A Metarevolutionary Manifesto: Serialized (Part 7 of 50)

[This is Part 7 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 6 here.]

We have so far said that something essential to humanity has been lost, and there is a wound at the core of the world’s dominant worldviews. We have lost the Good. 

We can now go deeper into our metacrisis, having explicated the metaphysical sickness to which zombies correspond: nothingness, valuelessness, meaninglessness. And, in contradistinction, we have started to see what the resolution of our meaning crisis might entail. Because this is a metarevolutionary manifesto, and not just a revolutionary or political manifesto, the journey which resolves our meaning crisis will also be our entry into broad metarevolutionary principles. In other words, what we learn about the love between Value and Action in the following sections of this book will apply equally to our meaning crisis, and to any metacrisis in any time or place. Thus, the remainder of the first half of the book will deal largely with the features of complex systems, for that is what a metacrisis (or a metarevolution) is. These features, when ignored, are recurrent points of failure in the effectiveness of action; and, when attended to and comprehended, recurrent inroads into the transformation of action (and/or action-centers) towards greater complexity, consciousness, and coherence.

Before we get to that, though, one might still ask how we could have lost the Good. We can point to many “good things”, can we not? But it is a different claim entirely that we have lost the Good, which is metaphysical possibility, and the first principle of all good things in their relative actuality. A meaning crisis or zombie apocalypse is not the failure to maximize happiness or achieve great wealth or any other such notion. A meaning crisis is closer to a “death of God” experience, in which the underlying conditions of meaningfulness collapse; it is closer to Earth being thrown out of orbit, severed from the Sun’s energy and plunged into darkness.

This is why we have said that every manifesto is metaphysical, as is every choice, however minuscule it might seem. In the second half of the book, we will even relate this to the idea of “sacred architecture” and the beauty of our cities—because what we create from material is always a reflection and embodiment of the spiritual. We will see that architecture is a psychological, religious concern. But before we get there, to such contextual implications, we must approach things from the other side, from metaphysics. And we shall argue that the Good is the metaphysical first principle of everything, and indeed can be the only non-nihilistic first principle. We will see that optimism is the belief that the Good is discoverable—and that this is a crucial distinction to such common turns-of-phrase like “meaning making”, or even the in-built assumptions of our modern concept of freedom. 

We must deal with this zombie problem. But there is no implication of violence here: It may seem straightforward to kill zombies, and thereby end the zombie apocalypse, but our mythological lens begs to differ. The absolutizing of power/violence is what creates zombies, despite the temptation to “fight fire with fire”. The countervailing force of the zombie apocalypse is love, not power; optimism is the only medicine for nihilism.

The concern that naturally presents itself, when we hear “absolute Good”, is tyranny—the imposition of someone other than you deciding what is good for you; some overpowering, totalitarian force deciding what is ultimately and supremely good for all; that we are objectifying ourselves—submitting our individuality to some superindividuality, of which we are slave-like parts of its all-encompassing mechanization. This is not what is meant here; we shall not commit the “structuralist fallacy” or any variation of what could be called pathological collectivism. 

Mark C. Taylor: “Instead of individuals creating systems that were subject to their control, systems [in the structuralist view], it seemed, were creating individuals by situating them in networks and structures that regulate all exchange. Far from a center of action, the subject appears to be a function of the system or structure it constitutes. When understood in this way, structuralism is the philosophical reflection of a seismic techno-social shift. By arguing that systems constitute individuals more than individuals create systems, however, structuralists commit the opposite error of existentialism: whereas existentialism privileges the individual over the system, structuralists privilege the system over the individual.”

Heinrich A. Rommen: “All these attempts…lead to the devaluation of the individual person, to its instrumentalization by a supra-individual substance and hence to the destruction of individual free will and individual responsibility, to the utter demoralization of social life.”

