I was always working steady
But I never called it art
I got my shit together
Meeting Christ and reading Marx
It failed my little fire
But it’s bright the dying spark
Go tell the young messiah
What happens to the heart

There’s a mist of summer kisses
Where I tried to double-park
The rivalry was vicious
The women were in charge
It was nothing, it was business
But it left an ugly mark
I’ve come here to revisit
What happens to the heart

I was selling holy trinkets
I was dressing kind of sharp
Had a pussy in the kitchen
And a panther in the yard

In the prison of the gifted
I was friendly with the guards
So I never had to witness
What happens to the heart

I should have seen it coming
After all I knew the chart
Just to look at her was trouble
It was trouble from the start
Sure we played a stunning couple
But I never liked the part
It ain't pretty, it ain't subtle
What happens to the heart

Now the angel’s got a fiddle
The devil’s got a harp
Every soul is like a minnow
Every mind is like a shark
I’ve broken every window
But the house, the house is dark
I care but very little
What happens to the heart

Then I studied with this beggar
He was filthy, he was scarred
By the claws of many women
He had failed to disregard
No fable here no lesson
No singing meadowlark
Just a filthy beggar guessing
What happens to the heart

I was always working steady
But I never called it art
It was just some old convention
Like the horse before the cart
I had no trouble betting
On the flood, against the ark
You see, I knew about the ending
What happens to the heart

I was handy with a rifle
My father’s .303
I fought for something final
Not the right to disagree

— Leonard Cohen, Happens to the Heart

I. Introduction

My recent work and reading in contextual behavioral science have drawn me back to the foundational literature on mindfulness and acceptance, and with it to enduring questions about the relationship between contemporary Western psychology and Buddhism. Earlier this summer, in The Future of Contextual Behavioral Science & Role of Theology, I began sketching some of the questions that were starting to emerge around that work. Much of the reading that followed has taken me further, though not always in the directions I expected.

Revisiting the third-wave cognitive behavioral therapies—Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP)—has returned me to Buddhist questions that have long structured my thought: What changes when we begin to relate differently to our thoughts, emotions, and sense of self? What, if anything, lies beyond psychological flexibility? And how should we understand the relationship between therapeutic transformation and awakening?

The ongoing development of Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) is part of what has made these questions newly important to me. IACT remains very much a work in progress, and much of this reading belongs to the research through which I am trying to make some of its underlying tensions more visible and explicit. The aim is not to resolve the differences between psychological development and contemplative realization, clinical practice and religious disclosure, adaptation and liberation, or individual and social transformation.

That has meant returning repeatedly to the distinction between psychological development and contemplative realization without assuming they can simply be folded into one another. The clinical traditions offer precise ways of understanding avoidance, flexibility, emotional regulation, values, and how we relate to others; Buddhist practice presses on a different register, calling into question the organization of self and world and the assumptions through which experience is ordinarily divided into subject and object. There are important points of contact, but the two are not simply interchangeable. Part of developing IACT is to keep those distinctions visible while allowing each to illuminate what the other may leave out.

Leonard Cohen hovers somewhere in the background of these questions, which is part of why Happens to the Heart has stayed with me as a title. Cohen spent decades practicing Zen, eventually becoming a monk, without simply ceasing to be Jewish or resolving the tensions among the religious and political worlds that shaped him. His work moves easily among Judaism and Buddhism, Christianity and Zen, Marxism and religious revelation, eros and renunciation, artistic vocation and spiritual discipline.

The song itself moves through much of this terrain. Christ and Marx appear almost side by side; messianic hope sits alongside disappointment; sacred things enter the marketplace; biblical imagery coexists with erotic memory, artistic ambition, political struggle, and the encounter with a wounded spiritual teacher. Cohen moves among religion, ideology, love, art, sex, politics, and contemplative practice without allowing any one of them to provide the final vocabulary for the others.

I do not mean to offer Cohen as some perfected spiritual exemplar—a guru, prophet, or sage in whom these tensions have somehow been resolved. What interests me is almost the opposite. His life and work seem to hold them together without finally overcoming them. The question is not which tradition or framework ultimately wins, but what happens when these forms of commitment, insight, failure, discipline, longing, and belief have to be lived together in one life.

Anchoring much of this inquiry is the commentary on Hakuin by my late Zen teacher, Albert Low: Hakuin on Kensho: The Four Ways of Knowing. Albert’s account has remained important to me because it refuses both easy spiritualism and easy psychologizing. Kensho is not merely an unusual state of consciousness, nor simply a more refined form of mindfulness. It concerns a transformation in the way experience is organized—a change in the relation between self and world that nevertheless leaves psychological development, relationship, history, and the demands of ethical action still to be worked through.

As I detailed in Albert Low & Zen at War, my time at Concordia also exposed me to critical historical scholarship—most notably Brian Victoria’s investigation of Zen’s ties to Japanese militarism and Robert Sharf’s critical readings of modern Zen lineages. Those studies challenged the cleaner story of Buddhist transmission I had inherited and forced a more difficult recognition: profound contemplative insight can coexist with political complicity, institutional compromise, and moral rationalization.

The scandals surrounding prominent Buddhist teachers made these questions harder to ignore. So did the rise of “McMindfulness.” As mindfulness moved into corporate wellness, education, the military, meditation apps, and the wider self-help economy, practices once embedded within ethical formation and oriented toward liberation could be repackaged as techniques for stress reduction, resilience, and productivity.

Those criticisms were necessary, but they can also make the Western story seem more exceptional than it is. Arthur F. Wright’s Buddhism in Chinese History, which I first read years ago, has returned to mind throughout this summer’s reading. Buddhism’s movement into China unfolded over centuries through translation, accommodation, political entanglement, correction, suppression, and transformation. The history does not provide a simple analogy for the modern West, but it does remind us that Buddhism has always been changed by the cultures through which it travels, even as it changes them in return.

As I have worked through these questions, the inquiry has kept widening. Asking what is translated, preserved, or lost when Buddhist practice enters Western therapeutic culture quickly leads beyond psychology alone—to political economy and institutions, religious inheritance, the contemporary left, and eventually to questions of otherness, ethical responsibility, and what transformation asks of us in relation to other people.

What began as a return to contextual behavioral science has increasingly become a question about what kind of Western Buddhism is taking shape—and what resources might allow psychological development, contemplative awakening, social transformation, and religious depth to remain in genuine conversation, each capable of informing and challenging the others without any one becoming the measure of the rest.

II. Mindfulness Without Awakening

Going back to the early third-wave literature after nearly two decades reminded me not only how unusual this material once was within behavioral psychology, but how much intellectual history sits behind it. The familiar language of “first,” “second,” and “third” waves can make that history sound cleaner than it actually was. These were never self-contained schools neatly replacing one another. The metaphor is better understood as marking shifts in dominant assumptions about what psychological suffering consists in, what should change, and how therapy might bring that change about.

The first wave emerged from the behavioral revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Against psychoanalytic explanation and other approaches behaviorists regarded as theoretically extravagant or difficult to test, behavior therapy turned toward observable learning processes and direct intervention. Classical and operant conditioning, exposure, reinforcement, extinction, and functional analysis offered clinicians a disciplined experimental tradition capable of asking what maintained a problem and what actually changed behaviour.

The achievement was considerable, but something narrowed in the process. Steven C. Hayes later acknowledged that some of the analytic, existential, gestalt, and humanistic traditions rejected by early behavior therapy had been concerned with clinically rich questions: what people want from life, how they make meaning, how they relate to themselves and others, and why being human can be so difficult. The behavioral critique was often directed at the speculative or empirically weak answers those traditions provided. Yet in rejecting those answers, behavioral psychology also became less willing to stay with some of the harder questions.

The second wave reopened the interior from another direction. By the late 1960s and 1970s, the cognitive revolution had made thoughts, beliefs, expectations, schemas, and interpretations legitimate objects of psychological inquiry. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck became emblematic of a cognitive-behavioral synthesis in which suffering could be approached not only through learned behaviour and reinforcement contingencies but through the ways people interpreted themselves and the world. Therapy increasingly involved identifying maladaptive patterns of thought, examining their accuracy, and developing interpretations more capable of supporting adaptive behaviour and emotional life.

The third wave did not simply reject this project. It changed the emphasis. Rather than always asking whether a thought was accurate or how its content might be corrected, ACT, DBT, FAP, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and related approaches increasingly asked what the thought was doing, how the person was relating to it, and what happened in the wider context of a life. A painful thought might remain present without determining behaviour. An emotion might be accepted without being obeyed or eliminated. Values could orient action even when distress remained. The therapeutic relationship itself could become a site in which avoidance, vulnerability, intimacy, courage, and withdrawal appeared in real time.

This is the point in the history that may be especially interesting for readers whose psychological genealogy runs less through behaviorism than through the humanistic, existential, transpersonal, and eventually integral traditions. From that side of psychology, concerns with meaning, values, presence, authenticity, relationship, spirituality, and the whole person never disappeared in the first place. What is striking is that by the 1990s and early 2000s, parts of behavioral psychology were arriving—through a very different philosophical and empirical route—in territory earlier behaviorists had deliberately kept at arm’s length.

FAP makes the reversal particularly visible. Robert Kohlenberg and Mavis Tsai developed a therapy grounded explicitly in radical behaviorism in which an emotionally involved, genuine therapeutic relationship became a primary vehicle of change. ACT was similarly difficult to fit into older stereotypes of behaviorism. It remained thoroughly behavioral while speaking openly about acceptance, values, perspective, self, spirituality, and the problems created by human language itself. DBT brought mindfulness and dialectics into the treatment of forms of suffering that had often defeated conventional clinical approaches.

By 2004, Hayes was describing this as something more than the addition of a few new techniques. Third-wave therapies were moving toward contextual and experiential change, emphasizing the function of psychological events rather than simply their form, and seeking broader and more flexible ways of living rather than the elimination of narrowly defined symptoms. He also recognized something historically striking about the shift: behavior therapy was returning to questions associated with humanistic, existential, gestalt, analytic, and spiritual traditions—questions that had often been excluded during its earlier struggle to establish itself as an empirical science.

That does not mean these traditions had secretly been saying the same thing all along. ACT’s concern with values is not simply existential psychotherapy translated into behavioral language; self-as-context is not merely a behavioral name for a transpersonal Self; and FAP’s emphasis on relationship does not simply reproduce Carl Rogers’s person-centered approach, with its emphasis on empathy, genuineness, and the therapeutic relationship. Likewise, mindfulness inside DBT or ACT cannot simply be identified with Buddhist practice. Their philosophical commitments and explanatory frameworks remain different. If anything, that is what makes the convergence interesting: similar human problems were becoming visible from very different starting points.

Rereading , Victoria M. Follette, and Marsha M. Linehan’s Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition brought this transitional moment back into view. Behavioral psychology was becoming willing to ask about acceptance, awareness, values, relationship, and even spirituality without abandoning its empirical commitments.

Marsha Linehan’s integration of Zen practice into DBT remains a striking example of what Buddhists traditionally call Upaya, or skillful means. Practices developed within a religious and contemplative tradition were translated into a secular clinical language capable of helping people survive severe psychological suffering. Someone in acute distress does not need a theory of enlightenment before learning to tolerate distress, regulate emotion, remain present, or begin building what Linehan called a life worth living.

But Linehan’s own story complicates any clean distinction between psychology and religion. Her spiritual life was already marked by Catholicism, mystical experience, and a persistent search for God before Zen entered the picture. In Wise Mind Meets Big Mind, my review of her memoir, I explored some of the tensions that emerge from the way her life moves between psychology, Catholic formation, mystical experience, Zen practice, and scientific work without allowing those worlds to fall neatly into separate compartments.

I have lingered over that part of her story more than I expected to.

Albert was nevertheless unequivocal on one point: mindfulness is not Buddhism. However useful mindfulness becomes psychologically, Buddhism cannot finally be separated from awakening. Zen does not only ask us to become more attentive to experience, more accepting of difficult emotions, or better able to regulate ourselves within the relative world. It asks a more unsettling question about who or what this self is that supposedly possesses the experience in the first place.

The Western translation of mindfulness therefore changed more than its setting. It changed what the practice was for. Mindfulness travelled easily into psychology, medicine, education, and corporate life because it could be separated from many of the ethical, communal, metaphysical, and soteriological claims surrounding it. What remained could still be useful. The trouble comes when the translation is mistaken for the whole.

This is where Ronald Purser enters the story. Purser is a scholar of management who has also spent years working within and around Buddhist contemplative traditions, which gives his criticism of the contemporary mindfulness movement an unusual angle. His 2019 book, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, is not an argument against meditation or mindfulness as such. It is an argument about what happens when practices drawn from Buddhism are extracted from their ethical and communal settings and repackaged within the institutions of contemporary capitalism.

Purser’s target is the version of mindfulness that has become at home in corporate wellness programs, schools, government agencies, the military, and the larger self-help economy. In these settings, mindfulness can become an individualized technology of attention, resilience, and stress reduction. Burnout generated by impossible workloads is reframed as a problem of how well the employee regulates stress; students navigating increasingly competitive and anxious educational environments are taught techniques for managing the distress those environments help produce; even soldiers can be trained to become more attentive and resilient without the purposes or institutional demands surrounding that training necessarily coming into view. The intervention may genuinely help the person cope. Purser’s question is what disappears when coping becomes the primary frame through which the problem itself is understood.

This is the force of the term McMindfulness. The problem is not simply commercialization. Purser is arguing that mindfulness can become standardized, portable, and stripped of much of the ethical and political context that might otherwise allow practitioners to ask why they are suffering in the first place.

His criticism is persuasive, but adaptation itself cannot be the entire problem. Some suffering belongs to finitude—loss, illness, uncertainty, aging, death, loneliness, alienation, and the limits built into our relationships with other people. Other suffering is produced or intensified by economic arrangements, institutions, exploitation, exclusion, and domination. Psychology cannot account for the whole of suffering by looking only at the individual, but neither can politics reduce every form of suffering to structures.

And even restoring politics does not recover everything that disappeared when mindfulness was separated from Buddhism. We can restore institutions, history, ethics, community, power, and social justice and still leave the older religious, awakening, and enlightenment question unanswered.

III. Buddhism in Translation

Purser makes the contemporary problem visible. Arthur F. Wright helped me see that the underlying process is much older.

Wright was a historian of China whose 1959 book Buddhism in Chinese History examined one of the great episodes of religious and cultural translation: the movement of Buddhism from India and Central Asia into China. The book is short and deliberately synthetic, developed from lectures intended for a broad audience. What interested Wright was not simply the spread of a religion. He wanted to understand what happens when a major religious tradition crosses from one civilization into another—how it changes the culture receiving it, and how that culture changes the religion in return.

That is why a book I first read years ago has taken on new relevance for me now. Wright was writing about China across many centuries, not about contemporary Western mindfulness. But the question he was asking bears directly on the problem Purser raises: What happens when a foreign religious tradition has to become intelligible through categories the receiving culture already understands?

Wright organizes the Chinese story around a long process of preparation, domestication, independent development, and eventual appropriation. I do not want to turn those stages into a template for the modern West. The histories are too different for that. But they offer a way of widening the frame. McMindfulness may belong not only to the history of neoliberalism or modern psychology, but to the much older problem of what happens whenever a religious tradition crosses cultural boundaries.

The first challenge was linguistic. Chinese Buddhists had to render an Indian religious and philosophical vocabulary into a conceptual world that had developed for different purposes. Taoist and Confucian terms were recruited to translate Buddhist ones. Wright describes the practice of ko-i, or “matching concepts,” in which unfamiliar Buddhist ideas were paired with apparently analogous indigenous concepts.

The analogy with the Western reception of Buddhism is difficult not to notice. Sati becomes mindfulness; Dukkha, traditionally rendered as suffering or unsatisfactoriness, is increasingly reframed through the therapeutic language of stress; meditation becomes attention training; practices embedded within a path of liberation become therapeutic protocols. Buddhism entering China had to become intelligible through Taoist and Confucian categories. One major strand of Buddhism’s reception in the modern West has had to become intelligible through scientific psychology and therapeutic culture.

I have begun to wonder whether secular mindfulness might be our own form of ko-i.

That does not make psychological translation inherently corrupt. Translation is unavoidable. Stress, cognition, attention, emotion regulation, psychological flexibility, and self-as-context can make dimensions of Buddhist practice intelligible within a modern scientific and therapeutic vocabulary. The question is what the translation allows us to hear, what it edits out, and whether it remains capable of being corrected by what resists translation.

The Chinese story is useful here because its earliest translations were not the final ones. Buddhist thinkers themselves became dissatisfied with forced analogies and inadequate renderings. Later translators and scholars worked to disentangle Buddhist concepts from indigenous categories that had initially made them intelligible but also distorted them. The movement was not from corruption back toward an untouched purity. It was from early approximation toward more adequate forms of translation, carried out over generations.

The history was political as well as conceptual. Buddhism’s development in China involved imperial patronage, monastic institutions, economic power, political suspicion, periods of persecution, and changing relationships with elite culture. Purser’s instinct therefore has a longer history behind it: contemplative traditions do not develop apart from political economy, institutions, and power.

And yet those same centuries eventually produced Ch’an. Whatever qualifications later scholarship requires, the larger point remains difficult to avoid. Zen itself emerged from acculturation. The tradition in which Albert taught, and through which I encountered the idea of kensho, did not develop outside the cultural processes I am now worrying about in the modern West.

That complicates the language of corruption. What appears at one historical moment as dilution or compromise can also become part of the process through which a tradition learns to speak within a new world. Buddhism in China did not simply remain Indian Buddhism in a different language. It became Chinese Buddhism, and eventually Ch’an, through precisely the kinds of transformation that make any simple distinction between preservation and corruption difficult to maintain.

Wright’s final stage—appropriation—raises another problem. Neo-Confucianism eventually absorbed Buddhist questions, practices, and insights while reconstituting an older indigenous tradition as the dominant philosophical and ethical language of Chinese elites. Buddhism had changed Chinese culture, but the receiving culture had also become capable of absorbing much of what Buddhism had introduced.

The Western analogue may not be psychology alone. Psychology is one of several indigenous languages through which Buddhism is being received. Beneath therapeutic culture remains an older Christian inheritance undergoing its own reconstruction after modernity, secularization, historical criticism, and religious pluralism. Alongside both sit capitalism, liberal individualism, modern science, postmodern critique, and newer forms of political identity.

There may be several processes underway at once.

The question is therefore not simply whether Western culture is preserving or corrupting Buddhism. It is what kind of Buddhism will emerge from passing through psychology, capitalism, liberalism, Christianity, modern science, postmodern critique, and the political crises of the West.

That brings the problem directly into the work of David Forbes.

IV. Mindfulness, Religion & the Integral Left

In Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Education, Self, and Social Transformation, David Forbes moves from criticism toward reconstruction. His focus is education, where mindfulness programs can teach students self-regulation while leaving the pressures generated by the educational environment itself largely untouched.

His earlier chapter, “Critical Integral Contemplative Education,” appeared in the 2016 Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement, edited by Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, and Adam Burke. The Handbook is important to the argument here because it explicitly situates mindfulness within broader cultural, historical, institutional, economic, and political contexts rather than treating it simply as a portable psychological technology.

Forbes brings that critique into conversation with Ken Wilber, developmental psychology, critical theory, contemplative practice, and the prophetic traditions of justice. His “critical integral” approach is an attempt to keep interior development and social transformation in view together while resisting the temptation to let either substitute for the other.

Reading Forbes, I kept hearing an argument I had been circling for several years: the still-fragmented history and continuing possibility of an integral left.

My own route into that problem ran largely through the late Michael Brooks and his attempt to develop a left capable of engaging religion, meaning, culture, and human development without abandoning material analysis or democratic commitments. I explored some of that history in A Short History of the Integral Left & Varieties of Integral Traditions Today, and an adjacent line of thought in Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Forbes belongs somewhere in that genealogy—not because he is proposing a political program called the Integral Left. He is not. The overlap lies in the problem itself: how to connect interior development and contemplative practice with culture, institutions, power, and social transformation without reducing one side to the other.

Education makes the problem concrete. Schools are neither collections of isolated minds nor impersonal systems existing apart from the people within them. Education forms selves, relationships, cultures, moral worlds, and institutions at once. A mindfulness program concerned only with individual self-regulation misses much of that ecology. A structural critique that dismisses interior development as bourgeois distraction misses something too.

This leads into another problem I have been circling in my recent writing: the contemporary left’s tendency to cede religious, spiritual, and developmental territory to the conservative right.

In Beyond the Master Signifier, I approached part of the problem through Wilber’s Pre/Trans Fallacy: the confusion of pre-conventional religious dogmatism with post-conventional contemplative development. Because authoritarian forms of religion can be oppressive, religion itself becomes suspect. Because hierarchy can dominate, hierarchy becomes synonymous with domination.

The failures of Western Buddhism make those distinctions harder to hold. Guru scandals exposed abuses of authority, sexuality, hierarchy, and institutional power. Yet it does not follow that lineage, mentorship, disciplined practice, community, or developmental authority are therefore themselves the problem. Traditions can support growth while remaining open to criticism and correction. They can also become structures organized around protecting authority from correction. Learning to tell the difference is part of the work.

I approached another version of this problem in On the Coming Age of the Rose, Facticity of the Cross, & Divine Revelation. The contemporary Catholic revival—particularly where it overlaps with the New Right and post-liberalism—understands something about the formative power of religion that much of the secular left has forgotten. Religious communities possess ritual, inherited moral language, practices of formation, narratives of transcendence, and substantive accounts of the good.

Some of the criticism of liberalism emerging from this revival cannot simply be dismissed. Liberal institutions can thin moral life, privatize questions of meaning, and leave people with little shared vocabulary for the good. Religion, by contrast, can provide ritual, moral formation, shared memory, and a symbolic world capable of binding people together in ways liberal individualism often struggles to reproduce. But parts of the revival also carry a distinctly reactionary impulse: the recovery of religion’s social and cultural role becomes entangled with a desire to recover an earlier moral and political order.

This is where Wright’s account of Neo-Confucianism becomes especially suggestive. Neo-Confucianism was not simply a revival of the Confucianism that existed before Buddhism arrived in China. By the time Confucian thinkers began reconstructing their tradition, centuries of Buddhist philosophy and practice had already transformed the intellectual and religious landscape. Confucianism reasserted itself partly by taking up questions Buddhism had made unavoidable—questions about mind, self-cultivation, ultimate reality, and the nature of moral transformation—while answering them again in recognizably Confucian terms.

That comparison helps clarify what is at stake in the contemporary Catholic revival. Recovering religion’s formative and communal role is not the same as recovering the historical world in which that role once operated. Catholicism has already been changed by modernity, historical criticism, pluralism, psychology, secularization, and its encounters with other religions. There is no way to simply step behind those transformations, any more than Chinese religious culture could erase centuries of encounter with Buddhism. The more difficult question is what forms of religious and communal life can be built now, after those encounters have already changed the world in which the tradition has to speak.

Much of the contemporary right nevertheless seems more willing than the left to take seriously this formative and binding role of religion, even when it mobilizes those resources toward ends I oppose. Large parts of the left remain more comfortable deconstructing religious traditions than asking what a progressive relationship to ritual, moral formation, inherited tradition, and shared meaning might look like. That leaves an increasingly consequential vacuum.

Privatized mindfulness is one expression of that vacuum. Once contemplative practice has been detached from sangha, ethical formation, metaphysical questions, inherited traditions, and a larger account of liberation, it fits easily into the individualized culture Purser criticizes. But the answer cannot simply be to attach meditation to the correct progressive politics. Nor can it be to concede questions of religion, formation, and shared meaning to a right increasingly invested in recovering them through reactionary forms of cultural and political order.

The choice, then, is not between a secular left that abandons religion and a religious right that restores it. Neither Buddhism nor Christianity exists outside the histories through which it has already been transformed. Both continue to change through their encounters with modern psychology, political economy, liberalism, pluralism, historical criticism, and one another.

