.

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 Mythos–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 function 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 2A.  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. Because it isn’t that anymore in any way that matters for contemporary Christian practice or understanding.

They 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 and Greek religious practice, 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. I would argue, however, that German Idealism culminating in Hegel was the last truly creative expression of the great Christian Neoplatonist tradition.

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. Nobody can read Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus and think he was a cool rationalist. And the verticality of Greek philosophy was essential in shaping Christian spirituality in its earliest forms.  

But Barrett is 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. 

So the 19th Century after the fading of Romanticism becomes increasingly individualistic and materialistic, both undermining whatever relevance religion–or 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. Science didn’t disprove religion; it just sucked up all the oxygen that religion needs to respire.

What changes is not the validity and power of traditional vertical knowledge, but rather the incapacity of the growing numbers of the educated to 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 activist, 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 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, especially when Republicans are in power.

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 was at least recognizably human 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-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. Its origin was in a Calvinist vertical mythos, but it was something that eventually found it could live very well without the vertical. Conservatives praise middle-class values, but there is no need for a God 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 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. 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 on the vertical dimension primarily 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 were God substitutes, and their plausibility or legitimacy was measured by the degree to which they solved the problem of modern alienation. They were all 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 churches 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’–in 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 dimension 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. Real men 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 being connected to the 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 matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers. 

Now it’s pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. 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 on the vertical dimension. People used to have such experiences all the time, which they recognized as experiences of the sacred. They still do, but the current fashion is to call them “aesthetic” 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 intersect with the everyday horizontal experience on the vertical dimension of depth. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved when learning of or witnessing a particularly inspiring manifestation of these transcendentals, 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 the 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.

Even in their description of the most intensely vertical, i.e., mystical, of the gospels, that of St. John, they 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.

But the point I want to make here 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, 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. They had or have no one to teach them, but they have 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 track, 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 have discovered 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.

Socratic 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. 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 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 divine 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 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 do that in posts in the future. 

Part 4A: Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

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 Mythos–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 function 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. Because it isn’t that anymore in any way that matters for contemporary Christian practice or understanding.

They 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. 

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 an 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. 

So the 19th Century after the fading of Romanticism becomes increasingly individualistic and materialistic, both undermining whatever relevance religion–or 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 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 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 was at least recognizably human 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-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. Its origin was in a 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 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 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. 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 on the vertical dimension primarily 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 were God substitutes, and their plausibility or legitimacy was measured by the degree to which they solved the problem of modern alienation. They were all 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 churches 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’–in 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 dimension 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. Real men 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 being connected to the 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 matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers. 

Now it’s pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. 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 on the vertical dimension. People used to have such experiences all the time, which they recognized as experiences of the sacred. They still do, but the current fashion is to call them “aesthetic” 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 intersect with the everyday horizontal experience on the vertical dimension of depth. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved when learning of or witnessing a particularly inspiring manifestation of these transcendentals, 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 the 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.

Even in their description of the most intensely vertical, i.e., mystical, of the gospels, that of St. John, they 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.

But the point I want to make here 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, 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. They had or have no one to teach them, but they have 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 track, 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 have discovered 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. 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 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 divine 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 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 do that in posts in the future. 

Part 4B: 

At some point I might go back and organize this series into something easier to follow, but in the meanwhile it’s simply a raw reflection of my thinking through things as I go. The problem/question that I’m working on is why, if most people believe in or are open to an ontology that has a spiritual dimension, are we living in a culture where a materialist imaginary dominates in the most important areas that shape our collective priorities. I’m also interested to think about whether it’s possible for a society to develop an imaginary that operates at a higher moral or wisdom level. What I say below does not depend on your having watched this lecture by John Vervaeke, but it will help. I recommend that you start around the 17-minute mark. Or you can read this first and go back and watch the video. 

Vervaeke is presenting a model for understanding what consciousness does, which is that it provides a way to focus our attention in such a way that it filters out the vast amount of possible information that there is out in the world and in our memories so that we might focus on what is relevant or salient. What defines relevance? Well that depends on your ‘salience landscape’. He references Piaget’s ideas about child development to illustrate how constraints within one’s salience landscape are overcome when one has insights.

In the five-candies example, he points out that most four-year-olds when given the choice between two rows of five candies in which the second row is arranged with more space between the candies, invariably choose the second row because it looks like more. Why? Because it takes up more space. Space, says Vervaeke, is “super salient” for the four-year-old, and super salience is usually a sign that you’re stuck or blocked by unconscious patterns that organize what is salient for you. Normal cognitive development is all about the way you transcend those unconscious patterns by having insights. An older kid will understand–will have an insight–that space isn’t relevant, that the only thing that matters is the number of candies. What’s in the world does not change, but your ability to see with greater clarity and depth does. 

So the point that Piaget and Vervaeke is making is that the way we see the world is not shaped by what’s there but by the constraints in our salience landscape. Cognitive development for all of us, children or adults, is determined by overcoming the constraints of our salience landscapes at different points in our life. The problem  lies not in our being blind to evidence but with the unconscious psychological systems or structures that organize what is ‘salient’ or relevant.

This goes a long way in explaining what has been described as the epistemic bubbles that shape our polarized politics. Kellyanne Conway was mocked for talking about alternative facts, but she would have avoided the mockery if she said instead that there are alternative salience landscapes, or alternative interpretive frames, which is what I think she really meant. Liberals also would do well to understand better how their own salience landscapes shape what facts are relevant, and which are not. 

Our salience landscapes shape the interpretive frame that shapes for us what’s meaningful. If we lived in a society that had a vertical dimension, we would understand that the path of wisdom is a life-long process of self-transcendence, i.e, of a continuous transformation of our salience landscapes. There are an awful lot of people, and many of them are our leaders in media, business, and politics, who haven’t advanced much further than to see the world from within a typical middle-schooler’s salience landscape. Middle School is when we all learn to be Social Darwinists. 

In theory, there is no limit to the kind of transcending that is possible. The wisest among us are those who have progressed furthest transcending their constraints–this is what it means to be truly free–but there are limits to what’s possible for any individual that are set by the collective metaphysical imaginary into which a person is acculturated. You can’t get too far ahead of the pack, or you’re completely in your own world, which is insanity. We all need to keep a foot in the social imaginary of our contemporaries. 

