Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Part 14–19
The Synthesis of Stoicism, Christianity, & Neoplatonism
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis notes. If you missed Part 8–13 click here. Notes on Dr. John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Link to full series here.
Part 14: Epicureans, Cynics, & Stoics
Hellenistic Era and Domicide:
Moving past the Axial age and into Hellenistic Period (323–31BC). As we saw in Part 4–7, Socrates’ disciple was Plato; Plato’s was Aristotle; Aristotle’s was ‘Alexander the Great’.
- ‘Alexander the Great’ (336–323BC) was a ‘world conqueror’ — which represented a return to a pre-Axial way of being and a disruption to the world
- Alexander distributed Greek culture across Africa, Asia minor and India — and following his death the empire split into four
- People were shuffled, distant from government, culture of origin, and shared history (physically, emotionally, intellectually)
They experienced what Douglas Porteous, Sandra Smith, and Brian Walsh call Domicide, which is the destruction of one’s socio-cultural home. Culture was spread too thin, and identity was confused.
The Hellenistic Era in this sense was an age of anxiety. A meaning crisis.
This meaning crisis shifted philosophy to a more therapeutic aspect of wisdom (to deal with the anxiety and suffering of the era — with three philosophies emerging that we will explore: The Epicureans, The Cynics, and The Stoics.
The Epicureans:
“Call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others.” — Epicurus
The Epicureans diagnosed anxiety to be the main problem of human existence.
It is important to distinguish between fear and anxiety.
Fear vs Anxiety
- Based on ‘The Courage to Be’, by Paul Tillich
- Fear involves an observable direct threat
- Anxiety involves the presence of a nebulous threat creating a loss of agency
Anxiety makes us unable to get an accurate view of the world (optimal grip).
Epicurean Logic — Death Anxiety:
The main anxiety Epicurean’s thought humans have is anxiety of death. Their argument:
Anxiety of death is the anxiety of ‘losing what is good’ — which gives the most meaning.
- It is not non-existence (before birth was non-existent)
- Not losing everything and everyone in an absolute sense (would imply loss of awareness of death)
- It is a partial loss — a loss of agency to have meaning
- Liable to lose wealth, fame, fortune, but mainly = relationships and friendships
As long as we have cognitive agency, we are able to cultivate philosophical friendships and pursue meaning, which is what actually matters.
The strategy for dealing with anxiety of death: learning how to live in the acceptance of your mortality.
While domicide exacerbates mortality salience (in the Hellenistic Era, COVID), solving this anxiety is not sufficient. Mortality has been a constant in human experience.
Another school gives a more comprehensive answer: The Cynics.
The Cynics:
- Antisthenes’ was a disciple of Socrates, like Plato — but had a different emphasis on seeking wisdom / truth. Plato thought argumentation was most important (Socratic method)
- Antisthenes thought more in terms of confrontation (to shock/reframe an individual)
- Antisthenes had a disciple Diogenes that epitomized this confrontation — disturbing social settings to encourage reframing and insight
The Cynics had a very different understanding of The Hellenistic Domicide.
They concluded that what causes us to suffer is what we set our hearts on; when we set our hearts on the wrong things, those things will fail us, and that’s how we suffer.
The Cynics came to the conclusion that The Hellenistic Period revealed the impermanence and artificiality of things; how dependent most things are on culture and history.
- That we take things for granted are not fundamentally real (temporary and culturally dependent)
- They viewed that attachment to these things causes domicide once the world inevitably destroys them
So, what to do:
- They believed the answer to this was to learn (not just believe) how to set one’s heart on the kind of things that are not man-made and contingent on history or culture
- They believed we should instead try to live in accordance with the laws of the Natural World as oppose to ‘purity codes’
Cynic’s are changing what we’re setting our heart on and by helping us pull apart our automatic emotional reactions from legitimate moral reflection — through confrontation (forced reframing).
Stoicism:
Diogenes had a disciple called Crates, who had a disciple called Zeno. While Zeno was a Cynic, he was also an admirer of Plato.