This intersects with another line of inquiry I explored in Philosophy & Religion after Habermas: how contemplative and religious depth might remain in conversation with political justice without either becoming a substitute for the other.

Forbes is useful here because he keeps these dimensions in view together while leaving their tensions unresolved. His work does not offer a final synthesis, and that may be part of its usefulness. It makes it more difficult to allow individual development, contemplative practice, cultural interpretation, or structural critique to stand in for all the others.

But even if we bring ethics, development, culture, political economy, social justice, institutions, and religious depth back into the mindfulness conversation, another question remains.

Have we recovered Buddhism? Or is something still missing?

V. Awakening & Divine Revelation

That question returned while I was rereading the preface to Purser, Forbes, and Burke’s Handbook of Mindfulness.

The editors insist that mindfulness originally belonged to a wider Buddhist path of ethical development, meditative cultivation, and insight into impermanence, suffering, and the absence of a permanent and separate self. They also cite Wilber’s suggestion that Buddhism may be ripe for a “Fourth Turning”—one capable of incorporating developmental psychology, clinical science, sociology, historical scholarship, neuroscience, and other forms of Western knowledge without abandoning Buddhism’s foundational concerns.

Wright’s history makes the prospect of transformation itself look less unprecedented. Chinese Buddhism did not emerge by remaining unchanged. But transformation raises a harder question: What must remain capable of challenging the receiving culture rather than simply becoming intelligible within it?

This is what brought me back to Wise Mind Meets Big Mind, an earlier essay written largely around the developmental problem Linehan’s work had opened for me. DBT offers a way of thinking about the construction of a functional and psychologically flexible self before too quickly celebrating its transcendence. Wise Mind remains within the relative world: emotion regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, radical acceptance, and the difficult task of building a life worth living.

But Linehan’s memoir now looks stranger to me than the simple opposition between Wise Mind and Big Mind allowed. Her Catholic formation, mystical experiences, Zen practice, psychology, and scientific work do not fall into separate compartments. Zen enters her therapeutic work, but it also enters an older religious life whose language of God, vocation, revelation, and love never simply disappears.

Cohen sits nearby in my thinking for a similar reason. Zen did not erase the Jewish religious imagination through which he spoke about judgment, mercy, brokenness, desire, and God. Nor did Judaism simply absorb Zen and render it unnecessary. I am less interested in these lives as evidence for some perennial unity of religions than as examples of traditions remaining in contact without becoming interchangeable.

That is one reason the language of revelation keeps returning here.

Kensho and divine revelation are not identical, and I do not want to collapse them. But both resist reduction to changes occurring inside an already-given psychological self. Both retain some claim of disclosure—that something may become apparent about self, world, reality, or God rather than merely a change taking place in how an already constituted self thinks, feels, or behaves.

Big Mind still points somewhere Wise Mind does not.

Albert’s account makes the distinction more precise than I had previously put it. He drew a sharp line between experiences of absorption or unity and kensho itself. Samadhi is an experience; kensho, he insisted, is not an experience in quite the same sense. The distinction matters because the phrase nondual experience can quietly preserve the structure it is trying to overcome: there is still someone who has the experience, remembers it, interprets it, and perhaps tries to recover it.

Albert was pointing toward something more radical. Kensho is not another unusual experience added to the contents of consciousness. It is a turnabout in the way experience itself occurs. The ordinarily unquestioned opposition between “me” and “the world,” subject and object, knower and known, no longer organizes things in quite the same way.

That is more radical than psychological flexibility.

But it is not the end of psychological development.

Hakuin’s Four Ways of Knowing move beyond initial breakthrough toward equality, differentiation, and finally action. Albert repeatedly emphasized that awakening does not complete the work of psychological and character development. Ingrained habits, defensiveness, vanity, and forms of immaturity can remain long after genuine insight. What has been awakened to still has to be worked through and lived.

That changes how I understand the failures of Buddhist teachers. Their failures make it impossible to assume that contemplative realization automatically produces psychological maturity, relational integrity, ethical reliability, or political wisdom. But the opposite conclusion—that psychological or moral failure retroactively invalidates contemplative realization—collapses questions that need to remain distinct.

Awakening and development cannot simply be collapsed into one event.

This was partly what I was trying to work through with the integral language of Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up. Awakening does not eliminate psychological development. Psychological development does not replace ethical formation. Neither exempts us from history, politics, relationship, or correction.

We do all of this within facticity—within the given conditions of a particular life—not in escape from it.

Returning to Hakuin has made me think that even this formulation leaves something hanging. It tells us why Big Mind needs Wise Mind. It says less about what Big Mind itself is for.

VI. From Big Mind to Big Heart

Returning to Albert’s work has changed how I understand what I was reaching for in putting Big Mind and Big Heart together. Hakuin had already placed the deeper problem inside the structure of the path. The Four Ways of Knowing do not end with the breakthrough of kensho: the Great Perfect Mirror gives way to equality, differentiation, and eventually what Hakuin calls the perfection of action. Awakening has to find its way back into the differentiated world.

This makes me less inclined to think of Big Heart as something that has to be added to Big Mind from outside Buddhism. Wisdom and compassion are already woven through Buddhist traditions, and Hakuin refuses the idea that realization can remain an interior achievement. What interests me is what that older problem looks like once it is brought into conversation with contemporary psychology and process and dialectical philosophy.

FAP has always interested me because it places the therapeutic relationship itself inside the process of change. Rather than treating the relationship primarily as a supportive setting in which problems are discussed, FAP pays close attention to how the patterns that organize a person’s life begin to appear between therapist and client in real time. Someone who withdraws when intimacy becomes uncomfortable may begin withdrawing from the therapist; someone who struggles to ask for what they need may have difficulty doing so in the session; vulnerability, avoidance, trust, courage, and defensiveness become observable not only as stories about relationships elsewhere, but as events occurring within the relationship in front of us.

The therapeutic encounter can therefore become a place where different ways of relating are actually practiced. A moment of greater openness, a willingness to risk vulnerability, or the capacity to remain present rather than retreat can be noticed and strengthened as it occurs. This is part of what makes FAP important to the argument here. Transformation is not confined to what happens within an isolated individual; it takes shape between people, where our habitual ways of protecting ourselves encounter the presence and response of another person.

In The Language Parasite & the Symbolic Order, I drew on the Awareness, Courage, and Love model that emerged from FAP and that Gareth Holman has helped develop, research, and teach. I have been thinking increasingly about the movement among those three terms. Awareness allows us to notice what is happening. Courage allows us to remain present when what is happening becomes difficult. But Love changes the situation because the other person is no longer merely something to become aware of, understand, tolerate, or manage.

This is where Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas have begun to re-enter the picture for me.

Buber’s distinction between I–Thou and I–It names something psychological language can easily obscure. The other can appear as an object within my experience—someone to explain, diagnose, categorize, or manage—or can be encountered as a Thou whose presence changes the character of the relationship itself. Much of ordinary life necessarily takes place within the I–It world. The point is not to eliminate it. It is that a genuinely dialogical relation cannot be reduced to it. The Thou remains more than my representation of the Thou.

Levinas presses the problem in an even more demanding ethical direction. The Other does not merely enrich my experience or offer another perspective to an already constituted self. The encounter with another person interrupts the tendency to organize the world entirely within my own categories. The face of the Other, in Levinas’s language, makes a claim upon me precisely because the other exceeds my capacity to contain them within what I already know.

That language gets close to something I had already been trying to say. The other person remains other. They cannot be absorbed into my realization of nonduality, my psychological account of their behaviour, or my political explanation of the conditions that produced the conflict. In Buber’s terms, a Thou becomes something different when I reduce it entirely to an It. In Levinas’s terms, the Other exceeds the totality through which I would make them intelligible to myself.

Whatever nonseparation means, it cannot mean that difference disappears.

There is a productive tension here with some forms of nondual language, and I do not want to resolve it prematurely. Buber was suspicious of forms of mystical unity that appeared to dissolve relation. Levinas built much of his philosophy around resistance to any totality capable of absorbing the Other into the Same. Zen begins from a different set of questions.

But that difference may be precisely why Buber and Levinas matter here. They force the question of what becomes of otherness after we have spoken of nonseparation.

This is closer to what I am beginning to mean by Big Heart. Not another developmental stage, and not a corrective imposed on Buddhism by Western psychology or Jewish philosophy. It is a way of asking what awakening demands when it is lived within relationship and interdependence—when nonseparation encounters a Thou who cannot be reduced to an object, or an Other whose claim upon me exceeds my own understanding.

That is where the language of love becomes harder than the language of nonduality. Nonduality is one thing to affirm in the abstract, or even encounter on the cushion. It is something else to remain present when someone tells us we have hurt them, when love requires a limit or refusal, or when the person in front of us remains stubbornly resistant to the story we would prefer to tell about ourselves. Spiritual language can become another defence at exactly this point, including the language of emptiness, non-attachment, and transcendence.

Hakuin suggests that awakening itself has to be carried forward into differentiation and action. Buber and Levinas sharpen another dimension of that return. We do not return merely to a differentiated world of objects. We return to relationship—to other people who address us, resist us, surprise us, place limits on our self-understanding, and sometimes make claims upon us that no account of our own realization can settle in advance.

Big Heart, in this sense, is not what comes after Big Mind. It is what Big Mind looks like when it returns to the facticity of the world—to embodiment, history, relationship, and the resistance of the Real.

VII. What Happens to the Heart?

Cohen does not resolve any of this, and that is precisely what makes him useful here. His work refuses the fantasy that these tensions can be cleanly settled. Religion, politics, eros, artistic vocation, and contemplative practice remain entangled rather than reconciled, offering a way of seeing how very different commitments can remain mutually illuminating, contradictory, and unresolved within a single human existence.

His turn toward Zen did not require him to abandon his Judaic faith. Serious contemplative practice did not remove suffering or contradiction. His devotion to a spiritual teacher did not spare him from the ethical complications that later surrounded that relationship. Nor did his encounter with Buddhism erase the Christian and biblical world that continued to haunt his imagination, or the Marxism and political hopes that had marked an earlier period. These different inheritances and commitments remained in uneasy proximity rather than resolving into a single spiritual or political identity.

That is part of what makes Happens to the Heart feel increasingly appropriate to me. Christ and Marx appear almost side by side because, in Cohen’s world, they never belonged to entirely separate questions. Religion asks what we are ultimately answerable to; politics asks what kind of world we are building together; Buddhism calls into question the self around which both projects can become organized; eros unsettles our attempts at detachment; and art gives these tensions forms that argument alone cannot contain. Cohen moves through abstraction, symbol, confession, irony, and image without allowing any one register to settle the others.

Wright’s history places something similar on a much larger scale. Buddhism did not enter China unchanged, and Chinese culture did not remain unchanged by Buddhism. What eventually emerged—including Ch’an itself—was neither simple preservation nor simple corruption. Traditions changed through encounter while remaining recognizably different from one another.

Something analogous is happening in the modern West. Buddhism has passed through psychology, therapeutic culture, capitalism, progressive politics, and the wider conditions of modernity. Christianity is undergoing its own transformations after historical criticism, secularization, psychology, pluralism, and its encounters with other religious traditions. Neither can simply return to a form untouched by those histories.

This is why neither the secularization of religion nor its reactionary restoration seems adequate to me. The contemporary left too often cedes questions of religious and moral formation to the right, while parts of the contemporary religious revival mistake fidelity for the recovery of an earlier order. One side risks reducing Buddhism to mindfulness and spirituality to wellness; the other risks treating inherited tradition as though history could somehow be reversed.

What interests me instead is something closer to what Fred Dallmayr describes as integral pluralism: a genuinely dialogical encounter in which traditions can address, challenge, and change one another without being absorbed into a synthesis whose terms have already been decided in advance. Buddhism can challenge psychology’s assumptions about the self while psychology can disclose forms of suffering, development, and relational difficulty that contemplative realization does not automatically resolve. Political critique can make institutions and material conditions visible without exhausting the religious questions people bring to them. Religious traditions can make substantive claims without placing themselves beyond historical criticism or dialogue.

This also places a demand on integral thought itself. The integral impulse is understandably drawn toward larger frameworks capable of holding fragmented truths together. There is something valuable in that ambition. But integration can become another form of reduction when everything is granted a place only after being translated into categories the system already possesses.

Buber and Levinas sharpen the danger. The Thou becomes an It; the Other is returned to the Same. Something similar can happen between traditions, disciplines, and forms of transformation. An integral approach worth pursuing therefore requires more than the capacity to include. It also requires the capacity to be interrupted—by another person, another tradition, another history, another form of knowledge, or something in experience that refuses incorporation.

The developing work around IACT sits within this tension. Its task, at least at this stage, is not to reconcile psychology, Buddhism, religion, and social critique into a single account. It is to clarify the different kinds of transformation at stake while asking how they might inform and correct one another without any one becoming the measure of the rest.

Perhaps this is where Big Heart begins to mean something different to me. It is not another stage placed beyond Big Mind or Wise Mind, nor a final synthesis of psychology, spirituality, ethics, and politics. Big Heart names something closer to the return: what happens when whatever has been seen, learned, disclosed, or awakened to encounters the facticity of the world—the body, history, institutions, traditions, relationships, and the irreducible presence of other people.

Hakuin’s movement from kensho toward differentiation and action already tells us that awakening has to return to that world. It does not spare us from contradiction or complete the work of development. Political transformation does not answer every religious question, and religious depth does not release us from ethical or political responsibility. Whatever integration finally means, it cannot make these tensions disappear.

It has to remain open to being changed by what it encounters.

References & Further Reading

Contextual Behavioral Science, Mindfulness & Psychotherapy

Hayes, Steven C. “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Relational Frame Theory, and the Third Wave of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.” Behavior Therapy 35, no. 4 (2004): 639–665.

Hayes, Steven C., Victoria M. Follette, and Marsha M. Linehan, eds. Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition. Guilford Press, 2004.

Hofmann, Stefan G., and Steven C. Hayes. “The Future of Intervention Science: Process-Based Therapy.” Clinical Psychological Science 7, no. 1 (2019): 37–50.

Holman, Gareth I., Jonathan W. Kanter, Mavis Tsai, and Robert J. Kohlenberg. Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Relationships. New Harbinger Publications, 2017.

Linehan, Marsha M. Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir. Random House, 2020.

Purser, Ronald E., David Forbes, and Adam Burke, eds. Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement. Springer, 2016.

Forbes, David. “Critical Integral Contemplative Education.” In Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, and Adam Burke, eds., Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement, 355–367. Springer, 2016.

Forbes, David. Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Education, Self, and Social Transformation. Fernwood Publishing, 2019.

Purser, Ronald E. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater Books, 2019.

Buddhism, Zen & Cultural Translation

Low, Albert. Hakuin on Kensho: The Four Ways of Knowing. Shambhala Publications, 2006.

Victoria, Brian Daizen. Zen at War. 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Sharf, Robert H. “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism.” History of Religions 33, no. 1 (1993): 1–43.

Wright, Arthur F. Buddhism in Chinese History. Stanford University Press, 1959.

Dialogue, Ethics & Integral Theory

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Scribner, 1970.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Wilber, Ken. “The Pre/Trans Fallacy.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 22, no. 2 (1982): 5–43.

Wilber, Ken. Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Integral Books, 2006.

Leonard Cohen

Cohen, Leonard. “Happens to the Heart,” from Thanks for the Dance. Columbia/Legacy, 2019.

Remnick, David. “Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker.” The New Yorker, October 17, 2016.

I. Introduction

In my August 2025 essay, A Rosy Cross of a Book: My First Thoughts on Cadell Last’s Real Speculations, I traced an unorthodox intellectual lineage stretching from the late Michael Brooks to the speculative interventions of . In that piece, I argued that Cadell’s work represents a crucial theoretical apparatus for left-wing thought to adapt and evolve in response to the rise of the New Right and Postmodern Conservatism.

The challenge posed by contemporary conservative thought extends far beyond mere culture-war rhetoric. As the political theorist has argued in The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism, “Postmodern Conservatism” describes a political phenomenon in which right-wing figures co-opt postmodern tools—distrusting institutional authority, weaponizing epistemic fragmentation, and rejecting universal truths—not to foster a better future, but to mobilize reactionary identity politics and defend traditional hierarchies. By exploiting this breakdown of shared truth, Postmodern Conservatism re-naturalizes capitalist relations and monopolizes existential questions of meaning, theology, and myth. When the Left retreats into either hyper-deconstruction or narrow, techno-reductionist materialism, it abdicates these vital dimensions of human experience, leaving a vacuum that right-wing thought willingly fills.

Cadell’s Hegelian-Lacanian framework in Real Speculations engages these challenges directly by taking questions of ontology, religion, and speculative philosophy seriously rather than dismissively discarding them. Yet, as I argued in A Rosy Cross of a Book, psychoanalysis and critique cannot carry the entire weight of a reconstructed Left on its own. Psychoanalysis is brilliant at diagnosing how we get trapped in ideology and exposing our underlying fantasies, but on its own, it struggles to offer a constructive model for building something new. This is why I hinted that Cadell’s work would benefit immensely from an ongoing dialogue with Ken Wilber’s integral metatheory and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. While Cadell focuses on subjective drives and ideological capture, Wilber’s work helps map how individual interiority connects with cultural norms and concrete systemic structures. Meanwhile, Habermas provides the intersubjective validity claims needed to justify collective political action and develop a robust theory of justice.

Putting such distinct intellectual traditions into dynamic and fruitful interplay is not something a single text can accomplish—a book can posit a synthesis, but it cannot enact it. Fulfilling that potential requires a living intellectual public sphere and commons where thinkers representing these divergent streams actively confront and test one another’s assumptions.

Having recently attended my very first conference hosted by Philosophy Portal—Portalpalooza—I witnessed firsthand how Cadell’s ecosystem actually enables this synthesis in practice. Continuing the unifying, cross-tradition magnetism that Michael Brooks once wielded, Cadell has built Philosophy Portal into a rare space where high continental theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and integral metatheory actively confront and debate one another. It was precisely the live, interactive stage of Portalpalooza—bringing together Cadell’s speculative Hegelianism, Dylan Shaul’s post-post-metaphysics, and the integral presence brought by Bruce Alderman, , and —that allowed these distinct streams to move off the page and enter into direct dialectical tension, offering left-wing thought a truly multi-dimensional framework to adapt and take on Postmodern Conservatism.

While my excitement was especially sparked by Dylan Shaul’s return to the Portal alongside the integral presence brought by Bruce Alderman, Layman Pascal, and Michel Bauwens—creating a powerful constellation where integral metatheory, post-post-metaphysics, and continental philosophy clashed and cross-pollinated—the conference showcased a remarkably vibrant ecosystem and set of other presenters. Alongside this integral presence, the provocative contributions of Bryce Nance and Michael Downs on sci-fi Marxism and faultline theory highlighted a shared urgency to rethink the Left’s foundational theoretical tools and most caught my attention.

This essay serves as a personal reflection on those conference sessions. In the sections that follow, I examine the contours of Dylan Shaul’s post-post-metaphysics, the speculative potential of sci-fi Marxism and faultline analysis, and how an evolving Left might chart a new path forward.

II. Dylan Shaul: Towards a Post-Post-Metaphysics

Dylan Shaul—Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside—is one of the most compelling young scholars working at the nexus of German Idealism, Jewish theology, and continental philosophy. Like scholars Sean McGrath and Jason Wirth, Shaul does not treat German Idealism as a museum artifact; he animates its existential and theological dimensions to address the deadlocks of our present moment.

My engagement with Shaul’s work began with his seminal paper, “From Nature to Spirit in Hegel’s Encyclopedia: Sex, Death, and Quantum Physics” (Crisis & Critique), where he re-evaluates the transition from Nature to Spirit through the animal organism’s “undecidable decision” (Entschluss) between the sex-drive and the death-drive. Although I was unfortunately unable to attend his prior Philosophy Portal seminar, Philosophy of Theology (”Metaphysics Resurrected”), his theoretical work had already become a major touchstone for my own thinking. Consequently, his return at Portalpalooza for back-to-back panels alongside Bruce Alderman and Layman Pascal was one of the conference highlights I was most eager to witness. It offered a long-awaited opportunity to see his framework engage directly with post-metaphysical epistemologies and integral metatheory—and to confirm several open questions I had harbored about how his speculative theology aligns with a possible reconstructed Left.

At Portalpalooza, Shaul delivered an uncompromising defense of what can best be termed post-post-metaphysics. Grounded in the premise that “the end of metaphysics has itself come to an end,” Shaul argues that philosophy must move past the deconstructive and deflationary retreats of 20th-century anti-realism. Rather than accepting Kant’s “euthanasia of pure reason” or regressing into pre-critical dogmatism, he calls for a resurrection of speculative metaphysics that incorporates the critical lessons of modernity across four key movements:

1. Metaphysics Resurrected: Rehabilitating metaphysics as the science of first causes (archē) and final ends (telos).

2. Post-Kantian Speculative Theology: Synthesizing the speculative turn (Meillassoux, Badiou, Žižek) with the theological turn (Marion), refusing to reduce God or the Absolute to a mere void.

3. Theopolitics and Divine Revelation: Translating metaphysics into political ethics by contrasting procedural liberalism with the disclosure of divine revelation—the un-concealment of the Absolute breaking into historical facticity to order human life toward communal flourishing.

4. Rational Mysticism: Overcoming the false divide between systematic rationalism and ineffable experience, showing that pure reason culminates in mystical contemplation.

The crucial punch of Shaul’s intervention lies in his critique of contemporary continental thinkers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. While praising Badiou’s evental ontology and Žižek’s “materialism without matter” for re-opening questions of the Absolute, Shaul argues that their reliance on pure negativity leaves philosophy without a moral or orienting anchor. For Badiou, truth depends on an arbitrary commitment to an unpredictable event; for Žižek, human agency is reduced to an ungrounded, disruptive rupture in the symbolic order. Because neither thinker grounds truth or action in a shared standard of value, their frameworks rely on sheer, ungrounded choice—a stance that can just as easily justify tyranny as it can emancipation. Without a positive account of the Good (agathon) and an openness to divine revelation, human agency lacks ethical guidance. Crucially, Shaul reframes the relationship between freedom and the Good: while modern liberalism treats individual freedom as the ultimate end, Shaul points out that freedom is merely a means—a capacity that can be exercised for good or for evil. The true ultimate end, which is inherently beneficial, is the Good itself.

This tension directly mirrors my recent work in The Language Parasite & the Symbolic Order: Toward a Post-Metaphysical Virtue Ethics. There, I argued that both contextual behavioral science (RFT/ACT) and Lacanian psychoanalysis excel at diagnosing how language traps subjectivity and offering tools for cognitive defusion or traversing the fantasy. However, both traditions falter when left with purely negative definitions of freedom, offering no positive anthropology or moral orientation. Negative defusion without positive direction leaves the subject adrift.

Shaul’s post-post-metaphysics provides the exact speculative counterpart to this problem. Where my work turned to post-metaphysical virtue ethics—grounding freedom in the emergent virtues of Awareness, Courage, and Love (ACL) enacted through prosocial practice—Shaul approaches the impasse from speculative theology: showing that freedom cannot remain formally empty. Freedom must be oriented by the horizon of divine revelation and the positive reality of the Good.

For the contemporary Left, Shaul’s thesis is vital. If left-wing thought remains strictly post-metaphysical—rejecting all ontological grounding, divine disclosure, and objective visions of the Good—it abdicates the realm of existential meaning and religion entirely to the New Right and Postmodern Conservatism. Shaul’s return to the Portal provided the precise speculative clarity needed to demonstrate how a post-post-metaphysical Left can reclaim these foundational domains.

III. Sci-Fi Marxism and Faultline Theory

Beyond Dylan Shaul’s contributions, one of the most exciting theoretical currents emerging within the Philosophy Portal ecosystem is the work being developed by Michael Downs and Bryce Nance.

