Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Part 20–25
Completing the Genealogy of the Modern Meaning Crisis
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis notes. If you missed Part 14–19 click here. Notes on Dr. John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Link to full series here.
Part 20: Death of the Universe
There were immediate consequences to people engaging with Aquinas, seen clearly in two influential figures:
- Meister Eckhart (1260–1328)
- William of Ockham (1287–1346) (“Ockham’s Razor”)
After God by Mark Taylor outlines this in more depth.
Meister Eckhart:
Eckhart represents a group of people called the Rhineland Mystics.
- Aquinas changed the nomological order — separating it reason from love, science from spirituality. This means love is driving ‘the will’ (both separate from reason).
- Eckhart developing this, attempts to re-understand the normative order. He proposes, instead of an ascent upward to God (through anagogic self-transcendence), God descends into you (through negation of the will).
This changes ‘love moves the will’ in faith, to ‘the way the will moves is love’ (specifically when the will negates itself)
The idea is, God is agapic love but we are resisting that with our will and we need to negate our own self-assertion to make space so God can flow in (descend).
This makes self-negotiation and inner conflict central to spirituality
William of Ockham:
At a similar time, Ockham proposes that God’s will as his primary faculty (as opposed to reason as in Neoplatonism and Augustine) — paralleling Aquinas
This further emphasizes it is not God’s agapic love that is his creativity, but his will (act of assertion). God’s will now supersede his reason. Any order found is actually just God’s will imposed.
This further separates spirituality from science (rationality from faith). God is no longer bound by rationality.
Ockham concludes we are made in the image of God and thus any order we find in the world is not actually real — but created as we speak about it (labelling a book a book)
Consequences:
This means there is no inherent intelligibility to the world. Any order perceived is actually in the head. The world is now, in a very real sense, absurd. It’s not intelligible in itself. And in addition, the supernatural world is no longer a source of reason and rational order — but God’s will.
What happens next catalyzes these developments.
Commercialism Following Black Death:
In 1346–1356 the Black Death (bubonic plague) killed 1/3 of the Europe’s population.
- People’s confidence in the worldview they had is being undermined — they think it’s the end of the world.
- People start moving around and then there’s a labor shortage. People start to be able to sell their labour for more money.
- They can start to change their status through their own effort.
- “By my willpower I can change my status. I can make myself something different.”
A new view in which reality is seen as a chaotic backdrop on which a battle of wills is occurring.
Commercialism Emerges:
- This rise of a more entrepreneurial spirit brings about a rise of commercialism.
- The state is also going to start protecting contracts and enforcing rules on these social institutions. We see the rise of corporate capitalism and the corporate state.
- This means people have a place for norms to govern their behavior that have nothing to do with the church or the aristocracy.
This means people are creating a secular alternative. A secular version of power, wealth, and prestige. The supernatural world is largely irrelevant.
New Psycho-technologies:
- Replace roman numerals with Hindu-Arabic numerals. It speeds up your ability to calculate and process information faster.
- The concept of zero gets introduced, and negative numbers because there becomes a need to think about debt.
- This creates a powerful upsurge in mathematical capabilities
- They also improve their celestial navigation, which arises to help prevent endeavors involving shipping and trade from failing.
People start to discover how chaotic the ‘heavens’ actually are. So they start using Aristotelian ways of thinking and new math to drive forward exploration into the ‘heavens’.
Copernicus:
Copernicus (1473–1543) proposes the math is better if you put the sun at the center of the solar system
The Copernican revolution calls into question the things that we can all see. (We all see the sun rise and set but that’s not really what’s happening. The sun’s not actually moving.)
What else is an illusion? What else isn’t real? Your sense experience isn’t putting you in touch with the world. This is terrifying to people.
This continues to separate the real world from the mind and experience — completely out of touch with the world. Apparently only math can bring the two.
Galileo:
Inertial Motion:
Galileo (1564–1642) discovers inertial motion. Things move because they are hit by a random external force, and they will continue moving like that until another random external force interrupts it.
After Galileo (mixed with the separation of science and spirituality), there is no inner life to things. “You are now a little island — a corpus in a vast desert of purposelessness. You are alone.”