Hopefully those who are more advanced in their self-transcending are beating a path to make it easier for others to follow. And when enough people follow, a tradition develops, and after a while that tradition, if it remains vital, affords to the broader society an alternative salience landscape that more and more people will find attractive, and things can reach a tipping point where the entire society flips its salience landscape so that it is more in touch with the Living Real. This happened in the Axial Age and some would argue during the Upper Paleolithic. But it also explains how imaginaries evolve, including, for instance, how intellectuals, even those in the French nobility, became “Republicans” in the 18th Century. For them it was a combination of seeing that the current ancien regime wasn’t working and that a compelling republican alternative was being presented by the philosophes.

Because these constraints that structure our salience landscapes are culturally conditioned, they shape a consensus reality in very provisional ways. They feel more real than they are. Premodern societies had constraints that are very different from the constraints of modern societies, and so what is relevant or salient for premoderns is very different from what is for moderns. The point is that we see things that our ancestors did not see because what we see as salient from within a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is very different from what is salient for people from within, really, any premodern metaphysical imaginary, whether in the West or anywhere else.

The challenge for us is to be open to the possibility that they saw things that we do not. I am not saying that we have to re-inhabit a premodern imaginary, but that we must retrieve in a postmodern key what was lost, which is the vertical or wisdom dimension. Wisdom was salient for our ancestors in a way it just is not for us, and so the question is whether we are capable of developing a new salience landscape where wisdom can be restored as salient not just for a few individuals here and there, but for the society as a whole. That is the formula for ‘renaissance’ or rebirth–a recovery or remembering of something vital that has been lost or forgotten. 

All of us are working within constraints, and to think that we know T.H.E. truth is always delusional, but some are wiser than others because their cognitive development has helped them see through certain common systematic or structural constraints that come with their acculturation. To use Vervaeke’s language, they have learned how to realize when they are bullshitting themselves.

We can never live without constraints because we need the necessary filters that consciousness provides to prevent our being overwhelmed by too much reality. But some filters (or salience landscapes) are more aligned with what is really there, and the goal is to be continuously trading up, so to say, i.e., to trade in one set of constraints for another that helps you to see more deeply what is really there, to get into, to use Vervaeke’s phrase, “deep contact with the guts of the world”. This was Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s project, and it’s the project of Iain McGilchrist. And as I argue here, it was the project of the great Renaissance artists influenced by Ficino’s Christian Neoplatonism. 

If you watch Vervaeke’s earlier lectures you will see that Socrates is a hero for him for pretty much the same reasons he’s one for me. In Part 3, I talk at length about how Socrates was a master of cognitive development in Vervaeke’s sense. The beginning of wisdom is to know that you don’t know, and Socrates’ project was to confront his interlocutors with the fact that they were bullshitting themselves. It’s all about seeing the limits of conventional wisdom, but it goes deeper.

Socrates understood that the people with whom he was conversing were living within a constrained salience landscape that came with their acculturation. For us those constraints are also shaped by experiences growing up, including trauma, but mostly from what you learn about and submit to in progressive stages how the dreary “real world” works within the constraints of a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary. And the same was true in Socrates day, even if the constraints were structured differently. Whether then or now, our experience is shaped by our acculturation starting with the Oedipus Complex when we learn what our role is in society and to follow its codes.

This is Stage 1 in Kohlberg’s moral development scheme,and his successive stages illustrate how what might be described as ‘moral’ saliency landscapes  progress from pre-Conventional, to Conventional, and, for some people, to post-Conventional stages. [**See note at end of post where I expand on this.] Schiller and Kierkegaard talk about similar shifts in saliency landscapes. The point in all of these is to move beyond or to transcend conventional constraints, and to find something that in contrast was ‘really real’. This isn’t a justification for antinomianism, but for discovering a deeper “law”, a deeper understanding about how reality actually works. And it isn’t just an intellectual exercise, but one that, if successful, enriches and deepens your experience of the world.

[As an aside here, a problem that I have with a lot of New Age spirituality is that it’s all about developing human potential that doesn’t really care that much about moral development so much as it cares about cognitive development. Or it’s what David Brooks calls the “higher selfishness” that is typified by Gwyneth Paltrow’s new-agey lifestyle brand “Goop”. There is no real wisdom without moral development, no matter how much other aspects of human potentiality might be expanded or developed. I don’t think Vervaeke, qua cognitive scientist, falls into this trap. I don’t agree with him about everything, but I respect his moral seriousness and sincerity. Moral seriousness is not a problem for any of the great civilizational post-Axial religions, and that’s why the recovery of the depth dimension must start with them and what they have to say about self-transcendence.

My own contribution to this, for what’s worth, is from a Christian Neoplatonic perspective, but I have the deepest reverence for the other great traditions from which I will always have much to learn. I will argue in a future post that the Christian Neoplatonic tradition does not reject Gnosticism, but takes what’s best from it and the other ancient mystery religions, and integrates them in a synthesis that has the highest level of coherency, scope, and richness. The renewed interest in Gnosticism after Nag Hammadi, while it might undermine a certain kind of wisdomless, conventional, law-and-order Christianity, does not undermine its deepest mission found in the the canonical New Testament, particularly in Paul and John, which is to provide a model for self-transcendence grounded in a moral ontology.] 

Socrates’ elenchus, I argue in Part 3, was a tool to awaken his interlocutors to the constraints of the their salience landscape so as to open them up to the possibility of experiencing what’s really there at a deeper, richer level of perception and understanding. Its relevance for us today lies in that while the elenchus could be used effectively to disabuse materialists of their constraints, the same is true for religious people. The problem with Christians or Buddhists or Muslims or any religious group is the way that their beliefs rigidify to become part of a system of constraints that need to be transcended if they are to truly understand the deeper truths to which such doctrines point.

We are all fools–whether religious or irreligious–if we think that we are not operating under constraints in our current salience landscapes. And all of us–whether religious or irreligious–are all captured by the constraints of a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary, which creates a baseline salience landscape from which we all need to be liberated. It has a tether on all of us. The problem lies in that too many people are too comfortable and too well-adapted to it, and too many of them are making decisions that shape our life together, and not for the better. 