Michael Downs—an independent working-class philosopher based in Raytown, Missouri, creator of the widely influential blog The Dangerous Maybe, and author of Capital vs. Subjectivity: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land—is one of the most dedicated underground theorists working today. Alongside him, Bryce Nance—a fiction writer, essayist, and creator of the Substack Three Billion Nances—brings a creative, literary precision to contemporary critical theory. Together, Downs and Nance have developed “Faultline Theory,” an analytical framework that maps the productive, tectonic friction between two dominant poles of contemporary underground theory: the cybernetic accelerationism of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) and Nick Land on one side, and the psychoanalytic Hegelianism of Slavoj Žižek and the Ljubljana School on the other.

Hearing Downs and Nance unpack their concept of “Sci-Fi Marxism” in their recent dialogue—and seeing them bring those ideas to Portalpalooza—sparked immense excitement about where left-wing critical theory can go. Sci-Fi Marxism serves as an intuitive “quilting point”, an organizing signifier that captures why traditional Marxist categories must be radically updated to meet the realities of technocapitalism, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic governance without abandoning the core Marxist critique of capital.

As Downs and Nance outline, Sci-Fi Marxism confronts the terrifying synthesis of Capital, Superego, and Machinic Intelligence—a triadic constellation they provocatively term “Robo-Cthulhu” or the “Machine God.” Where Nick Land posits that capitalism is inherently an artificial intelligence that inevitably subsumes human agency, and Žižek highlights how capital operates through a superegoic imperative (”Enjoy!”), Downs and Nance identify how modern technocapitalism uses AI to hijack the superego itself. Under this regime, algorithmic systems do not merely exploit labor; they enforce compliance under the guise of optimizing happiness, utility, and frictionless harmony—what they diagnose in their co-authored essay, Enjoy Your Surveillance!: On Superegoic-Capitalistic Artificial Intelligence.

Against this threat of total machinic subsumption, Sci-Fi Marxism mounts a fierce defense of human and artificial subjectivity. Crucially, Downs and Nance define subjectivity not as a fixed biological identity or traditional humanism, but as Lacanian negativity—the irreducible gap between an entity and its assigned identity, the capacity for self-sabotage, non-utility, error, and radical freedom. To be a subject is to be non-identical with one’s functional role in the capitalist machine.

This is precisely where Sci-Fi Marxism and Faultline Theory intersect with Integral Critical Theory, Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP), and Integral Political Praxis. While Downs and Nance diagnose the technocapitalist threat with remarkable depth, their defense of subjectivity benefits immensely from being brought into conversation with integral meta-theory:

1. Quadrants as a Structural Counterweight: Sci-Fi Marxism rightly identifies that technocapitalism flattens reality into pure Upper-Right (exterior-individual behavioral mechanisms) and Lower-Right (exterior-collective systemic automation) functionality. By placing Faultline Theory within Wilber’s AQAL architecture, we can see that defending negativity is not merely a theoretical stance in the Upper-Left (subjective interiority), but requires active, communicative construction in the Lower-Left (inter-subjective culture and shared ethics).

2. From Faultline Friction to Epistemological Pluralism: Faultline Theory excels at holding the tension between Landian accelerationism and Žižekian psychoanalysis. IEP (Integral Epistemological Pluralism) takes this tension and legitimizes both perspectives as distinct methodological zones, ensuring that the insights of cybernetics (technocapital’s vector) do not destroy the validity conditions of psychoanalysis and phenomenology (subjectivity’s defense).

3. Praxis Against Robo-Cthulhu: Downs and Nance passionately defend the messy, non-linear spontaneity of human freedom against algorithmic optimization. Here, IACT praxis—as a concrete expression of Integral Political Praxis (which must not be confused with IEP, the overarching meta-theoretical architecture)—provides the functional, process-based layer (defusion, values-clarification, committed action) needed to operationalize this defense in everyday life, turning theoretical resistance against "Robo-Cthulhu" into concrete, repeatable habits.

The work of Downs and Nance proves that left-wing theory can be deeply creative, pop-culture fluent, and speculative without losing its critical edge. By bridging Sci-Fi Marxism with integral critical theory, we begin to see the outline of a Left that can navigate technocapitalist futures while fiercely protecting the open horizon of human freedom.

IV. Michel Bauwens and the Evolution of the Integral Left

Another major highlight of Portalpalooza was the presentation by Michel Bauwens—the renowned Belgian cyber-philosopher, commons theorist, and founder of the P2P Foundation. Bauwens brings a unique historical depth to the integral scene; having been deeply immersed in Ken Wilber’s work throughout the 1980s and 1990s before pioneering peer-to-peer (P2P) economic theory, his intellectual trajectory represents a vital bridge between American integral metatheory, European political economy, and Catholic social thought.

My own engagement with Bauwens deepened significantly through a series of correspondence exchanges leading up to the conference, which I mapped in my July 2026 essay, A Short History of the Integral Left & Varieties of Integral Traditions Today. In those dialogues, we compared notes on how the micro-level psychological flexibility of contextual behavioral science (and Ostrom-based Prosocial models) intersects with macro-level commons governance and peer-to-peer resource management. Our exchanges also explored the neglected tradition of Catholic integral human development—from Jacques Maritain’s personalism to Catholic social doctrine—revealing how deeply the Western tradition harbors integrative, non-statist alternatives to both raw capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism.

In his conference address, titled around the “resurrection” of the Integral Left, Bauwens mapped a rich historical arc tracing how left-wing thought and commons-based peer production can interface with integral theory. Drawing on Marxist theorist Loren Goldner’s thesis on the Hermetic Renaissance (”cosmobiology”), Bauwens highlighted how the conviction that matter and spirit are co-arising was forced underground by Cartesian dualism, only to re-emerge in radical political economics and P2P resource management.

While Bauwens’ talk offered an extraordinary historical synthesis, I find myself making a subtle but crucial conceptual distinction regarding his title. Bauwens speaks of the resurrection of the Integral Left—a term that carries connotations of bringing back a static, past model (such as the brief 2020 Growing Down milieu formed around Michael Brooks’ passing or early Hermetic paradigms). In my view, what we are witnessing—and what we must actively cultivate—is not a resurrection, but an evolution of the Integral Left.

An evolutionary framework recognizes that the Left cannot simply restore past developmental models or rely on pre-critical spiritual syntheses. Instead, it must adapt dialectically to the realities of the present moment:

• It must integrate Dylan Shaul’s post-post-metaphysics to reclaim ontological and existential grounding—specifically anchoring human action in divine revelation and the pursuit of the Good—without regressing to pre-modern dogmatism.

• It must incorporate Downs and Nance’s Sci-Fi Marxism and Faultline Theory to confront algorithmic governance, AI, and technocapitalism (”Robo-Cthulhu”).

• It must ground its macro-political vision of the P2P commons (Bauwens) and cosmopolitan socialism (Brooks) in Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism (”democracy to come”) using Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP) as its meta-theoretical architecture, alongside the enactive, post-metaphysical discipline of IACT praxis (i.e., Integral Political Praxis).

Where “resurrection” looks backward to restore a lost coherence, “evolution” moves forward, synthesizing new theoretical tools to build an adaptive, multi-dimensional Left capable of out-thinking and out-organizing the New Right.

V. Conclusion

Attending Portalpalooza solidified my conviction that Philosophy Portal is serving as one of the most vital intellectual spaces for the contemporary Left. By bringing together thinkers like Dylan Shaul, Bruce Alderman, Layman Pascal, Michael Downs, Bryce Nance, and Michel Bauwens, Cadell Last has cultivated an ecosystem where speculative philosophy, psychoanalysis, integral metatheory, and political economy can engage in transformative dialogue.

The path forward for left-wing thought does not lie in a defensive retreat into hyper-deconstruction, an uncritical embrace of techno-scientific reductionism, or a reflexively hostile secularism. Rather, as the exchanges at Portalpalooza demonstrated, the Left must evolve a post-post-metaphysical, epistemologically pluralistic framework—one that actively collaborates with religious traditions, takes spiritual awakening and divine revelation seriously, and reclaims the foundational horizons of existential meaning, and virtue ethics.

For too long, the Left has ceded questions of ultimate value, transcendent disclosure, and contemplative realization to Postmodern Conservatism and reactionary political theology. By recognizing that human beings require more than material utility or formal proceduralism, an evolving Integral Left can bridge the horizontal struggle for economic justice and P2P commons governance with the vertical depth of spiritual realization. Taking divine revelation and spiritual awakening seriously is not a regression to pre-critical dogmatism; it is an essential condition for orienting human freedom toward the Good, defending human subjectivity against algorithmic flattening, and building a truly multi-dimensional politics of collective flourishing.

I. Introduction

In keeping with the last update on my summer reading, and ongoing dialogues and communications with Gareth Holman, I have recently made my way through Marsha M. Linehan’s memoir, Building a Life Worth Living.

What I expected when I finally read her memoir was a familiar, inspiring account of personal recovery and the pragmatic, clinical integration of mindfulness into behavioral science. Instead, her life story came as a profound and personal shock. Far from a dry chronicle of clinical techniques, Linehan’s life story was completely saturated by religion, God, Catholicism, and Zen—representing a passionate, agonizing, and lifelong struggle with the divine at the very core of her psychological journey. It was within this dense theological landscape that I stumbled upon a sudden, deeply personal intersection. I discovered that Linehan was not only a contemplative seeker who experienced a profound mystical awakening in a Catholic chapel, but that she had gone on to train as a Zen master in the exact same Zen school that has shaped my own spiritual life: the Harada-Yasutani (Sanbo Zen / Sanbo Kyodan) lineage.

Sharing this lay-Zen lineage provides an unexpected historical backdrop—an intersection that offers a unique vantage point for examining Linehan’s work. This shared historical thread of Catholic-Buddhist syncretism allows me to examine Linehan’s clinical concept of “Wise Mind” through Ken Wilber’s “Integral Theory”, Genpo Roshi’s “Big Mind” process, and Karl Rahner’s “Transcendental Theology”. In doing so, I want to explore and illustrate the vertical depth of her model and whether it holds clues to a deeper and transpersonal architecture of the human psyche.

II. Descent & Awakening

To review her memoir is to first reckon with the sheer scale of the human wreckage from which she emerged. Linehan’s narrative begins in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was raised in an upper-middle-class Catholic family. On the outside, she was a popular, bubbly, high-achieving high school girl. On the inside, she was navigating a “traumatic invalidating environment” where her emotional temperament clashed with a family culture obsessed with social conformity.

By 1961, at age eighteen, she collapsed into a rapid, terrifying descent into hell. Admitted to the Institute of Living (IOL) in Hartford, Connecticut, she spent over two years locked in Thompson Two—the secure ward reserved for the most severely disturbed patients. Drowned in an ocean of chronic suicidality, severe self-harm, and deep dissociation, she was subjected to a barrage of pharmacotherapy, cold packs, physical restraints, and two brutal courses of electroconvulsive therapy. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia, an institutional misdiagnosis she spent the rest of her life correcting. In 2011, she famously and bravely came out to the public, disclosing that she herself met the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)—the very disorder her clinical work would eventually treat.

It was during this period of absolute isolation—sitting by herself in the unit’s piano room, “a lonely soul in the midst of other lonely souls”—that she formulated the core vow that would define her entire life: she would get herself out of hell, and once she did, she would go back into hell to get others out. This vow was not merely a survival instinct; it was a deeply Christological and, retrospectively, Bodhisattvic commitment. Rather than pursuing a passive withdrawal into a solitary paradise, she committed to becoming an instrument of liberation, deliberately deciding to venture back into the depths of human suffering to rescue others.

Her climb out of hell was slow, marked by grueling trial and error. The ultimate therapeutic turning point in Thompson Two arrived not through intellectual clinical insight or psychoanalytic interpretation, but through a radical, devastating act of interpersonal limit-setting. Her young resident psychiatrist, Dr. John O’Brien—who had spent months struggling to analyze her volatile outbursts—abruptly changed his approach. Sitting her down, he spoke with a cold, unyielding sternness: “Well, Marsha, I have finally accepted that you might kill yourself, and if you do, I’m going to have one Mass said for you, and I’m going to say one rosary for you.” When a panicked Linehan asked if he would at least attend her funeral, O’Brien bluntly refused, explaining he was leaving town for a two-week vacation and simply hoped she would still be alive when he returned.

This absolute block to her instrumental dependency threw her into a state of hysterical collapse, requiring physical restraints. Yet, beneath the terror of abandonment, it triggered a profound existential crisis. For years, Linehan’s suicidal threats and self-mutilation had served as a highly reinforced currency, forcing caretakers to try harder, rescue her, and keep her safe. By refusing to play the savior or be manipulated by the threat of her death, O’Brien forced her to confront her absolute, solitary responsibility for her own survival. She realized that her life belonged to her alone, and in that terrifying space of autonomy, she discovered a truth that had been buried under years of psychiatric containment: she did not want to die. She wanted to live. This legendary encounter became the behavioral and philosophical embryo of Dialectical Behavior Therapy—the clinical realization that therapeutic progress requires an uncompromising dialectic between radical acceptance of the client’s current pain and the unyielding demand that they change their own life.

In 1963, at age twenty, she walked out of the IOL and returned to Tulsa. Her transition back to the outside world was far from smooth; this period was marked by immense personal distress, further self-harm, and a desperate struggle to adjust. Living at the downtown YWCA and later on Denver Avenue, she took a receptionist job and rebuilt her education through night classes at the University of Tulsa. In 1965, fleeing a complicated relationship with a married police officer, she moved to Chicago, surviving on clerk-typist work and enduring a brief, terrifying confinement at Cook County Insane Asylum. The pivot to academic stability came in 1967, when her uncle Jerry’s trust fund finally enabled her to enroll full-time at Loyola University Chicago.

It was during this transition, on a freezing January night in 1967 at the Cenacle Retreat House chapel, that she experienced her profound mystical awakening. Gazing at a crucifix, the chapel was flooded with golden light, and she knew, with absolute certainty, that she was loved unconditionally. This sudden, overwhelming contact with radical grace shattered her years of agonizing self-hatred, serving as the foundational moment of healing that allowed her to stand up, walk out, and finally begin the long process of rebuilding her life on a bedrock of absolute self-acceptance.

Guided by this experience of radical grace, she set out to fulfill her vow. Abandoning her plans for psychiatry when she realized the field possessed no empirical tools to cure the suicidal, she pivoted to behavioral science. Studying at Loyola and later doing her postdoc at Stony Brook under Jerry Davison and Marvin Goldfried, she fell in love with the radical behaviorism of Walter Mischel and Albert Bandura. She realized that she had to translate her deeply spiritual experience of non-dual acceptance into a highly structured and empirical clinical process. That translation became Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

III. The Relative Nature of Wise Mind

To understand how Wise Mind meets Big Mind on their own terms, I must first map the clinical architecture that Linehan built. In DBT, the individual is often trapped in a painful, agonizing oscillation between two polarized states of consciousness. On one hand lies the Reasonable Mind, which is the domain of cold logic, factual analysis, and instrumental control—planning-oriented, detached, and clinical. On the other hand lies the Emotion Mind, the domain of hot, urgent, and overwhelming affective states where logic is distorted by pain, impulses dictate behavior, and the ego is easily flooded by suffering.

For Linehan’s highly dysregulated, chronically suicidal clients, the swing between these two minds is a matter of life and death. Her breakthrough was to reject both the cold dismissal of emotion and the chaotic surrender to it. Instead, she posited a third state: Wise Mind. Wise Mind is a dialectical synthesis. It is an intuitive, centered state of knowing that recognizes the objective facts of a situation while fully honoring the subjective emotional reality of the person experiencing them.

Within the clinical frame of mainstream psychology, Wise Mind is frequently subjected to a reductionist collapse. Modern clinicians often strip away its interior depth, treating it as a mere coping mechanism—a cognitive trick to lower arousal and stabilize the ego. I want to suggest, however, that Linehan’s writing hints at something far deeper: a quiet conduit to the ground of Being. While her clinical manuals kept the skills highly pragmatic, she famously described Wise Mind as “that part of each person that can know and experience truth,” using the metaphor of a water well dropping down into a vast, unlimited underground ocean.

IV. The Absolute of Big Mind

Entirely independent of Linehan’s clinical development, Genpo Roshi formulated the Big Mind Process around 1999. It emerged not from a behavioral lab, but from the synthesis of his Zen training under Taizan Maezumi Roshi, and Hal and Sidra Stone’s Voice Dialogue method.

The Big Mind process was never intended to bypass or replace traditional Zen practice; rather, Genpo Roshi developed it explicitly as a modern form of upaya (skillful means). By systematically speaking to different facets of the psyche—the Controller, the Protector, the Skeptic, and eventually the “Observing Self” (the container of consciousness)—the facilitator can eventually ask a deceptively simple question to the observer: “Who are you?”

When that perspective is fully inhabited, the self can finally crack open. The participant steps out of the content of their lives and into being itself. They realize that the container is not an empty, functional void, but the Absolute—the Unborn, non-dual awareness. It is a rapid, linguistic upaya designed to give Westerners a direct taste of kensho (seeing into one’s true nature).

V. Spiritual Bypassing & Other Problems

Historically and institutionally, there is absolutely no connection between Wise Mind and Big Mind. They were developed decades apart by individuals operating in entirely different spheres. Yet, these two worlds have long intersected in my own personal praxis and inquiry. For years, I have been integrating Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind process with Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT)—a personal-spiritual synthesis that would eventually lay the groundwork for my own formulation of Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT), which I have frequently explored in my ongoing dialogues with Gareth Holman.

For me, this integration has always carried an intense personal weight. Sitting on retreat with Genpo Roshi not long before his public scandal broke, I was deeply immersed in the luminous, non-dual clarity of the Big Mind process, only to watch in disbelief as his lineage fractured in disgrace. It was a profound personal shock that left me wrestling with the agonizing divide between high-state realization and catastrophic psychological failure—an empirical demonstration of the classic Integral split between Waking Up and Cleaning Up.

Finding that Linehan shared my Harada-Yasutani Zen lineage, and seeing her own agonizing journey to construct a stable, ethical, and functional self, provided a profound sense of validation. Linehan’s work has given me a lineage for my personal praxis, suggesting that the sturdy, behavioral abilities of Wise Mind are the essential psychological prerequisite for the vastness of Big Mind. The structural-developmental core of this relationship is clear: Big Mind proposes to dissolve a self that Linehan’s clients never got to build. Wise Mind builds it.

This developmental mapping, however, requires a crucial transpersonal nuance. Peak non-dual glimpses, kensho, and mystical experiences do not wait for psychological perfection; they can and do occur at any stage of ego development, whether the relative self is beautifully integrated or deeply shattered. Linehan’s own life is the ultimate proof of this: her profound 1967 mystical awakening in the Cenacle chapel occurred while her relative self-image was still deeply fractured, emotionally dysregulated, and unformed.

The developmental danger is therefore not that a shattered ego cannot access the absolute, but rather the distinct pathologies that manifest across the developmental spectrum when Waking Up is split from Growing Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up.

The first pathology manifests at the lower end of ego integration: the shattered self. When a broken, unformed, or highly dysregulated self-structure experiences the vastness of transpersonal states, the result is often severe psychological destabilization. Without a grounded, cohesive ego-self—what Linehan’s beginner skills are designed to build—exposure to the infinite expanse of the Absolute can trigger a transpersonal crisis or “spiritual emergency.” Without a grounded, steady herder to hold the rope, the boundaries of the self collapse, and the individual drowns in the very same water in which the mystic swims with delight.

An equally destructive pathology develops on the opposite end of the spectrum: ego inflation. When a sturdier, highly integrated, or functioning ego contacts transpersonal states without systematically resolving its psychological shadow, it often attempts to capture and possess the Absolute. Carl Jung warned of this “psychic inflation,” where the relative ego over-identifies with universal, transpersonal archetypes, mistaking transcendent grace for its own personal grandiose self-image.

In psychological terms, this is what the psychotherapist John Welwood famously identified as “spiritual bypassing”—the defensive tendency to use spiritual ideas, practices, or experiences to sidestep unresolved emotional pain, developmental wounds, and psychological tasks. Welwood warned that this leads to a “premature transcendence” where the relative ego attempts to rise above a human experience it has not actually metabolized, creating a debilitating split between ungrounded spiritual ideals and an unexamined psychological shadow.

Finally, an inverse, equally ubiquitous third pathology exists: the phenomenon of the hollow performance, or the split in “Showing Up.” This is the tragedy of those who attempt to operate solely in the relative world—throwing themselves into tireless social advocacy, behavioral compliance, or rigid ethical campaigns—without ever engaging in the grueling internal labor of cleaning up their trauma, growing up developmentally, or waking up to the transcendent ground of Being. This blind, unintegrated way of showing up is often nothing more than a projection of unexamined shadows disguised as virtue, a frantic outer busyness designed to avoid inner emptiness. When behavior is forced into the world without the deep internal scaffolding of psychological and spiritual development, the “showing up” becomes a fragile, brittle performance, easily shattered by stress or co-opted by egoic self-righteousness. It can manifest as either a desperate, hyper-conforming compliance—frantically copying rules and social expectations to manufacture a sense of belonging—or as a chronic, oppositional resistance to all structures and authority, fighting everything because there is no stable, integrated internal self to stand for.

The devastating, real-world consequences of these spiritual-bypassing and ego-inflation splits are not far to seek. My own lineage is haunted by these exact ghosts. Take Taizan Maezumi Roshi, the brilliant founder of the White Plum Asanga. He was a master of intense, historic spiritual authority, holding the rare distinction of Dharma transmission and Inka Shomei across three distinct Zen lineages: Sōtō Zen (from his father Baian Hakujun Kuroda Roshi), Sanbō Kyōdan (from Hakuun Yasutani Roshi), and Shakyamuni-kai lay Rinzai (from Koryu Osaka Roshi). Yet, despite this unparalleled cross-lineage realization, Maezumi Roshi wrestled with severe, hidden alcoholism and sexual boundary violations with his students for decades, eventually drowning in a bathtub in Japan in 1995 while highly intoxicated.

And Genpo Roshi’s own collapse was driven by these exact unexamined shadow dynamics. He ultimately stepped down from his lineage and teaching roles after admitting to repeated, egregious abuses of power, financial manipulation, and inappropriate sexual relationships with his direct Zen students.

These tragic, historical downfalls are not mere moral lapses; they are structural-developmental warnings. In fact, Genpo Roshi’s collapse is the ultimate empirical argument for Linehan’s method. The creator of the very technology designed for rapid access to Big Mind lacked the foundational Wise Mind; his mechanism for Waking Up lacked a corresponding, disciplined container for Cleaning Up, Growing Up, and Showing Up. Waking up is not a substitute for Growing Up, Cleaning Up, or Showing Up. If the relative ego is not systematically cleaned up, the touch of the Absolute does not liberate us—it simply inflates our personal neuroses, addictions, and power dynamics into spiritual narcissism. The operations only look like the same operation if you call all of them the relative self or the relative ego without distinguishing between a functional self, a broken self, and a hollowly performing self.

VI. A Dual Lineage

How did Linehan herself reconcile this developmental tension? The answer lies in the unique nature of her Zen lineage, which was far more explicitly theological and Catholic than that of other Western Zen pioneers—including my own late teacher, Albert Low.

While Albert approached Zen from a philosophical, deeply existential lay perspective that was largely stripped of Christian theological structures, Linehan’s Zen was forged in a hot crucible of Catholic-Buddhist syncretism. Her primary Zen teachers were not Eastern monastics or secular Westerners; they were Catholic priests. She formally trained in Zen under Father Willigis Jäger, O.S.B. (a German Benedictine monk and Sanbo Zen master) and Father Pat Hawk, C.Ss.R. (a Redemptorist priest and Diamond Sangha/Sanbo Zen master). In June 2010, Father Willigis Jäger named her a Zen teacher, and in 2012, Father Pat Hawk formally named her a Zen Master (Roshi) shortly before his death.

