McGilchrist

• Democracy and the Classical Tradition

  I’ve been using terms like “original”, “Deep Real”, “Neoplatonism” in ways that I’m sure many readers here find obscure, if not objectionable. When I talk about Neoplatonism or about Aristotle, I’m really talking about the classical tradition, which is Neoplatonic through and through. I thought it might be helpful to excerpt from a post entitled

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• Genealogy Part 12A: Vervaeke’s Neoplatonic Wisdom Project

  I'm going to break up Part 12 into several components based on the conversations between Bishop Maximus and John Vervaeke that I have linked to here. In addition to watching these conversations between these two, I have watched the second half (25 lectures) of Vervaeke's Awakening to the Meaning Crisis, which has enabled me to

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• End of History?

  Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a

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• Genealogy Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism

  The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past, as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of

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• Max Scheler on What Poetry Does

  For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie ], fulfil a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognisable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of

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• Genealogy Part 8: Plato–Habitus as Heuristic

  Whether the goal was to convert, to console, to cure, or to exhort the audience, the point was always and above all not to communicate to them some ready-made knowledge but to form them. In other words, the goal was to learn a type of know-how; to develop a habitus, or new capacity to judge

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• Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

  I don't see myself as doing anything particularly original, but I do see myself as part of a larger effort to get things rebalanced. When I talk about the "Living Real", that's real for me, but I am no prodigy in the scope of my experience of it. It's real enough for me that it

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• Genealogy Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus

  Rather than proceed in some linear fashion with the genealogy of the title, I want to explore first the claim made in Part 2 concerning the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical–or Wisdom–dimension. Without first having established that, I think it's very difficult to understand why the originary Mythos of the West–Christian Neoplatonism–worked for so

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

  Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of

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• A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part I

  [This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post] “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and

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