But in the same way that we all need salience landscapes, all religions need doctrines. The idea of doctrine-less religion or religion without religion is silly. It is embraced mostly by people who have strong religious instincts but who are either trying to shake the rigid religious formation in which they were brought up or because they associate these doctrines with the rigid, doctrinaire people whom they understandably find deeply unattractive.

But doctrines should not be thought of as unbelievable things that we believe anyway because we fearfully think that’s what is expected of us–that’s Kohlberg Stage 1. We should think of them rather as invitations for contemplation. We should feel challenged by them. We need to take them seriously because people wiser than we have taken them seriously for thousands of years. They are truths that call us into a deeper relationship with them, and if we approach them in the right way, they will deepen and broaden us, i.e., increase our level of wisdom as they transform our salience landscapes.

A living tradition is one in which the insights of one generation are passed to the next, not as propositional assertions of truth, but in the vitality of the lives lived in that tradition that are exemplary of its wisdom and moral fruitfulness. One is inspired by their lives, and so wants to follow on the path of wisdom and moral fruitfulness they trod before us. So we approach any doctrine in a spirit of learned ignorance. We must assume that we have no idea what the doctrine signifies, but if we are even half alive, we feel that there is something calling to us in it, and we hearken to it. 

So I’ve been arguing that because the salience landscape in which most people today are acculturated is so profoundly shaped by rationalist-materialist assumptions, it is extraordinarily difficult to take spiritual or awakening experiences seriously or to interpret them in a way that might actually be life transforming in a positive way. People will continue to have these experiences, but the question is whether they are having them in such a way that the ontonormativity that challenges them to align their own lives on a higher salience landscape can have a similarly transformative effect in our broader cultural life.

I suspect that what has to happen is that enough people who have these experiences–the 30-40%–will click together at some point in response to some one or some group who presents a coherent interpretation of their experience that creates the conditions that make a next step possible. In other words a new collective salience landscape emerges within a certain group within the culture that becomes a movement, but its appeal lies in that it is continuous with what we have come to understand about reality through science, but reframes scientific factuality not with “alternative facts” but with a compelling alternative salience landscape that meets the criteria for coherence, scope, and richness in a way that nothing available to us now in our collective life does. 

We’ll see. 

Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series 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.

**How I think of Kohlberg’s Six Stages

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic

1. Follow the Rules for fear of Punishment. Example: Teacher’s pet in elementary school who tattles on those breaking the rules. Rules are arbitrary and have no legitimacy except as how those with power define a regime of rewards and punishments. Example of arrested Level 1 development: the slave in any master-slave relationship. 

2. What can I get away with? I’ll do what’s expected of me to avoid punishment, but will do what I want if I’m clever enough to get away with it. Since the rules have no legitimacy outside of an arbitrary rewards and punishments regime, there is nothing wrong with doing what you want so long as you can avoid punishment.  Example: healthy testing of boundaries typical in middle school necessary for developing sense of autonomy.  Example of arrested Level 2 development: Donald Trump. Rules are for other people. I make my own, and I don’t care who gets hurt.

Conventional: Kierkegaard’s Ethical

3. So rules matter because they define what is  “right”, but personal loyalties matter more. I’ll break the rules if it benefits those I love even if it means I’ll get in trouble if found out. Example: It’s wrong to lie, but I’ll tell a lie to protect a friend who will get in trouble if I don’t. Extreme example: The mother with a sick child who will break every protocol–steal, scream, maim or stomp over anyone who gets in the way of her mission–to make sure her sick child gets the best care in a hospital. 

4. Personal relationships matter, but the common good matters more. You can’t just break the rules with impunity because it benefits your family and friends. Example: Socrates submits to his execution despite being offered escape by rich friends. He rejects escape because he does not want to undermine the rule of law in Athens. His personal well being and the pain of his loss for his friends is not as important as the larger common good. 

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard’s Religious

5. The rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi.

6. The rules might be right, but in some instances circumstances require that I break them and suffer the consequences. K’s teleological suspension of the ethical. Example: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed for his involvement in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler.

How one’s moral thinking and actions develop from one stage to the next depends on a lot of factors, including challenges posed in particular existential situations. Not everybody is confronted with the choice whether to get involved in a plot to assassinate a genocidal madman. But that’s the point. The rules at one level don’t determine thinking or behavior in situations where they don’t apply, and the morally mature person understands the difference.

And it’s usually a personal crisis of some sort that forces a choice about one will move from one level to the next. Socrates is not the moral inferior of Bonhoeffer; it’s just that the choices that they were confronted with were different and so required a different order of thinking. And it could be argued that Socrates was condemned for the same reason that MLK was shot and Bonhoeffer hung because each in their different way was perceived as destabilizing the existing social order. So really Socrates’ moral mission was enacted on Level 5/6, even if his choice to submit to his execution was made on Level 4. 

I should also point out that most of our public moral thinking in politics and business operates on the level of utility, which never goes beyond Levels 1 and 2. The highest level of moral development that you’ll see dramatized on TV is Level 3, which is that family and friend loyalty trumps everything else. But most of our popular culture in TV and films operates only on Levels 1 and 2 where Level 2 people think of themselves as uebermenschen and everyone else as Last Men. I’m sure that’s how Trump thinks of himself, as a superman who lives in a realm beyond good and evil. He, and other masters of the universe like him in the political and business spheres, confuse the Pre-Conventional with the Post-Conventional, which is what N really means in his talk of beyond good and evil. Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional thinker who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can’t tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension–no wisdom–which provides criterial with which to evaluate their thinking and behavior. 

 

Part 5: Salience Landscapes and 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 defiance of it.

We’re at a point where we find it quite understandable what God might have been thinking when 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 hysterical crusade against Clinton, the oxycontin plague, the frequency of mass shootings,  the invasion of Iraq, the the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of the Tea Party, the rise of white nationalism, the rise of Trump,  and now tens of millions of people living in a 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 from going there. I fear we will if we don’t find a way to reboot.

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. A salience bubble organizes our experience as in a virtual world alienated from the living, real world. 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.

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 relevant 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 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 her 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.

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 keep them prisoner?

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 those 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 them. 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 will resist them for fear of being captured and killed by them. This is a zero-sum situation–either eat or be eaten. 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 the Living Real.