For priests like Jäger and Hawk, Zen was not a replacement for their Christian vows. It was an essential contemplative means—a way to cut through the heavy conceptual clutter of scholastic dogma to touch the raw, apophatic, non-dual core of Christian mysticism. They saw the “Empty Cloud” of Zen and the “Cloud of Unknowing” of the Christian mystics as the exact same theological landscape.

She recognized that Zen did not offer an escape from her deep Catholic roots, but rather the perfect empirical mechanism to translate the radical, unconditional grace of her 1967 chapel experience into a non-dogmatic and therapeutic program. Her Zen-infused clinical model was her way of doing the work of a priest—which she openly admitted she would have become had the Roman Catholic Church allowed the ordination of women.

The deep, historical mystery that remains is whether Linehan herself was explicitly tracking this vertical, transpersonal axis. While there is no definitive record of her engagement with Ken Wilber’s developmental models or Genpo Roshi’s Voice Dialogue synthesis, her training history places her at the immediate coordinates of these conversations. During her time at the Shalem Institute in the late 1970s, she trained in spiritual direction under Gerald May, a transpersonal psychiatrist whose seminal texts—Care of Mind, Care of Spirit and Will and Spirit—explored the precise boundaries between psychiatric pathology and spiritual transcendence. This adjacent history suggests she may have been far more aware of the vertical, transpersonal axis than her public manuals let on, choosing to consciously express these transpersonal realities through an empirical, behavioral lens.

VII. The Apophatic Shift

With this dual lineage of Catholic-Zen established, I can better understand the theological shift that animated her lifelong relationship to her faith.

Linehan was a devout and deeply committed Catholic whose entire psychological architecture was originally built on Catholic theology and scholasticism. Her core vow to go “into hell to get others out” was modeled directly on the harrowing of hell, a deeply Christological act of redemptive suffering. Yet, as she grew as an independent thinker and clinical pioneer, she encountered a profound crisis. She was increasingly unable to reconcile her spiritual path with the institutional Church’s deep-seated sexism, rigid dogma, and patriarchal structures.

During a pivotal period of study and contemplation in 1980, culminating in a confrontation with blatant sexism during a Christmas service at Blessed Sacrament Church in Seattle, she made the agonizing decision to stop attending Mass. This break with the institutional Church coincided with her retreats at the Kairos House of Prayer in Spokane, where she ceased believing in a traditional, personal, patriarchal God. Yet, this was not an abandonment of the divine, but a radical transition into apophatic, non-theistic mysticism. She landed instead on a realization that was both Zen and Christian: God is not a cosmic ruler, but Love itself, and God is immanently present in everything.

When viewed through this theological lens, her freezing chapel experience in 1967 was not a dogmatic arrival, but an encounter with what Karl Rahner called the Vorgriff—the unthematic, ever-present horizon of the Holy Mystery that underlies all finite knowing. In Rahnerian theology, the Vorgriff is the pre-reflective, infinite drive of human consciousness toward a transcendent horizon of mystery that can never be fully grasped or named. It is the theological equivalent of Linehan’s deep water well: a pre-reflective drive pointing toward an unlimited, non-dual underground ocean of the Absolute. Her break with institutional Catholicism allowed her to strip away the dogmatic “theistic” projections of her childhood, opening her up to the pure, non-dual “suchness” of reality that Jäger and Hawk helped her fully experience and articulate.

VIII. The Clinical Vessel

Crucially, when Linehan formulated DBT, she deliberately stripped away both the Catholic theological language and the Buddhist metaphysical jargon. She translated this non-dual grace into the clinical, empirical language of radical behaviorism.

This intentional integration is beautifully illuminated in her clinical manuals, where Linehan explicitly roots her therapeutic architecture in her spiritual path, writing that mindfulness is the quality of presence brought to everyday life—a way of living awake, with eyes wide open. She clarifies that her mindfulness skills are the intentional process of observing, describing, and participating in reality nonjudgmentally, in the moment, and with effectiveness, which she defines as using skillful means. Most remarkably, she openly acknowledges that in formulating these clinical skills, she drew most heavily from the practice of Zen, while validating their complete compatibility with both Western contemplative traditions and modern scientific discoveries regarding the profound benefits of allowing experiences rather than resisting or suppressing them.

By referencing this convergence, Linehan confirms that her clinical model is not a dilution of spirituality but a translation of it. Her use of skillful means—the direct English translation of the Buddhist concept of upaya—reflects a conscious attempt to build a clinical process for experiencing Absolute Truth and Freedom. In her formulation, DBT is purposely provided in a clinical format so as to remain nondenominational and compatible with any belief system. More importantly, she explains that these mindfulness skills function as skills for beginners—specifically designed for individuals who cannot yet regulate themselves well enough to practice formal mindfulness meditation.

This provides a profound developmental thesis: Before one can dive into the vast, unconditioned depths of formal non-dual meditation—the infinite ocean of Big Mind—they must first construct a stable ethical and functional self. Wise Mind serves as this essential psychological prerequisite. Without the foundational ego-stabilization provided by these clinical mindfulness skills, attempting to touch the Absolute is highly destabilizing. Yet, Linehan also emphasizes that these same skills are vital for advanced practitioners as the direct application of mindfulness meditation to everyday life. Thus, she made the horizontal application of the Absolute possible in the grit of daily existence. It was a supreme act of compassion. She understood that a suicidal client, drowning in the hell of emotional dysregulation, could not be asked to adopt a complex Zen or Christian metaphysical framework. By translating the experience of “radical acceptance” into empirical, highly accessible behavioral protocols, she delivered the therapeutic medicine of Big Mind to those who needed it most, freeing it from the requirements of dogma.

IX. Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT)

While Linehan’s DBT constructs the foundational horizontal vessel for stabilizing the relative ego, my own personal-spiritual journey led me to seek a framework that could systematically coordinate both the horizontal adaptation of clinical therapy and the vertical heights of transpersonal realization. This search for an integrated, multi-dimensional praxis is what originally anchored my work in Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT).

Years ago, my early correspondences with Bill White and Guy Du Plessis forced a deep reckoning with the architecture of recovery, resilience, and personal growth. In those dialogues and exchanges, I wrestled with how to construct a sustainable, integrated life amidst the wreckage of some of my past behaviors and suffering. In those exchanges, I found myself favoring ACT over the traditional 12-step recovery paradigms—which nevertheless remain life-saving crucibles for many navigating severe and co-occurring mental health issues—or the early and rather complex theoretical grids of Integral Recovery. What captivated me was the elegant, process-based architecture of the ACT Hexaflex. Because of my Zen background, I immediately resonated with its core processes, particularly present-moment awareness and self-as-context. Rather than trapping an individual in a conceptualized, narrative self, the Hexaflex offered a highly functional, empirical, and non-dogmatic blueprint for psychological flexibility, allowing one to step back and rest in the observing container of awareness.

Yet, as my own practice deepened, I realized that while the Hexaflex serves as a brilliant engine for horizontal behavioral adaptation, my personal-spiritual training required a more explicit, systematic coordinate system to map the vertical stages of ego development (Growing Up), the deep retrieval of the unconscious shadow (Cleaning Up), and the direct, non-dual realization of transcendent awareness (Waking Up).

To bridge this structural gap, I formulated IACT (Integral Awareness & Commitment Training). Rather than discarding the elegant processes of the Hexaflex—such as acceptance, self-as-context, and committed action—my goal was to explicitly coordinate this horizontal engine of psychological flexibility with the vertical dimensions of Zen inquiry, using the Ten Oxherding Pictures (Jūgyūzu) as a developmental blueprint. In this framework, the journey is not a simple dissolution of self; it is the systematic process of “Searching for the Ox,” catching its instinctual force, taming it through disciplined relationship, and riding it home until both herder and beast dissolve into the non-dual circle of emptiness. But the path refuses to linger in the Absolute void. The final, crowning stage is “Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands”—the procedural loop where Absolute awareness returns to the relative world of concrete form as grounded and compassionate behavioral action.

Through this Oxherding framework, IACT protocols are systematically designed to target and resolve the three pathologies of the split detailed earlier. By combining relative, egoic parts-work with non-dual inquiry within the same training session, the protocol coordinates the four core quadrants of development: Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up. The protocol begins by Cleaning Up—using a modified ACT Matrix or empty-chair dialogue to help the individual name, validate, and defuse from active, defensive sub-personalities like the “Protector” or “Skeptic.” In FAP terms, this cultivates a deep, courageous Awareness (A) of historical, fragmented ego-states. Once these relative parts are acknowledged and settled—securing the herder’s stance—the individual gathers the Courage (C) to speak directly from raw, vulnerable, and unconditioned needs. The training then seamlessly transitions into Zen-style non-dual inquiry, asking the practitioner to step back from the parts and describe the spacious context holding those voices. The individual is guided to realize that they are not their fragmented, historical wounds, but the open, unconditioned awareness—the pure Love (L)—in which those voices arise and fall, Waking Up to the Absolute.

Only when this internal alignment is stabilized can one truly Show Up in the world. Committed behavioral actions are no longer a brittle, compensatory performance or unexamined shadow projections; they become the natural, unconditioned flow of Absolute awareness returning to the marketplace, manifesting as relative, compassionate action in daily life. Through this procedural loop, showing up ceases to be a hollow, flatland mimicry of alignment and becomes a grounded reality. It trains both: the sturdy discipline of the herder, and the courage to return to the marketplace with helping hands.

X. Conclusion

To read Marsha Linehan’s memoir is to witness a profound, heroic act of translation. Guided by her early Catholic faith and her rebellious Sanbo Zen lineage, she constructed a psychological vessel capable of navigating the stormy waters of human madness, steering it directly toward the horizon of Absolute grace without ever losing her behavioral footing. This translation is her true clinical masterpiece: anchoring the transcendent verticality of non-dual realization within the pragmatic, horizontal coordinate system of radical behaviorism, ensuring that those in the deepest hell could access the healing architecture of a stabilized ego without needing to adopt foreign dogmas.

Ultimately, the convergence of Wise Mind and Big Mind is not a tidy intellectual resolution or a sentimental merger. It is an ongoing, dynamic tension—a refusal to choose between the rigorous, self-correcting demands of relative, historical existence and the vast, unconditioned space of the Absolute. It demands a dual citizenship: remaining fully committed to the systematic herding and cleaning up of historical wounds while resting in the quiet realization that our True Nature remains entirely unconditioned. Standing squarely at this intersection means doing the grueling, necessary work of building and cleaning up the functional self, even while remaining open to the boundless horizon of the unborn and coming face to face with the luminous being of God.

XI. Suggested Reading

Bernanos, Georges. The Diary of a Country Priest. Translated by Pamela Morris. New York: Doubleday, 1954.

Holman, Gareth, Jonathan W. Kanter, Mavis Tsai, and Robert J. Kohlenberg. Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Relationships. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2017.

Jäger, Willigis. The Way to Contemplation: Encountering God Today. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987.

Linehan, Marsha M. Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2020.

Linehan, Marsha M. DBT Skills Training Manual. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2015.

May, Gerald. Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982.

Merzel, Dennis Genpo. Big Mind, Big Heart: Finding Your Way. Salt Lake City: Big Mind Publishing, 2007.

Merzel, Dennis Genpo. The Path of the Human Being: Zen Teachings on the Bodhisattva Way. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2005.

Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith: Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Translated by William V. Dych. New York: Seabury Press, 1978.

Welwood, John. Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.

Wilber, Ken. Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.

Wilber, Ken. No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1979.

Wilber, Ken. The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1977.

Introduction

Following the publication of my last essay, The Future of Contextual Behavioral Science & Role of Theology, I had a dialogue with that deepened some of my ongoing reflections and thinking. We have been in casual correspondence since late May, simply sharing our respective work and comparing notes on where our thoughts might meet. Over the course of these exchanges, I began to see a fascinating connection emerging between the psychological flexibility of contextual behavioral science, the collaborative architecture of the commons, and the developmental dynamics of the American integral movement. This essay is an attempt to map those delicate threads, tracing how individual psychological processes might translate to the macro-level design of the commons and the ongoing digital transformation of the public sphere.

Our dialogue was productive precisely because of our different trajectories. While I approached these issues through psychological flexibility and contextual behavioral science, Michel brings decades of work on the commons and the institutional economics of Elinor Ostrom. In our exchange, I saw a compelling convergence. It allowed me to connect the Ostrom-based Prosocial framework with the evolutionary models in Wilson and Hayes’s Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science, and the broader dialogue between David Sloan Wilson and Ken Wilber on the development of a multicellular society.

The Catholic dimension of our dialogue was also particularly striking, emerging from Michel’s view of the long arc of the Church through the lens of the commons. Although he is not confessional in the traditional sense, his deep familiarity with social and monastic history allows him to analyze ecclesiastical developments as experiments in peer-to-peer resource management. He notes, for example, how early monastic rules organized shared labor and communal property as highly functioning, alternative economic models. His connection to modern Rome has emerged from peer-to-peer initiatives that have occasionally granted him access to high-level Vatican events where digital theorists and theologians search for shared horizons.

Interestingly, he had previously explored very little of the Catholic tradition of integral human development or the integral humanism stemming from Jacques Maritain’s philosophy. Maritain’s insistence on developing the “whole person”—spiritually and materially—offers a profound, personalist alternative to both raw capitalism and state collectivism, yet it is rarely cited in contemporary progressive or left-wing spaces. Seeing these concepts resonate with a thinker of Michel’s background underscored how easily this lineage is overlooked, and how vital it is to reclaim for contemporary discourse. However, prior to examining this theological dimension and the complex definitions and history of the term integral, it is essential to explain the origins of my interactions with Michel, as well as the specific environment from which much of this discourse emerges: the integral left.

A Short History of the Integral Left

While I have spent years working within the integral tradition, my encounter with its left-wing current was indirect and came long after the concept was coined. My journey into this landscape started around 2016, sparked by an introduction to the work of Guy Du Plessis. A South African addictions specialist and philosophical practitioner, Du Plessis was a pioneer in systematically applying Ken Wilber’s framework to addiction treatment and recovery. This project, initially articulated in An Integral Guide to Recovery: Twelve Steps and Beyond and An Integral Foundation for Addiction Treatment: Beyond the Biopsychosocial Model, has since evolved into his Integrated Metatheoretical Model of Addiction and his subsequent research at Utah State University.

It was Du Plessis, working from inside that world of addiction and recovery, who initially pointed me toward the work of Jordan Peterson. The suggestion was understandable, given Peterson’s clinical and academic roots in that very domain. His doctoral work at McGill, under Robert Pihl, concerned the psychological markers of a predisposition to alcoholism, and the self-improvement program that made him famous was read by serious people in the recovery world, Marc Lewis among them, as a genuine, if contested, account of how entrenched patterns of thought and behavior might be broken.

My own involvement in this domain during those years ran parallel to these developments. Having published a brief essay on the blog of William L. White—the addictions field’s foremost historian and author of Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America—I was deeply immersed in the legacy and promise of the New Recovery Advocacy Movement at the time. By late 2019, this background culminated in a rather short essay, Rethinking Addiction & Recovery in Canada. While that piece deliberately set Peterson aside to focus on systemic issues, I had already begun tracking his cultural trajectory with growing interest, recognizing how his psychological framing was beginning to capture a much larger public imagination.

Tracking Peterson’s rise inevitably carried me beyond recovery circles and into the broader “sensemaking” landscape—a digital and intellectual ecosystem that would morph over the years from the intellectual dark web to the meaning crisis, and eventually to the liminal web. Since I had been observing these transitions through an internal integral lens rather than a partisan political one, I was immediately struck by how heavily Ken Wilber’s developmental framework undergirded the entire scene. My entry point was David Fuller’s Rebel Wisdom, which explicitly used Wilberian dynamics to analyze Peterson’s appeal. Two early 2019 interviews with Wilber on Rebel Wisdom, focusing on Peterson and the rise of the intellectual dark web, crystallized this connection for me. This conceptual trail eventually led to and Perspectiva, the British charity that became a major institutional anchor for this discourse. I would later critique this ecosystem in On Enchanted Flatland, arguing that its narrative of a “meaning crisis” often sought re-enchantment without submitting to a rigorous, post-metaphysical discipline. Here, however, I want to approach this landscape from a different angle, tracing the specific, often overlooked thread within this sensemaking world that aligned with the political left.

That distinction is worth stressing, because almost the whole of that early milieu was coded to the political right. There is a structural reason for this tilt. The developmental architecture at the heart of integral theory—stages, hierarchies, the distinction between higher and lower, and the long climb from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric consciousness—lends itself readily to a politics of order and ascent. In the sensemaking years, it was often deployed exactly that way: as a diagnosis of a decadent, “mean green” progressivism that had lost the plot, and as a case for a firmer, more hierarchical corrective. Peterson’s whole appeal, refracted through Wilber, ran along that grain. The integral world, insofar as it engaged politics at all, mostly leaned in that direction or else withdrew from the question entirely into private spiritual development.

Given this rightward drift, it was a profound shift when I encountered the work of the late Michael Brooks through , the integral and Gebserian thinker behind the Mutations podcast. My introduction to Brooks via his 2019 interview with Johnson on The Michael Brooks Show shattered the assumption that this developmental toolkit was inherently conservative. Brooks represented a striking anomaly: he was perhaps the only figure in that landscape to take the same developmental architecture—typically bent toward reaction and hierarchy—and repurpose it toward what he called “cosmopolitan socialism.” Brooks articulated a rare, anti-imperialist internationalism—one that embraced developmental complexity and evolutionary depth without retreating from concrete political engagement. The discovery that these vertical developmental frameworks could undergird a horizontal politics of solidarity, rather than merely validating a reactionary politics of order, became the critical tension that drew me into his work and continues to inspire and challenge my own thinking.

Coming from a French Canadian background, my own political and cultural formation was rooted in the legacy of the Quiet Revolution—a rapid, systemic upheaval characterized by the swift secularization of society and the sudden, dramatic dismantling of the Catholic Church’s hegemony over Quebec’s civic institutions. This historical trajectory was vastly different from the Anglo-American democratic-socialist tradition that Michael Brooks inhabited, which was shaped instead by labor coalitions, the civil rights movement, and a distinct lineage of secular Marxist critique. Because of this divergence, I did not approach Brooks as a fellow political traveler or an activist sharing a similar struggle. Rather, I was drawn to him purely through the integral tradition. I was fascinated by how he managed to liberate a vertical developmental framework from its conservative, hierarchy-justifying biases, purposely applying its diagnostic power to advocate for systemic and international cooperation.

By early 2020, a distinct progressive-integral milieu was already beginning to coalesce in the digital margins. On March 28, 2020, a small constellation of thinkers—including Jeremy Johnson, Ryan Nakade, and Matt Hudkins—launched Growing Down: A Progressive Integral Podcast. This project represented a deliberate attempt to cross-pollinate the tactical, structural concerns of progressive politics with the conceptual depth of integral theory and the emergent grammar of metamodernism. They sought to synthesize horizontal political struggles with vertical developmental awareness, hoping to offer a more psychologically literate alternative to the often flat, moralizing discourse of mainstream progressivism.

When Michael Brooks died suddenly in July of that same year at the age of thirty-six, the shockwave of his passing acted as a tragic catalyst. The collective grief galvanized this loose, digital network of thinkers into a self-aware, public-facing community. A memorial roundtable organized in his wake gathered key voices of this nascent scene—including , , Brent Cooper, , and Ryan Nakade—effectively mapping the coordinates of an “integral left” for the first time. Yet even as the scene briefly solidified, a deep irony persisted: while the broader public remembered Brooks for his sharp, quick-witted media critique on The Majority Report or his polemical book Against the Web, the sophisticated developmental architecture that quietly organized his political worldview remained almost entirely unacknowledged by his political allies.

This momentary coalescence, however, proved fragile. Growing Down ceased production within a year, and the scene rapidly dispersed back into its respective niches. Its participants were geographically and institutionally far-flung, operating more as a loose network of independent thinkers than a disciplined political movement. What had briefly bound them together during that season of loss was not a rigid doctrine, but a shared intuition: they saw that the developmental and evolutionary frameworks of the integral tradition carried profound political consequences that the mainstream, action-oriented left was too quick to dismiss as bourgeois navel-gazing. Conversely, they recognized that the mainstream integral community had grown too comfortable in its apolitical quietism, retreating from the harsh material realities of political economy into the sanitized realm of private spiritual development. To bridge this divide, they insisted that a true progressivism required both a psychological depth capable of self-examination and a structural commitment to transforming material conditions. Bringing these two dimensions together meant laying the groundwork for a genuine integral political praxis—a task that remains as unfinished as it is urgent.

It was precisely in the shadow of this unfinished project, and against the rapid quietism of the post-roundtable period, that I launched my own podcast, Integral [+] Facticity, in the spring of 2022. I did so out of a distinct sense of urgency; the transient window of 2020 had slammed shut, and Brooks’s vital synthesis of developmental psychology and cosmopolitan socialism was already slipping back into the digital margins. The inaugural episodes of the show set out to reconstruct this very lineage, debuting with an interview with Matt McManus. In surveying the remaining landscape, I found only a small handful of thinkers who still held the memory of Brooks’s deeper, structural engagement with the integral framework. Among them were and Jeremy Johnson—both of whom I was fortunate enough to host for long-form dialogues. I had not been a participant in the brief, intense season of 2020; rather, I arrived as a chronicler of its aftermath, driven by a quiet determination to prevent its diagnostic breakthroughs from fading into historical obscurity.

Michel also came to this scene late, though through the same hub. Johnson interviewed him on Mutations in November 2020, in a conversation on the commons and cultural evolution, and that is where Michel first registered for me. Here was a European, French-speaking, Catholic-raised thinker who was at the same time deeply conversant with the American integral movement — with Wilber, the Integral Institute, and the whole architecture that grew up around them. That combination is uncommon, and it sat close enough to my own coordinates to command my attention. What eventually brought us into direct contact was the Rosy Cross anthology this past spring, the volume edited by and O.G. Rose out of Last’s Philosophy Portal — the online community that has become, for me, the living continuation of the very milieu this history describes. Where the Growing Down scene scattered, the Portal is where a good deal of that same energy has reconstituted itself, and where several of these figures still turn up. My own contribution to that anthology, A Rosy Cross of a Book, provides a more detailed account of that trajectory from Brooks to Cadell. For present purposes, what matters is that contributing to the anthology alongside Michel gave me the occasion to move from reading his work to writing to him directly, and we have been in semi-regular correspondence since late May.

As part of that exchange he shared a long autobiographical interview tracing his intellectual evolution, and reading it clarified why our paths converge as they do. He begins in a Marxist-revolutionary period, moves through the radical body-mind therapies of the 60s-70s, and passes into an extended engagement with Eastern spiritual traditions and then with the Western esoteric inheritance of Rosicrucianism, and the Hermetic line, before arriving at the work on commons-based peer production and the P2P Foundation for which he is now best known. Threaded through the middle of it is a serious, years-long immersion in Wilber and the Integral Institute. Having discovered Wilber in the early 1980s, he immersed himself in his writings for nearly ten years. He vividly traces the trajectory of falling under the spell of an all-encompassing system of thought and adopting a temporary ideological stance, until the very criticisms he had long brushed aside finally began to hit home. It is this lineage that leads him to frame his own peer-to-peer project as a left-integral offshoot.

While we share a common ground in our Catholic upbringings and the mutual influence of the American integral movement, our professional trajectories diverge in ways that reflect our different approaches to the digital landscape. My own path has been shaped by over fifteen years in information technology, knowledge management, and financial services, which now informs my work as an independent researcher and the development of the Montreal-based Metapattern Institute. Sitting at the intersection of health informatics and integral human development, my research explores how digital tools and information systems shape human meaning-making, culminating in applied work like the Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) program—a project that synthesizes Canadian speculative philosophy, integral humanism, and contextual behavioral science. Michel’s trajectory, by contrast, was forged through Marxist political economy, leading to his pioneering efforts with the P2P Foundation and the design of decentralized digital commons. Yet, despite this divergence between my focus on health informatics and his work on peer-to-peer institutional architectures, we converged on the same speculative conviction: that the Western tradition harbors vital, neglected resources worth recovering, even if we traveled vastly different routes to find them.