We can overcome these issues, and it begins with a recovery of the Good and the understanding that it is absolute in a way which is inclusive of the relative. The Nietzschean “death of God” as Mark C. Taylor argues, is part of an ongoing “seesaw” between all-immanent and all-transcendent (monist and dualist) metaphysics; a fluctuation wherein we currently find ourselves in the labyrinth of relativism, where the transcendent (beyond) has been entirely lost. This is the zombie worldview—i.e. nihilism. When there is no absolute Good to which relative goods can point, Value per se devolves into “valuable for me”. From Plato to Leibniz, we find that the highest form of Good (and Love) is ecstatic and agapic—i.e. it connects the absolute and relative in lightning-like moments of hierophany, and good for me precisely because it is good for all, including me. The best of love is that which makes love most universal—love which supports the underlying conditions of love. 

D.C. Schindler: “Aristotle recognizes only two senses of good—(1) things good in themselves and (2) things good as a means to those—compared to Plato’s three categories. Aristotle’s view effectively separates the senses of goodness into a sharp dichotomy: we choose a thing either because it is intrinsically good or because it is instrumentally good. Though he affirms this difference, Plato at the very same time refuses to make the dichotomy absolute and allows a third possibility, a ‘both/and.’… This central class of good clearly represents the most comprehensive form, which simultaneously allows and overcomes a distinction between an intrinsic good and its extrinsic benefits. To put the issue in more technical terms, we could say that both Plato and Aristotle distinguish between goodness in an absolute sense (in itself), and in a relative sense (in relation to an extraneous benefit), but that Plato goes on to designate a third sense of goodness that is absolute in a manner inclusive of rather than exclusive of the relative.”

The Good is the first principle of everything. It is the entire content of what we call “possibility” or “the absolute”; and goodness-in-action is the entire content of what we call “actuality” or “the relative”. Action (as a term including power, energy, Will, Deed, perception, appetition, change, differentiation, transformation, and more) is the Good’s first Form, which then informs all others. Action is the first emissary of the Good. This claim, stated from metaphysical first principles, can also be stated from the foundational principles of physics—in which action is the building block of everything.

Christoph Schiller: “In 1899, Max Planck discovered, in his measurements on light, the existence of what he later called the ‘elementary quantum of action’. An ‘elementary quantum’ is an indivisible smallest entity. Planck’s discovery and his choice of terms gave ‘quantum’ theory its modern name… Action measures change…[and] is the most fundamental quantity in physics... The quantization of action thus implies that in nature, change occurs in small steps.”

Georgi Georgiev & Iskren Georgiev: “[And] Pierre de Maupertuis…in 1750 stated the law of the least action as a ‘universal principle from which all other principles naturally flow.’”

Arto Annila: “[Thus,] the principle of least action provides a holistic worldview in which Nature in its entirety and every detail is described in terms of actions.”

  The Good itself is the possibility of perfection, and Value per se, which we experience as the endlessly new music of actuality, played by the centers of action—an orchestra of souls—which compose it. This is optimism. It is belief in the absolute possibility of the Good, and the conviction that our actions may influence the unfolding of its actuality. It is the only alternative to nihilism, which places Power in this supreme position. Optimism is the belief that these “two worlds” of the absolute and relative are in fact two sides of a coin—which means that the “transcendent beyond” is here with us, and human experience happens within a naturalistically spiritual plenum. 

Iris Murdoch: “There is nowhere else, it is all here.”

Eric Perl: “[This means that what] Plato presents in the middle dialogues…is not two worlds, a world of sensible instances on the one hand and a world of transcendent forms on the other, but rather one world, that of intelligible form, and the appearances of that world which constitute sensibles. It is this understanding of the properties of instances as appearances of the forms that enables us to reconcile immanence and transcendence. The form is in the instance in that it appears and may be cognized here, in this particular association, as the property of this instance; and it is transcendent, that is, is not itself conditioned by the particularities of this or any other appearance and can be known apart from them. Since the same form may be apprehended as it is, as one, itself by itself, or as it appears, as many, as the property of each of the instances, it is both transcendent and immanent. The transcendence of the forms, then, so vividly presented in the middle dialogues, is not the separation of one world, one set of objects, from another, but is rather the priority and independence of intelligible reality in relation to the sensible appearance of that reality, and is thus a transcendence which does not contradict but rather both implies and is implied by immanence.”

