[If readers here are too busy or shy to ask questions, I’ll ask them for you. If you have better ones, ask them in comments.]
Q: Here's what I don't get so far. You say metaphysics is best understood as story or a narrative. That makes no sense to me. Stories are things we make up; metaphysics is supposed to be about truth. It should be a rational attempt to understand the nature of Being, to know what's real and what isn't, to think about the relationship between mind and matter, time and space, and maybe squeeze in a few thoughts about the nature and destiny of humanity. Anybody can come up with any kind of story that deals with these issues, and it's just science fiction or fantasy. These are entertainments, not philosophy.
A: Well my first response to you would be to point out that all the earliest attempts to think metaphysically were cosmogonic myths, which are stories.
Q: Right, aboriginal science fiction. Crazy stuff people made up while sitting around stone-age campfires.
A: Even Plato, whom everyone thinks is all about abstraction and timeless, static systems uses myth to to lay out his cosmogenesis in the Timaeus–and he does it in a dialog, which is in itself a form of narrative or dramatic storytelling.
Q: Whatever. What does it have to do with truth? The myths people made up in Asia are different from the stuff people made up in Europe and Africa, and different still from the stuff people made up in Australia and the Americas. And within each of those geographical areas there are differences among the differences.
A: Yes, there are differences, and the differences are important. But there are similarities, and the similarities are also important. So let me come to the question of narrative truth by first talking about a revolution in philosophy that I mentioned in passing a few post ago. Phenomenology was a game changer in philosophy regarding how to think about what counts for truth—even metaphysical truth—but very few people, even academics who swim in the world Phenomenology made, understand its impact.
Q: And what impact was that?
A: First, Its undermining of the chokehold that Positivism had on what passes for truth. Second, its taking what I would describe as a nihilistic turn in French existentialism and French post-structuralist thought that spread througout the North Atlantic intelligentsia. And third, it’s opening up what I hope to be a stage we’re entering now, which is moving out of that nihilism into something new. The key people for me clearing the ground for the new thing are MacIntyre, Taylor, and Hart.
Q: Really? How many followers do they have on social media?
A: There are two kinds of social change, the kind that rises from the bottom up, and the kind that percolates top down. A truly significant cultural revolution has to have both working together. It has to have the energy of the first, and the intelligence of the second. Both have to meet and crossfertilize one another. Social media is a reflection of the first, and that’s not unimportant, but it’s unintelligent and driven by unconscious energies. It needs some kind of conscious, intelligent superstructure to give its chaotic energies form.
Right now on the reactionary Right we have a parody of that. There’s the chaotic energies of an angry populist mass being directed by intellectually incoherent crackpots at the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society. This cannot succeed in the long run, but it has power because the Left has nothing to match it, and the Left’s critique of the Right really amounts to nothing more than: “Really? Yuk.” Problem is a more and more young intellectuals are looking at the Left and saying the same thing.
MacIntyre, Taylor, and Hart are not reactionaries, but they reject the metaphysical presuppositions that undergird the late capitalist order in ways that secular Liberalism is powerless to do. They offer both critique of the current order’s nihilism along with a positive view of the human future.
Q: Ok. So tell me your philosophical revolution story, but first, explain what you mean by Positivism.
Q: Let me get at it by starting with a provocation to illustrate the difference. Earlier you were saying how the one thing that you can say about premodern societies is how they differed from one another, and I agreed. But for all the differences from continent to continent, and from tribe to tribe, there are certain phenomena that were universally acknowledged. Let's call these phenomena the gods or spirits. There were all kinds of them–river spirits, mountain spirits, forest spirits, meadow spirits, sky spirits, fire spirits, earth spirits, weather spirits. And they were local; they had a particular character that was shaped to their geographical locations, and they were part of a larger ecology that included animals, plants, and the mineral world.
Q: So what’s that got to do with us?
A: Well, the first point to make is that these gods or spirits were “phenomena” that were universally experienced, and when something is universally experienced, you have to account for them, and you need to justify the method you use to account for them, and that requires that you honestly examine the presuppositions that shape your account, and that requires being open to the possibility that maybe your account isn’t the best one. Maybe there are better ones.
Q: Well, how do you judge what’s better?
A: Good question, and we’ll get to that another time, but, first, how do you account for these phenomena?
Q: I don’t know. I haven’t thought that much about it. As I said before, it’s probably just stuff people made up like we make up science fiction or fantasy. They didn’t have scientific explanations for things, so they came up with fanciful ones. Do you have a better explanation?
