Toward a New Meaning Narrative
Restoring a Participative Ontology and Epistemology.
Q: What’s the question this post is attempting to answer?
A: Why has our late modern experience for more and more people become so flat, one-dimensional, and with each passing decade so meaningless?
Q: Do you have a short answer?
A: Yes. It’s because the way we use language—and other symbolic representations—has come to disconnect us from reality rather than to help us to get a deeper, richer grip on it. We see this particularly dramatized in how meaningless language has become in our daily experience of its abuse in political and commercial discourse. Anything is believable, and nothing is believable. We live in word clouds that hypnotically induce to accept for reality phantasms that have hardly anything to do with reality.
Q: Isn’t language and our use of symbolic forms a rather technical concern for professional linguists and philosophers of language? Why should the rest of us care?
A: Do you care about being in touch with reality? Or do you want to just keep living in this phantasm? And besides, fast-moving developments in AI are forcing us to confront the consequences of our living in this cloud. I’d argue that the future of what it means to be human is at stake. That’s a concern for all of us, not just experts in linguistics.
Q: Well, I don’t experience my life as meaningless or out of touch with reality. There are plenty of things that make my life enjoyable and interesting.
A: There are two reasons to account for that:
One, maybe because you’re like Matrix character Cypher who, if he had succeeded in reentering the Matrix, would have been satisfied to live a shallow life of hedonic pleasure in a phantasmal cloud of privilege. This is the condition that Kierkegaard called the despair that does not know it’s in despair.
Two, because you have found your own individual way to break through the phantasmal cloud to the Real, and have found a way to live authentically inside out. If this describes you, you are attuned to how new technologies are strengthening and reinforcing a phantasmal reality that seduces us and seals us off from the Deep Real, and in doing so draws us more deeply into despair. People in ‘two’ live with one foot inside the phantasm, and one foot outside of it. They seek gradually to restore and make normative the “outside reality” by infusing it into the shell of the inside phantasm.
Q: What has AI to do with our experience of phantasmal meaning?
A: AI is forcing us all to reconsider what it means to be human and what it means to be meaning-making creatures. In a previous post I quoted NYU’s Leif Weatherby who said—
…I think we have to return to the liberal arts to make our way forward in the age of A.I. For students today, studying math and language might turn out to be the only way to be flexible enough to face a rapidly changing market in which a computer science degree is no longer a guarantee of a job. But it’s also a way to deepen our humanity in the face of these strange machines we have built, and to understand them. And that is something that A.I. will never do.
The argument that the Liberal Arts are a practical tool to make people more employable is a tired utiilitarian trope that doesn’t interest me. That the study of the humanities are essential for deepening our humanity does.
Q: But who cares about the humanities anymore? They seem to be providing answers to questions people no longer have.
A: Yes. Because the humanities—and the social sciences—in our mainstream educational institutions, influenced by postmodern theory have failed to play their humanity-deepening role. In fact postmodernism asserts that there is no depth, that everything is surfaces. That humans don’t speak language, but that language speaks them. The idea that it’s possible to deepen our humanity is excluded a priori. Language is not something that provides a portal into reality, but rather constitutes a phantasmal web of our own weaving that overlays a roiling, chaotic sea of meaninglessness.
Q: Are they right?
A: I think that many postmodern doctrines accurately describe the experience of many if not most the intelligentsia in the post WWII era—certainly more with each passing decade starting in the 70s. Postmodern theory is an accurate and honest attempt to articulate the experience of meaning in what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
Q: Is there any other accurate and honest attempt to articulate human experience in the TCM.
A: Yes. But for now it’s a rather uninfluential minority.
Q: Is there any reason to believe they will become more influential?
A: Yes. The main reason is that the current consensus is proving itself to be inadequate to meet the meaning needs of a society that is reeling from the de facto nihilism of late capitalism and its culture-destroying technological disruptions.
Q: What would change if they were to become more influential?