Zeno wanted to do is integrate the rational argumentation and reasoning of Plato, with the provoking aspects of the Cynics — this is Stoicism.
Zeno thought the Cynics focused too much on attachments, and not the process of attachment (product vs process). No what the heart is set on, but how.
Stoicism parallels Keith Stanovich et al work on rationality — not focusing on cognition by the process of cognition.
What process?
- The agent-arena co-identification (Part 13); a process where one is simultaneously assuming and assigning an identity at the same time
- However, if the co-identification process is mindless, automatic, and reactive, the process will be susceptible to all kinds of self-deception and destruction
We need to understand how we assume and assign identities (both to ourselves and our socio-cultural environment) and do it in a way that can strengthen our agency when there is the threat of domicide.
In Part 15, we look at specific Stoic practices, in their attempt to aid the domicided world of the Hellenistic era, and its existential anxiety.
Part 15: Marcus Aurelius & Jesus
The Stoics said we need to bring this process of co-determination, co-creation of agency, and arena into our awareness. They recommended two ways of doing this: Prosoche, and Procheiron.
Prosoche:
Prosoche refers to paying attention to how you’re paying attention; paying attention to the process of co-identifying.
- This involves learning to distinguish the event, from the meaning that we latch on to the event (not the semantic meaning but the existential meaning — mode from Part 13). This is the core of all modern psychotherapies
- When a bad event happens, the co-identification could cause a negative state of mind because of parasitic processing (not intrinsic to the event at all)
- If meaning and event are fused, the only way to adjust the meaning (existential mode and identity) is to adjust the event (which is impossible). We do not have control of events
The fusion of the meaning and the event often leads to existential con-fusion.
- This confusion is the same confusion between the having and being mode from Part 13
- The having mode controls things. But if we think we can control events outside our control then we are modally confused
It is important to practice bringing this co-identifying process to one’s awareness in a way that is transformative and developmental so that we can understand the distinction between events and the meaning of events (meaning is the agent-arena relationship / identity).
Pulling the event and the meaning apart is necessary to recalibrate one’s sense of control and identity because although we don’t have much control over the event, we have more control over the meaning (of the event) than we realize.
Core of wisdom is knowing what is inside and outside control.
The leads to the Stoics diagnosis of the existential anxiety:
- It is not mortality that we are anxious about, it is fatality (Beyond Fate by Margaret Visser)
- In modern times we associate ‘fatal’ with something that means ‘death’ but that is not the origin
- Fate: the rolling from their own causal necessity (as oppose to predestined by divine power)
If meaning and event are fused together we become subject to fatality of all things (impermanence etc.).
The reason fatality is associated with death is because death is where the two (the meaning and the event) inevitably come apart
- Death is where the events of the universe and all the meaning and we attach to it separate
- Death reveals the ultimate loss of agency by showing us how the meaning and the event are not identical
Everything is fatal in that the meaning and the event/thing are not identical; if we attach the two then we suffer when they come apart.
So how do we practice this?
Procheiron:
Procheiron is a set of psychotechnologies that help separate meaning from the event.
- It means ‘ready to hand’, remembering (in the sense of satti from Part 8)— mindfulness — remembering in a way that brings skills and sensibilities to bare in an appropriate and effective manner
Need to be aware of the Agent-Arena relationship as the meaning making machinery and then decouple the events of life from the meaning.
Premeditatio:
- They told parents to remember that every time they kissed their child goodnight, that they might not wake up the next morning
- The Stoics wanted people to understand that they can do everything in their power to protect their loved ones, but they cannot ultimately control the universe
The meaning that a parent and child is making together is separate from the event of their possible death in their sleep.
The View from Above:
- This involves viewing the situation you’re in from a ‘higher’ perspective in terms of space and time (first within your house, your area, then your city, then country, the continent etc.)
- Related to the Solomun effect (Part 11)
During this practice, one’s agent-arena relationship is altered, and what one values and finds important radically transforms. Sense of self, what matters, what is important, what things mean, are being radically transformed.