A: I would say that I have a better approach, and it starts with having more curiosity about what our ancestors experienced as real or unreal, and contrast that with what people today experience as real or unreal, and then explain the difference.
Q: Well the difference is that we have science, and they didn’t. Why should it get more complicated than that?
A: Well, I would say that your attitude toward the existence of spirits is what the philosopher Owen Barfield called RUP, a ‘Residue of Unresolved Positivism’. Positivism and the naiveté of its presuppositions have been long debunked, and yet we all walk around the world with prejudices that were formed by Positivist presuppositions. Are you at least open to the possibility that your RUP is obstructing your ability to see things in a richer, more interesting way?
Q: Wait a minute, you’re not going all fairies and wizards on me, are you?
A: As I said, I’m starting with a provocation to introduce the differences in approach between Positivism and Phenomenology. The most important is that Phenomenology starts with acknowledging that if it is a phenomenon, if it’s something that “shows up” in consciousness, we have to be curious about it and try to understand it on its own terms rather than to reduce it to fit within our existing presuppositions. Phenomenology opens things up in a way that is impossible to do in a Positivist straitjacket. So in response to your question, let’s just say I have a Phenomenological openness to what the ‘gods’ as phenomena represent, and I resist dismissing them as superstitious nonsense.1
Q: Ok. Let’s back up. You still haven’t told me what you mean by Positivism?
A: Positivism basically holds that the only truth that can be called truth is from information that comes from the senses and has to be logical. Anything else is not real knowledge–it's just opinion or belief or fantasy. Dreams, intuitions, religious experiences are all nonsense because they have non-senses-based origins. Until the 70s, everything that we accepted as 'real' knowledge was Positivistic in its inflection. Even work done in the humanities like history, literary studies, and, of course, philosophy, all aspired to be as Positivistic as possible. The very term 'social science' is an indicator of how the positivist approach to things that in the past had more to do with the soul and that ought not to be reduced to positivist terms felt that their legitimacy depended on being 'scientific' in the positivist sense.
Q: So what's wrong with that?
A; It's absurdly, epistemologically naive. A guy like William James2 saw through it, and it's why he called his philosophizing "Pragmatism", not to be confused with "Utilitarianism".
Q: The difference?
A: Without getting into the weeds, let’s just say that 19th Century Utilitarianism is kissing cousins with 19th century Positivism. James’s Pragmatism, anticipating the postmodern critique of Positivism, made the case that all knowledge, even scientific knowledge is "what works". Science doesn't have some special relationship the truth, it just comes up with provisional models that seem to work until they don't, and then science is forced to adapt. That's how scientific progress happens–it recognizes that whatever is currently accepted as true is never completely true, and needs to change to adapt to 'new' facts that didn't fit the previous model. Quantum theory is an advance on Newtonian physics. It doesn't mean that Newton was wrong. What he came up with still works within a limited framework, but his framework, and any other framework is a mental construct. It doesn’t exist in the material world. And the important thing to understand is that we will never have the complete framework. As our knowledge increases, so does our need for the development of more expansive frameworks.
Positivism in its materialistic, sense-restricted presuppositions no longer works even to explain what happens in the natural sciences, and any intellectually honest, philosophically literate scientist knows this. Science is just a web so many provisional mental constructs, many of which contradict one another. They work within their given spheres until they no longer provide a coherent account of the phenomena. That’s when science comes up with better models that map better what "shows up", and what shows up is always a phenomenon of consciousness.
Q: Shows up?
A: Yes, that's my way of reconnecting with Phenomenology. It’s a much more sophisticated and adaptive method for expanding our knowledge. It’s very pragmatic, but it’s also very open to a far broader range of phenomena than Positivism allows for—as James’s Varieties of Religious Experience models. It assumes that any kind of knowledge is first and foremost a construct of consciousness, of the Mind. Nevertheless, Phenomenology is radically empirical. It studies what’s there, what shows up, the phenomena, but it doesn’t exclude phenomena because they have no material basis. In fact, phenomena that have a material bases, when they are described through a Phenomenological lens, become far more interesting. They become symbolic forms. That mountain over there as symbolic form is far more interesting than what the geologist sees. It’s an ecology of symbolic forms with an inexhaustible multi-dimensionality of meanings. Those meanings are a rich way of real ‘knowing’.