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.” 

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 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’s 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. 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 landscape 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 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 landscape determines as most relevant. And besides, there is a Plan B for those who make the decisions. Elite decision makers very rarely suffer the consequences of their mistakes. The rest of us do.

***

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 (1) how broad the scope of their knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, (2) how coherent its integration of its knowledge on both dimensions, and (3) how both the scope and coherence of our knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to our experience. Religious fundamentalism fails by that 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, and richness 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 and coherence, but lacks vertical scope and richness. Religious subcultures like the Amish or Hasids have coherent, 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. 

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. Withing 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, the meaning that they create ex nihilo. It’s not that they don’t believe in God; it’s just 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 what it is about humans that they, unlike animals, need meaning and purpose isn’t a relevant 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. Better to just use the snake oil of their own making. 

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 captured by the constraints of the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary.

It naively assumes that real knowledge isn’t possible on the vertical dimension, or they dismiss 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.

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 philosophy. 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 an impediment that it is 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.

Nevertheless, the bias within a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is to see Mind as somehow produced by matter, which makes no real 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 matter is in itself, it has more the qualities of mind than whatever we used to think was the mind-independent character of matter 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 legitimate but incoherent, and because it’s incoherent, it shouldn’t have the 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 checkers. 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 need to face what’s coming. 

Religion 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. 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 and airplanes?

The problem is not about a dispute concerning what’s really there, but with the efficacy–the scope, coherence, richness–of different metaphysical imaginaries. It’s not about what’s there but about how our metaphysical imaginary limits what we can see and experience. The problem is not that people don’t believe in spirit/mind, but that they live in a metaphysical imaginary in which materialist explanations are the only ones that have legitimacy. The problem is that our intellectual elites–and so almost all legitimate intellectual discourse–are so captured by Rationalist Materialism that they are in the predicament of the captives in the mirrored room described above. 

The argument of this series is that to refuse the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical because it doesn’t fit within the dominant rationalist materialist imaginary 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. 

Part 6: Vervaeke’s Awakening Series vs. My Genealogy Series

Plato lived at a time when the inner crisis of the traditional Greek polis and the religion intimately bound up with it had become evident, and there seems to be no reason to deny that this had a profound effect on his decision to abandon the public arena to cultivate the wisdom necessary to build a more just human society. The reform of the polis meant the reform not only of its citizens, but of its religion as well. If society is out of joint, it can only be because humanity’s whole attitude toward the universe and its divine source was in need of repair. Plato’s philosophy is powered by an unremitting desire for reform: personal, political, and religious.

Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 1991, p.  25

If you’ve  been reading my “A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity” series, you are aware that I just learned of Vervaeke’s “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” series of YouTube video lectures. If you are intererested in what I am doing, you will be interested in what he’s doing. We are barking up the same tree. But I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain that while much, if not most, of what I’m arguing is consonant with Vervaeke, there are a few critical places where we disagree. At the time I wrote Parts 4A and 4B in this series, I had only watched up to his Lecture 10, which I found very helpful in making my argument for the restoration of a metaphysical imaginary that had restored a vertical or transcendent wisdom dimension. I have to-date completed watching his lectures up to 24 on Hegel. 

It’s clear that Vervaeke wants to restore a wisdom dimension to our way of knowing as much as I do, but he’s mainly interested in establishing its legitimacy from a cognitive-science point of view. I think that his main concerns are to establish a broadened therapeutic model that establishes scientifically legitimized psycho-technologies that help people overcome their individual meaning crises. I am more interested in the broader social-political dimension of the meaning crisis and how that might be resolved in a way that enjoys broad consensus. I know–good luck with that. Nevertheless, however unrealistic such a project might seem at this moment, things do change in unexpected ways. So I do not see this as an idle exercise, but rather, if nothing else, as something that might be of use for my grandchildren. 

Vervaeke recognizes that these psycho-technologies are not new, and he’s at pains to show how they were understood and used in shamanic relgious traditions but more importantly in the great Post-Axial religious traditions. His first 24 lectures tell the story of Post-Axial cognitive development by spending a little time with Buddhism, but mostly by tracing out historical developments in the Western religious or “awakened” thinking from Socrates, through the Gnostics, Neoplatonists, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and on to the Romantics and Hegel. Considering its ambitious scope, I think he provides a very solid survey in a very concise format. I have a quibble here and there, but nothing serious. I think more positively about Romanticism than he does, for instance. 

We differ in a more significant way in that I have a broader concern, and a more ambitious argument to make, which is reflected in the epigraph. The Socratic/Platonic project was to reform the religion or metaphysical imaginary of early Hellenism. Their project initiated the Western wing of the Axial Revolution. The crisis in early 5th/4th century Athens is very different from the crisis that we face, but I don’t think the solution is all that different, which is a recovery of the vertical or transcendent dimension that first broadly emerged in the mid-first millennium BCE. The loss of this dimension is what we now think of as the death of God. I think of this loss as temporary and aberrant. I believe it can be found again, but in a way adapted to a post-Positivist, global cultural milieu. 

It goes to what I wrote in Part 1: Lots of people have beliefs and experiences that occur on the vertical dimension of human experience, but those experiences are out of joint with the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates in techno-capitalist/Neoliberal societies. And so that forces them to live in meaning bubbles that have little or nothing to do with the public world in which they live day-to-day. We think we live in a pluralistic society, but we really don’t. Rationalist Materialism is not on an equal footing with other possibilities; it dominates all of our thinking when it comes to decisions that we make in the economic and political spheres–and plays an outsized role in shaping thinking and imagination in the cultural sphere as well. This is despite the fact that 95% of people are open to the possibility that there is a spiritual dimension, and 30-40% of people have had what Vervaeke calls awakening experiences, i.e., temporary experiences of spiritual provenance.

Vervaeke and I would probably both agree that most of those people who have had such experiences go back to sleep again and go on with their lives as if they never happened. The hypnotic, soporific power of Rationalist Materialism and its shadow spawn, techno-capitalism (See Note 1), is so, so powerful. Only a few find the resources within the culture to interpret and develop those experiences in a fruitful way. Religiions used to do that kind of work, and still do here and there. But Vervaeke’s solution is to establish scientifically legitimated psycho-technologies that when they become broadly available will help individuals to transcend their individual crises of meaning. I’m all for it, and more power to him. We disagree in that I think that the broader culture needs a richer, broader way of interpreting these experiences. In other words, we need mythos. 