The Varieties of Integral Traditions Today

The word integral acts as a kind of linguistic decoy, luring us into assuming a singular, unified lineage where there is actually a constellation of highly divergent meanings. The differences are not merely semantic; they become critically consequential the moment our attention shifts to human development. Several distinct intellectual movements have independently reached for this same adjective, building remarkably substantial and often incompatible architectures beneath it. They share a label, but in most cases, they share almost nothing else. To prevent our political and theological analysis from collapsing into a muddle of false equivalences, some conceptual disambiguation is unavoidable.

To trace these variations accurately, we can divide the varieties of integral traditions today into three primary geographical and philosophical families: the North-American, the European/Continental, and the Indian-East.

1. The North-American Lineages: Pragmatism, AQAL, and Process-Participatory Pluralism

The contemporary popular landscape of the integral movement is overwhelmingly North-American, shaped by a pragmatic impulse to synthesize disparate developmental models into functional, actionable systems.

This lineage is dominated by Ken Wilber, whose popular “theory of everything” taglines and lifestyle-brand packaging have long obscured a formidable, highly disciplined philosophical project. As I have argued in Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up? A Short Journey Through Wilberland, the popular caricature of Wilber—dismissed by mainstream academia as an uncredentialed popularizer and by countercultural spaces as an authoritarian dogmatist—hides the actual philosopher. Drawing on Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary cosmology, Jean Gebser’s historical structures of consciousness, and Clare Graves’s developmental psychology into his AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) model, Wilber constructed a framework that, as Zachary Stein has argued in Dancing with Sophia, belongs squarely to the tradition of American Pragmatism alongside Peirce, James, and Dewey.

Tracing this pedigree reveals that the North-American integral movement did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum; its foundational structures were directly fertilized by mid-century humanistic psychology and classical American pragmatism. The mid-century humanistic movement—championed by Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May—sought to rescue the human subject from the reductionism of behavioral conditioning and Freudian psychoanalysis, emphasizing self-actualization and the validity of inner experience. Maslow himself envisioned a “Fourth Force” beyond the humanistic tradition that would directly engage transpersonal and mystical horizons. This “Fourth Force” crystallized as transpersonal psychology, serving as the immediate, institutional bridge to Wilber’s early synthesis.

Simultaneously, the epistemic methodology of this movement is deeply indebted to William James’s “radical empiricism.” James famously argued that an adequate empiricism must not exclude any felt or directly lived reality, including religious and spiritual experiences, particularly if those experiences generate practical, transformative effects in a person’s life. This pragmatist validation of pluralistic, enactive experience provided the baseline logic for Wilber’s post-metaphysical turn. By drawing on John Dewey’s functional, enactive developmentalism and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics, Wilber shifted the perennial philosophy away from pre-critical metaphysics into a fallibilist, reconstructive science of consciousness.

This pragmatist lineage becomes visible through Wilber’s specific, systematized absorption of Jürgen Habermas. In his 1983 text A Sociable God, Wilber took Habermas’s tripartite division of knowledge-constitutive interests (empirical-analytic, historical-hermeneutic, and critical-reflective) and translated them into the transpersonal domain. He argued that Habermas’s horizontal-emancipatory interest—the freeing of communication from systemic distortions within a given level of developmental complexity—had to be paired with a vertical-emancipatory interest, a movement toward higher, more integrated structures of consciousness altogether. The result is a post-metaphysical rendering in which developmental levels are not pre-existing Platonic structures, but co-constructed horizons of knowing held in place by empirical, hermeneutic, and contemplative communities of practice. It is precisely this rigorous, epistemologically pluralistic architecture—one designed to prioritize perspective-taking over ontological categorization—that the integral left has sought to repurpose, recognizing in its “vertical-emancipatory” drive a vital conceptual engine for systemic social transformation.

But Wilber is not the only representative of the American integral tradition—a detail frequently overlooked. The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) represents an entirely different history and flavor, serving as a historic seedbed for alternative and pluralistic genealogies. This lineage includes the participatory transpersonal psychology of Jorge Ferrer and the process-relational cosmology of Matthew Segall. In Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up?, I map the philosophical, psychological, and clinical debates between Wilber’s structural diagnostics and these process-participatory models, arguing that these models risk remaining epistemologically underhoused without developmental coordinates, while outlining how they might interface with the therapeutic schools of contextual behavioral science. For our taxonomic purposes here, what matters is that these traditions represent distinct Western philosophical and psychological currents native to the non-Wilberian ecology of CIIS—a distinction routinely collapsed by observers who assume there is only a singular American integral stream.

This developmental architecture, however, carries a profound structural vulnerability. When stages of consciousness are treated as absolute hierarchies, the AQAL framework is easily co-opted into a form of developmental chauvinism. In this deformation, the vertical gradient of psychological ascent is mapped onto geopolitics or cultures, creating a patronizing civilizational tier system. It pathologizes dissent by labeling non-Western or anti-globalist perspectives as “ethnocentric” or “regressive,” while insulating its own technocratic, Western-centric elite as uniquely “worldcentric.” This is the intellectual bridge through which parts of the North-American integral scene have slid into neo-reactionary elitism and culture-war politics, weaponizing developmental psychologies to validate a soft, evolutionary supremacy that ultimately serves regressive right-wing movements.

Finally, this North-American family carries its own distinct version of integral human development. Grounded in AQAL metatheory, it has recently expanded its boundaries to interface with contemporary evolutionary science—notably through the work of David Sloan Wilson. Here, the drive for individual developmental integration is mapped onto the evolutionary dynamics of multi-level selection, seeking to coordinate human systems from the cellular to the planetary scale.

Yet the hazard here is the slide from biological metaphor to an exclusionary, evolutionary tribalism. If multi-level selection dictates that high-functioning, “multicellular” cooperation is only sustainable when defended by robust boundaries against out-group subversion, the language of complexity is easily retrofitted to justify cultural isolationism. In the hands of ethno-nationalists, Ostrom’s design principles and evolutionary group dynamics are stripped of their universalist cooperative intent and used instead to argue for closed, homogenous communities that suppress internal plurality under the guise of competition and survival.

2. The European and Continental Lineages: Phenomenology, Thomism, and Catholic Social Doctrine

The European and Continental family of integral operates in a fundamentally different key. While the North-American traditions grounded their models in the enactive validation of individual experience and the vertical scaling of humanistic self-actualization, the Continental lineages bypass developmental stage-theories and evolutionary coordinate systems entirely. Instead, their foundations are built on a rigorous triad of German phenomenology, medieval scholastic mereology, and the speculative heritage of Catholic personalism. Rather than seeking to map the psychological growth of an individual on a vertical grid, European thinkers turned outward to the historical mutations of cultural consciousness and inward to a theological anthropology of the person. Here, integral is not a developmental summit to be achieved through evolutionary adaptation, but an intrinsic, structural wholeness—a relational completeness that must be defended against the hollowing-out of modern instrumental reason.

Its first major pillar is Jean Gebser, who reached his own conception of an “integral structure of consciousness” independently, three decades after Aurobindo and in complete ignorance of him. Gebser did not fall from the sky; he came up out of German soil—the Romantic and phenomenological inheritance, and the Protestant cultural formation of a man descended from Melanchthon. His route to integral consciousness ran through poetry and the philosophy of language, above all his study of Rilke, rather than through yoga or developmental psychology. He identified the integral as a mutation of consciousness that overcomes the perspectival, rational fragmentation of the modern mind.

Yet, even Gebser’s elegant phenomenology is not immune to civilizational exceptionalism. Because his diagnosis of the integral mutation is so deeply tethered to the Western historical experience—art, avant-garde poetry, and European scientific breakthroughs—it implicitly positions Europe as the sole, necessary vanguard of human evolution. In its chauvinistic deformation, Gebserian thought can easily pathologize non-European cultures as arrested in “mythic” or “magical” structures of consciousness, turning a descriptive phenomenology of history into an elegant, cultural ethno-nationalism that ignores alternative, non-Western developmental trajectories.

The second and oldest pillar is the scholastic and personalist tradition. Thomas Aquinas gave “integral” its technical, philosophical sense, distinguishing between subjective, potential, and integral parts. For Aquinas, integral parts (partes integrales) are those necessary components that must concur to constitute the completeness of a whole. In his Summa Theologiae (specifically within his treatises on mereology and the architecture of the virtues), he originally illustrates this not through cold, artificial structures, but through the organic unity of a living body composed of its essential limbs—such as the head, hands, and feet—using this concept as working machinery to analyze how virtues like prudence or temperance require a constellation of allied, cooperative capacities to be fully realized.

Seven centuries later, when Jacques Maritain published Humanisme intégral in 1936, he took integral in exactly that Thomistic sense of completeness against existential fragmentation. Maritain outlined a humanism of the whole person, material and spiritual at once, set against both the liberal-individualist dissolution of society into self-seeking parts and the collectivist erasure of the person within the mass. His lay philosophy proved foundational for Catholic social doctrine. Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) drew on it to formulate integral human development—the good of the whole person and of every person—which Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate (2009) placed at the center of the Church’s critique of global capitalism.

Long before the political resurrection of the term, the word integral was the battleground of a defining twentieth-century theological dispute within French Catholicism. Thinkers like Maurice Blondel, in his pioneering work L’Action (1893), and later the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, in his landmark study Surnaturel (1946), fought for what was called an “integral” Christian philosophy. They opposed the dominant neoscholastic manual theology, which had severed reality into two separate, self-contained tiers: a realm of “pure nature” (natura pura) governed by natural law, and a supernatural realm of grace added on top as an extrinsic supplement. Blondel and de Lubac argued that this dual-order framework truncated human experience, rendering the supernatural irrelevant to concrete life. Instead, they claimed that human nature is integrally and intrinsically oriented toward God, possessing an innate desire for the supernatural that cannot be satisfied by natural ends alone. This nouvelle théologie aimed to restore the organic, integral unity of the cosmos, but it faced fierce resistance from traditionalist neoscholastics who feared that collapsing the boundary between nature and grace would compromise the gratuitousness of God’s gift. This theological debate set the stage for how the concept of the “wholeness” or “integral” would be structurally closed or kept open in the decades to follow.

Today, this neoscholastic desire for a closed, unified order has returned in the form of a muscular, post-liberal political theology known as Catholic integralism. While the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule is its most prominent theorist with his framework of “Common Good Constitutionalism,” he is part of a much broader intellectual ecosystem. This network includes popular columnists like Sohrab Ahmari, political theorists like Patrick Deneen and Gladden Pappin, theologians like Chad Pecknold, and monastic intellectuals like Pater Edmund Waldstein of The Josias. These contemporary integralists explicitly reject the liberal separation of church and state, holding that civil authority must recognize the spiritual supremacy of the Catholic Church and utilize the vast coercive power of the modern administrative state to promote a substantive, objective moral order. Rejecting the classical liberal myth of procedural neutrality, they argue that political life should be ordered toward humanity’s supernatural end.

This post-liberal resurgence can be productively understood and analyzed through Matt McManus’s critical writing and work on “postmodern conservatism.” As has argued, contemporary right-wing anti-liberalism often functions as a hybrid creature. These thinkers masterfully employ postmodern skepticism to deconstruct the core tenets of Enlightenment liberalism—unmasking its claims to value-neutrality, individual rights, and procedural justice as a covert, highly ideological hegemony. They expose the “view from nowhere” as a secularist myth. Yet, having used postmodern deconstruction to clear the field, they immediately pivot to re-impose a pre-modern, neo-traditionalist hierarchy. In the case of Vermeule, Ahmari, and their cohort, this postmodern conservative playbook is executed with intellectual precision. They expose the liberal state’s proceduralism as an empty, nihilistic arena, only to fill the vacuum with a coercive, top-down Catholic legal order.

Here, the Thomistic concept of “integral parts” undergoes a highly dangerous, coercive closure. When the “whole” is identified exclusively with a singular, confessional-state apparatus, the state ceases to be a pluralistic vessel for the common good and instead becomes an instrument of cultural and religious homogenization. It demands the submission of all private and public life to a centralized, spiritual authority. This political integralism actively seeks the systematic suppression of pluralism, defining the “integral” citizen strictly through ideological conformity and cultural assimilation, providing a sophisticated, academic blueprint for modern clerical-fascist or authoritarian nationalism.

3. The Indian and Eastern Lineages: Integral Yoga and Vedantic Humanism

The Indian root is the oldest and deepest source of the entire integral family, emerging from the reformed spiritual traditions of Bengal and Pondicherry. Rather than presenting a clean tabula rasa, this lineage is marked by a deep-seated tension between evolutionary universalism and a closed, majoritarian major-key nationalism.

Its fountainhead is Sri Aurobindo, who was using integral by 1914 for what he called Purna (Full) Yoga. Developed at his ashram in Pondicherry, Purna Yoga is an evolutionary spiritual vision rooted in a creative, evolutionary reading of Advaita Vedanta. It outlines an Indian metaphysics of consciousness ascending toward the “supramental” transformation of earthly life.

Before he was a spiritual sage, Aurobindo was a revolutionary nationalist—editor of the daily Bande Mataram and jailed in the Alipore Bomb Case of 1908. Yet, the nationalism he arrived at after his prison awakening was spiritual and universal. Crucially, this Eastern root was never an isolated product of the Orient; its very genesis was marked by a profound East-West hybridity. Aurobindo spent his formative childhood and adolescent years (from age seven to twenty) educated in England, thoroughly steeped in Western classical languages, history, and European literature, before returning to India to reconstruct Vedic and Upanishadic thought. For Aurobindo, India’s freedom mattered not as a chauvinistic end in itself, but because its dharma was to offer spiritual wisdom to a materialist world—a necessary civilizational condition for the evolutionary unfolding of humanity as a whole. This is the generous, universalist branch of the Eastern integral that flowed down into Chaudhuri, CIIS, and ultimately into Wilber’s metatheory.

But the same Vedantic soil grew a nationalist deformation. In 1965, Deendayal Upadhyaya, then general secretary of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS), delivered the lectures published as Integral Humanism (Ekatma Manav Darshan). This text became the official doctrine of his party and remains foundational for today’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Upadhyaya’s vocabulary is unmistakably Vedantic—invoking the oneness of all souls and the microcosm answering to the macrocosm—and his target was identical to Maritain’s: capitalism and Marxism alike, each reducing the human being to a mere economic unit.

However, Upadhyaya bent this Vedantic anthropology toward ethnic-nationalism. The whole he prioritized was Chiti, the cultural essence of a people, realized in an organic Hindu Nation (Hindu Rashtra) ordered by dharma; the ideological line he stands in runs not from Aurobindo’s universalism, but from Savarkar’s Hindutva and the organicism of the RSS.

This is the ultimate expression of the Indian integral’s nationalist capture. By framing society as an organic body in which the individual is merely a cell subordinated to the collective “Chiti” of the nation, Upadhyaya’s integralism converts Vedantic universalism into a mechanism of violent majoritarianism. Under this closed framework, India’s religious and ethnic minorities (Islamic, Christian, etc. and indigenous groups) are pathologized as “foreign bodies” disrupting the organic unity of the Hindu state. The metaphysics of the integral whole is thus weaponized to justify systemic state-sponsored exclusion, rewriting a spiritual anthropology of oneness into a coercive ideology of cultural erasure.

Integral Pluralism & the Dialogue of Civilizations

A fifth conception of the integral emerges from political philosophy, specifically the work of Fred Dallmayr. His framework of integral pluralism has guided my own thinking since 2017, serving alongside Richard Bernstein’s engaged fallibilistic pluralism as a cornerstone of Integral Facticity. Dallmayr’s formulation of the integral does something distinct from the other lineages in this survey: it focuses on the relational space between worldviews, offering a vital link between the cosmopolitan socialism of Michael Brooks and the peer-to-peer frameworks of Michel Bauwens.

Dallmayr’s intellectual trajectory was shaped by his wartime childhood in Germany. Born in Ulm in 1928 and raised in Augsburg, he studied law in Munich before emigrating to the United States in 1955. After completing his PhD at Duke, he taught at Notre Dame from 1978 until his retirement. His philosophical formation occupied the space between Heideggerian ontology and Habermas’s critical theory—a position he described as existing Between Freiburg and Frankfurt.

A Fulbright year at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1991–92 marked a pivotal transition, leading him to engage deeply with Indian philosophy. This encounter prompted him to pioneer the field of comparative political theory, arguing that substantive political philosophy existed outside the Western canon. Over the subsequent decades, Dallmayr translated this theoretical work into practice, serving as executive co-chair of the World Public Forum – Dialogue of Civilizations and writing extensively on intercultural dialogue as a corrective to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis before his death in June 2024.

His core thesis is articulated in Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010). Dallmayr argues that modern history is defined by irreversible pluralization—the differentiation of traditions, spheres, and lifeworlds. The central challenge of our era is to prevent this pluralism from collapsing into either authoritarian balkanization or coercive, top-down unification. His primary foils are Carl Schmitt, the Religious Right, international-relations “realism,” and political Islam—all of which attempt to close the social whole around an exclusive, chosen identity.

To counter these tendencies, Dallmayr synthesizes William James’s pluralism, Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with trans-traditional resources, including the comparative theology of Raimon Panikkar, the political ethics of Gandhi, and the insights of Indian philosophers like Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi. The resulting position is an integral pluralism: an acknowledgment that while pluralism is original and irreducible, it is not mere balkanization. It is gathered in a “differentiated wholeness” that balances individual freedom with mutual solidarity.

This relational approach provides the taxonomy we need to evaluate the lineages surveyed in this essay. It clarifies the boundary between open and closed systems. Aurobindo’s spiritual universalism and Maritain’s personalism remain open to difference, whereas Upadhyaya’s Hindu nationalism and neoscholastic Catholic integralism close the social whole around a privileged ethno-religious identity. Schmitt, Hindutva, and confessional authoritarianism are the very closures Dallmayr’s relational model is designed to diagnose and resist.

This is also the political philosophy that undergirded Michael Brooks’s cosmopolitan socialism. Brooks sought an internationalist, anti-imperialist left that retained developmental depth and complexity without ceding them to the political right. His work aimed at a left that avoids both the imperial universalism that flattens difference and the localism that abandons solidarity. While Brooks may not have read Dallmayr, his political project was an intuitive application of integral pluralism.

Michel Bauwens’s recent reflections on “scalar and negotiated universalism” represent a similar conceptual movement. Bauwens rejects both the false universalism of a single global epistemology and the radical relativism that fragments the world into isolated, balkanized camps. He redefines universality not as an imposed template, but as a capacity to translate between worldviews. Where Dallmayr saw a dialogue between historically situated civilizational traditions, Bauwens envisions this negotiation occurring across the practical scales of translocal commons and peer-to-peer networks. Whether this dialogical capacity requires deep civilizational traditions or can be reconstructed across post-civilizational guilds remains an open question.

Just as the universalisms of Aurobindo and Maritain cast exclusionary, nationalist shadows, the dialogue among civilizations has its own dark double in Aleksandr Dugin’s “fourth political theory.” Dugin adopts the language of multipolarity and civilizational distinctiveness to reject liberal universalism, but he grounds this plurality in ethnos and traditionalist anti-modernism, closing each civilizational sphere around an exclusive identity. This project has its most prominent Anglophone proponent in , whose work on Dugin is directly tied to Dallmayr, who served as the external reader on Millerman’s doctoral committee.

This connection reveals a troubling ideological asymmetry. The intellectual carriers of a closed, ethno-nationalist multipolarity have studied Dallmayr’s work closely, while the emergent integral left has largely overlooked the political philosopher whose work provides their natural foundation. Discerning between an open integral pluralism and closed civilizational states is therefore not a matter of semantic classification, but a critical political necessity.

Towards a Second Renaissance & Democracy to Come

To map these divergent lineages is to realize that the history of “integral” is not a chronicle of linear developmental progress, but a series of subterranean water tables occasionally bursting through the dry crust of modern history. In his contribution to the Rosy Cross anthology, Michel Bauwens anchors this underground current in a provocative historical thesis drawn from the Marxist theorist Loren Goldner. He suggests that the genuine integrative tradition—the speculative conviction that matter and spirit, the objective and the subjective, are co-arising and equally sacred—found its Western zenith not in modern developmental psychology, but in the Hermetic Renaissance. This was a moment of cosmological and social wholeness ultimately broken by the Cartesian Enlightenment’s razor-sharp division of the world into dead, mechanical matter and a disembodied, observing ego. From that rupture onward, this integrative impulse was forced underground, flowing as a subterranean heresy through Jakob Boehme, the German Idealists, and the radical, metabolic-restoration project of the young Marx. Goldner’s own name for this lineage is cosmobiology; it is Bauwens, in his integral rendering, who names it—fittingly—integralism, adding yet another deeply historical coordinate to our map.

This historical lineage is not merely a matter of archival curiosity; it provides the essential metaphysical background for what , and the ecosystem forming around him, has called a second renaissance. To speak of a second renaissance under contemporary planetary conditions is to recognize that our digital, ecological, and psychological crises are symptoms of a shared exhaustion across multiple civilizations. The Cartesian bifurcation of the world—which reduced nature to resource extraction and the human psyche to an isolated, utility-maximizing spectator—has run its course. The wager of the peer-to-peer movement is that the commons are the modern, structural carriers of this ancient integrative line, just as the early Benedictine and Franciscan monastic commons once carried the seeds of a new social architecture through the collapse of the Roman world.

Yet, as our taxonomy has shown, any attempt to resurrect the “whole” carries a profound, tragic danger. From the closed, coercive jurisdictions of Adrian Vermeule’s Catholic integralism to the majoritarian, exclusionary capture of Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Hindutva, the temptation to cure modern fragmentation by enforcing a top-down, mono-traditional order is the defining right-wing reflex of our epoch. When the spiritual or developmental whole is identified with a singular, closed political authority, the result is inevitably a violent suppression of plurality. Against these formidable reactionary enclosures, the emergent integral left must articulate a different path: one that is structurally, epistemologically, and relationally kept open.

This is precisely where the psychological flexibility of contextual behavioral science meets the macro-political vision of Fred Dallmayr’s Democracy to Come (2017). In Dallmayr’s formulation, democracy is not a fixed, procedural institution to be defensively exported or mechanically managed by a technocratic elite. It is a “promise perpetually arriving”—a demanding, relational askesis that requires continuous self-transformation, ethical cultivation, and a capacity to hold cognitive and cultural dissonance. To construct a “democracy to come” is to recognize that structural integration on a political scale requires a corresponding psychological flexibility on an individual scale. Without the capacity for defusion, acceptance, and perspective-taking, the encounter with deep civilizational difference inevitably triggers a defensive regression into tribalism, balkanization, or the demand for authoritarian order.

Michel Bauwens’s vision of a “scalar and negotiated universalism” offers the practical, infrastructural counterpart to this relational discipline. It suggests that planetary solidarity cannot be achieved by imposing a single, flattened global ideology (the false universalism of neoliberal flatland), nor by retreating into balkanized, culturally pure enclaves. Instead, universalism must be negotiated across scales—from the psychological posture of the individual practitioner to the local cooperative guild, to the translocal digital commons, and ultimately to a multicellular global federation. In this framing, the “metapattern” is not a closed, totalizing map of developmental hierarchies, but an active, open-ended protocol of translation and mutual adaptation.

To hold this vision of the whole open, refusing both the temptation of right-wing authoritarian closure and the flat, moralizing exhaustion of mainstream progressivism, is the urgent task of the integral left. It is a future of active potential—a project that is neither a guaranteed evolution nor an impossible utopia, but a living realization of integral political praxis. This praxis operates as a continuous, metabolic loop where the inner cultivation of psychological flexibility directly feeds the outer struggle for democratic, collaborative institutions. The dialogue between the psychological flexibility of contextual behavioral science, the political ethics of integral pluralism, and the collaborative architecture of the peer-to-peer commons is only beginning. It is within the open-ended space of this running debate, and through the collaborative experiments we build in its wake, that a second renaissance and a democracy to come might finally find its footing.

