Ness over Ism — from Belief Systems to Existential Styles
Finding our way back to participation
This essay is an attempt to carve out livable space in our ism-saturated cultural moment.
Participatory Knowing
One of the most insightful people I learned about last year is UofT psychology professor John Vervaeke. In his Youtube series he talks about how we are currently in a meaning crisis and proposes a tentative cure.
One of his most powerful concepts are the “Four Ps”. Each P represents a type of knowing, i.e. a way to be in touch with reality, and, as such, emphasizing a different aspect of it. Here they are:
- Propositional knowing: realness as truth
- Procedural knowing: realness as power
- Perspectival knowing: realness as presence
- Participatory knowing: realness as attunement
Let’s take dance: you can explain what dance is and how it works (propositional), you can know the steps you need to do to perform the dance (procedural), you can have a subjective experience of the dance as you perform it (perspectival), and finally, you can be attuned to the other dancer so that you can both adapt in real time to the full complexity of the dance as it’s happening (participatory).
A key aspect of the meaning crisis is that we are stuck in propositional knowing and have lost touch with participatory knowing (exemplified by the step from the Socratic/Platonic attitude, where one is in constant dialogue with the world and others, to the Aristotelian attitude, where it’s more about the single-author treatise, about building a theory about the world).
This is unfortunate because the participatory dimension is deeper, and a substrate for all other kinds of knowing: if we are not attuned to reality, all other forms of knowing are ultimately meaningless.
Liminal Mode and Game B
Last year, John Vervaeke found a natural peer in Jordan Hall, a thought leader in a scene that attempts to answer the question “Our current civilizational structure, game~a, has in-built self-terminating dynamics. What comes next? What is game~b?”
After years of analysis of the so-called “Deep Code” of our civilization, Hall comes to the following conclusion:
[Evolution] coded (at a very deep level) a capacity to shift from “culture mode,” where we are limited to using the tools in our given cultural toolkit, into a creative “liminal mode,” where we can form collective intelligence to navigate complex reality directly and with remarkable fluidity.
What we then need to be able to abandon our current niche is to “listen to our deepest humanness and allow ourselves to become sensitive to creative liminality”.
Hall’s theory marries well with Vervaeke’s 4 Ps: liminal mode (I’d argue) is nothing else than participatory knowing without propositional knowing, in other words, a strong and real attunement to the world beyond anything that can be put into words (this, by the way, is why nobody has, or can have a definition of Game B, to the dismay of many).
Existential Style
Our obsession with the propositional makes belief systems extremely salient to us. Which worldview, which ideology, which creed, which -ism we subscribe to becomes a fundamental part of our identity.
And yet, while it is important that we hold accurate beliefs about the world, deeper and significantly more important than our belief system is the way we go about participating to the world. The way we show up. Our “existential style”.
Why style? Because it captures the ineffable, unique, personal, contextual nature of the participatory dimension. It’s about the how. Styles emerge before they are named and become movements. First came the impressionistic painter, then came impressionism. First someone played funky, then came funk.
Why existential? Because it isn’t just something we do, it’s something we do and something that comes through us, it’s something we are and are part of, it is what Vervaeke calls “transjective”, i.e. a real relationship between us and the world.
Ness over Ism
If our belief system is our “ism”, our existential style is our “ness”. Some examples:
- Altruism vs acting with kindness
- Agnosticism vs showing up with openness
- Being “in the right” vs acting “with integrity”
- Humanism vs “being human”, a “Mensch”
- Theism vs devotion
- Christianity vs being Jesus-like
- Buddhism vs being Buddha-like
Existential styles can be synergistic in ways belief systems can’t. One can be both Jesus-like and Buddha-like, but not Christian and Buddhist. It’s the layering and depth of meaning that makes meaningful action truly complex, as opposed to the mere complicatedness of algorithmic, belief-based action.
Our obsession with the propositional is but one existential style — no matter what belief system we subscribe to. It’s the attitude to subordinate our participation to our beliefs. It’s to want to know first, knowledge and expediency over meaning, the old Luciferian temptation. But given that the participatory dimension is the substrate of the propositional, this attitude undermines itself and automatically leads to absurdity and nihilism (or, more correctly, to nihilness).
Existential styles can be infinitely more varied than belief systems: if you start paying attention to people’s existential styles you discover a whole new world of richness and beauty. I don’t know who has the right beliefs within the cultural scene I spend my time in, but there are so many people I admire and respect and enjoy for the unique presence and quality and form of caring they bring to the space.
Existential styles cannot be reduced to our attempts to put them into words. You can not subscribe to an existential style, you can only enact it. Our attempts to codify them are, at best, the finger that teleports one’s attention to the moon, and at worst, the simulacrum that disconnect us from our preconceptual here-ness. Make no mistake: this very thing, the article you are reading is a mere ism. This, too, is but a finger.
What, then, is the “right style”? What is our right relationship to the world and our beliefs? What is going to solve the meaning crisis and help us steward our civilization to Game B?
He does a little dance, then sits
Now he is beckoning