The heart of the word “inertial” is “inert.” Dead. Lifeless. Not capable of moving itself.
This changes ‘matter’ from ‘potential’ for information to ‘that which resists’. Matter is now just this resistant inert “stuff.”
Scientific Method vs Subjectivism:
Galileo also gives us the scientific method, which is a way for overcoming our willful generation of illusion and self-deception.
This gives a huge power to the scientific method and to math. Anything I can measure mathematically is real. It is in the object, or as we come to say: “objective.”
What about all the things we can’t measure mathematically in this view?
How sweet the honey is, how beautiful the sunset is, how meaningful these words are.. where is all that meaning?
It must be inside the mind (because of the new separation between world and mind). It’s subjective (in this view).
“Created by your meaning-making mind, and its willful self-deception.”
Where we Are:
Disconnected from the world, trapped inside our heads, lost meaning. All that is out there is dead inert ‘stuff’ and all that is in the ‘mind’ is inner conflict and a battle of wills with other beings.
This is dissolution of the normative, nomological and narrative order.
- Nomological: new scientific worldview is one ‘I’ don’t fit into
- Normative: self-transcendence and ascent is gone
- Narrative order: purpose and story of things are gone
The orders are breaking down.
In Part 21, we look at how the Protestant Reformation then occurs to try reconfigure Christianity to this new worldview and emerging crisis — which exacerbates the crisis further.
Part 21: Martin Luther & Descartes
Martin Luther:
Martin Luther (1483–1546) embodies the chaos and confusion of his era, influenced by Rhineland mystics and recognizing the inner conflict as essential to spirituality.
- He concludes that human efforts are futile and clashes with the Catholic Church, asserting that faith alone can save — causing the Protestant reformation
- God’s act of saving becomes arbitrary, devoid of reason, and demands radical acceptance.
The perspective of perspectival and participatory knowing is diminished to accepting propositions without evidence, disregarding the mind’s participation in salvation.
Shutting Down the Monestaries:
Luther also proposes to shut down the monasteries. For Luther, self-transcendence is the grand illusion and thus the monasteries are not needed. The state becomes intwined with the safeguarding of knowledge (which as a result becomes politized)
But the monasteries were an important source of wisdom. As the university is to knowledge, the monasteries were to wisdom (self-transcendence). The two are supposed to make an important synthesis of how human beings are to make sense of themselves and the world and how to find a meaningful life
It means we lose all the psycho-technologies of wisdom. Cultural communities committed to providing guiding support for those who want to pursue wisdom — the historical tradition that can relay to us the patterns of success and failures for transformation
Today we do not know where to go for wisdom. We have sapiential obsolescence.
The Separation of Church and State:
Luther's’ views and attack on tradition also promoted the separation of churn and state.
Church:
- Luther believed that there is nothing in between God and the individual (the Priesthood of All Believers). Everybody has equal spiritual authority. Therefore, the church is to be democratic.
State:
- However, outside the church we do not know who is saved and who is not save and that is the world that needs to be kept in check by the sword (state).
As such, inside the church (under gods love) should be treated differently from outside the church (under gods wrath) — and the State should not interfere with the Church.
This will further drive the secularization of the culture. This makes the sacred more and more separate and seclude onto itself and individual — and more separate from science/university and the state/politics
Problem with Luther’s Model:
The problem with Luther’s model is that there’s nothing you can do to know you are saved. If there is no causal role to being saved then there is no causal evidence.
One does not know if they are saved. This creates tremendous anxiety.
He says that what you can do about this anxiety is work hard to make your life good i.e. that socioeconomic success is evidence that God sees you as good.
We then get the advent of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, etc. (See book by Max Weber: “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”)
Fragmentation of Protestantism:
Luther was surprised by the fact that Protestantism quickly fragments.
- Because there was no authority, tradition, or history except the individual conscience — peoples interpretations fractured. This was the separation of claims of knowledge, institution, tradition.
- This was exacerbated by individuals trying to show they were saved through specific interpretations
Narcissism and the fragmentation of Protestantism marched in lockstep and mutually accelerated. Notice that God is withdrawing. He’s become an arbitrary will in a battle of wills.