D.C. Schindler: “[Which brings us to an understanding of] the paradoxical twofold nature of the Good: its absoluteness is not exclusive of, but necessarily inclusive of, relativity… In other words, relation to the absolute, properly conceived, does not simply eliminate what is relative or partial. If it did, then the absolute and relative would exist as competing members of the same class, as it were, and the absolute would thereby cease to be what it is. Instead, what is relative and partial gets integrated into an order that both transcends and includes it and it thus acquires a necessity it would otherwise lack.”

Eric Perl: “As soon as we recognize that the forms are the universal intelligible natures of sensible particulars, we are able to break free from spatial metaphors, from thinking of immanence and transcendence in terms of the local presence or separation of one sensible thing to another. Thus the apparent opposition between them disappears. Where, among all the beautiful things in the world, is beauty? Everywhere and nowhere: everywhere, because wherever a beautiful thing is, there is beauty, as a property which it has and by which it is beautiful; nowhere, because we cannot point to any one of them and say, ‘There it is!’ as if it were identical with or confined to that one instance… Physical, sensible things have and display incorporeal, intelligible natures which transcend them, and only by having such transcendent principles present in them as their properties or determinations do they have any intelligibility, any identity, any reality at all… The ascent from the world of sense to the place of the forms is not a passage from one reality to another, but a cognitive ascent from appearance to reality, from the apprehension by sense of the many appearances, to the apprehension by intellect of the one form which is appearing.”

Iris Murdoch: “[This means that] Plato’s Forms, as objects of moral desire, and principles of understanding, are to be thought of as active creative sources of energy in the world, but are mythically pictured as separate and transcendent; they cannot be relativized by being absorbed into (historical or psychological) transformations of existence.”

Eric Perl: “[Yes, and] as incorporeal, changeless, intelligible realities, the forms remain as transcendent to the world of physical, mutable, sensible things as the strongest proponent of separation could maintain. But this transcendence must not be conceived in dualistic terms, as the positing of another world over and above sensible things, an additional set of beings located elsewhere. The fundamental point of Plato's theory, rather, is that transcendence is not elsewhere but in our very midst. What is present in sensible things, as their properties, is transcendent form. The presence of the forms in their instances implies that our experience is shot through with intelligible ideas, with thought-contents. In one sense, we cannot see the forms: they are not themselves objects of the senses. In another sense, we never see anything but forms: they are the very ‘looks’ which our sense experience is always presenting to us, what is present in it for the mind. The forms are separate, not here, in the world experienced with the senses, in that they are not members of it; but they are here in that they are the very natures which sensibles things have and display. And it is in this sense that everything we encounter with our senses is not reality itself but an image, an appearance, a presentation, of the intelligible, eternal, divine reality.”

Iris Murdoch: “[This] double nature of the Forms, being both immanent and transcendent, [means that what]…is ideal is active in the imperfect life, and yet is also, and necessarily, separate from it. This separateness is connected with the possibility of freedom and spiritual movement and change in the life of the individual.”

What follows from this is optimism: The belief that reality is the unbreakable connection between the actual and the possible, the marriage of the relative and absolute, and a permanently entwined complex composed of the immanent and transcendent. And therefore, what we experience may be called a spiritual plenum (or pleroma or plenitude)—a place where everything is the body of the Good. All of this is to say that if the “beyond” is here—if the Good is absolutely sovereign, yet always present in Action—then optimism is both the orientation of seeing value everywhere, and the moral duty to lovingly connect Action to Value in such a way that leads to the greatest actual perfection. Our optimism is the belief that everything is a complex, loving mixture of Value and Action; that meaning is real, discoverable, and present everywhere; and that morality is nothing other than the good use of energy in the actualization of perfection.

Owen Barfield: “[So] let us begin by assuming straightaway not merely that matter is a form of arrested physical energy, but that Leibniz was right when he propounded that matter is coagulum spiritus—a kind of coagulation or concentration of spirit—that the material is formed from and within the immaterial, rather as ice is formed from and within water.”

Value is. Wisdom and Beauty are its symbols. Morality and Justice are the Good’s actualization through its psychopomp, Love.