A Civilization Is Only as Healthy as Its Metaphysics

David Bentley Hart's Psyche v. Hephaistos

Over the next few weeks, among other things, I'll be thinking out loud a bit about Hart's arguments in All Things Are Full of Gods. Hart's book is a relatively heavy lift made somewhat more readable by its dialogic form, but some might wonder why people should make the effort to read and understand it. Well, if you’re still reading here after about a year now, it probably means that you more or less care about what I care about, and Hart’s argument in his book is foundational for almost everything that I’ve been exploring here.

He's making the case that I believe is central to laying the intellectual framework for the the overthrow of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, if ever such an overthrow is to happen. This is not a 'religious' argument; it is a philosophical one, but one that opens up possibilities for religious thought along the lines suggested in my essay about Merton and Taoism.

As I wrote in that post, the framing of a metaphysics is a civilizational challenge for thought and imagination. It does not require faith, even if people of faith play a role in shaping it. Religious conservatives call for a return to faith, but faith is personal and private, and it cannot be imposed on those who have not been gifted with it. It's like poetry and music in that respect. You can't make people like Yeats or Bach; there has to be something alive in you that responds to them. (But a healthy civilization would naturally produce most people who did respond to them. It’s not just a matter of taste.)

And the same is true for reading the New Testament or attending a mass. It's absurd to expect people to believe in the assertions of faith, whether of the Trinity, the resurrection, or the real presence. Those things can only make sense for those who have been in some way 'initiated' into their mystery. Civilizational thought has to be a public cultural inheritance that can be challenged and evolved. People need to be able to argue about it by making arguments that appeal to reason. So you cannot build a civilization on the subjective experience of faith. As the Calvinists in Geneva and Massachusetts Bay found out, you can't even build of city shining on a hill with just faith.¹

So a civilizational metaphysics is different. It must have a rational foundation, but rational does not mean material. It means that it makes sense to any thoughtful, open-minded person who thinks about it. It making sense must be accessible to anyone with a degree of intellectual honesty who wants to make sense of the world and of his or her experience in it. For it to broadly accepted, It must be intellectually plausible and emotionally and spiritual inspiring. It must open up possibilities for people to become full-spectrum human beings. And as I've argued elsewhere, there are four criteria by which to evaluate a civilizational metaphysics:

1. It must embrace the entire scope of human knowledge. It needs to take into account the breadth and depth of everything we know, from everything that science tells us on the horizontal dimension (See diagram below.) about the mechanics of the material world, to everything that the great sages have told us about the spiritual heights and soul depths on the vertical dimension.

2. It must be coherent. It must integrate and harmonize what is known on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. The one should be enriched and deepened by the other.

3. It must have richness. It must provide practices for individuals and communities that provide plausible ways of living that lead them to the attainment of the deepest longings and highest aspirations of the human spirit. It must produce authentic exemplars of full-spectrum human beings who embody a full, richly lived life in this sense.

4. It must be adaptable. It must be secure enough in its foundations in the first three criteria to be able to adapt and assimilate new knowledge when it becomes available on either the vertical or horizontal dimensions.

All of the great post-Axial civilizations when they were at their flourishing peak get high marks according to these criteria. Our civilization fails miserably. I can’t think of one contemporary American public figure whom I would describe as a truly great soul. And if one emerged, he or she would probably be ignored.

We are in a civilizational crisis because the metaphysical imaginary of developed societies is captured within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, and insofar as we accept its limitations as the really Real, we live in an imaginary that lacks scope because of its amputation of the north limb of the vertical axis. And because we live captured in this way, we have no sense of solidarity that might give us the power to resist how the TCM is dragging us toward a future. In that future, the only imagined possibilities for the human shrink. With each passing decade, we are becoming less and less human, and more and more machine-like.