As a civilization, we will have a healthier relationship to the empiricism in scientific method if we see that what the natural scientists are doing is a branch of Philosophy that that has to be more critical of its metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions. The naiveté of its materialism is still very deeply entrenched not because it has any real philosophical justification, but because it’s an old habit that lingers from the 19th century.3
Q: But hold on. What you're saying about how James's Pragmatism explains how science works seems reasonable, but that doesn't translate into other ways of non-sense-based knowing. We’re back to why cosmogonic myths are not knowledge; they’re just stuff people made up because they didn’t have science. Certainly you don’t think the Timaeus is true.
A: The Phenomenological method grants 'reality' to any 'phenomena'. The first step in the method is simply to describe everything that “shows itself”—every idea, feeling, association that comes into awareness without judgment. This opens up a broader range of experiences for empirical examination, but it has many unresolved issues regarding interpretation. It would take us too far afield to get into those problems here, but I think they’re resolvable, just not within the constraints of Phenomenology.
But regarding your question about the Timaeus, I would say that it, like the Book of Genesis, is not literally true, but like any symbolic form that has passed the test of time, it is owed our respect and our attention. We need to allow it to disclose itself to us on its own terms, and then that disclosure has to be integrated with other things we have come to know from other sources. Philosophy in the future will be a more synthetic and integrative work than an analytical one. That’s the work of interpretation, and how to do that effectively warrants several posts.
Q: But even so, isn’t the epistemological aspect of this quasi-solipsistic subjectivism? How do you distinguish between what’s really being disclosed from the symbolic form and what you’re projecting onto it.
A: That’s your RUP showing. Phenomenology brackets out the subject-object polarity. It asserts that there is this field of consciousness, that the Phenomenologist must be radically empirical in her description of what shows up in that field without worrying about its origin. Martin Heidegger, the most famous 20th century phenomenologist, best articulated this new way of knowing when he used the Greek word ‘aletheia’ to get at this new way of knowing. It means truth as the hidden that discloses itself. For Positivism, there is only what has already disclosed itself. Aletheia suggests that there are depths yet to be disclosed. Whether the origin of what is disclosed is in here or out there is not an important question. What’s important to understand is that we are knowing beings who are thrown into a world with which we are deeeply enmeshed in ways we are mostly unconscious of. So what matters most is not where it comes from, but that phenomena exist at all, and that knowledge is the continuous process of making the unconscious conscious, the undisclosed disclosed.
Q: But how do you know whether what discloses itself is real or not? Aren’t some things that show up in consciousness more real than others? I can imagine a flying horse. That’s something that “shows up” in my consciousness, but that’s not as real as this pencil that I’m holding in my hand. And besides, wasn’t Heidegger a Nazi. Why should anybody pay attention to him?
A: All of these are important questions, and I can’t answer them satisfactorily here, but I’m trying to lay a foundation. And, yes, Heidegger was a Nazi for a while. He quit the party, but he never really recanted his joining in the first place, and that's part of the problem with "aletheia". Aletheia is a way of opening up to a broader range of experiences for philosophy to take seriously as 'knowledge' than Positivism allows for, but the problem of interpretation remains. Heideggerian phenomenology is a game-changer for epistemology, but it fails in both metaphysics and ethics.
Heidegger's apparently 'interpreted' Nazism as a deep disclosure of the hidden depths of Being, and so this clearly indicates that he lacked what we've been talking about as "moral maturity". He was Nietzschean in the beyond-good-and evil sense. If it's powerful and gives one a primordial sense of power and belonging to the volk, it's gotta be good. His problem was exactly what MacIntyre was talking about–that without some kind of rational, transcendental foundation, everything boils down to Yay and Yuk. For Heidegger, and for lots of people who should have known better (Ezra Pound comes to mind), if it's anti-secular, anti-alienation, anti-technocracy, anti-positivist, anti-capitalist–Yay.
Q: Well, aren't you 'anti' all those things?
A: Yes, but I believe in the Good in a way that was never possible for Nietzsche and Heidegger—or for most of the intelligentsia who were so influenced by them. And that makes all the difference. There are a lot of people who say the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That was, essentially, Bill Buckley's m.o. He was no Heidegger–Heidegger had depths and originality that Buckley had no idea of–but he was Heidegger adjacent politically, as are a lot of people these days on the religious right vis-a-vis Trump. J.D. Vance is front of the line there. They haven't the moral good sense to see to what degree they are trafficking with real evil in a crusade that I think they sincerely believe is anti-evil. They are not unintelligent people, but their foolishness is creepily disturbing.
Q: You still haven't explained how narrative and metaphysics go together.