Vervaeke makes it clear that while he recognizes the significance of the Axial Revolution, he doesn’t think that its use of mythos is retrievable because it is not plausible for us as late moderns after the death of God, and he seems to think that cognitive science can do the job that mythos once did. Maybe he’s right, but I’m dubious. I understand why he thinks this–it’s hard to imagine anything else within a metaphysical imaginary dominated by Rationalist Materialism. I’m trying to imagine a way out of those constraints–or at least how transcending the constraints of Rationalist Materialism and its positivist biases might be possible. If individuals can do it in a fruitful way, groups can, and if groups can, then so can the larger society. This has happened historically before, and it can happen again. Whether it will or not, I don’t know, but I think that if Vervaeke and his colleagues in cognitive science are successful in their project, it prepares the way for the success of what I’m arguing for. 

Vervaeke probably wouldn’t agree because he seems to be in the religion-without-religion camp, which, imo, is unsustainable even if it were desirable. Religionless religion = contentless wisdom. He argues that the content given in awakening experiences isn’t relevant. In one of his lectures he says that some people have experiences of higher consciousness after which they say, “I know now that there is a God,” and others say, “I am sure now that no God exists.” So he seems to think that the content of one cancels out the content of the other in a way that makes both unreliable testimony and as such not legitimate knowledge. And besides, knowledge isn’t the point. Overcoming the constraints is. 

I understand that some people find the religionless option attractive insofar as it insures against a rigidifying dogmatism, but there are other ways of dealing with that problem without giving up the idea that right understanding of the content given in these experiences is possible and preferable because of the way it can enrich culture. And it fails to address what I feel is the really important problem going forward, which is that a consensus needs to be developed that has enough potency to resist where Rationalist Materialism is dragging us. 

For Vervaeke, fruitfulness is achieved by the individual overcoming or transcending psychological constraints at one level by rising to a higher level of cognition, and I recognize the importance and legitimacy of that. Parts 4A and 4B explore its importance. But surely there can also be a legitimacy that comes from traditions that integrate the broad range of insights of those who have had a broad range of experiences of “higher consciousness”.

There are already sapiential traditions that have the legitimacy of thousands of years of testing truth claims derived from a wide variety of awakening experiences. Sapiential traditions have ways to discern the legitimacy or delusional character of the experience, to take the content that people report regarding their experiences seriously on their own terms, and then to reflect how they might be integrated into a larger, broader understanding so that these experiences might be interpreted in the most fruitful way that expand knowledge on the vertical dimension. This is real knowledge with real content.  

So to take his example about contradictory testimony about the existence of God above: the Dark Night of the Spirit is something recognized in Christian mysticism that in no way contradicts other experiences people have of the radiance of God’s agapic love. In fact the experience of darkness or absence is an indicator of a more advanced state of spiritual development. The two experiences are not contradictory, but different aspects within a bigger picture. The experience of absence is just as much content as the experience of presence. Each is powerful and important, but the interpretation is more important. And if you have the first experience outside the context of a broad, well-established sapiential tradition, you would probably be persuaded that there is no God. The sapiential tradition provides the bigger picture, a picture that hardly anybody is familiar with anymore, apparently not even Vervaeke who has made a sincere effort to educate himself about post-Axial spiritual traditions.

So from my pov, he is doing good work, but it needs to be supplemented. And that’s really the goal of where I’ll be going in the development of my Genealogy series. When I first started it in December, my goal was to make the case for Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary in a postmodern key, and that’s still where I want to go. The five parts that I’ve written so far were attempts to clear the ground, so to say, to do what I can to make such a project at least minimally plausible for the skeptical but open reader. My plan is to show how powerful the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis was for 1500 years, why it broke down, and why and how I think it could be restored–not in a spirit of nostalgia but in a spirit adapted to a postmodern/post-positivist milieu.

I recognize people like John Millbank and the others in the Radical Orthodoxy ‘movement’ as allies in this project, but my goal is to write in a way that is more accessible for the non-specialist. I don’t see what I’m doing as original, but I think I have a good nose for what’s ‘originary‘, i.e., what is connected to the Living Real, which is the origin of anything worth paying attention to. So I see my task as to curate and synthesize the originary work of others, hopefully in a way that is interesting and helpful for those who take the time to read through these long and admittedly first-drafty essays. This is a blog after all, not a book. It’s a record of my learning and thinking about what its implications are. Maybe someday it will turn into a book, but I have no particular ambition to write one. 

The second part–why it broke down–is already laid out in a summary I made of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which can be found here, but in order to do justice to the first part–the power and depth of the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis–I think it’s necessary for me to go deeper and into more detail. And my primary resource for doing this is Bernard McGinn’s remarkably, rich and clear exposition of the entire tradition of Western mysticism in his “Presence of God” series. I’ll also be drawing on Pierre Hadot from time to time, who was a source for McGinn and Vervaeke. McGinn is currently a retired University of Chicago scholar who published the first volume in this series in 1991 and the most recent in 2021, so it spans thirty years (so far?). For the purposes of this “Genealogy”, I will focus primarily on Vol 1, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the 5th Century and Volume 4, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany.

I’m reading in both now at the same time. The first is important for establishing how the Christian revelation and Greek contemplative ‘theoria‘ was developed in the “schools” founded by Plato, Aristotle, and others over six hundred years that culminates in the Plotinian synthesis, how Jews and Christians interacted with this tradition in such a way that culminated in Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysos. Volume 4 is important for the way Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysos were ‘modernized’, so to say, after Albertus Magnus moved from Paris to Cologne in the mid-1200s to lay the foundations for modern science on the one hand, and on the other, the spiritual tradition we now call the Rhineland mystics. The great figures in this northern European Christian Neoplatonic tradition include Albert’s student Aquinas, and their younger contemporary Meister Eckhart, Eckhart’s disciples Suso and Tauler, then Nicholas of Cusa, and later Jacob Boehme. (Is it oxymoronic to be a Lutheran Neoplatonist? A question for later consideration.)