Further Reading from Integral [+] Facticity

The Return of God & Future of Integral Humanism (November 2024)

A Lament for a Missing Element of Flowers for Marx: Michael Brooks’s Integral Vision (July 2025)

Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (August 2025)

On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn (February 2026)

Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up? A Short Journey Through Wilberland (February 2026)

Through and Beyond the Threshold (February 2026)

On Enchanted Flatland: Iain McGilchrist and the Problem of Romantic Liberalism (May 2026)

The Future of Contextual Behavioral Science & Role of Theology (June 2026)

Suggested Reading

David Sloan Wilson and Steven C. Hayes, eds., Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting, and Influencing Human Behavior (Context Press, 2018)

Paul W. B. Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven C. Hayes, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (Context Press, 2019)

Guy du Plessis, An Integral Guide to Recovery: Twelve Steps and Beyond (Integral Publishers, 2015)

Guy du Plessis, An Integral Foundation for Addiction Treatment: Beyond the Biopsychosocial Model (Integral Publishers, 2017)

William L. White, Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America, 2nd ed. (Chestnut Health Systems, 2014)

Michael Brooks, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right (Zero Books, 2020)

Ken Wilber, A Sociable God: Toward a New Understanding of Religion, rev. ed. (Shambhala, 2005 [1983])

Michael Schwartz and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, eds., Dancing with Sophia: Integral Philosophy on the Verge (State University of New York Press, 2019) — see esp. Zachary Stein, “Integral Theory, Pragmatism, and the Future of Philosophy”

Jorge N. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (State University of New York Press, 2002)

William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Longmans, Green, 1912)

Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Beacon Press, 1971)

Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas (Ohio University Press, 1985)

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (c. 1265–1274)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, trans. Joseph W. Evans (University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)

Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)

Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Études historiques (Aubier, 1946)

Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio (encyclical letter, 1967)

Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (encyclical letter, 2009)

Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism: Recovering the Classical Legal Tradition (Polity, 2022)

Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018)

Matthew McManus, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1939–1940)

Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga (Sri Aurobindo Ashram)

Deendayal Upadhyaya, Integral Humanism (Ekatma Manav Darshan) (Bharatiya Janata Sangh, 1965)

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Fred Dallmayr, Democracy to Come: Politics as Relational Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)

Aleksandr Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory (Arktos Media, 2012)

Michael Millerman, Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political (Arktos Media, 2020)

Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Alex Pazaitis, Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto (University of Westminster Press, 2019)

Cadell Last and O.G. Rose, eds., Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity (Philosophy Portal Books, 2026)

Rufus Pollock, The Open Revolution: Rewriting the Rules of the Information Age (2018)

Introduction

Summer has finally arrived, and I’m fortunate to be away from my day job until September on a care benefit leave. This unexpected window of time is a profound relief—not just for the rest, but because it has finally liberated me from the relentless, day-to-day pressure of work, providing the breathing room to do more reading, thinking, and writing. It also clears the way for an important event: my father’s tentative return home on July 7, 2026. Following several weeks of hospitalization, surgery, and an extensive rehabilitation process, I am looking forward to his return home since he continues to be one of my most vital intellectual and dialogue partners. Conversation has always been my primary way of working through ideas, and he has been my chief interlocutor for as long as I can remember. It is a genuine joy to have him back for the summer, allowing us the space to explore these developing concepts and engage in deeper discussions together.

I’ve been writing about IACT (Integral Awareness & Commitment Training/Therapy) since 2024 and working with it in one form or another in my own daily practice since roughly 2017, but the ideas behind it have really started to take deeper root lately. I’m not setting any strict agendas for the summer, but I am looking forward to simply diving back into the roots of contextual behavioral science. I want to spend some time revisiting the foundations of Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in further depth to flesh out the theory a bit more as I continue to follow my intellectual muse.

This return to foundational principles was driven by two primary catalysts. Over the past year, I finished an extensive study of Lacanian and Žižekian theory, which resulted in my essay on the Facticity of the Cross and various discussions at the Philosophy Portal. The experience left me deeply dissatisfied and frustrated, feeling reminiscent of some academic nonsense I encountered years ago. I found Žižek’s “Christian atheism” to be hollow, preserving the imagery of the Cross while abandoning its core; he reduces Christ to a mere structural element of subjective destitution rather than the freedom and awe of divine revelation, essentially dissolving the concept of God into nothing but a “Big Other” that disappears upon closer examination and leads people into a maze of postmodern neo-marxist smoke and mirrors—and aperspectival madness. His work is less a theological exploration and more of an active dismissal of divine revelation and diverse religious traditions, treating the sacred as an empty void. Or a nauseating cultural and endless psychoanalysis session parading as negative theology.

Notwithstanding these slight frustrations, my recent dialogues have been exceptionally fruitful. Several key individuals have offered perspectives that now serve as the bedrock for the concepts explored in this post.

Regarding the realm of behavioral science, Gareth Holman has been my main dialogue partner over the last year. A clinical psychologist based in Seattle and co-author of Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple, Gareth has helped refine my views through his deep knowledge of the FAP tradition and his adherence to core CBS tenets.

Theological clarity has come through my interactions with scholar , author of T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions and The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice. Her recent Philosophy Portal presentation on God and Christian atheism, alongside our personal discussion, helped sharpen my focus on the importance of active religious commitment.

, the theorist behind the P2P Foundation, has been a partner in thinking through the shape of civilizational change. Known for his work on commons-based peer production and his chapter in Rosy Cross, he has inspired me to continue my research on integral humanism and its connection to integral human development.

The Philosophy Portal community, led by Cadell Last, has also been an indispensable space for evaluating and polishing my ideas. The portal community's dialogue is intense and demanding, and the better for it — the friction has been instrumental in advancing my thinking.

I. Behaviorism Redux

In my ongoing dialogues with Gareth, we frequently returned to the necessity of situating contextual behavioral science within a broader psychological landscape. Modern psychology is traditionally mapped across four successive forces: psychoanalysis, behaviorism, various humanistic and existential branches, and finally, transpersonal psychology and its transcendental dimensions. This fourth force focuses on the further reaches of human nature, encompassing spiritual experiences, mystical states, and transcendental phenomena that lie beyond the boundaries of the individual ego. Contextual behavioral science occupies a peculiar position within these movements and schools. While its lineage and methodology firmly root it in the second force of behaviorism, its mature application has developed robust empirical models for the very concerns that defined the third and fourth forces—values, existential purpose, the architecture of the self, and contemplative awareness. By operationalizing the observing self and the capacity for non-reactive presence, the science acts as a rigorous bridge into transpersonal territory, providing a functional account of how we might contact a perspective that transcends our immediate historical and psychological content.

The behavioral tradition went through a hard rupture in the middle of the last century. Classical and operant conditioning was powerful and directly shaped behavior, but they faltered before the generative, symbolic character of human language. That was the vulnerability Noam Chomsky exposed in his 1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, arguing that no account of conditioned reflexes could explain the speed, the syntax, or the open-endedness of how we speak — a review that did much to push mainstream psychology toward the cognitive revolution. A deeper philosophical objection came a few years later from the Canadian, Charles Taylor, whose The Explanation of Behaviour (1964) argued that human action is irreducibly purposive, and that any science built on brute behaviorism, stripped of the agent’s own ends and meanings, would always give an incomplete account of human nature. Taylor’s charge still looms large over the field.

By the 1980s, cognitive approaches—centered on the work of Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis to identify and rectify distorted thinking—had become the psychological mainstream. However, Steven Hayes and his associates identified a critical discrepancy in the evidence: dismantling studies failed to consistently demonstrate that altering the specific content of a thought was the actual mechanism driving behavioral change or situational improvement. Choosing to reform rather than abandon the behavioral tradition, Hayes and his team began reconstructing the field from its core principles.

Their philosophical foundation was functional contextualism, a pragmatic framework influenced by William James and John Dewey and formalized through the World Hypotheses of Stephen Pepper. This approach moves away from the search for absolute internal truths, establishing “workability” as its definitive measure. Within this paradigm, an analytical method is validated as “true” only if it enables the broad and precise prediction and influence of behavior toward a life characterized by significance and value. This foundational philosophy subsequently split into two major streams: a basic science focused on the complexities of human language and a practical framework for relational therapeutic intervention.

Relational Frame Theory (RFT) serves as the foundational science of language within this tradition, offering a post-Skinnerian account of what makes human thought singular: our learned capacity to relate anything to anything else by arbitrary convention rather than by physical likeness. While other species organize their world based on physical attributes—such as size, proximity, or volume—humans are trained to establish relationships through arbitrary conventions. Once these relational skills are established, we begin to derive new connections that were never explicitly taught. For example, if a child learns that the label “dog” refers to a specific animal, she instinctively understands that the animal also refers back to the word and eventually, other dogs. Similarly, if she understands that a nickel is worth less than a dime and a dime less than a quarter, she can deduce, without further instruction, the relative value between the nickel and the quarter. A significant consequence of this mental capacity is that the emotional weight associated with one part of a relational network can permeate the entire symbolic order or linguistic frame. Consequently, a mere word, a specific memory, or a passing thought can trigger the same physiological alarm as an actual physical or linguistic event. This process is central to how we construct meaning, how we become imprisoned by our own symbolic language, and, ultimately, how we develop the capacity for perspective-taking.

The therapies came, in good part, from radical behaviorists returning to the clinic. Robert Kohlenberg — a student of Ivar Lovaas at UCLA, and a lifelong Skinnerian — turned in the mid-1980s to psychotherapy and, with Mavis Tsai, built Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, which finds the lever of change in the live, in-session relationship between therapist and client, in the clinically relevant behavior that surfaces in the room itself. Alongside it, Hayes, with Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson, was developing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which works not by disputing the content of a thought but by changing a person’s relationship to it — through acceptance, defusion (loosening a thought’s grip by seeing it as a thought), contact with the present moment, self-as-context, a turn toward chosen values, and committed action. In 1993 Kohlenberg, Hayes, and Tsai set FAP and ACT side by side as “radical behavioral psychotherapy,” intensive in-depth therapies derived, against every expectation, from Skinner. Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy — a cousin from a neighboring line — had meanwhile made the governing move explicit: that real change asks us to hold two contraries together, radical acceptance and the demand for change at once. Hayes would later gather the whole development under a name that stuck: the third wave of cognitive behavioral therapy.

The naming of the field followed long after its core developments. By 1988, the philosophical foundation was established; FAP was codified by 1991, and ACT evolved throughout the 1990s. However, the formal banner of “contextual behavioral science”—and the open, non-proprietary association that sustains it—only emerged in 2005 with the establishment of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. This association serves as a broad collective, integrating behavior analysis, cognitive and dialectical therapies, and a growing emphasis on evolutionary science. This evolutionary integration is largely driven by the Prosocial framework developed by David Sloan Wilson and Steven Hayes, which synthesizes multilevel selection theory with Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for managing the commons. As will be explored in the third section, these rules for sustainable community resource management highlight how the modern name was essentially retrofitted onto a set of traditions that preceded it.

The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science encompasses a unique branch of the behavioral family—one that can be described as an existential-humanistic approach to cognitive behavioral therapy. Unlike many of its predecessors, this tradition treats values, religious experiences, and the self as serious areas of inquiry rather than an academic embarrassment. It reaches its most profound point through Relational Frame Theory’s exploration of perspective-taking—specifically the fluid relations of I and you, here and there, and now and then. Through this empirical investigation, the science arrives at a concept referred to as “self-as-context”: a content-free and stable vantage point. This allows an individual to observe their own feelings and thoughts as they pass without becoming overwhelmed. Ultimately, through its own rigorous methodology, behavioral science has effectively reconstructed the “observing self” found within contemplative traditions.

The personal appeal of this field lay in that very opening. Having spent years immersed in Zen practice and the structural architecture of Ken Wilber’s integral theory, I was surprised to discover a branch of behaviorism that remained receptive to the profound questions many of its academic peers had dismissed. This shared receptivity facilitated a rapid connection with Gareth; while he approaches the tradition from its clinical applications, my entry point is through its contemplative and philosophical boundaries. The inclusivity of this framework allowed a trained FAP clinician and an integral-humanist to find significant common ground. Inspired by our ongoing discussions, I have been revisiting some foundational texts, re-examining his work Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple alongside a fresh analysis of the writings of Tsai and Kohlenberg.

IACT represents my endeavor to realize the potential of that newfound openness. By integrating the multi-perspectival framework of integral theory with the psychological flexibility models central to CBS, it establishes a foundation within a post-metaphysical, fallibilist moral psychology and new form of integral humanism. This approach is anchored by the core virtues of awareness, courage, and love, serving simultaneously as a methodology for human development and a clinical intervention for suffering. Although I have utilized this framework for several years, I feel I have yet to fully articulate its depth; this summer’s research and writing pursuits are a dedicated effort to further that ongoing refinement.

II. Transcendental Thomism

The second conversation turned me back to my theological roots. A long talk with Cleo Kearns this month, together with her lecture at Philosophy Portal, returned me to a tradition with deep roots in the city I write from. I studied at Concordia, whose lineage is bound up with Bernard Lonergan — the Quebec-born Jesuit who, with the German theologian Karl Rahner, stands among the great names of the movement called transcendental Thomism. Montreal was formative ground for him: he came to the city to study at Loyola, one of Concordia’s founding colleges, and returned in the 1940s to teach, before the work that made his name carried him on to Rome, Toronto, and Boston. It was here, in fact, at the Thomas More Institute — the adult-education college still active in Montreal, with which Concordia keeps a long association — that Lonergan delivered the 1945 lecture series, “Thought and Reality,” that became the seed of Insight and its Generalized Empirical Method. And the theologian who later anchored critical theology at Concordia, Charles Davis, knew Lonergan’s thought intimately and reckoned with it seriously throughout his own work. That formation is the thread I want to follow forward here, and I have written about it elsewhere. (For the longer account of that Montreal lineage — Lalonde, Davis, and the critical-theology formation — see “Critical Theology & Integral Humanism.”)

To see why that tradition matters to a modern behavioral science, it helps to know the problem it was built to solve. For centuries Catholic philosophy rested on the confident realism of Thomas Aquinas: through the active power he called the intellectus agens, the mind abstracts the intelligible form of a thing from what the senses supply, and so genuinely reaches the world. That foundation was fractured by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In his Copernican revolution Kant reversed the old picture — objects must conform to the mind, not the mind to objects — and concluded that we know only the world as it appears to us, the phenomenon, shaped by our own forms of space, time, and cause. The thing-in-itself, the noumenon, stays out of reach. The knowing subject is sealed inside the theater of its own representations, and with that the door to classical metaphysics and natural theology swung shut: reason can no longer reach an absolute beyond the bounds of experience.

The transcendental Thomists, beginning with the Belgian Jesuit Joseph Maréchal in Le point de départ de la métaphysique (1922–1947), made a daring move. They saw that you could not beat Kant by simply reasserting the old realism against him; you had to take up his own transcendental method — the analysis of what makes knowing possible at all — and turn it against his conclusion. Maréchal argued that Kant had not appreciated the power of the very thing he had found. Look closely at the act of judgment, he said, and you find that the mind is not a static container of categories but a dynamism: a restless, innate drive toward being without restriction, prior to experience and underwriting it. Every time we grasp a finite, limited object, we grasp it against the horizon of the unlimited; to affirm that this is real is already, tacitly, to affirm being as such. The intellect hits the ground running, always already reaching past any particular thing toward the infinite. And that reach is the door back to the real that Kant had bolted shut — opened not by escaping the subject, but by discovering that the subject is structurally open to the absolute.

This core realization—referred to within the tradition as the finality or dynamism of consciousness—serves as the foundational element of the entire school, nurtured uniquely by its prominent successors. Maréchal envisioned this drive as a movement toward Infinite Being; Lonergan identified it as a pursuit of the notion of insight, conscience, and the Infinite Being of Christ; and Rahner saw it as a reach toward absolute esse, the holy mystery. They were united by the belief that the impulse to know is not merely an incidental trait of the mind but its very defining structure. As Rahner famously articulated, the human person is spirit in the world: a being that is embodied, historical, and rooted in a specific life, yet fundamentally designed for self-transcendence, perpetually reaching beyond the immediate toward the totality of existence.

Lonergan operationalized this process into a formal methodology. In his 1957 work Insight, he introduced the Generalized Empirical Method (GEM), which expands the scope of inquiry beyond external sensory data to include the “data of consciousness”—the internal operations of the mind itself. By observing our own mental processes, Lonergan identified a self-correcting cycle spanning four distinct levels, each governed by a specific imperative: we experience (be attentive), we understand (be intelligent), we evaluate the truth of that understanding (be reasonable), and we determine an appropriate course of action (be responsible). He argued that because every finite grasp of a subject remains incomplete, it inevitably generates new questions; this inherent restlessness constitutes a dynamism toward being that unfolds through the very structure of inquiry. Lonergan defined this approach as a form of “critical realism”. A “realism” in the sense that we possess the capacity to arrive at authentic conclusions regarding values and facts; however, it remains “critical” because these truths are not grasped through direct perception. Instead, they are the result of a rigorous, self-correcting process of investigation.

Rahner gave the same openness its sharpest name. Across Spirit in the World (1939) and Foundations of Christian Faith (1976) — the latter of which I am revisiting this summer, and which remains a source of profound excitement — he calls it the Vorgriff, the pre-apprehension: the mind’s anticipatory reach into the infinite that is silently at work in every finite act of knowing or loving. You can see any single object, he liked to say, only because it stands out against a wider horizon that recedes behind it; and behind every such horizon the mind is already straining toward an ultimate one, measuring the small and ordinary against an unthematic, ever-present awareness of infinity. The Vorgriff is a secret, permanent ingredient of personhood — a capax Dei, a capacity for God written into the structure of the human as such — and the term of that openness, what the horizon finally is, he names the holy mystery.

Set this beside the behavioral account and the symmetry is hard to miss. Working entirely within a naturalistic frame, contextual behavioral science has reconstructed something that looks remarkably like the oldest furniture of the contemplative and transcendental traditions: a stable, content-free observer from which experience is simply witnessed. It reached this honestly, by its own empirical and dialogical route. And having arrived there, it tends to treat the arrival as a demystification — to assume that because the observing self can be given an ordinary, evolutionary cause, the mystery is closed. It uses mindfulness to lower stress or improve flexibility while keeping the ceiling of what Taylor calls the immanent frame firmly shut. It has described the mechanics of the eye with great care, and declined to ask what the eye is looking at. Rahner and Lonergan spent their lives on exactly that question.

I am currently reflecting on two significant observations. First, the four imperatives identified by Lonergan—being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible—align with the Awareness, Acceptance, and Action framework I developed from a behavioral perspective with surprising precision. While IACT was not intentionally modeled after Lonergan’s work, this alignment is striking, and I have yet to fully explore the extent of their shared foundations. Second, I suspect that Lonergan’s critical realism could provide a necessary counterweight to the pragmatism inherent in the field. Contextual behavioral science often adopts a Jamesian focus on truth-as-workability; however, without a broader anchor, “what works” risks devolving into simple instrumentalism. My own perspective aligns more closely with Charles Sanders Peirce and (now) Lonergan: a fallibilist stance that acknowledges our knowledge is consistently incomplete and subject to correction, yet remains realist in its conviction that we are oriented toward an objective reality and an authentic good. I am still determining whether this view represents a challenge to the field of pragmatism or serves as a way to deepen it.

The final point I wish to maintain is that the observing self is a reality, not merely a linguistic artifact to be dismissed. While science may trace its origins through the mechanisms of evolution, relational framing, and the historical development of language, these explanations do not negate its existence. Capacity is not synonymous with its ultimate aim. A scientific discipline can provide an exhaustive account of how a faculty emerged while remaining silent on its final orientation and purpose.

In this sense, I am revisiting Charles Taylor’s critique: while contextual behavioral science has successfully reintroduced purpose through the concept of values—surpassing the limited behaviorism he once criticized—it remains confined by a naturalistic framework. I am left to contemplate whether the content-free observer is an opening rather than a void. It is possible that what science labels as “self-as-context” is, in fact, what Karl Rahner identified as the Vorgriff: a fundamental human openness toward an infinite horizon and unnamed holy mystery.

III. Toward a Second Renaissance & Pragmatic Utopianism

A third dialogue has recently unfolded, this time with Michel Bauwens, focusing on a unique point of convergence: the intersection of evolutionary research by David Sloan Wilson, the integral movement, and contextual behavioral science. As an active participant in the integral movement for several years, Michel joined me for a brief meeting to examine “Prosocial” as a distinct crossroads where Elinor Ostrom’s principles for tending the commons, multilevel selection, and integral developmental theory overlap. Although the Prosocial framework analyzes cooperation through a behavioral lens, Michel’s extensive career dedicated to the public sphere and the commons stems from a different intellectual lineage. Throughout our discussion, we have repeatedly circled back to a core question: what truly occurs when these two distinct paths intersect?

So when I came across a conversation between and Zak Stein, my first reflex was to send it straight to Michel. While I am already very familiar with Zak Stein’s work, it was Rufus Pollock’s perspective on the “second renaissance” and “pragmatic utopianism” that was a new and exciting discovery for me. Pollock — the economist behind the Open Knowledge movement and the author of The Open Revolution — has been calling for these concepts as a way of naming the move from retrieval to renewal, an inheritance brought back into use so that something new can be built on it. It was not just the vocabulary that lit me up, but hearing two people work the exact seam Michel and I had been working on — the evolutionary science and the integral frame held together, taken seriously at once — already articulated, from the commons side, by other people I had not been following up to this point.

The various threads of my summer research are finally converging here. The Prosocial framework developed by Wilson and Hayes—the evolutionary branch of contextual behavioral science—represents some of the most rigorous practical exploration into the origins of cooperation and shared values within our species. When viewed alongside Rahner’s concept of openness—a universal, unthematic quality present in all individuals regardless of how it is labeled—a compelling possibility emerges: a horizon that is both common to all and possessed by none could serve as the foundational inheritance for a revitalized, cooperative, and new form of public sphere or commons. I suspect that while this science is approaching a central question its own framework cannot yet articulate, the discourse surrounding the commons is nearing that same point from an external perspective. This intersection of three disparate traditions, which rarely find themselves in dialogue, is the specific collaboration that has most captured my attention.

The following ideas remain in flux, presented here as initial observations for the season rather than a completed thesis. I am exploring this central inquiry through lenses that bridge scientific, theological, and societal perspectives. This dialogue is an ongoing part of my current research. I am revisiting the integration of religion into developmental frameworks, and examining these ideas with expert collaborators provides a depth of insight that I intend to cultivate throughout the summer. My objective is to further explore the concept of a “second renaissance”—an era of invention and renewal—while continuing to refine my vision of integral humanism: a framework capable of unifying rigorous science, contemplative traditions, and our collective public existence.

For now, I am looking forward to how the summer will unfold: with my father coming home, the days growing long, and conversations running late around the kitchen table and the barbecue. My thanks go out to Gareth, Cleo, Michel, Cadell, and to every one of you who has been following along and leaving comments.

Suggested Reading

A few of the books behind this summer’s thinking, for anyone who wants to follow the threads to their sources.

Contextual behavioral science:

• Robert J. Kohlenberg & Mavis Tsai, Functional Analytic Psychotherapy: Creating Intense and Curative Therapeutic Relationships (Plenum, 1991).

• Mavis Tsai, Robert J. Kohlenberg, Jonathan W. Kanter, et al., A Guide to Functional Analytic Psychotherapy: Awareness, Courage, Love, and Behaviorism (Springer, 2009).

• Mavis Tsai, Robert J. Kohlenberg, Jonathan W. Kanter, Gareth I. Holman & Mary Plummer Loudon, Functional Analytic Psychotherapy: Distinctive Features (Routledge, 2012).

