Last time we were talking about the historical developments that happened around Kant. We took a look at Kant and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I present Nietzsche as one of the great prophets (I’m using that in the Old Testament sense of a prophet) of the meaning crisis. We talked about a way of understanding what Nietzsche is saying, how it’s not just simply atheism. We also took a look at a way in which Nietzsche doesn’t really adequately give us a response to the meaning crisis although he indicates that an important project within the response to the meaning crisis is: how do we reappropriate from the Axial legacy the idea of radical self-transcendence within a secular scientific worldview?
Kant’s trying to unify the two halves separated by Descartes; he proposes a shift where the mathematical, rather than being ‘out there’, is a lens that you apply to reality. “Math isn’t discovering reality, math is ultimately about how the mind imposes a structure on reality so it can reason about it.” Vervaeke comments: “that’s a really big price you pay for getting the two sides of Descartes back together!”
A quick description of predictive processing, how actually there does seem to be a filtering thing going on. Bottom-up and top-down processing are “completely interpenetrating in a completely self-organizing manner outside of your cognitive awareness.”
The Romantic reaction to this Kantian model is to notice that the closer you are to the mind / the more rational you are, the more you’re in your abstract frame and out of touch. So in order to get closer to reality, you have to move further from the mind / from rationality / from math.
Jung is basically Kantian epistemology plus gnostic mythology.
Vervaeke’s very ambivalent about the Romantics because they’re after contact with reality and they’re trying to recapture the lost perspectival / participatory knowledge. But because they’re in a Kantian framework, they think they get that by going into the depths of the irrational aspects of the mind.
The Romantics become anti-empiricists; the empiricists view the mind as a blank state that’s impressed on by experience, whereas the Romantics see the world is an empty canvas on which imagination expresses itself. (Vervaeke thinks both are wrong; I think they remind me a lot of no-self and self, which I view as interrelated like the taijitu.)
“[Romanticism] is a pseudoreligious ideology so it sweeps the continent but it’s like spiritual junk food. It’s tasty, but it’s not nutritious, and so what happens to it? Well it quickly gets translated into nastier forms, not without first of all setting the world on fire. Romanticism plays a big role in the rise of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.”
Romanticism fails; it wants to be the replacement for Christianity and doesn’t, but it also doesn’t go away.
Schopenhauer takes the Romantic notion of outward motion (from mind to world) as ‘imagination’ and replaces it with ‘will’. Previous depictions put the ‘head’ above the ‘stomach’, visualizing humans as using reason to overcome their passions; Schopenhauer inverts this order, where the stomach (will) is the driver, and reason is its servant.
Schopenhauer is pretty down on the ‘will to live’ (“sex is a cruel joke played on the individual by the species” → your life is shaped by striving for something that doesn’t really benefit you and isn’t worth it)
Nietzsche takes will to live and replaces it with the will to power. Nietzsche sees the Lutheran version of Christianity as about suppressing the capacity for self-transcendence, and the will to power as recapturing it. (Vervaeke thinks the core problem with Nietzsche is that you have self-transcendence without the machinery for dealing with self-deception, which is what rationality ultimately is.)
Also, I’ll pull out this quote where he tries to summarize the overall project:
I’d like to now pick up on what comes after Descartes, because I foreshadowed at the end of our last episode that we are in a quite significant situation. We are radically disconnected from ourselves, both our own bodies and our own minds, from other people, from the world, from history, from culture, from sapiential institutions, from traditions of transformation. We are radically isolated and bereft, and yet we face these tremendous crises: ecological crisis, socioeconomic crisis, political crisis, mental health crisis, they’re all interlocking and we face it and they’re so exigent and so pervasive and so profound and so complex that we need a fundamental transformation in consciousness, cognition, character, community in order to really restructure our sense of who and what we are in our relationship to the world in order to address these crises.
Now, the systematic set of psychotechnologies that have brought about such radical transformations in the past have been religions, and yet part of the heritage of Descartes and the Scientific Revolution and the ongoing fragmentation that has followed from the Protestant Reformation is an increasing secularization of the world. That’s a little too simplistic—I mean, it’s bifurcated, you get the increasing secularization on one hand and then the increasing attempt to nostalgically retreat to a pre-scientific model in various forms of fundamentalism, which of course is doomed ultimately to a complete kind of failure.
This is happening such that for many of us, a return to religion in order to provide the multi-level, multivariate complex transformation that is needed to meet the crises that we’re facing is not available to us, precisely because we are pro-religious or we are myopically entrenched within a pre-scientific model of the Scientific Revolution that will in no way avail us with what we need in order to address these crises. So either way you want to turn, the religious option is not a viable one.
What I want to now explore is why a secular solution for many people also no longer seems viable. So what I want to argue is that we face this hard problem of needing a religion that is no religion. It cannot be fully secular, but we don’t want it to be religious, and it is filled with all this paradoxical tension and contradiction that I’ve tried to argue is the hallmark of the Cartesian legacy.