I’ve been arguing for a while that the southern wing of Christian Neoplatonism that flowered in Ficino’s Florentine Platonic Academy is the key to understand the criteria by which great art should be evaluated from the Renaissance through Romanticism–esp., Keats, Shelly, Wordsworth, Coleridge and beyond. But the other little understood Christian Neoplatonic stream tracks through the Rhineland toward German Idealism. If German Idealism is incomprehensible without the Rhineland mystics, neither are they comprehensible without understanding the proto-Christian Neoplatonism that developed starting with figures like Clement of Alexandria and Origin.

And none of any of this would be comprehensible if there were not an experiential, “awakened” dimension that was the foundation for all their thinking. This is a sapiential tradition that had vitality until the middle of the 19th Century when it hit a wall after Hegel. (Is Wm James an exception? We’ll look into that.) The question now is whether Vervaeke is right that there’s no recovery of the knowledge, qua mythos, that lies on the other side of that wall. I think that it is recoverable, and that this great tradition can be renewed–not just for people at the fringe, but in a way that inspires a broader cultural renaissance. I continue to promote the possibility of renaissance not just because I believe it’s possible but because I believe the alternative is so very, very dark. 

So the plan, for now at least, is to do what I can to understand that tradition better for myself and to do what I can to make it interesting and plausible for readers here who might also be interested to understand it better. The installments over the next weeks  (and months) will explore the Axial impact of Socrates and Plato, the schools that developed from them. For reasons explained above, I’m more interested in this ‘tradition’ not for its various thought systems but for its development of life-transformative psycho-technologies, to use Vervaeke’s term, that afforded experiences of transcendence that grounded their thought systems, which were left-brain-hemisphere attempts to understand the world in the light of their experiences on the vertical dimension. And then the task is to understand how awakened Christian thinkers appropriated these technologies and transformed them. 

———-

Note 1: I just want to clarify that I am not a Luddite, I am not against markets; I am not against innovation, and I am not against rationality, except in its reductively materialist forms. And I am against the tail wagging the dog when the tail is Neoliberal technocapitalism and the dog is the broader society. The tail wags the dog when the dog has no ground upon which to set its feet to resist, and so cannot say No to developments in technocapitalism that are in techno-capitalism’s interests but not the interests of the larger society or of humanity in general. 

 

Part 7: The Bigger Picture 

[For Nietzsche t]he Overman or post-human animal is he who freed himself from those forms of sham religion known as Nature, Reason, Man and Morality. Only this audacious animal can peer into the abyss of the Real and find in the death of God the birth of a new species of humanity. As with Christian faith, the only place to begin is with a confession that our hands are steeped in the blood of divinity. Man, too, must be dismantled, in so far as he is modeled on the unity and infinity of the godhead. He is defined so completely by his dependence on his Creator that the two must fall together. There can be no obsequies for the Almighty without a funeral ceremony for humanity as well. The death of God must herald the death of Man, in the sense of the craven, guilt-ridden, dependent creature who bears that name at present. What will replace him is the Overman. Yet in his sovereignty over Nature and lordly self dependence, the Overman has more than a smack of divinity about him, which means, ironically, that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him.

That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware. The Incarnation is the place where both God and Man undergo a kind of kenosis or self-humbling, symbolized by the self-dispossession of Christ. Only through this tragic self-emptying can a new humanity hope to emerge. In its solidarity with the outcast and afflicted, the crucifixion is a critique of all hubristic humanism. Only through a confession of loss and failure can the very meaning of power be transfigured in the miracle of resurrection. The death of God is the life of the iconoclast Jesus, who shatters the idolatrous view of Yahweh as irascible despot and shows him up instead as vulnerable flesh and blood.  

–Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

It’s clear to me, anyway, that our life here on earth has a purpose, and that the future of the earth is central to that purpose. And yet it’s clear that for most Christians this history, or any sense of humans being part of an evolving historical drama, has little to do with their understanding of who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. I think there is a mythopoetic narrative possibility here that awaits its moment to emerge into a legitimate space that has not yet been prepared for it. We live now in a time when all grand narratives are suspect, but that will not always be true. It’s just a sign of the temporarily “decadent” stage through which we must pass in our time. We are at a historically low slack tide now, and soon enough we will be dealing with the flood tide and its aftermath.

In the meanwhile, the default Christian mythopoesis about history seems to depend strongly on the “exile” model–history is jail time: we do our time on the earth following the rules as best we can so that we can get out of jail on good behavior and go to our heavenly home in the spiritual pleroma. This model, in my opinion, is more Buddhist or Hindu than Christian. In such a model the earth is a prison to be escaped. I think of the earth rather as our ailing, semi-comatose mother whom humans must find a way to nurse back to health.

And so the exile model also enervates rather than energizes progressive political action by focusing on goals to be realized in eternity rather than in history. The Enlightenment idea of historical progress has likewise suffered enervation. Like all grand narratives, its assumptions have been debunked by postmodern deconstructive skepticism. And so the secular Left, because of its now postmodern assumptions, has no plausible narrative of human progress that it can embrace unironically, and so has become feckless in the face of threats from a more robust, grounded, regressive Right.

At its energetic best the postmodern secular Left musters something like Occupy Wall Street, but because of its anarchic, foundation-less ethos, it has no ground to stand upon and so to sustain itself. The Enlightenment model, including its Marxist offshoots, was always flawed because too dependent on a flattened understanding of the human being and its aspirations, and it is hard for me to see any plausible sustainable resistance to the Right that is not grounded in an imagination of human possibility that is deeper and richer than the flattened, postmodern model of the human to which the secular Left largely subscribes. 

But because the Enlightenment narrative for human progress has failed does not mean that another narrative of human progress cannot be framed. And I would argue that once there is a broader willingness to recognize that Christian ontological foundations can legitimately provide a framework for its development, Christian thinkers and activists can play a pivotal role in shaping such a future narrative. That foundation is already there; it always was. The Enlightenment narrative grew from a reductive misappropriation of it. We are clearly not at a point where the broader culture and its public intellectuals are willing to recognize that fact, but it’s interesting to me that a Marxist like Eagleton seems to be working his way toward it, and that is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Maybe, maybe not. Eagleton, at least, understands the terms of the problem.