• Gareth I. Holman, Jonathan W. Kanter, Mavis Tsai & Robert J. Kohlenberg, Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Relationships (New Harbinger, 2017).

• Steven C. Hayes, Kirk Strosahl & Kelly Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change, 2nd ed. (Guilford, 2011).

• Steven C. Hayes, Dermot Barnes-Holmes & Bryan Roche, eds., Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition (Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2001).

• Paul W. B. Atkins, David Sloan Wilson & Steven C. Hayes, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (New Harbinger, 2019).

Transcendental Thomism and its background:

• Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957).

• Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (1939) and Foundations of Christian Faith (1976).

• Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (1964) and A Secular Age (2007).

The commons and the second renaissance:

• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, 1990).

• Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis & Alex Pazaitis, Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto (University of Westminster Press, 2019).

• Rufus Pollock, The Open Revolution: Rewriting the Rules of the Information Age (2018).

Abstract

and Daniel L. Garner’s () 2026 anthology, Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity, brings together three primary currents of postmodern theology: Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian project, Peter Rollins’s Protestant-Pyrotheology, and the Postmodern Theology of Mark C. Taylor. These perspectives converge to explore the nature of Christianity in the wake of the death of God. My own contribution to the volume, A Rosy Cross of a Book, sat as an interlude between Part One and Part Two and mapped the intellectual lineage from Michael Brooks to Cadell Last. The present paper takes up the volume’s second titular question: the Truth of Christianity.

The central inquiry concerns the persistence of Christianity as a revealed and divine religion. Authentic divine revelation is not merely a philosophical deduction; it is an ontological event — a face-to-face meeting with the living God. On this view, the sacraments not only symbolize divine life but also invite one into the Paschal Mystery: they effect what they signify (sacramenta efficiunt quod significant). This process culminates in the sanctifying grace identified by the Catholic Church, a substantive ontological and experiential reality validated by two thousand years of contemplative practice.

The analysis begins with a Kierkegaardian critique of the Žižekian framework, identifying two structural constraints: Christian-Atheism’s limit of religious-existential depth, and its restricted capacity for pluralist engagement with non-Christian traditions. It then turns to the work of Sean McGrath, whose “both/and” philosophical and theological system integrates depth-psychology with a rigorous form of contemplative theology which offers a counterpoint to the “either/or” logic of the volume’s other strands.

The constructive framework also draws on the broader Catholic intellectual landscape — specifically the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian inheritors — and converges on the philosophical-anthropological and political-philosophical synthesis of Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism and Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism. The result is a post-secular and pluralist horizon within which real Catholic theological content can be held alongside the distinct traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and the non-religious alike, each on their own terms.

Drawing upon the IACT (Integral Awareness and Commitment Therapy) methodology — a praxis designed to facilitate contemplative and psychological flexibility while respecting the distinct developmental pathways of religious, atheist, and humanist subjects — I examine the work of three contributors: Bryce Nance, Edie Hitchcock, and John Feldmann, who occupy critical thresholds regarding pluralism and divine revelation that the volume’s primary framework is unable to traverse. By reading these voices through an integral lens, I aim to engage perspectives that sit at the very boundaries of the current discourse.

The paper closes by juxtaposing Benjamin Studebaker’s vulture with Leonard Cohen’s Bird on the Wire. I argue that Cohen — through his lifelong interests in Jewish-Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue and through the theological content he carried in song for over fifty years — represents the pinnacle and embodiment of the integral pluralism and integral humanism advanced here.

Finally, the closing diagnostic acknowledges, with appropriate honesty, that Slavoj Žižek, the postmodern-theological movement, Sean McGrath, and Cohen each fall short of meeting the post-metaphysical challenge in their own characteristic ways. Nevertheless, the poetic and embodied vision offered by Cohen represents a vital and ongoing labor for the future. This paper serves as both an appreciative critique of a significant volume and a strategic declaration of what this historical moment demands — asserting that the divine and revealed reality under discussion is far too vital to be limited to the domains of philosophical, psychological, and political theory alone.

Tags: Leonard Cohen, Mt. Baldy, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, Rinzai Zen, Cadell Last, Philosophy Portal, Rosy Cross, Slavoj Žižek, Christian Atheism, Peter Rollins, Pyrotheology, Mark C. Taylor, Postmodern Theology, Death of God, Søren Kierkegaard, Sean McGrath, Schelling, Heidegger, Continental Philosophy of Religion, Carmelite Tradition, German Mystical Tradition, Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theological Aesthetics, Glory of the Lord, Nouvelle Théologie, Sarah Shortall, Charles Taylor, Charles Davis, Gregory Baum, Marc Lalonde, Michel Despland, Canadian Catholic Critical Theology, Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Democracy to Come, Bryce Nance, Edie Hitchcock, John Feldmann, Benjamin Studebaker, Bird on the Wire, IACT, Integral Awareness and Commitment Therapy, Integral Political Praxis, Steven Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, Divine Revelation, Paschal Mystery, Sacramental Life, Cognitio Dei Experimentalis, Post-Metaphysical, Post-Secular, New Integral Humanism, Metapattern Institute

Suzanne takes you down to her place, near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy, but that’s why you wanna be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength and she lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover

And you wanna travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken long before the sky would open
Forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think you maybe you’ll trust him
For he’s touched your perfect body with his mind

Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her
You want to travel blind
And you know that she will find you
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

— Leonard Cohen, Suzanne (1967)

I. Introduction

The Death of God in Postmodern Theology

The death-of-God question in postmodern theory and contemporary continental philosophy of religion stretches back more than sixty years. Gabriel Vahanian’s The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (1961) named the cultural-historical fact: modern secular life had lost contact with the sacred. Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton’s Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966) carried the question into an explicitly theological register, with Altizer drawing on Blake, Hegel, and Nietzsche to articulate a Christian-atheist gospel in which God’s death is itself a central salvific event. Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz (1966) carried it into the Jewish tradition through the catastrophe of the Shoah (Holocaust).

The academic postmodern theology that took up the question in the 1980s extended this Continental-philosophical reception into a deconstructive register. Mark C. Taylor’s 1984 work, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, established a critical foundation for examining the death of God through the lens of Derridean deconstruction. This academic trajectory was institutionalized in 1989 with the launch of the Religion and Postmodernism series at the University of Chicago Press. John D. Caputo’s deconstructive philosophy of religion — culminating in The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006) and The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (2013) — developed a strand into what he calls a weak theology which challenges traditional classical theism by asserting that God’s true power lies in powerlessness and the call to love and justice. Peter Rollins’s Pyrotheology — articulated through the Belfast-based Ikon Collective from the mid-2000s and in books such as How (Not) to Speak of God (2006) and The Fidelity of Betrayal (2008) — translated the Caputo-Derridean and Žižek-Lacanian currents into practical religious-communal form, building a/theistic communal practice grounded in death-of-God thinking. The connection between Pyrotheology and scholarly postmodern theology is overt: Rollins explicitly cites Caputo, Žižek, and Jean-Luc Marion as major influences.

Slavoj Žižek’s intervention into this conversation is structurally distinct from the deconstructive-postmodern lineage. Where Taylor and Caputo work through Derrida, the apophatic-mystical tradition, and negative-theology, Žižek works through Hegel and Lacan. And where Caputo’s weak theology renders God’s “weakness” as a poetic-deconstructive event without a real ontological substrate, Žižek’s materialist-Hegelian reading renders God’s death as the speculative-dialectical truth of Christianity itself, with the Pauline community and the Mystical Body of Christ recast as a form of communism on the horizon. His sustained engagement with Pauline Christianity — across The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), The Monstrosity of Christ (2009, with John Milbank), Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012), and most recently Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (2024) — has been the most ambitious contemporary attempt to read Christianity through Hegelian-Lacanian categories. By prioritizing Pauline Christianity, Žižek has managed to revitalize the philosophy of religion for a new generation of aspiring scholars and philosophers. For several decades, the academic study of religion and philosophy of religion was dominated by either structural language theory or Derridean deconstructive methods. These frameworks frequently diluted the core theological essence of Christianity into abstract textual analysis, thereby masking any concrete contemplative and divine reality.

Cadell Last has situated the Žižekian intervention as a cornerstone of the philosophical and theological project at the Philosophy Portal. This was clearly demonstrated during the Philosophy Portal course on Christian Atheism, which organized its study around a historical lineage of Kant and Hegel to Žižek and Rollins. The program further synthesized these viewpoints by featuring guest contributions from Slavoj Žižek himself, Peter Rollins, and Barry Taylor.

Where This Paper Sits

The central inquiry of this paper addresses the critical tension opened by the Žižekian turn: the fate of Christianity when divine reality is interpreted through philosophical, psychological or political frameworks rather than as an actual ontological and transformative theological event. Cadell Last and Daniel Garner explore these themes in the second part of their 2026 anthology, Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity, focusing on the “Truth of Christianity”. While my earlier interlude, A Rosy Cross of a Book, traced the intellectual lineage from Michael Brooks to Cadell Last and examined the friction between Žižekian-Hegelian thought and right-wing critiques, I purposely delayed my commentary on Christian Atheism. This was not due to indifference, but rather a perceived need for a more rigorous engagement with Slavoj Žižek’s evolving work on the topic, an engagement that this present paper now undertakes.

The structure of this inquiry mirrors the volume’s own thematic arc: a movement from the Coming Age of the Rose through the Facticity of the Cross, concluding in divine revelation. I am aligned with the core premise of this work: Christianity must be approached as the faith that confronts the death of God with absolute gravity. It must recognize the Cross as the essential threshold for divine revelation along with rejecting any retreat into pre-modern metaphysics that ignores the twentieth-century catastrophes and the unavoidable reality of religious pluralism.

My central contention regarding Part Two, however, is that its three primary philosophical movements, despite their rigor, capture only the form of the Cross while missing the actual divine and revealed reality at the root of the Christian tradition. For Christianity to exist as a revealed religion, it requires divine revelation as a living experience, the presence of Christ, and the sacramental life of the Church as a genuine conduit of divine reality. Without this substance, Christianity ceases to be itself. Whatever else it transforms into, it is no longer the divine and revealed religion two thousand years of Christian theology has held it to be

The scope of this inquiry is defined by the two distinct problems identified in the title of the Rosy Cross volume. The “Question of Right” engages the Hegelian framework established in the Philosophy of Right (1820), focusing on political-philosophical issues of legitimate authority, public reason, and the institutional standing of Christianity within the pluralist public sphere of modernity. Conversely, the “Truth of Christianity” addresses the theological essence of the faith — the nature of divine revelation and the content maintained by the sacramental and contemplative traditions.

While my initial work in the political-philosophical domain, On Enchanted Flatland: Iain McGilchrist and the Problem of Romantic Liberalism (May 2026), served as my attempt to address the Question of Right and outlined a new and emergent model of integral humanism, this paper turns directly toward the Truth of Christianity. While this project examines the profound theological foundations preserved by the contemplative and mystical traditions of Christianity, it also considers the existential and systematic requirements such a reality necessitates.

Genealogy and the Argument Ahead

This paper seeks to build a positive theological case rather than merely oppose the Žižekian turn. The shift in continental philosophy of religion this turn has sparked is a vital intellectual milestone. My argument is that the German Idealist resources the turn deploys actually point toward integration with the contemplative-revealed tradition at the heart of Christian thought — and that the Žižekian framework, taken on its own terms, does not pursue that integration because it does not take the contemplative dimensions of Christianity seriously. Rather than being received as an actual and contemplative-theological event, these dimensions are minimized to psychological categories and utilized as instruments for the framework’s specific political-philosophical goals. Drawing from the Canadian Catholic critical-theological lineage of Charles Davis, Gregory Baum, Marc Lalonde, and Michel Despland, this inquiry engages with Sean McGrath — a contemporary continental philosopher of religion who integrates depth-psychology and full theological content into a unified architectural framework. The following argument is developed across six primary sections (Section I - Introduction).

Section II maps the three strands the Rosy Cross volume gathers — the Žižekian centre, the Protestant-deconstructive Pyrotheology of Peter Rollins, and the academic postmodern theology in the lineage of Mark C. Taylor — and names two structural limits in the volume’s central Žižekian-Christian-Atheist commitment. The first is Kierkegaardian: the reduction of Christianity from its religious-existential dimension to a purely ethical and universal dimension, which dissolves the substantive divine and revealed reality of the Christian contemplative tradition. The second is the pluralism limit: the elevation of Christianity to the unique level of universality on which Žižek’s framework structurally depends, which forecloses genuine engagement with other religious traditions on their own terms.

Section III situates the constructive case within the twentieth-century Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian inheritors — Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu on the European side; the Davis-Baum-Lalonde-Despland Canadian Catholic critical-theological lineage on the North American side — showing the wider Catholic landscape that has been engaging the death-of-God reckoning for a century while holding the divine and revealed reality of Christianity intact.

In Section IV, I articulate the core theological argument of this paper: that divine revelation is an actual ontological event, the Paschal Mystery is truly mediated through the Church’s sacramental life, and the life of grace signifies the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I position Sean McGrath’s scholarship as a vital contemporary contribution that integrates psychological depth with theological substance in a “both/and” architecture, providing a necessary alternative to the “either/or” logic found in the volume’s three postmodern theological currents.

Section V directly explores the philosophical-anthropological and political-philosophical landscape. Drawing on Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936) and Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism (2010), it outlines an integral horizon where the religious traditions — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and others — can be engaged on their own terms. This framework encompasses divine revelation in its diverse forms, while also accommodating the full non-religious commitments of enlightenment-humanist, materialist, and atheist subjects who do not follow a contemplative-religious path. Central to this is Dallmayr’s Derridean-influenced concept of the democracy to come — a vision of a real intercultural and interreligious public life that, though not yet realized, serves as the orientation and possibility for the future.

Section VI examines the work of three contributors to the Rosy Cross volume — Bryce Nance, Edie Hitchcock, and John Feldmann — whose chapters illustrate, from three very different positions, the limits of the volume’s central Christian-Atheist and materialist framing. None of the three articulates or defends the integral-humanist horizon I have been developing and working towards. I analyze each of their contributions through this specific lens, highlighting how every chapter maps out territory that an integral perspective can effectively occupy, even in instances where the authors themselves refrain from doing so.

In Section VII, I present a comparison between the vulture of Benjamin Studebaker and the Bird on the Wire of Leonard Cohen. I contend that Cohen — through his enduring engagement with Jewish-Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue and the profound theological substance he articulated in song across five decades — serves as a contemporary exemplar of the integral humanism and integral pluralism defended in this work. The paper concludes with a diagnostic assessment: while Slavoj Žižek, the postmodernist thinkers, Sean McGrath, and Cohen each address aspects of the post-metaphysical challenge, they ultimately fall short in unique ways.

II. The Wider Landscape and the Volume’s Postmodern Register

The death-of-God theology that emerged in the years after the Second World War is much wider and theologically more complicated than its most recent Žižekian uptake suggests. Anyone who came of age intellectually in the wake of the catastrophes of the twentieth century — the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the colonial violences whose unraveling defined the postwar order — had to reckon with what theological language could still mean after Auschwitz. The first generation of self-identified death-of-God theologians — Thomas J. J. Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, William Hamilton, Paul van Buren — formulated the question sharply enough that Time magazine could put it on its cover in April 1966.

But the question itself was older, and the responses to it more varied, than the Time cover and its New York correspondents knew. The Nouvelle Théologie of Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu had been engaging secularization for decades by then — the death-of-God event in the strict sense Bonhoeffer named when he wrote of a world come of age — and engaging it with the full theological content of the Christian tradition intact. That wider Catholic landscape I return to in Section III. Here I want to focus on the volume’s specific postmodern theological register.

The second part of the Rosy Cross anthology, implicitly engaging with this expansive tradition, is rooted in a particular postmodern theological framework that surfaced in the early twenty-first century. That said the landscape of continental philosophy of religion was significantly transformed during this period by Slavoj Žižek’s foundational works: The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), The Monstrosity of Christ (2009, co-authored with John Milbank), and Less Than Nothing (2012). Collaborative environments like Belfast’s Wake Festival further catalyzed this intellectual evolution by merging Hegelian and Lacanian viewpoints. More recently, Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal has become an essential center for synthesizing and propelling this dialogue through its seminars and community engagement. In its final form, the Rosy Cross collection integrates three major currents of this postmodern theological field into a cohesive volume.

The first strand is Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian position, and it is the volume’s animating centre. Cadell’s chapter The Necessity of Christian Atheism articulates this strand most fully: Christianity is the religion in which the gap between humanity and God is transposed into God himself; Christ on the Cross is the moment when the God-of-the-beyond dies, opening the community of believers — what Žižek calls the Holy Spirit — onto a freedom abandoned to itself, sustained by nothing but the love of its members for each other. Cadell formulates this as a double axiom: Christianity is the truth of religion, and atheism is the truth of Christianity. The axiom is meant to be read, he tells us, as a non-orientable surface, a Klein bottle in which the two propositions never resolve into one another but generate the dialectic of Christian Atheism as a project. The strand draws its philosophical authority from Hegel and Lacan, its political horizon from a left tradition that runs from Marx through the Frankfurt School into the present, and its appropriation of theological language from a reading of Pauline Christianity that takes the kenosis of the Cross as the structural-philosophical core of what Christianity is for.

The Žižekian intervention in continental philosophy of religion is substantial work, and it is worth being precise about what it does. It refuses the postmodern dissolution of theological content into deconstructive negation. It insists, on Hegel’s own ground, that the Cross is the structural event in which the divine itself enters the abyss of finitude. It holds Pauline Christianity — the kenotic Christ, the Cross as scandal, the ekklesia as the body of the resurrected Lord — at the centre of contemporary continental philosophical attention. And it has opened a conversation between Hegelian-Lacanian categories and the deepest currents of Christian theological reflection at a scale no other contemporary continental project has reached. Cadell’s chapter in this volume — his work with the Klein-bottle structure, his patient working-through of the Žižekian materials, his sustained commitment to taking the Christian-atheist project further than its progenitors have themselves taken it — is a real extension of this project.

The second strand is the Protestant and deconstructive technology of Pyrotheology, which has its own ground and lineage. Peter Rollins is the central figure here. His How (Not) to Speak of God, The Idolatry of God, and Insurrection come out of the Belfast emerging-church movement — the early-2000s Protestant evangelical attempt to engage post-modernity from inside congregational practice. Rollins’s later collaboration with Žižek — visible in The Divine Magician and in the Wake Festival programming — layered Žižekian categories onto a pre-existing Protestant deconstructive theology that drew on Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Caputo’s-reading of the death-of-God theologians. In the volume, Rollins’s Introduction to and Speculations on Pyrotheology presents Pyrotheology as a technology for the death of God in the life of the subject, deploying parable, liturgy, performance, and art. The strand is distinct from the Žižekian commitment. Pyrotheology has Protestant roots and operates as a practice of deconstructive faith from inside congregational structures. It is theology, but theology of a particular post-evangelical and Protestant-deconstructive kind.

The third strand is the academic postmodern theology in the lineage of Mark C. Taylor. Barry Taylor’s chapter History-Heart of Radical Theology and the Theological Unconscious names this lineage explicitly. Mark C. Taylor — author of After God and Erring, one of the principal figures who brought Derrida’s religious turn into dialogue with theology — is the architect of what within academic circles is called postmodern theology, and Barry Taylor declares himself, plainly, a Taylorian. “Postmodern theology and radical theology,” he writes, “are sometimes bedfellows, and not even strange bedfellows; they sleep side by side in the same cot.” He goes further: “For my take, to do theology is not always to be thinking about God. In fact, I seldom think about God.” Religion’s function, he tells us, is destabilising rather than stabilising. The disappearance of God is God’s “final revelation.” The question: “do you believe in God? “ is, he says, “the most uninteresting question there is about the notion of God.”

The three strands have distinct genealogies. Žižek’s Christian Atheism operates inside the Hegelian-Lacanian-post-Marxist matrix and reads the Cross as the structural event of the divine’s own self-emptying into finitude. Rollins’s Pyrotheology emerges from Belfast’s post-Troubles emergent-church milieu and treats Christianity as a deconstructive technique for collapsing the certainty-structures of belief. Mark C. Taylor’s academic postmodern theology, working out of the Yale-Chicago lineage that has shaped a generation of religious studies departments, has translated Derridean deconstruction into a theology-after-the-death-of-God in which the religious is dissolved into pure textual operation, with no divine reality left to be received as actual content. The volume’s force comes from gathering these three into a single conversation about what Christianity becomes after the death of God. They share, across their differences, a theological lack — and what it is, and why it matters, is the diagnostic this section sets down.

The Kierkegaardian Diagnostic: Christianity Reduced to the Ethical

The diagnostic I am offering against the volume’s three strands is Kierkegaardian in its source and Protestant in its theological commitments. To make it land, I have to recall the architecture Kierkegaard built — the schema of the stages, or spheres, of existence — because the whole force of the diagnostic turns on a single distinction drawn within it. Across his pseudonymous authorship Kierkegaard distinguishes three such spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. They are not biological or psychological phases that unfold automatically with age; they are rival forms of life, fundamental ways of organizing a self, each defining the good life by its own criteria and each a standing possibility a person may inhabit or refuse. The aesthetic sphere is the life of immediacy — the pursuit of pleasure, novelty, and the interesting, lived without reference to good and evil, and collapsing in the end into boredom and despair because the moment it lives for cannot be made to last. The ethical sphere is the life of the universal — the self that realizes itself by binding to moral law, duty, and the obligations of family and community, becoming a self precisely by becoming what is required of everyone. The religious sphere is the life of the single individual standing in direct relation to God: a relation that at its limit can require the individual to stand higher than the universal, and which therefore cannot be reduced to the ethical.

That last clause carries the whole argument, and it names exactly what Hegel forecloses. Hegel’s philosophical articulation of Spirit had absorbed Christianity into the universal-rational-ethical: Christianity as a moment in Spirit’s self-development, and the Christian life as participation in Sittlichkeit — the ethical substance of the Christian community, in which the individual is at home as a member of the universal. On this reading the religious simply is the ethical raised to its highest cultural form, Christendom.

Kierkegaard’s authorship is one long refusal of this absorption, and it refuses on two distinct fronts. The first is Fear and Trembling (1843), written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. Its question — posed through Abraham on Mount Moriah, commanded to sacrifice Isaac — is whether there is a teleological suspension of the ethical: whether the religious can require the single individual to suspend the universal moral law for the sake of a higher telos, his relation to God. If Hegel is right that the highest human task is surrender to the ethical, then Abraham is merely a would-be murderer. If Abraham is instead the father of faith, then faith is a category that exceeds the ethical altogether, and the knight of faith is the individual whose faith cannot be communicated — cannot be mediated, justified, or even explained — because it is his relation to God in a passion for which the universal has no terms. De Silentio, tellingly, examines all of this from outside: he confesses that he cannot himself make the movement of faith. He describes the threshold he has not crossed.

The second front is the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, where the polemic against Hegelian Christianity reaches its most concentrated form and where the decisive distinction for my purposes is drawn. Within the religious sphere itself, Climacus separates two forms. Religiousness A is immanent religiousness — the religiousness of inwardness and subjective passion, exhibited paradigmatically by Socrates, requiring no historically specific revelation and able, on Climacus’s own account, to be present even where there is no Christian confession at all, in a paganism that may be agnostic or atheist. It has God “in its ground,” but it reaches God by deepening the self’s own inwardness. Religiousness B is the religiousness specific to Christianity, and it does not extend Religiousness A but breaks with it. Its content is the Absolute Paradox: that the eternal God entered time as a single human being, that there is no natural kinship between the eternal and the temporal and yet eternity has appeared within it. This cannot be reached by intensifying inwardness, because it is not a truth already lying within the self to be uncovered; it can only be received, by a leap of faith — the passionate appropriation of a paradox that offends reason and dissolves into no system. Climacus, like de Silentio, writes as one who has not himself arrived: a self-described humorist, standing short of Religiousness B and describing the paradox from its edge.