The protestant revolution has become ingrained in how we view ourselves. Even though many of us are children of secularisation there is this notion that we must ‘work hard’ and if we don't ‘work hard’ it will be revealed how worthless we are. Looking for a mark of uniqueness and not disappear into nothingness and meaninglessness.
The Spiral Downwards:
All of these factors: the scientific revolution, corporate capitalism and protestant revolution are all reinforcing each other and causing anxiety
People have been cut off from the world by the scientific revolution and now the Protestant fragmentation cuts them off from the church and now you the individual need to bear it all while simultaneously being told you don’t have the resources or the capacity within you to do it.
“A nothing that has to bear it all.” Cut off from wisdom. Ever more anxiety.
Descartes:
Following this, Rene Descartes (1596–1650) attempts to use the new math to create the solution to the meaning crisis. He creates a new psychotechnology so powerful, it is nearly transparent to our cognition today.
Cartesian Graphing:
Descartes invents Cartesian graphing. The x, y, z system. Taking the algebra Galileo had been using and invents graphing.
This brings with it a powerful idea: analytic geometry. Geometric objects can be converted to an algebraic equations — that capture reality. Equations are not “like” what they represent, but are what cut through the illusion of reality.
But it’s not a contact of experience — it is purely abstract and symbolic. This brings with it a radical idea: that this can help explain the meaning crisis. Descartes thinks the meaning crisis is the lack of and search for, certainty.
Computation and Certainty:
Perspectival, participatory conformity has been replaced with Propositional certainty. For Descartes, math gives you certainty and cuts through illusions.
Descartes thinks the answer to the crisis is to transform our minds into machines of certainty. To translate the world into propositions and then translate those propositions into abstract, mathematical functions.
His view was that to address the anxiety of the age we need certainty (through computation)
But the project of certainty fails (key to the 18th-20th century of scientific and philosophical history.
Hobbes:
A contemporary of Descartes, Hobbes (1588–1679), makes notion of computation more explicit and radical.
His idea: matter is real, so if I built a material machine that did computation I would have created cognition. Hobbes is proposing artificial intelligence.
In the process, Hobbes kills the soul. The last place where the individual was left — in the mind.
In Part 22, we will discuss the debate between Descartes and Hobbes in more detail.
Part 22: Descartes vs. Hobbes
Descartes argument attacked two central claims of the scientific revolution:
1. That matter is real
2. Reality can be mathematically measured.
Matter is Real:
Descartes rejects Hobbes’ materialism — stating that engaging in reasoning (as opposed to computation) means one cares. To reason, one acts on purpose, in terms of meaning, and cares about standards/goals (a normative standard).
But instead, what the scientific revolution proposes about matter is that it’s inert, that it has no purpose, no meaning. That is the conflict.
As such, Descartes argues you cannot have a material reasoner. The view of matter fundamentally makes the idea of rationality deeply problematic
To continue the increasing divide Descartes is arguing between mind and matter, lets turn to the second axiom of the scientific revolution.
Mathematics Measuring Reality:
Mathematic model of reality implies two types of properties:
Primary qualities: Measurable by math. In the object (objective)
Secondary qualities: Not mathematically describable (subjective)
- Galileo forms the notion that these are only experienced in the mind — behind the veil — by the subject (subjective). That way in which your mind doesn’t “touch” the world.
- Qualia = purely subjective only in the mind
And many philosophers since (Thomas Nagel, etc.) have noted that matter does not possess “qualia” so there is no way to manipulate matter to generate them.
Descartes Doubt:
Descartes starts to worry about this and feels like he has to doubt everything and goes on a search to find something he cannot doubt.
Ultimately, he lands on the idea that he can’t doubt the idea that he exists. cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”)
Even in the face of a complicated illusion his mind must exist (in order for him to even interpret such an illusion).
We used to have the mind in touch with the world. Then we had the mind in touch with the math. And now we are left with the interpretation that all we have left is mind in touch with mind.
“The problem with Descartes’ solution is its existential cost.”
- Descartes is essentially arguing that mind and matter are essentially different. All properties matter has, mind doesn’t have and vice versa But if they share no properties how do they causally interact?