Internalizing Socrates:
This involves a Socratic questioning of the definitions and meanings of thought patterns to illuminate self-deception.
Example:
- Client: Everything I do is a failure
- Therapist/Internal Socrates: Really? Everything?
- Client: Well no, not everything Therapist: Did you get here successfully today?
- Client: Yes
- Therapist: What about clothing yourself and brushing your teeth? Did you do that?
- Client: Well, yes…I didn’t mean everything…
You may believe it — but you don’t MEAN it. You are ‘bullshitting’ yourself with salient beliefs. Motivation and arousal are way ahead of understanding so meaning-event are confused.
Depth of Life:
What Procheiron and Prosoche are attempting to point out is how to get a depth of life in the present as oppose to time.
- Even if you had immortality you would not know how to use it. You would pursue endless goals until you realise you are sort of done with all that. And realise being done is the point
- If you form your identity as a narrative of achievement of unending duration your life you will ultimately fail — and even if I gave it to you it would fail
- You do not want a length of life but a depth of life
If you identify with the X axis you are doomed to fail and thus have a sense of anxiety about death and an endless need to achieve to fill the hole of having. but this is modal confusion.
Wisdom is the seeking of this fullness of being through understanding of the self (self-transcendence).
This is the culmination of the Greek philosophers and the Axial Age.
Ancient Israel:
To continue the work on awakening from the meaning crisis, we need to introduce concepts central to ancient Christianity in our historical account.
In post-Hellenistic era in Ancient Israel a religion emerged in Israel that was deeply informed by the Ancient Israeli tradition. Jesus of Nazareth was born in this tradition, and he was responsible for a radical transformation.
We are more concerned with how Jesus and Christianity transformed the Israelite Axial legacy — and how it relates to what we already know.
To understand this we need to reintroduce the idea of Kairos:
Kairos:
Knowing crucial turning points, in a perspectival-participatory sense (Part 3) — perfect timing, the spirit of finesse.
- The Israelite Axial legacy believed that God would intervene kairotically to help people
- Jesus represents this ultimate turning point, not just historically but personally
- God’s capacity for creating logos / and thus Kairos has been identified in a particular individual
- Because Jesus is a person, you can identify with him and that Kairos can take place in you (similar to internalizing Socrates)
- Jesus metaphorically referred to this as being ‘born again’ which indicates radical metanoia. ‘Metanoia’, here, is similar to the idea of awakening (‘noia’ means ‘noticing’ which refers to perspectival awareness, and ‘meta’ means ‘beyond’)
This refers to a radical transformation in one’s identity and salience landscape. Being ‘born again’ in this sense refers to a new mind, heart, and modal existence.
Kairos as Agape:
Christians depict this as love:
- Love is trivialized in modern contexts
- One can feel a range of emotions in love (happy, sad, confused, jealous, etc.), but love itself is not an emotion or feeling
Love is a modal way of being that deeply influences the agent-arena relationship.
Eros is where ‘erotica’ comes from; however, it is much more than just sex. It is the kind of love that involves being one with something.
Philia is the kind of love that is satisfied through reciprocity; it is often what we feel in a friendship.
However, the kind of love that Jesus incarnated as Kairos is agape.
- It is the love a parent provides unconditionally to a newborn to create a person — through interaction and participation with the entity
Agape is a transformative love — considered to be the highest form of love, as it transcends personal interests and desires — the creation through participatory interaction.
Christianity, with the idea of agape, changed the cultural fabric of the Roman empire.
In Part 16, we will discuss agape and Christianity in more detail.
Part 16: Christianity & Agape
Agape & Metanoia:
Jesus embodies the love of creation as rational transformative power: agape.
This power brings about a metanoia — a fundamental turning of your whole orientation. A personal Kairos (person course is being changed).
- What ‘you’ is, is an internalization of how others view you — and that is how you gain your reflective rationality
- “You fundamentally gain your self-understanding, your sense of self, and your ability to reflect on yourself by how you are reflected through other people.”