A: A restoraton of participative thinking as an antidote to alienated thinking. While it would start with the intelligentisia, as almost all significant cultural change does, it will eventually percolate downward throughout the culture influencing the arts and media.
Q: Alienated thinking? Participative thinking?
A: Yes. The first is thinking that flows from a condition of alienation, of being cut off from reality while the second flows from a condition of connection or communion with reality. Thinking flows from experience. If your experience is mostly that of disconnection, then your thinking is inclined to embrace a metaphysics of meaninglessness. If your experience is mostly that of connection, then it is llikely to embrace a metaphysics of participation.
A metaphysics is not just an abstract intellectual construct; it works to the degree that it robustly articulates experience in a meaningful way for most sane, thoughtful people. Robustness is measured according to the criteria Scope, Coherence, Richness, and Adaptability that I laid out in “Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins”.
Q: What are examples of participative thinking?
A: Plato & Aristotle, Neoplatonism, the Christian Neoplatonism of the Fathers through Aquinas, Bonaventure, & Nicholas of Cusa, Florentine Neoplatonism, Aspects of German idealism, and Romantic thinkers like that of Goethe and Coleridge, more recently the the thinking of Heidegger and his students like Martin Buber, and some of the thinking flowing from developments in theoretical physics all point to a participative ontology and epistemology. And of course thinkers like Charles Taylor and David Bentley Hart, about whom I’ve written so much, are important contemporary thinkers in this vein.1 But it’s not just a western thing. The philosophies that flow from Taoism, Vedanta, Sufism, and much of Jewish thinking provides resources to restore this participative mode of thinking and experiencing. In other words pretty much every major civilization throughout the world embraced a participative ontology and epistemology until intellectuals in the West rejected it to make room for the Baconian Project.2
Q: Why does nobody take these thinkers seriously?
A: Well lots of people take them seriously, but they don’t have much of an impact on shaping mainstream cultural discourse. Why? Because that discourse is largely captured by materialist presuppositions that are axiomatic for hegemonic scientific/naturalistic explanations. Scientific explanations seem authoritative because, as the bumper stickers says, “science is real”. The corollary that flows from that is that all non-scientific discourses are by comparison un-real because they are merely subjective or fancifully speculative or just plain irrational, so therefore not worth taking seriously. Utilitarian materialistic thinking pays the bills and puts people on the moon. Any other kind of thinking is merely personal preference and has no place in shaping public discourse or public policy.
Q: Ok. But isn’t the real problem that most people embrace a metaphysics of disconnection because that seems to truthfully articulate their experience?
A: There’s a chicken-and-egg dynamic here. But most humans, even most intellectuals, are not yet completely sealed off from the experience of connection or communion with what is deeply real. But because they live in a meaning environment that is dominated by alienated thinking, they are led to devalue their experiences of communion and to see them as ‘merely’ personal and private rather than as a key to what is really Real. What must happen is that these experiences of communion must become the basis to articulate an alternative metaphysical narrative that supplants the currently hegemonic public narrative of disconnection and meaninglessness.
Q: What makes you think that’s going to happen?
A: It may not, but I think that people want meaning and connection, and they’re ready for something completely different. Things can change in a flash. We’ve seen it over and over again in recent decades—mostly in negative ways. What was once unthinkable these days quickly becomes normalized. Why do we assume a mostly positive change is impossible or cannot be normalized?
I’m not saying that these thinkers all agree with one another, but that they, in their different ways, provide significant alternatives to the narrative of meaningless and disconnection that now dominates our public discourse.
I talk about the Baconian Project quite a bit in my Cathedral Lectures as having supplanted the great participative metaphysical narrative of Western Civilization to open up a space for the scientific revolution. The argument I make in those lectures is that while clearly the Baconian Project has generated many material benefits for humanity, it has profoundly unbalanced us and reached its reductio ad absurdum in post-WWII transhumanism. Transhumanism is a very influential, if not the dominant, narrative among tech elites who have been given unchecked license to shape the human future, and if left unchecked likely to end it.