- (e.g. two pieces of matter (a hand and a table) slam into each other and the causal result is pain. What is pain? A qualia. Pain doesn’t weigh anything. It has no colour. Has no electromagnetic radiation, no chemical structure.)
Mind and matter continually interact in a bi-directional manner. But Descartes cuts off the gap for mind and matter to interact — because they share no properties in which they can interact. That gap undermines your whole existence. The relationship between your mind and your body is a complete mystery
“Descartes did not give us a secure way of being in touch with reality, he gave us an unstable grammar of realness.”
Pascal:
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) realized this but also realizes what Descartes is trying to achieve is impossible and that the meaning crisis is powerful.
Pascal then makes a distinction between the spirit of geometry (math) and the spirit of finesse. His concern/fear was that we lost the latter.
- We’ve lost procedural knowing — knowing how to do things.
- And perspectival knowing — knowing what it’s like.
- And participatory knowing — knowing that is how we are bound up with something else in a process of mutual transformation.
We’re now stuck where Socrates was at the beginning of the Axial Revolution. We have scientific knowledge, but although it was rigorous and plausibly true it did not afford transformation; self-transcendence into wisdom.
In Part 23, follow up on Descartes and look at Kant and pseudo-religious ideologies.
Part 23: Romanticism
Kant:
Emmanuel Kant (1724–1804) is trying to deal with this fracturing of realness left by Descartes. He asks: how is it that math is so good at describing reality?
We originally had the Neoplatonic answer: that math represents an intelligibility that is embedded in the idos and structural-functional-organisation of reality. But that has been discarded through the progression of thought from Part 19–23.
How can we get those two sides of Descartes together — the side that says: math is real but all I really have is access to my mind.
Kant’s Proposal:
A radical proposal, a “Copernican revolution”:
These patterns of intelligibility that we find in the world aren’t actually there. Not in the sense we think they are.
In his view, the mind contains structures, akin to “filter-frames” or glasses, that bring order to otherwise chaotic experiences. This contrasts with the Platonic model, as it implies the mind actively “makes sense” of reality.
For Kant this means we can never know the world as it is, the “thing-in-itself.” The mind is only ever really touching itself. But it is an answer the questions as to why math works — it is the grammar of the mind. It is creating a structure of the world.
The price to pay for getting the two sides of Descartes together is to get them both inside the mind — further separating the individual from the world.
Consequences of this View:
The implicit idea is that raw “thing-in-itself” is being filtered and structured through layers of cognition. As raw material moves closer to cognition it becomes more and more rational, mathematically intelligible, but also farther and farther away from being in contact with the world.
For Plato, as you move deeper and deeper into rationality you get closer and closer to reality, but for Kant it’s the opposite.
The idea that as you move closer to your nonlogical, irrational, dream-like impressions and leave behind the rational/logical side you’re actually getting in closer contact with the world. This is the main idea of Romanticism.
Romanticism:
“Romanticism is the idea that we can recapture contact with reality by moving away from the rational layers of cognition and into the irrational layers.”
Romanticism (peak between 1800 and 1850) becomes a pan-European movement across the arts and religion. A key idea is that “imagination is where the mind initially imposes the order on raw data of experience.”
- The Romantic idea is that the world is a blank canvas upon which the imagination can express itself. This is why “expression” is an important concept for Romantics.
- This is in contrast and conflict with Empiricists, who view the mind as a blank slate that the world imposes itself upon (or, as Locke says, “impresses”), which becomes part of the “scientific” model.
Romanticism lays out a framework for you to regain contact with reality by moving into the world of the imagination, all with the machinery of religion.
It is the first of all the other pseudo-religious ideologies that follow.
Consequences of the Romantic View:
The price you pay for Romanticism is that you’re right where Descartes and Luther left you: you’re still trapped inside your mind. And the only way to get in touch with reality is to think and behave irrationally?
The issue with romanticism (besides its flipped Kantian model rationality) is that some may be able to have the transformative experiences (William Blake for example) — and put it into imagistic words — but without a systematic set of psychotechnologies (practices, institutions, regular and reliable guides to transformative experiences) and systems to go along with it, all you have is words.