- Thus, you participate in agape to create others
Jesus was teaching that we could all experience this transformative power of agape. We could all become vessels throw which agape creates other human beings and experience agape with our relationship to ‘God’.
Agape itself is God. Agape is a process. You participate in it.
This gave the Christians a psychotechologies that allowed them to ‘take-over’ the Roman empire. All the ‘non-beings’ of the Roman world could participate in agape to become human through God.
Agape & Forgiving:
Agape has a sacrificial element to it because you give before the person earns.
“All agapeic love is fore-giving love, because it is giving before the person that is receiving the love can in any way be said to have earned it.”
Hence the emphasis on forgiveness in the Christian message.
Jesus’ death epitomize the sacrificial forgiveness that is at the core of the Christian teachings, and God as agape.
(Followers of Jesus weren’t originally known as that — they were originally referred to as followers of “The Way.” Because that’s what Jesus was teaching, a “way” to achieve these insights and this “fore-giving” of agape).
A person that epitomizes the transformative capacity as well as the darkside of agape is Saul — discussed next.
Saul & Agape:
Saul was a Jew and also a Roman citizen at a time when these two groups were very antagonistic to one another. He seems to have integrated these two different aspects to his personality by way of the law.
- Saul saw these followers of Jesus and their language of agape and adoration of Jesus as deeply threatening, both to his Jewish heritage and to Roman order
- He began persecuting them, and it was at about this time that they started being referred to as, disparagingly, “Christians” (followers of Christ, which means “the anointed one”)
- But then he has a transformative experience — he relates it to being struck by a light (insight/consciousness spike/ enlightenment/super salience) — which engenders in Saul a deep inner conflict
- Saul goes into the desert (a symbolic place for transformation across a number of belief systems) and returns transformed. Not just in mind, but in name: from Saul to Paul
Paul’s message about agape in a participatory way (knowing by identifying):
- And now I will show you the most excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love then I am only a resounding gong or a clanging symbol
- If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have faith that can move mountains but have not love then I am nothing
- If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but I have not love I gain nothing
- Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self-seeking
- It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth
- It always protects, it always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies they will cease, where there are tongues they will be stilled, where there is knowledge it will pass away
- For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes [‘perfection’ here meaning ‘completion’] the imperfect disappears
- When I was a child I tacked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man I put childish ways behind me
- Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.”
- (Seeing a reflection — like people in Plato’s cave. But with agape we will come to know as we are known — this participatory love)
Will talk more about this later. This is Gnosis (A deep knowledge of spiritual meaning that is bound up with agape.)
Darkside of Agape:
Any aspect of yourself that you do not understand can get projected onto what you love. Paul, in a sense, projects his own inner conflict (between the “old Paul (Saul) and the new Paul”) as the inner conflict of God.
- This idea that God has two aspects to itself: represents law and judgement (perfectly just) and thus condemned to death. But God is also the agapeic parent that loves us
- So, Paul takes the idea that Christ is sacrificial to satisfy God’s demand for justice
- So, within the astonishing foundational message of agape — there is a projection that the course of reality is a struggle between justice and agape
What if we experience agape and gnosis and metanoia without the machinery of Christianity and its metaphysics of redemption?
In Part 17, we trace how Christianity starts to intersect with the Axial Revolution to accomplish this — and into conflict / confluence with the strain of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism.
Part 17: Gnosis & Existential Inertia
“A way to understand the Gnostics is that they are the Axial Revolution within the Axial Revolution.”
- An attempt to take the Axial Revolution to its culmination. Provide the undercurrent of Western societies understanding of spirituality / history / and direction
However, before we look at the history of Gnosticism— lets unpack what gnosis is (that deep knowledge of spiritual meaning that is bound up with agape). To do this, we need to start with Existential Inertia and Sensibility Transcendence.
Sensibility Transcendence:
A Worldview: when you have a deeply integrated, dynamically coupled way of seeing yourself and your inner agency + seeing the world as an arena (A bi-directional model; a mutual conformity; a reciprocal revelation.)