***

Owen Barfield in his book Saving the Appearances provides a mythopoetic way to think about the Christian meaning of history that I, at least, find compelling. For me it’s a heuristic device, a provisional way to organize and hold random things I believe together with an openness to a better way presenting itself. Barfield understood the problem of modern cultural decline in much the same way Nietzsche did, but he frames it as a necessary, if risk-fraught, middle phase in the unfolding of a larger historical drama. This drama extends back in the evolution of human consciousness to what he calls Original Participation and forward to Final Participation, i.e., from the metaphorical Garden of the beginning times to the metaphorical New Jerusalem of the far-distant end times, from the participation mystique of totemic and animistic peoples, to the communion of saints envisioned in Revelations.

These ideas are similar to Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mythopoesis regarding the movement of history from the Alpha to Omega, from creation of the cosmos to the true telos of history at which point all things converge in Christ. Both Barfield and Teilhard take evolution seriously, but in a way that hearkens back more to Hegel than to Darwin. (See Note 1) The mechanics of Darwinian biological evolution are mostly accepted but subsumed into a larger movement that is geist-driven, i.e., spirit or mind driven–or, as I would put it, grounded in an understanding of how the world is dynamically grounded in the Logos, what I have been calling in other posts the Living Real. 

Like Nietzsche, Barfield agrees that the modern era has been a time in which the last vestiges of transcendent meaning as a ‘given’ in the world have disappeared—transcendent meaning is no longer something a truly modern consciousness experiences as coming from out there. Moderns experience meaning partly from acculturation, but while that provides the scaffolding, the most intense experiences of meaning are subjective and constituted from within. But with this enhancement of subjectivity comes social fragmentation, anomie, fecklessness, enervation–and with it the progressive undermining of the cultural scaffolding that has brought us to this postmodern moment. So the solution must be to awaken capacities in the human soul and the soul of the earth (which are the same thing) in order that meaning in the world be reconstituted. The movement toward Final Participation is a movement toward an intersubjective communion: the alienation of the subject-object rift is repaired, all beings become Thous. The lion lies down with the lamb, and swords are refashioned into plowshares.

For Nietzsche this reconstituting project assumes a world without grace and without the possibility of communion–it is radically individualist. If there is any meaning to be created, it derives from the ontologically groundless uebermensch and his surrender to the will to power. For Barfield’s postmodern Christian, the reconstituting project derives from an ontological grounding in the Logos that dwells in the depths of the human soul and the soul of the world. For Barfield it is possible, indeed essential, that meaning be constituted by a different kind of ‘overcoming’ man, not Nietzsche’s uebermensch, but rather the Logos awakener, the man or woman in whom the shattered or broken image of the Logos in whose likeness they were created can itself be reconstituted: awakened, healed or reintegrated into a joyful communion with the cosmos.

Whether currently believable or not by most non-believers, this narrative opens up human possibilities rather than closes them off, and it provides a frame that helps to shape a humanity-enhancing political agenda. The bigger problem as I see it is that most Christians don’t believe it either because they are still locked in the Exile model. If Christians don’t live it, or something like it, they offer no real alternative to the prevailing narratives of the secular Left or the inflamed Right. 

If for the postmodern Christian, meaning is fundamentally subjective, that does not mean it is arbitrary or ungrounded. It just means that the grounding is intrinsic, and lies within the supple, grace-inspired, Logos-grounded human heart rather than in the cultural nomos. We are still in a fraught intermediary stage insofar as we still feel compelled to privilege objective truth as real truth, which we still see in the vestiges of in positivistic science. But the understanding of truth as subjective to which Kierkegaard pointed, and then later Nietzsche, directs us to an understanding the rest of us have to catch up to. For both the postmodern Christian and Nietzsche, truth is not static and timeless; it’s creative, dynamic, and evolving, but if for Nietzsche truth is basically stuff the “post-human animal” makes up as he goes along, for the postmodern Christian it is deeply grounded in a creative, evolving understanding of the Logos’s awakening in history. It is, therefore, about discovering depths and potentialities in the Logos-grounded human being heretofore unrealized. For Christians the image of those potential capacities fully realized is the risen Christ. 

***

An epochal shift occurred on the first Easter that has even now  only just begun. The nature of this shift didn’t manifest itself broadly in the West until the time of the Renaissance and the dawn of the Modern period when individual inwardness and the autonomy of the thinking self became more broadly experienced by humans for many reasons, not the least of which was the broadening of literacy after Gutenberg. Modernity has been very much the Age of the Eye; whatever we’re moving into now will involve a different McLuhanite ratio of the senses, and with it a corresponding shift in consciousness that is even now underway. 

The ancient Israelites were the “Chosen” people because they were “given” the Law on Mt. Sinai. If at first the law was given extrinsically on slabs of stone, the Law has worked to soften the heart to be vulnerable enough to receive an awakening of the Law, i.e., the Kingdom of God, i.e., the rule of Justice, that Christians believe became a new possibility for humans through his birth, death, and resurrection. This new Law is like an infusion of blood in the sick soul of the earth and of the humans who live on it, and is the salubrious power by which the law of tooth and talon becomes subverted by the law of Justice and Peace.  

Since those events, that Law has been gradually awakening in the depths of human souls of many who recognize it intrinsically or intuitively, whether or not they are Christians or even believers of any kind. It’s just there as an ontological fact. The only question is whether humans will hearken to it and align their lives with it. To the degree that they do, they become “justified”. What’s important is, first, the intuition of Justice as an inspiring trasncendental that calls us to live at a higher level, i.e., to live by a law that subverts the “natural” inclination to live in accordance with the will to power, greed, and joyless pleasure.

The Logos sings the secret song that the entire cosmos sings; we hear it and hearken to it with the grace-inspired heart–the conscience–and the more developed the conscience the more clearly heard the song. The condition of being fallen is the condition of not being able to hear the song.

The great saints sing this song and dance spontaneously to its rhythm. But all humans of good will, believers or unbelievers, hear it to some degree whether they recognize its source or not. Christians are those who identify it as the Logos and who believe that the human capacity to hear this song at all depended on the events we celebrate during Holy Week. It is therefore something that is supra-subjective, in the sense that it is the song of the Cosmos, but intra-subjective because of the way we all can participate in it if we open ourselves to it and hearken to it. And as it sounds in one heart it has the power to awaken its sound in the hearts of others, and eventually it will be a song heard and sung everywhere and developed everywhere. That’s my image of Final participation, the Omega point, and of how we are to find our way to it.