It’s a pseudo-religious ideology. “It’s spiritual junk food. It’s tasty, but it’s not nutritious.”
Nihilism, Schopenhauer, & Nietzsche:
Schopenhauer:
There are still further attempts to understand Romanticism. It quickly passes into Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), the godfather of Nihilism.
Schopenhauer internalizes the romantic model of the world, influenced by Kant.
He makes a proposition of the arbitrary will (the will to live, the raw will that structures you). The arbitrary will is relentless but it’s pointless (since it’s not rational in the worldview). He concludes ultimately the rational mind is in service of the irrational will.
This is showing that separating meaning making from rationality has a deep price to pay
So, for Schopenhauer it all amounts to a nihilism, a pessimism. You’re left with a meaningless existence. Nihilism becomes an existential response to Romanticism.
Nietzsche:
Schopenhauer has a great follower who later renounces him: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a Father of Post-Modernism.
For Nietzsche, everything is pressing itself out, and that this is a feature not just of our minds but of reality itself. To create and master oneself in the world.
He sees a way of getting back something that was lost: self-transcendence.
(Note: his father was a Lutheran pastor, so he understands Christianity in a very Lutheran way, a way of suppressing the capacity for self-transcendence. This is why he’s trying to move away from and reject Christianity. He’s deeply influences by the Stoics and other Axial Age thinkers and he’s trying to bring it back but he’s blocked by this Lutheran interpretation.)
If we can stop suppressing this self-transcendence we can change the pessimistic will to live into the creative act of the will to power
But what he has created is self-transcendence without the machinery of dealing with self-deception. That’s what rationality really is: psychotechnology that affords self-transcendence by training you to overcome self-deception (lost in the reversal made in the Kantian model).
In Part 24, we will look at more pseudo-religious ideologies, specifically Hegel’s idealism, before tying all these influences to an apex — the tragedies of 20th century.
Part 24: Hegel
We need to go back to Kant to trace out another important line of development: Kant to Hegel (1770–1831) — which had tremendous impact on the political and cultural landscape of the meaning crisis.
Hegel & Idealism:
First thing that Hegel points out is that the ‘thing in itself’ is completely unknowable. For something to be unknowable is equivocal to being non-existent
This leads to Hegel says: “the real is the rational.” This leads to the conclusion that reality is found completely within the structure of rational thought. (This is a form of idealism — that reality in some way is made by or constructed by the mind in some way.)
- Hegel sees the irrational aspects of the mind as a kind of potential within the mind, a potential for rationality.
- Patterns of intelligibility + reality is a “mind” in this extended sense. These patterns’ structure reality, they’re not just an experience of it.
- Irrational elements are constantly being transformed into more rational elements.
So this whole thing becomes known as Absolute Idealism. The living system of patterns of intelligibility ultimately make sense — these patterns making sense are identical to the form of reality.
Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis:
How does one study this way of understanding the world? Through history, looking for patterns and grammars of intelligibility. How have cultures formed worldviews and ways of “making sense”? These are patterns that we “realize” (the word being used in both the sense of experiencing something and also the sense in which things are being made real).
Hegel finds that when you look at history, you see a tension between two opposing forces:
- Differentiation (grasping the differences between things, distinguishing, clarifying, contrasting, and articulating); and
- Integration (gathering things together to form systematic connections).
Hegel understands the process of understanding as systemization. As you progress through developmental stages in life, your system gets improved — parts get reintegrated, and you get a better systematic understanding of the world. “A living system of patterns of intelligibility.”
So, as you look through history, ideas get introduced and then get contrasted/differentiated by counter-ideas, which are then drawn together into a higher integration. The higher integration then becomes a new idea, which can have a counter-idea, etc.
So, you have an unfolding, emerging complexification, a process which Hegel calls dialectic. In this sense, reality is pure change.
All of this resembles the scientific way of trying to understand the world, via math + experiment. i.e. the absolute but abstract + the changing and empirical.
Self-Referencing:
This living system of principles for rationally moves from understanding things to understanding everything systematically… which then becomes self-reflected. It can then “grasp itself.”
Hegel interprets this Understanding (collective understanding) understanding itself as Reason.