John Wright talks about sensibility transcendence, drawn from ideas in the Iris Murdoch book The Sovereignty of the Good.
- Reframing how you see the world at the same time as you are reframing how you see yourself
- A participatory change between agent and arena. It’s not a reframing of things it’s a transframing
Transframing
- A normal insight is a reframing. This transframing is a bi-directional insight of agent and arena. You also have an insight on how you view yourself (systematic insight)
- This transforms a worldview. Both the agent-arena are transcending
- This is what Christianity was offering: the metanoia of how they could go through this radical transformation in this way. Opening up the world + opening up themselves (anagoge from Part 9). A sensibility transcendence into a more real mode of being is Gnosis
Existential Inertia (Being Stuck):
The opposite of a sensibility transcendence is existential inertia. Frankfurt proposes the term unthinkable.
Unthinkable / Unviable:
- Something is unviable to you or unliveable to you, even though you can think about it and consider it
- You may want this way of being, but it seems impossible even though you can envision it
- E.g. quitting your job and doing what you want to do
“The way one is participating with themselves, and the world is preventing them from getting what they want”.
This can cause a loss of agency because they are stuck and unable to change worldview.
Transformation Barrier (Being Stupefied):
- L.A. Paul in Transformative Experience, brings up that these transformative experiences render us stupefied because they force us to confront a deep existential ignorance
- “With personal transformation, you don’t know what it’s like to be that person in that world because you have to actually be changed and the world has to be changed in order for you to have that participatory knowing.”
- The issue with going through these changes in agent-arena relationships is you cannot reason your way through it: you don’t know what you’ll be missing, or what you’ll gain from a change in being. the old way of being will be completely unthinkable to you once it is changed
This is because a transformative experience is one where the perspectival knowing and participatory knowing are radically changed — not propositional.
- Faced with radical ignorance on both sides of the equation. Don’t know what missing, don’t know what losing. And they do not know if they should. One is stupefied
So, on the edge of transformative experiences / sensibility transcendence is inertia and indecision. We are stuck and stupefied. This can lead to modal confusion and parasitic processing.
Play & Enactive Analogies:
A way of dealing with this is to get use to the mode of being through play.
- For the decision to get a child they may get a dog
- For romantic relationship they may go on a trip together
“Play” is a liminal zone — this space between where you are and where you want to be in.
- “As organisms become more intelligent and more in need of developmental transformations, they also become more playful — they need more and more play. Play is not a frivolous thing. One of the disasters of our culture is that we think of play as only about fun”
- This play is a confrontation with a transformative experience
- It’s an enactive analogy: An analogy you enact. You go through the actions (perspectival and participatory)
“One of the important things that religion was is play. That’s what ritual properly understood is. People are playing — serious playing — to try to put themselves in a liminal place, a place between two worlds: the normal world and the sacred world they want to dwell within.”
Gnosis:
In summary, Gnosis is sensibility transcendence (a transformative experience of the agent-arena relationship) brought about by enactive analogy (play/ ritual). It is anagoge (self-transcendence from Part 12).
Gnosis is an altered state of consciousness that frees you from being existentially trapped by transform perspectival and participatory knowing.
In Part 18, we’ll go see how Gnosis was taken up in a movement in the same time as Christianity
Part 18: Plotinus & Neoplatonism
Gnosticism:
- The issue with gnosis is that this destabilization through changing the relevance landscape can lead to parasitic processing and bullshitting
- Thus, it is important to build up a community — a shared mythology (psychotechnologies) to provide feedback and encouragement
- This will help teach the relative skills to bring about wisdom (ability to overcome self-deceptive behavior to bare — to engage in the transformative experience
Gnostic Mythology:
The Gnostics created a mythology to help understand their worldview. It’s a mythological scaffolding for bringing about gnosis.