A: You're right, but I've laid the foundation for it. Because the way I see it there are three stages we have to go through to get to a plausible, broadly embraced Big Story. First, loosen the Positivist stranglehold on what counts as legitimate truth. We’re mostly done with that stage, which was the work of Phenomenology and what followed it during the 20th Century. The Positivism of the 19th Century lingers as a bad habit, but it wasn’t where most of the intelligentsia in the humanities and social sciences were at the end of the 20th Century. But that intelligentsia, in its rejection of Positivism, was mostly a negative, debunking intellectual force, and as such had swung to the other extreme. It embraced the Nietzschean/Heideggerian/ Sartrean/Deleuzean/Foucauldian rejection of Positivist naiveté. This was necessary, but they did it in a way that has led to a dead end. And so for that reason is forcing a reaction that I believe is already beginning, which is the second stage.
Q: And what might that be?
A: For the culture's intelligentsia to embrace a non-positivist/non-nihilist metaphysical narrative. I think this starts with a recovery in a postmodern key of the classical tradition. It’s there sleeping in our collective unconsciousness, and it just needs a jolt to be awakened. And as it awakens it will provide a new framework—a new mental construct or model for reality—and with it new possibilities currently unavailable for imagining the human future will open up, and a third stage will emerge.
Q: Ok. What’s that?
A: This will be truly original thinking in which a new imagination of the human future—new philosophy, art, poetry, spiritual practices—that has enough heft to offer a robust alternative to where the techno-nihilists are taking us.
Q: How long are we talking about here?
A: Decades. A lot depends on how much of a mess the Reactionary Right and Techno-capitalists make of things and how long it takes for an intellectual vanguard within the Intelligentsia to come fully around to Stage 2.
People are impatient, and they want change now, but it doesn’t work that way. It has to emerge organically; it can’t be engineered. All truly original thinking is context-dependent, and you can’t do Stage 3 work if you still have one foot in Stage 1 and the other in Stage 2, as is our situation now. It’s important to understand where we are and to do the work that makes sense now.
But if I were to guess, Stage 3 ‘emerges’ at the beginning of the the next century, if we make it that far. But I have no idea.
Q: You’re full of good cheer.
A: The forces that seek to dehumanize us are huge, and the stakes are equally huge. Nevertheless, I’m hopeful for a better, richer, more deeply human future, but that doesn’t mean that we can get to it quickly or easily. In the meanwhile we can only do what in good conscience we see is there for us to do, which for me, in part, is Stage 2 work that is within the scope of my limited capabilities.
Notes
1. An interesting but flawed book along these lines is Dreyfus’s and Kelly’s All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular World (2011). The late Hubert Dreyfus, a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, was the dean of American Heideggerians, and his student Sean Kelly was at the time of this book’s writing the chairman of the Philosophy Department at Harvard. They take the “gods” as phenomena very seriously, but offer an interpretation that syncs with a postmodern, non-positivist sensibility. I assigned this book in one of my classes because I see them as intellectually serious allies in the search for a non-nihilist approach to the meaning crisis engendered by late capitalism. But Heideggerians that they are, their flaws are Heidegger’s flaws, which is a failure in ethics or moral philosophy. They try to address that, but don’t succeed at all. If you’re nterested, I wrote a post about that here.
2. One of the most interesting courses I took as an undergraduate was entitled “William James and Phenomenology”. James was the great American philosopher/psychologist whose Varieties of Religious Experience (1908) is a classic work of Phenomenology before Phenomenology was invented. He ‘describes’ with detail and respect the wide variety of religious experiences without making any judgments about them, or tries not to.
I see what James was doing, what Freud and Jung were doing, what Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology and the people influenced by him like Heidegger, Jaspers, Buber, Merleau-Ponty, even the existentialism of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, as the key figures in revolutionizing our ideas about what Truth and how we relate to it as ‘symbolic form’. They, along with many others, represent a Stage 1 Intellectual Vanguard. With the exception of James, these were all continental European thinkers, and in Anglo-American circles neither Pragmatism nor Phenomenology had much of an impact on academic philosophy until the 1960s. (I think of John Dewey as more of a public intellectual than as a academic philosopher.) Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was very much in the Jamesean spirit. It was the nail in the coffin for whatever was left of Positivist orthodoxy among intellectually honest American philosophers of science. That doesn’t mean that intellectual dishonesty or philosophical naiveté didn’t or doesn’t still linger.
3. David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods is important in what I’m calling at the end of this post the Stage 2 effort to destroy what’s left in Positivist Materialism that lingers in the sciences and the nihilism that lingers in the humanities, and to replace it with a retrieval of forgotten ideas from the classical tradition.
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