“This process through history by which reality and rationality have realized themselves (self-actualizing)… is God.” Hegel has secularized and rationalized the Hebraic heritage. “A secularized, non-religious god.” There is a telos to this.
And so Hegel sets out to make religion conscious and rational — as an embodiment of the Giest’s self-actualization:
“We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.” The last religion as a translation between mythology and philosophy.
Looking at Myth vs. Philosophy:
As an example, Hegel represents the Holy Trinity in this manner in the following:
- The myth of “The Father” = “understanding as unarticulated , unactualized, undifferentiated.”
- The myth of “the Son” = the philosophical “articulation into particular things”
- The myth of “Son is sacrificed and reconciles with the Father” = the philosophical “realization of the identity in difference of the Father & Son”
- The myth of “The Holy Spirit” where God is agape = the philosophical “self-awareness of Geist”
“He’s taking the theological machinery that he sees at work in myth, and integrating it with the philosophical and scientific understanding that is impacting so powerfully on Europe in his time.”
This is a powerful attempt to reconstitute and save the meaning making machinery, and salvage the Axial legacy to give an account of how to develop a contact with reality that is spiritual and rational at the same time. He is trying to create a new grammar.
Critiques of Hegel:
But what has happened in the critical response to Hegel — and how has this infused the development and intensification of the meaning crisis?
Hegel sets up this pattern of secularizing religion into systems of ideas that attempt to give us a total explanation and guide.” Unfortunately, this effectively makes him the godfather of totalitarian ideologies.
1. Schopenhauer:
- Schopenhauer has a deep critique of Hegel, since his understanding of reality is based around the will — the will to live — which isn’t really adequately addressed in Hegel.
2. Kierkegaard:
- Kierkegaard also has a strong critique of Hegel.
- He said “Hegel made a system and then sat down beside it.”
- He thought there was an impersonalism to Hegel, a lack of perspectival and participatory knowing. You don’t need to undergo any radical change, have a mystical experience, higher state of consciousness etc. Theology becomes purely conceptual, propositional, rational self-reflect… not projects of transformative experience.
- Like Socrates with the natural philosophers — it is profound truths, but does not have existential transformative relevance.
3. Marx:
- Marx reshapes Hegel’s view, making it ‘history is not driven by reason, it’s driven by the monster.’
- Marx critiques based on this that the struggle between opposing ideas is actually the struggle between socio-economic classes.
In a way, Marx is actually completing and brings to a logical conclusion the secularization implicit in Hegel, “supplying” the missing participation.
- Marx introduces the idea of dialectic + participation coming together in the form of political, socioeconomic revolution.
- Marx has turned the kairos into the revolution. Violent, totalizing ideology with elements of Schopenhauer’s “will” that promise a secular utopia. That one has to be “on the right side” of history to bring about the utopia.
“All three critiques share a sense that Hegel’s totalizing ideology has not captured the core of human meaning-making.”
In Part 25, we will look at how this ramifies through Germany and the 20th century.
Part 25: The Clash
The conclusion of the idea that the political arena is where ideas are in conflict and win out over one another is culminated in the idea of nationalism.
Nationalism:
“Nationalism is the idea that the nation-state can take on a role in many ways that God has taken in the past.” This includes your patriotic devotion, commitment to it, willingness to sacrifice for it, and participation in its historical development.
In the 19th century, a fierce nationalism emerged around the time of Marx, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. It quickly became wedded to imperialism.
As a result, the entire movement began to take on secular, pseudo-religious ideologies and identities as people tried to fill the gap left by the departure of the Christian framework.
World War I:
Then disaster strikes: WWI (1914–1918). An entire generation across Europe is decimated. And Germany, being defeated, is especially traumatized. The victors, especially France & England, treat Germany poorly, weakening it economically.
Marxism begins rising in Germany as a real threat, and Goethe was an example of the rise of German Romanticism which was becoming decadent as well.
- All while there was also: ongoing fragmentation brought on by the Protestant Reformation… the idea of “will to power,” an undercurrent of Gnosticism & anti-Semitic traditions… a collapse of German Idealism…
- To replace Hegel’s idealistic interpretation of history and Marx’s socio-economic interpretation of history, there some who turn to a racist interpretation of history.