Demiurge:
- Gnostics took the demiurge from Plato — the awareness that shifts eternal forms into shapes and things in space and time
- Gnostics thought that the demiurge was an evil overlord for creating a traded world of suffering
- They were trying to articulate the feeling of being trapped. That somehow the sociological structures and patterns of their daily reality were thwarting their efforts and contributing to their feeling of entrapment
This parallels the idea that existential entrapment is encouraged by the societal norms of the culture — elevating deception, modal confusion, parasitic processing.
This is a radical idea: all gods must be transcended. that the everyday world must be transcended to ‘the god above all gods’. God of Old Testament = Demiurge. God of New Testament = Agape.
The Gnostics saw the purpose of Christianity as giving us a mythology that can free of us our existential suffering and transcending to the gods.
“The core of spirituality is not worship. The core of spirituality is self-transcendence.”
The Gnostics are therefore the Axial of the Axial Revolution. A way of reconfiguring to have a non-theistic, non-supernatural understanding of sacredness.
Neoplatonism & Plotinus:
Now set out Christianity and its relationship to agape, and now Gnosticism as a non-theistic sacredness. Now turning to Neoplatonism.
Plotinus (date) created “the grand unified field theory of ancient spirituality.”
Combining:
- Aristotle proposes conformity theory (Part 6), and levels of being (actualization from potentiality)
- These are levels of reality — of realness. As we know (participatory /gnosis) these levels of reality (make them viable) we conform to them, and we change — moving to a higher level of the self (anagogically — self transcendence)
- And as we are transformed, we are more capable of living in that higher level of reality
- This combines Aristotle’s conformity theory and levels of being — whereby Plato’s anagoge is the self-transcendence through the levels of being and thus conforming to them (changing structural-functional-organisation to level up)
- Each level of reality is the process of conformity — to create oneness. Understanding a set of things is understanding their commonality and integration
- As we try find the deeper underlying principles that integrate things together, we become more integrated (more real — realized) as a dynamical system (anagoge)
This makes deeply remember the being mode.
The One:
The culmination of this realization and anagoge is ‘The One’ (the principle that makes everything else real — that integrates everything else together). That by which reality is realized and mind realizes reality. You cannot know the One because it is that which from everything is known — it is beyond thought. Non-duality.
In Part 19, we’ll focus on Augustine, someone who further combined these currents of Christianity, Gnosticism and Neoplatonism.
Part 19: Augustine & Aquinas
Plotinus brought about the unification of the best science (Aristotle), therapy (Stoicism), and spirituality (Platonism). After Plotinus (~270 CE) the Roman Empire starts to go into decline, drawing a close to the ancient era.
A figure arises that brings Christianity, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism together: Augustine.
Augustine:
Augustine was influenced by Neoplatonism and Paul given his inner conflict at a time when Rome was falling.
He had an insight: at the heart of reason is love.
- Plato and Plotinus were ultimately saying that we are driven by two powerful loves
- The love of becoming one, and one with what is most real
- The love for what is true, real, beautiful
So, Augustine sort a form a healing (a gnosis).
“There is a love that is within reason that can help you grow beyond reason to what reason always sought.”
Aristotle & Plotinus:
So, Augustine says Neoplatonism needs Christianity. The healing and the response to evil that Gnosticism was looking for can be found in Christianity. He synthesizes them all together.
- Nomological order: the fundamental principles by which knowledge and reality co-operate (conformity theory, geocentric worldview)
- Normative order: This is what Plotinus gave us — how we can move in an orderly fashion up the levels of reality/consciousness/self from what is less real to what is more real (Gnosis)
The ascent is driven by a love — a love of knowing what is real and simultaneously becoming what is real (anagoge through agape). The normative order tells you how you can become better.
Christianity & Neoplatonism:
Augustine thinks that Christianity combines normative and nomological order.
- Nomological order is everything moving to get where it belongs (a tree moves with the eidos of a tree)
- Normative order is moving towards reality and towards goodness and purpose — to afford realization (cognitive and in the world)
- All this is driven by love (the gnosis agape) — which is the narrative order in Christianity
- The great story about the course of history moving toward a final consummation: the Promised Land
Augustine puts all 3 of these orders together — nomological, normative, and narrative into a mutually sustaining fashion.