The way I want to argue that is to try to show that the responses to the meaning crisis that come after Descartes. I’m going to talk about them in terms of the pseudo-religious ideologies, and how we have been traumatized by our interest and bewitchment by these ideologies precisely because these ideologies have led to titanic warfare and genocidal bloodshed. So we’re trapped between; we can’t return to religion, and we can’t move to its political secular alternatives because of the trauma that has been inflicted by their history, and so we are stuck. “There is no political solution”, to quote The Police, and yet we are not willing to return to a nostalgic and therefore impotent religious framework, so we sit trapped.
One of the things I got confused by in listening to this podcast was in the ‘two halves separated by descartes’. He said it I felt in a very off-hand way without even briefly reminding us what those two halves were. Is there a way I could get just a brief description of that?
Is it the separation between body and mind?
PS. I think you missed a couple words here:
The Romantics become anti-empiricists; the empiricists view the mind as a blank state that's impressed on by experience, the world is an empty canvas on which imagination expresses itself.
I believe that the part beginning with “the world is an empty canvas...” should start with ”...while the Romantics think that...”
I believe yes, tho I think Vervaeke upgrades it to something a bit more extreme: a separation between mind and reality. (Your only experience of reality, including the other people in it, is mediated by your body.)
Episode 23: Romanticism
Another short summary, so let me summarize.
Kant’s trying to unify the two halves separated by Descartes; he proposes a shift where the mathematical, rather than being ‘out there’, is a lens that you apply to reality. “Math isn’t discovering reality, math is ultimately about how the mind imposes a structure on reality so it can reason about it.” Vervaeke comments: “that’s a really big price you pay for getting the two sides of Descartes back together!”
A quick description of predictive processing, how actually there does seem to be a filtering thing going on. Bottom-up and top-down processing are “completely interpenetrating in a completely self-organizing manner outside of your cognitive awareness.”
The Romantic reaction to this Kantian model is to notice that the closer you are to the mind / the more rational you are, the more you’re in your abstract frame and out of touch. So in order to get closer to reality, you have to move further from the mind / from rationality / from math.
Jung is basically Kantian epistemology plus gnostic mythology.
Vervaeke’s very ambivalent about the Romantics because they’re after contact with reality and they’re trying to recapture the lost perspectival / participatory knowledge. But because they’re in a Kantian framework, they think they get that by going into the depths of the irrational aspects of the mind.
The Romantics become anti-empiricists; the empiricists view the mind as a blank state that’s impressed on by experience, whereas the Romantics see the world is an empty canvas on which imagination expresses itself. (Vervaeke thinks both are wrong; I think they remind me a lot of no-self and self, which I view as interrelated like the taijitu.)
“[Romanticism] is a pseudoreligious ideology so it sweeps the continent but it’s like spiritual junk food. It’s tasty, but it’s not nutritious, and so what happens to it? Well it quickly gets translated into nastier forms, not without first of all setting the world on fire. Romanticism plays a big role in the rise of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.”
Romanticism fails; it wants to be the replacement for Christianity and doesn’t, but it also doesn’t go away.
Schopenhauer takes the Romantic notion of outward motion (from mind to world) as ‘imagination’ and replaces it with ‘will’. Previous depictions put the ‘head’ above the ‘stomach’, visualizing humans as using reason to overcome their passions; Schopenhauer inverts this order, where the stomach (will) is the driver, and reason is its servant.
Schopenhauer is pretty down on the ‘will to live’ (“sex is a cruel joke played on the individual by the species” → your life is shaped by striving for something that doesn’t really benefit you and isn’t worth it)
Nietzsche takes will to live and replaces it with the will to power. Nietzsche sees the Lutheran version of Christianity as about suppressing the capacity for self-transcendence, and the will to power as recapturing it. (Vervaeke thinks the core problem with Nietzsche is that you have self-transcendence without the machinery for dealing with self-deception, which is what rationality ultimately is.)
Also, I’ll pull out this quote where he tries to summarize the overall project:
One of the things I got confused by in listening to this podcast was in the ‘two halves separated by descartes’. He said it I felt in a very off-hand way without even briefly reminding us what those two halves were. Is there a way I could get just a brief description of that?
Is it the separation between body and mind?
PS. I think you missed a couple words here:
The Romantics become anti-empiricists; the empiricists view the mind as a blank state that's impressed on by experience, the world is an empty canvas on which imagination expresses itself.I believe that the part beginning with “the world is an empty canvas...” should start with ”...while the Romantics think that...”
I believe yes, tho I think Vervaeke upgrades it to something a bit more extreme: a separation between mind and reality. (Your only experience of reality, including the other people in it, is mediated by your body.)
Fixed.