Luther’s Anti-Semitism and Nazism:
All of these things begin to be drawn together “in the autodidactic vortex of Hitler’s mind.” The meaning crisis begins to be driven to a fever pitch in the Weimar Republic.
“You misunderstand Nazism if you understand it only as a political system” or only as fascism, or racism. It is fascist and racist, but they are in service of a “Gnostic nightmare.”
- “It’s in our blood”… “We’re a master race, but trapped in a worldwide conspiracy” that is “keeping us from knowing our divine heritage” etc.
- Luther’s antisemitism is mixing up with a strand of Gnosticism that says the people that worship the God of the Old Testament are the Jews, which all makes a weird, twisted kind of sense to Hitler.
- “Nazism is a tsunami of bullshit in which all of these currents that are emerging out of the collapse of the three orders are being spun by Hitler in order to try to give people a brutally powerful response to the exigent intensity of the meaning crisis in Weimar Germany.”
He lucks out, because that socio-cultural process is intensified by the socio-economic collapse of the Great Depression. It seems to vindicate his Gnostic nightmare.
The Culmination:
So now we have two immense pseudo-religious ideologies: Marxism and Nazism. And they’re diametrically opposed to each other — history of race vs history of class
(Both with mythologies of becoming the kairos that brings about a utopia — a promised land)
And they meet in the most titanic struggle of the Eastern Front in WWII (1939–1945), in the Battle of Kursk in 1943. “There’s nothing like it. It is the biggest battle in history. Literally.”
They are both a fixation at the level of beliefs. Totalitarian ideologies — attempts to create secular alternatives to religions. Attempts to recapture the Axial legacy, where mythology is being confused for politics. A complete politicisation of the quest for meaning.
“The perspectival knowing has been reduced to your political viewpoint. The participatory knowing has been reduced to your political identification.”
This is the culmination of the genealogy of the meaning crisis from Part 1 to 25. This is about where we are up to in the meaning crisis, and it is time to build forward.
The Meta-Crisis:
All of this isn’t just symptomatic of the meaning crisis but contributes to it and exacerbates it. A meta-crisis (Thomas Bjorkman).
To address it we need to have comprehensive change in our consciousness, cognition, character, and culture. The only thing that has ever integrated these things in the past is religion. Our only attempts to replace this in the 19th/20th centuries — pseudo-religious ideologies — “have drenched the world in blood.”
So, we need to respond to the meta-crisis, and respond to the pseudo-religious ideologies:
- One proposed solution is a nostalgic return to religion. An attempt to ignore all this history. This just leads to a new set of fundamentalisms (Vervaeke even considers atheism one of these) and politicizations. When fundamentalism and politicization interact we get a potential for terrorism.
- Some people find themselves being in a state of post-religious. Fragmented, autodidactic… which can dangerously interact with politicization as well as pseudo-religious ideologies. It sits between them in a state of disarray, but can still interact with them, maybe as part of a search for a way out.
“We seem to need a religion that cannot be any kind of religion at all.” “There is no political solution to our troubled evolution.” — The Police
Having explored the collapse of the three orders (nomological, normative, and narrative) through history and the genealogy of the meaning crisis through Parts 1 to 25 (the halfway point), it is time to turn our attention to cognitive science (the other side of the argument)and the machinery of meaning-making itself, to attempt to build a solution to the meaning crisis — a religion of no religion.
Cognitive Science:
If we are to recover from the meaning crisis — one must try understand the machinery of meaning making to build a theoretical structure to recover the legacy of the Axial Revolution — and then this structure can aid in the forming of new systematic sets of psycho-technologies.
What is cognitive science?
There are different levels of analysis and also different disciplines:
- Neuroscience studies the brain and patterns of neural activity.
- Computer science studies information processing in terms of things like programs, and can get into artificial intelligence (AI)and artificial general intelligence (AGI).
- Psychology studies behavior, getting into things like working memory, long-term memory etc. and employ experimentation to gather statistical data.
- Linguistics studies language — “It’s through language that minds are linked together.”