The world is organized nomologically, so that it moves through history narratively (agape), so we can all self-transcend normatively.
Meaning in Life:
These 3 are backed up in cognitive science with the most important things in ones meaning to life as the following:
- Coherence: The more intelligible, the more real things are and fit together, the more meaningful you find your life. This is the nomological order
- Significance: how valuable — how good — are the element of your life. This is the normative order
- Purpose: Does your life have a direction. This is the narrative order
These are the 3 axes of the space of meaning. (We’ll come back to the cognitive science).
What we have building over the last 19 Parts is a long and powerful history of how our culture has articulated the Axial Revolution and generated a grammar of understanding the Axial Revolution. A worldview of inhabiting a worldview where wisdom and meaning have been developed and articulated in a compelling fashion.
Why don’t we have this integration anymore:
We now need to understand why it all fell apart and where does that leave us.
We have a nature of the history of the meaning crisis. Now we need a genealogy — the process of loss of this meaning.
Roman Collapse:
During the Roman Collapse (DATE) there was a traumatic loss of cities, literacy, trade, commerce.
- The heritage given by Augustine was so profound it was a home for people during this period — but things start to pull it apart.
- In 1054 there’s a division. Christianity splits into Eastern Orthodox and Catholic (the great Schism).
- By separating itself from the East, Western Christianity loses some of its deeper connections to the Neoplatonic mystical theology. The West starts to become more Aristotelian.
After Augustine:
This starts with a change in the psychotechnology of reading:
- Before reading was spoken out loud — recited. This draws on many other ways of communicating, participation (a different kind of knowing — a communal act)
- People start to read silently to themselves, and give priority to coherence of language instead of transformation of themselves in the world
- They lose a psychospiritual, existential transformation. Reading becomes the consumption of propositions
Model Shift:
Because of this a new model for thought emerges:
- Old model: thought is conforming to the world (which is articulated and developed into the whole process of anagoge, gnosis, self-transformation). Knowing as a way of being
- New model: knowing is to have coherent propositional language. Thinking is to have propositions in the head
This is a shift from:
- The extensive self (the self that is transjectively connected to the world) — and understands itself in terms of the world
- To the intensive self (inside the head and inside the beliefs of propositional language)
This way of reading empowers argumentative skills tremendously, but loses reading as a psychospiritual, existential transformation.
Christianity Crisis:
At this time, the West rediscovers Aristotle during the Crusades. This starts to create a crisis in Christianity:
- Aristotle is a figure that cannot be ignored (fundamental to Augustine’s worldview of the age) — but he describes a world that does not have the Christian mythology attached to it
- So, there is an attraction to the explanatory power provided by Aristotle. The model of clear definitions, clear picture and propositions that Aristotle proposes becomes enmeshed with this new way of reading (of experiencing knowing inside the head of propositional beliefs)
- Cannot be ignored, but he cannot be assimilated
Thomas Aquinas:
Thomas Aquinas arises who sees this looming threat:
- He creates a distinction between the natural world and the supernatural world
- He does this by saying reason and science try to understand this world (the natural world) and can discover real truths through reason and science, but the Neoplatonic world is also real — somehow more real
- The supernatural world is only accessible by faith
- Reason is down in the natural world, but love is now up in the supernatural world
- Before (Plotinus/Augustine) love (agape) moved reason. Now love moves ‘the will’ (to assert things it cannot know through reason). So faith now becomes the act of willful assertion (will of God)
- Before faith was participation in flow of history (kairos). Now is the assertion of propositions
- Love and reason is pulled apart. Faith and Kairos is pulled apart
Science and spirituality are starting to become divorced from one another in a profound way. If something is scientific then it’s not spiritual, and vice versa. Same with reason vs. love.
As the scientific worldview became more successful, this decoupling means that the supernatural world starts to become less and less real to us (whereas before it was integrated).
And if it’s no longer viable to us then the whole Axial world mythology & grammar of meaning/wisdom/transcendence is now threatened to fall apart.