And this is why I think that Charles Taylor's and David Bentley Hart's books published in this historically significant year are for so many reasons so important. Theirs are both efforts to restore the northern axis of the vertical pole. This is perhaps more explicit in Hart's book where the argument is summed up early on by Psyche:

PSYCHE: For what I concluded from this admittedly humble episode is that mental acts are irreducible to material causes; that consciousness, intentionality, and mental unity aren’t physical phenomena or emergent products of material forces, but instead belong to a reality more basic than the physical order; that the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for roughly four centuries is incoherent and inadequate to all the available empirical evidence; that in fact the foundation of all reality is spiritual rather than material, and that the material order, to the degree that it exists at all (on which we may reserve judgment), originates in the spiritual; that all rational activity, from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind’s constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God.

Once again, this is not the God of faith. This is simply God as a metaphysical principle, like the Tao, that establishes that Mind, not Matter, is the Good, and as such it is the living foundation for everything that exists. This position is opposed by the blacksmith/engineer, Hephaistos, who argues in defense of the metaphysics of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Responding to Psyche he says—

HEPHAISTOS: I see. The mind of God again, no doubt. [With a laugh:] Curiouser and curiouser. Well, I know that I’m in a distinct minority here, but I trust you’ll all pardon me if I remain true to my materialist convictions and continue to reject talk of God as anything more than a fantastical rhetorical resort to an explanatory cipher. And I hope you’ll also not think less of me if, despite the staggering evidence of a rose blossom plucked after deliberation from a tree, I continue to believe that the most rational and logically parsimonious explanation for the existence of all things—including mental phenomena—is that they’re the physical results of wholly material causes, operating in strict obedience to purely physical laws of causation.

EROS: I don’t always believe you’re quite as insensible to the mysteriousness of life and mind as you affect to be.

HEPHAISTOS: I assure you, there’s no affectation involved. I certainly see no need to explain life as the force of the divine mind in all things, or some spark of divine fire animating material organisms. We have no need of that hypothesis, to coin a phrase, or of any other form of “vitalism.” Organic life is the fortuitous product of unguided chemical interactions. Each species is the product of a phylogeny stretching back through time to a sea of rudimentary and barely active chemical elements, and any given individual organism is merely a kind of machine, a functioning combination of intrinsically purposeless parts, all constructed from an ensemble of largely inert chemical ingredients.

Hart’s Psyche throughout the book makes compelling arguments that such a materialist/physicalist metaphysics is fundamentally illogical. To reject it is not a matter of faith or personal preference, but of clear thinking. I’ll try to unpack some of those arguments in future posts.

Now I've been arguing all along that hardly anybody outside the culture's intelligentsia believes that human beings are machines in the way that Hephaistos describes them. And yet our whole society--our healthcare system, our politics, our educational system, our media, and almost every piece of high culture in film and fiction operates within a metaphysical imaginary that is shaped by Hephaistos's metaphysics and not at all by Psyche's.² Is there any wonder that we're in a civilizational crisis?

What? You don’t think so?

Ideas matter, and insofar as Hephaistos's ideas are the ‘code’ that runs the systems for everything that is important in our public life, we have become a civilization that for good reason feels as if it's about to crumble from its own dead weight. And there’s an increasing probability that it will unless we find a way to rebalance in some profound, fundamental way.

As a society we need to have the argument between Psyche and Hephaistos publicly aired. I know that’s a reach because it would bore most people to tears. But not everybody, and I hope some of those are among you reading this post. But if nothing else, the intelligentsia here, in Europe, Asia and elsewhere needs to better understand the implications of a global society in which Hephaistos's metaphysics continues to take the field unopposed. Ideas, whether we like it or not, have real material consequences.

1. See Perry Miller’s Errand in the Wilderness in which he talks about the crisis that the early Puritans had when their children could not prove that that they were “born again”, a criterion of faith that was required for full church membership. Within a few generations New England was more about making money to prove you were among the elect than by having a profound conversion experience to prove it.

2. Psyche does not deny what is factual in Hephaistos’s account, but she insists those facts need to be understood within a broader richer interpretive frame.