For Barfield these changes  in human consciousness during the modern period have not been spiritually regressive despite the secularism and materialism that have accompanied them. He recognizes that for the educated urban dweller in the West, religious language and ritual have lost almost all of their sacred power as something given to us from a meaning world out there in culture. But that does not mean that what comes to us as given from the tradition is therefore untrue or unbelievable as atheists insist. Does that mean, then, that rituals like the Catholic/Eastern Orthodox mass because they confer no external meaning should be cast off as meaningless? No, because the mass is the celebration of the central event on which all history pivots, and as such the moment when the song of the cosmos dies into human subjectivity, so that it might rise again in our human singing of it and in doing so awaken one another and eventually our semi-comatose mother, the earth. The mass is that song, and to participate in it is to sing it whether we experience the full significance of its meaning or not.

***

And right now the Christian imagination of the future is not very robust because it is still hamstrung by its premodern self-understanding. The exile model–the heaven as final destination model–still plays too powerful a role in the Christian imagination of history. The idea that the goal and purpose of human existence is to get off the planet and into some spiritual pleroma can no longer be embraced; too much is at stake, and it makes too easy a blindness to our responsibility for future generations who will live on the earth. 

There is indeed a spiritual pleroma, and it is the source of all life and all goodness, but our job is not to get off the planet and into it, but to be the awakening point in whom the unheard song is heard and sung. We humans are the infusion points through which the Logos lives into our death, enlivens our souls, and thus enables us to renew the face of the earth.

This is a big, big task, and we are only at the beginning of our understanding how to do it, because we are only at the beginning of understanding how radically things have changed in the last five hundred years. We are only beginning to fathom the massive, unprecedented responsibility that human beings have now assumed for the future of the earth.

I believe this this cultural moment that conservatives call “decadence” is a necessary moment in our collective spiritual evolution. It is not a story of decline but rather simply a story of transition from the old to something new. It is analogous to the ancient Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness, or perhaps better to think of it as a cultural dark night of the soul, a collective Good Friday moment through which we must pass in order for a cultural resurrection, a renaissance, to occur. In the Darkness we must maintain hope; we must keep putting one foot in front of the other, we must trust that if we stay alert and vigilant we will be able to tell the difference between the song that calls us forward or calls us to disaster.

We are in a transitional experience, but the outcome is never certain because the outcome depends on our fallible choices. We have the choice either to fall back into Egypt or move forward into Canaan. Nazism was Germany’s hearkening to a neo-pagan song, a song that awakens a nostalgia for totemic embeddedness. That tendency is an ever-present temptation for all “decadent” western societies. Nostalgia is the siren song to which the Right hearkens, and we should never underestimate its power to enchant and to draw us toward shipwreck.

Over the years I’ve written extensively about my fears that the attitudes that lie behind the political popularity of movement conservatism are rooted in this nostalgia for lost embeddedness and with it the lost sense of the sacred. It was a terrible loss, and it is cruel to adopt an attitude of contempt toward those who feel the loss most acutely. But you don’t win these people over politically by debunking their beliefs, but rather by offering them something better. And the Left in this country is not offering anything that satisfies the ontological craving that those on the Right feel.

If the cultural Left believes it has adopted a more grown-up understanding of how things are in its refusal to believe in spaghetti monsters or however they callowly reject a deeply complex and interesting religious tradition, they will soon discover that they will be overwhelmed by religious forces that are not so complex and interesting. Going forward, the argument will not be between the forces of irreligion and religion but between good religion and bad religion. Good religion hears the song of the Logos, bad religion the enchanting, demagogic songs of the anti-Christ.

————–

Note 1: “‘Hegel’, remarks Jurgen Habermas, ‘completed the philosophical appropriation of the Judeo-Christian tradition as much as was possible under the conditions of metaphysical thinking.’ Transcendence is now, so to speak more horizontal than vertical–more a question of history which is perpetually in excess of itself, en route to some future pleroma or state of fulfillment, than of a God who lies in the silent spaces beyond his own universe.” (Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, pp. 46-47)

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Note 1: This is a repost of a pre-Trump essay written in 2016 at a time when even most Republicans saw Trump as a vulgar, self-absorbed buffoon not to be taken seriously. It is entitled “Death & Resurrection of the Human: The Rising of the Logos’s World Constituting Song“. I post it as part of this Genealogy seriesespecially for those who have not been reading here over the years to provide some context. And I post it because I think it goes to the heart of the larger argument I’m trying to make, which is that we need to develop a postmodern mythopoesis, i.e., a pole in a reconstituted metaphysical imaginary that plausibly provides a vertical dimension. Such a mythopoesis cannot just be fabricated out of whole cloth as if it were some science-fiction fantasy or a work of purely intellectual construction. It has to be grounded in a tradition of revelation sustained by individuals from generation to generation who are awake to the significance of that revelation. And it must work plausibly to provide a robust, fruitful interpretation of people’s experience of the Living Real, which is more common than is generally acknowledged (See Taylor or James.)

I see what I’m doing as small ‘c’ catholic in the spirit of Pico della Mirandolla. I am writing from a Christian perspective because that’s where my roots lie and because I believe its disclosures, but I do not see it as incompatible with others who do it from a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim perspective–or the cognitive-science approach exemplified in John Vervaeke’s work. And it’s for this reason that much of what I write is about the restoration of Christian Neoplatonism, which is metaphysically cognate with other such post-Axial traditions. We all have things to learn from one another. There will always be differences, but we also need to acknowledge that we all have a stake in the future of humanity that rationalist materialism and its mechanomorphic imagination of the human being does not. 

My interest is to retrieve and celebrate what is vital from the western wing of the Axial Revolution. I look forward to learning from those who are doing it from other traditions–and from cognitive science, which is heir to the Western wing of the Axial Revolution, as Vervaeke is quite aware. I just think the scope of what can be relevantly retrieved and developed from Western axiality is broader than he does. 

Note 2: 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.

 

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)

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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 Vernunftand 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. 

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 “Webaptize 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.

Part 10: Face to Face–The Jewish Foundation