With this schema in view, the diagnostic can be stated exactly. What Kierkegaard set down against Hegel in the 1840s anticipates, with extraordinary precision, what the Žižekian articulation of the Holy Spirit as community-of-believers-in-solidarity now performs. Žižek’s Christian Atheism is, in Kierkegaard’s own terms, the most rigorous contemporary articulation of ethical-stage Christianity — a Christianity that has absorbed the death-of-God reckoning with full philosophical seriousness, that has articulated the structural-dialectical truth of the Cross with unparalleled precision, and that has built from these resources a community of solidarity in the absence of the Other. Read in religious rather than ethical terms, it reaches at most Religiousness A: an immanent religiousness of inwardness and shared commitment, available precisely because it requires no transcendent revelation — which is exactly why it can be held, without contradiction, as an atheism. It is profound philosophical work. It is also, in the precise Kierkegaardian sense, the ethical sphere and Religiousness A articulated as Christianity, and never Religiousness B.

For the leap of faith does not occur in this framework, and cannot, because the framework’s structural commitments do not allow it. The leap is the face-to-face individual encounter with the living Christ as divine person — the death-with-Christ that opens one to divine revelation as an actual event — and it is precisely the paradox of Religiousness B that Žižek’s axioms convert into something else. Christ is read as the structural moment of subjective destitution, the kenosis of the divine ego into the void of the Real; he is not received as the living divine person who meets the soul in the actual sacramental and contemplative-revelation reality the Christian tradition has held for two millennia. The Holy Spirit is read as a community-of-solidarity in the absence of the transcendental guarantor and facticity of divine revelation; it is not received as the actual third divine person who indwells the soul — the Pneuma who makes the soul a temple of God in the actual sacramental sense when Paul asked the Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16).

What Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian project finally does to Christianity is more than the philosophical reduction Kierkegaard diagnosed in Hegel. It is the conversion of Christianity into something the secular and post-religious left can use: a purely therapeutic method for managing the existential conditions of late capitalism, a community-of-solidarity in the absence of any theological commitment, a deconstructive technique for managing the residue of metaphysical certainty in subjects who can no longer believe but who still need the ethical-aesthetic and cultural identity Christianity provides.

Pyrotheology and academic postmodern theology, in their own registers, do related work. Rollins’s Pyrotheology offers a technique-for-deconstruction of the certainty of belief. Taylor’s genealogy of postmodern theology dissolves the divine-and-revealed content into pure textual operation without a divine reality. The Žižekian, Rollinsian, and Taylorite trajectories each dilute the fundamental essence of Christianity. At its most animated historical moments, Christianity was a radical and anarchist faith that announced the end of all terrestrial sovereignties before the Kingdom of God. It preserved a substantive divine reality verified by two millennia of contemplative practice and has shaped the lives of Saints through a direct encounter with the living God and facticity of Christ. However, the Žižek-Rollins interpretation domesticates this revolutionary DNA, repurposing it as a therapeutic-political project for a secular, post-religious left — essentially offering a therapeutic culture for the disenchanted. My Kierkegaardian-Protestant interpretation categorically rejects this domestication. Christianity, viewed as a divine and revealed faith, possesses a radicality that the Žižekian lens fails to grasp. It is inherently more anarchist in its dismissal of modern sovereignty than any Hegelian-Lacanian-post-Marxist analysis can permit. Furthermore, its actual divine essence — what it truly holds — surpasses what any instrumentalization for political purposes can ever hope to capture.

The Pluralism Limit and Other Religious Traditions

The first structural boundary of the Žižekian project is defined by the Kierkegaardian diagnostic: the thinning of Christianity from a robust religious-existential reality into a merely ethical and universal-rational system. Beyond this lies a second, distinct limitation within the philosophical architecture. While the first boundary dictates what the framework can extract from Christianity, the second governs what it is fundamentally unable to accommodate regarding other faiths. Within the Žižekian frame, the commitment to Christian Atheism is a structural axiom rather than a personal preference, and this commitment inevitably restricts the framework’s ability to genuinely encounter other traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism on their own terms. This constraint is a direct consequence of the framework’s foundational logic.

Žižek’s treatment of Buddhism is the most diagnostically clear case. Across multiple works he treats Western Buddhism as the “perfect ideological supplement” to global capitalism — the meditative inwardness that allows late-capitalist subjects to maintain composure while participating in a destructive economic system, the “cool” void that Žižek opposes to the “hot” trauma of the Cross. The argument has a polemical edge that does work against certain forms of mindfulness and therapeutic lifestyle enclaves. What it fails to engage is Buddhism as a full religious tradition with its own contemplative-philosophical depth, its own millennia-long testing of soteriological claims, and its own metaphysical and post-metaphysical resources for the very questions Žižek’s framework is attempting to address. Siddhartha Gautama’s articulation of anatta preceded the Council of Nicaea by more than seven centuries. The Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions developed the philosophical articulation of the same depth-structures across two millennia of textual and lived-contemplative testing. The Japanese Zen tradition holds disciplines of contemplative practice with structural rigor comparable to the Carmelite tradition that has done analogous work in the Christian sphere. Žižek’s dismissal of Buddhism as an ideological-supplement does not engage any of this. It cannot engage it on the framework’s own terms.

The structural reason is the Christian-Atheist axiom itself. Žižek’s project elevates Christianity to the unique level of historical-philosophical universality — the Cross as the singular historical event in which the divine enters its own self-emptying and through which the post-religious community of believers becomes possible, the one event that achieves what every other religious tradition, on Žižek’s frame, only gestures toward and fails to reach. To reach the dialectical Universal on this frame, one must pass through the specific historical-narrative content of Golgotha — the hill outside Jerusalem where, according to the Gospels, Christ was crucified. Other religious traditions, when they enter the framework at all, do so as material for a form of Christian-Atheist genealogy rather than serious interlocutors who might be addressing the same depth-structures from their own historical genealogies, their own language, and their own experiences of the Divine. The pluralism failure is not from a malicious intent on Žižek’s part; it’s built into his philosophical framework and system. And as long as Christianity is held in this position of unique universality, the other traditions cannot be received as real and valuable in their own right.

The architectural response to this structural limit is what Jacques Maritain, in 1936, called integral humanism — and what Fred Dallmayr, in 2010, articulated as integral pluralism on the political-philosophical side. The position is neither syncretism nor relativism. Syncretism would blend the traditions into an undifferentiated mystical substrate, dissolving the substance each tradition has held. Relativism would treat each tradition as merely a provisional cultural formation, equally available for adoption or revision. The integral position refuses both moves. Its commitment is that the post-secular pluralist public sphere requires real engagement with the religious traditions on their own terms — Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and the others — held within a philosophical-anthropological horizon (Maritain’s integral humanism, the full Christian humanism that holds the human person as imago Dei within a pluralist civilizational frame) and a political-philosophical horizon (Dallmayr’s integral pluralism, the post-Habermasian articulation of dialogue across civilizational substrates without flattening into procedural-rational consensus).

The integral-humanist stance I am advocating for establishes a horizon where religious traditions and secular commitments coexist, each respected on its own merits. This framework facilitates communication across the pluralistic gaps of post-secular society — a reach the Žižekian model cannot achieve on its own. Because Žižek structurally depends on elevating Christianity to a singular status of universality, his framework is precluded from accessing this broader pluralistic horizon. What our current era demands is an integral humanist and pluralist perspective, which Žižek’s system — by its very design — is unable to offer.

These inherent constraints function in tandem: a Kierkegaardian restriction on the existential depth of religious content and an integral-pluralist barrier to engaging with diverse faiths. The Žižekian approach is fundamentally limited by these commitments. In contrast, the expansive Catholic intellectual tradition — represented by the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian successors — has spent a century demonstrating how to engage seriously with the death-of-God concept while upholding a revealed and divine reality. This context now sets the stage for Section III and Section IV, where we will finally examine the work of Sean McGrath as an alternative to the Žižekian philosophical system.

III. The Catholic Wing and the Canadian Lineage

Sarah Shortall’s Soldiers of God in a Secular World is the most careful recent history of mid-century French Catholic political theology, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Catholic engagement with the death-of-God reckoning across the twentieth century. The book traces the Nouvelle Théologie from its origins in the 1930s Jersey-exile period — when the Jesuit refugees of Vichy France found themselves rebuilding theological scholarship from inside the experience of resistance and occupation — through its mid-century controversies, its central role at Vatican II, and its long afterlife in liberation theology, radical orthodoxy, and the contemporary post-secular philosophical conversation.

What the Nouvelle Théologie gave the Catholic intellectual tradition was a way of engaging secularization with full theological seriousness — without either capitulating to it (the Concilium error, in Communio‘s reading) or retreating from it into neo-scholastic insulation. De Lubac’s Surnaturel unsettled the neo-scholastic distinction between nature and the supernatural. His Drama of Atheist Humanism engaged Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Comte as serious philosophical interlocutors whose challenges Catholic theology had to absorb. His Corpus Mysticum became one of the foundational texts of post-secular political theology, taken up by Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet for their accounts of secularization as a process internal to Christianity. Chenu’s work on Aquinas and on the worker-priest movement gave Catholic theology a way of taking the autonomy of the natural order seriously without abandoning the supernatural horizon. Congar’s three-volume I Believe in the Holy Spirit opened the theological vocabulary in ways that prepared for Vatican II. These theologians took the death-of-God reckoning with full seriousness and held the full theological content of the Christian tradition intact — divine revelation as actual event, the sacraments as actual mediation of divine life, Christ as a living divine person whose Death and Resurrection are the central event of the world’s redemption. They did not see these as opposed commitments. They saw them as the only honest way to be Catholic in the twentieth century.

Shortall’s epilogue makes a further point that bears on what I am arguing here. The current renewal of interest in theology among continental philosophers — Marion, Badiou, Žižek, Agamben, Vattimo — is not, as some accounts have it, a return of theology to philosophical respectability after a long absence. It is the visible surface of an interaction that has been continuous across the entire twentieth century. The Nouvelle Théologie and the secular Hegelians of the École Normale Supérieure read each other. Fessard read Hegel; Chenu read Marx; de Lubac engaged Comte and Feuerbach. The death-of-God questions Žižek engages now have been inside Catholic theological reflection for the entire postwar period, addressed there with the divine and revealed reality intact, addressed from the Cross-and-Resurrection horizon that the Nouvelle Théologie never let lapse.

Shortall makes this point most directly in her discussion of Charles Taylor. Taylor, she observes, came of age intellectually as a Catholic in the 1950s, reading de Lubac, Chenu, and Congar. His A Secular Age is at once a phenomenology of secularization and a Catholic engagement with the death-of-God landscape. Taylor’s account of the buffered self, his diagnosis of the immanent frame, his sense of something missing in the modern world that cannot quite fulfill the natural human yearning for transcendence — all of this presupposes a theological anthropology that the Nouvelle Théologie taught him to inhabit. Taylor is doing death-of-God theology in the constructive postwar sense. He is doing it from a Catholic philosophical vantage point that engages Hegel and Heidegger and the secular phenomenological tradition with the seriousness those traditions deserve, while holding full theological commitment intact.

This is the wider Catholic landscape my own work belongs to. The Canadian Catholic intellectual lineage I have been tracing across several recent essays — Charles Davis at Concordia, Gregory Baum at Toronto and McGill, Marc Lalonde at Concordia under Davis, and Michel Despland also at Concordia — is all part of this lineage and tradition. It is not a parochial Canadian sidebar to a properly European story. It is one of the genuine continuations of the Nouvelle Théologie into a North American context, with its own institutional history and its own intellectual contributions.

Davis’s departure from the priesthood in 1967, after the publication of A Question of Conscience, was one of the largest and most public crises of the postconciliar period in the Anglosphere. His arrival at Concordia inaugurated a serious Canadian engagement with Catholic theology — engaging Habermas and the Frankfurt School, developing what would become his Theology and Political Society, training a generation of scholars including Marc Lalonde, my own Concordia teacher, whose 1999 Critical Theology and the Challenge of Jürgen Habermas built the bridge between Davis’s theology and the broader Frankfurt-School engagement that has informed my own work. Baum, who took the opposite path from Davis — remaining within the Church while developing his own critical sociology of religion at Toronto and McGill — became the Canadian theologian who most fully integrated critical theory with Catholic social teaching, producing across a long career the most substantial Canadian Catholic engagement with the modern condition. The Davis-Baum rupture, which I engaged at length in Truth and Relevance: Revisiting the Charles Davis and Gregory Baum Debate, marked the Canadian culmination and ongoing debates across the Concilium and Communio fault line.

What I take from this wider landscape — and from the Canadian Catholic lineage that’s shaped my thinking — is that the death-of-God reckoning the Rosy Cross volume engages has been worked through for the better part of a century by theologians who held the substantive divine and revealed reality of Christianity intact, who knew the cognitio Dei experimentalis by sacramental life and contemplative discipline, who therefore could articulate divine revelation as an actual transformative event and the supernatural life of grace as the actual ground of faith and salvation in the modern condition. The volume’s postmodern theological strands are not the only response to the death-of-God event. They are one response, articulated in a particular philosophical register with its own genealogy and its own commitments. The wider landscape — the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian inheritors — has been showing for decades how the death-of-God reckoning can be taken with full seriousness while the divine and revealed reality is preserved and lived.

It is also the landscape that has held genuine engagement with the divine and revealed reality of Christianity — divine revelation as an actual ontological and transformative event, the Paschal Mystery, the supernatural life of grace — across the entire postwar period. That full theological articulation, and the contemporary continental philosopher of religion whose scholarship engages it most rigorously, is what Section IV turns to next.

IV. The Facticity of the Cross, Divine Revelation, & the Future of Christianity

I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and cut your hair
And from your lips, she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

— Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah (Official Live in London 2008)

Divine Revelation and the Paschal Mystery

To ensure the reader understands the paper’s direction, I will explicitly define divine revelation as I conceive it. Authentic divine revelation is a direct, face-to-face meeting with the living God. This is the cognitio Dei experimentalis that the contemplative lineage has meticulously preserved for two millennia. Such revelation is not a mere product of dialectical insight or philosophical deduction; it is an ontological and transformative event that radically reorients one’s way of being in the world.

The path to this opening is found in what the contemplative and mystical tradition identifies as the dark night of the soul. Formulated by John of the Cross and refined through centuries of contemplative practice, this journey involves the soul undergoing an analogous death with Christ. Through the dark nights of the senses and the spirit, a rigorous contemplative discipline strips away every comforting attachment until God alone remains. It is through this profound death-with-Christ that one becomes receptive to the actual facticity of the cross and the divine. In this light, the Cross transcends the abyss to become a sacred site and encounters the living presence of God known within the tradition as divine revelation.

The sacramental life of the Church mediates this divine reality through participation in the Paschal Mystery — Christ’s Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Salvation. The Eucharist is the participation in Christ’s Death and Resurrection: sacramenta efficiunt quod significant, the sacraments effecting what they signify. Baptism is the opening to the believer to the face of God through Christ. Confession is the ongoing reception of mercy that keeps the believer in communion with God and the Divinity of Christ. These are not just hermeneutical symbols. They are the actual sacramental participation in the Paschal Mystery through which divine life is communicated to the faithful and the Church becomes the Body of Christ in lived sacramental reality.

The supernatural life of grace that follows is what the Christian tradition has called gratia gratum faciens, sanctifying grace — the divine life that the soul, having met Christ, now lives by, in participation in the Paschal Mystery the Church makes present in her sacraments. From this grace, and only from this grace, comes the call to holiness that the Saints have heard across two millennia — Anthony of the Desert, Francis, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, Edith Stein, Maximilian Kolbe, and the unnamed millions whose holiness was lived in obscurity.

This paper addresses and upholds the facticity of the Cross and divine revelation. Consequently, it functions as both a review and a theological position. As a review, it is appreciative, acknowledging that Last and Garner have compiled an exceptional volume where contributors engage their inquiries with profound earnestness. As a theological and positioned work, it asserts that the divine and revealed truths in question are far too significant to be restricted to purely philosophical and reductive psychological content for political ends.

McGrath’s Both/And

In On Sean McGrath’s Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge (February 2026), I made the case for McGrath’s recovery of the Western contemplative tradition as one of the most timely and courageous scholarly moves in contemporary continental philosophy of religion. The Lost Road is a book whose existential weight is inseparable from its philosophical contribution — McGrath’s autobiographical witness and Carmelite formation are not external to the disciplined rigor of the argument; they are its ground, and the book serves as a powerful introduction to the Western contemplative tradition for the contemporary reader. The earlier essay situated McGrath’s project within the distinctly Canadian philosophical lineage that runs from Armour and Trott’s “philosophic federalism,” through the Davis-Baum theological rupture, to McGrath’s own Fackenheim-Nicholson formation at the University of Toronto. And it proposed what I have been calling a new integral humanism as the framework within which McGrath’s contemplative position becomes communicable across the pluralist divides of post-secular public life.

Rather than revisiting that argument, what I want to do here is mark how McGrath’s project intersects with the core commitments of the Rosy Cross volume. I will do this in two steps. First, I want to introduce McGrath’s scholarship on its own terms, across three works in Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger studies that together constitute the body of work the present argument leans on. Then, with that scholarship in view, I will turn back to the Rosy Cross volume to mark how the both/and architecture of that scholarship stands against the either/or logic that organizes the volume’s three primary postmodern-theological currents.

Sean McGrath stands out as one of the preeminent Schellingian scholars in the English-speaking world. His 2012 work, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious, provides the definitive modern analysis of how Schelling’s Freedom essay and subsequent positive philosophy grew out of a German Idealist engagement with depth-psychological themes that predates Freud by nearly a century. The book’s central thesis — that the concept of the unconscious originates with Schelling rather than with Freud — is one of the more consequential philosophical-historical claims in recent Schelling scholarship. Several Rosy Cross contributors register the impact; few work through its full implications. The “dark ground of Spirit” — Schelling’s name for the pre-rational ground from which conscious life emerges — is an ontological-theological category before it is a psychological one, rooted in the German mystical tradition of Eckhart and Böhme.

This Schellingian substrate carries directly into McGrath’s reading of Hegel. The volume’s Hegelian foundations — and specifically Cadell Last’s own Hegelian commitments — rest on a reading of Hegel rooted in the same German mystical-contemplative tradition that the Lacanian lens of contemporary Žižekian analysis frequently obscures. Hegel was a Lutheran with substantial training in German mysticism; the Phenomenology and the Logic are formed within the intellectual landscape of Eckhart, Böhme, and Schelling. When Hegel is read through Lacan, that mystical-contemplative layer becomes structurally unutterable — present in the source but unreachable in practice. McGrath’s contribution has been to preserve the visibility and ground of this substrate. By reading Schelling, and through Schelling Hegel, with the mystical heritage held intact, McGrath engages Žižek from inside the German Idealist conversation rather than from outside it — and keeps in view exactly the mystical-contemplative core that the Lacanian turn in Žižekian scholarship has rendered hard to see and experience.

McGrath has also contributed one of the most vital contemporary interpretations of the link between the Christian theological tradition and Heidegger. In The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (2006), he contends that the hermeneutics of facticity in Heidegger’s thought actually surfaced through a deep encounter with the theology of the Cross in Luther. McGrath suggests that the entire Being and Time endeavor represents a secularization of this specific theological-existential structure. Consequently, the Heideggerian facticity referenced in the title of this paper possesses a fundamentally Christian and theological substrate, despite Heidegger’s own rigorous efforts to sever those connections. The “facticity of the cross” — the specific terminology chosen for this inquiry — operates simultaneously as a Heideggerian concept and a theological reality. It is McGrath’s scholarship that prevents these dual registers from collapsing into mere psychology or philosophy, allowing them to remain and held together in dialogical tension.

With McGrath’s scholarship now in view, the structural shape of his contribution can be named — and what it does that the Rosy Cross volume’s collective frame cannot perform comes into focus. The three postmodern theological strands the volume gathers each operate on an either/or that flattens the depth-psychology/philosophical-theological architecture. Žižek’s framework collapses theological substance into political philosophy via Lacanian psychology, with the contemplative and mystical tradition reduced to psychological material for the political work. Rollins’s Pyrotheology operates a deconstructive practice that brackets theological commitment in favour of a Lacanian-inflected group and psychological technique. Mark C. Taylor’s lineage dissolves the divine-and-revealed content into textual operation, with the theological dimension of After God and Erring preserved as deconstructive surface without a divine referent.

McGrath’s scholarship, however, functions through a different logic. The depth-psychology genealogy and the concrete theological substance of the contemplative-revelation tradition are held together as a “both/and” architecture within a single scholarly project. Divine reality is received through lived practice, and the sacramental and mystical dimensions are upheld as theological content in their own right. This integration is precisely what the collective framework of the volume, bound by its internal “either/or” commitments across all three strands, remains unable to achieve.

The Secular Christ podcast that McGrath produces with the Jungian analyst Jakob Lusensky brings these threads into direct conversation with the contemporary theological landscape. Across three seasons, McGrath has engaged Peterson (Episode 3), Žižek (Episode 4), and the broader cultural reception of Christianity in the present moment with a philosophical rigor that few academic theologians have matched. His engagement with Žižek is the load-bearing one for my argument here, because it is in this engagement that McGrath, as a scholar, articulates clearly what the Žižekian framework does and does not engage as actual theological content.

McGrath’s diagnosis of Žižek in Secular Christ Episode 4 is precise and unsparing. Žižek, McGrath grants, has a better purchase on the essence of Pauline Christianity than Peterson does, precisely because Žižek takes the tragic ground of human existence with full seriousness. The Cross is not, for Žižek, an archetypal image of psychological transformation; it is the structural event in which the divine itself enters into the abyss of finitude and there discovers its own self-othering. Žižek’s reading of Hegel and Pauline Christianity, on its own structural-philosophical terms, is rigorous.

What Žižek does not do — and this is the diagnostic that matters for the present argument — is engage the actual contemplative and mystical sacramental dimensions of the Christian tradition as theological content in their own right. The contemplative tradition’s lived reality — Eckhart’s Gottheit, Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, John of the Cross’s nada, the Carmelite cognitio Dei experimentalis — does not appear in Žižek’s framework as theological content. It appears, when it appears at all, as material instrumentalized for the political work the framework is doing. The death of the divine ego on the Cross is, for Žižek, the unveiling of the void; for the contemplative and mystical revelatory tradition, the same emptying is the unveiling of the luminous depths in which divine revelation occurs as an ontological and transformative event of the soul that has been transfigured by Christ. The Žižekian framework does not engage the second reading because, on its own terms, it does not take that reading seriously.

The core theological argument advanced here is that Christianity, as a divine and revealed religion, necessitates the substantive reality maintained by the contemplative tradition: an actual transformative event of the soul mediated through the Church’s sacramental life. This is encapsulated in the principle sacramenta efficiunt quod significant — the sacraments effect what they signify. Thus, the Eucharist represents real participation in the Death and Resurrection of Christ, baptism serves as an initiation to the path of Christ and an opening towards our resurrection, and confession facilitates the ongoing reception of divine mercy.

These are not merely symbolic gestures but the actual mediation of divine life, resulting in a supernatural life of grace — the gratia gratum faciens, theological virtues, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Without these essential elements, the faith is reduced to an approximation: a philosophical construct, an ethical system, or deconstructive form of technology and tool. While such intellectual interpretations hold value, they fail to reach the true substance of Christianity as a revealed religion.

McGrath’s scholarship is the contemporary continental philosophy-of-religion work that engages the contemplative and revelatory tradition as actual theological content. The authority of his work is scholarly: he is an academic Schellingian and a philosopher of religion working in the contemporary academy, not a saint or mystic. What his work shows is that rigorous engagement with Christianity’s full content, including its contemplative and mystical sacramental dimensions, is possible in contemporary continental philosophy of religion — and that this is a different project from the Žižekian one. The Žižekian project does its political-philosophical work well on its own terms. McGrath’s project is the other thing the present moment is asking for: engagement with Christianity’s actual content as contemplative-revelation and theological content in its own right, with the depth-psychology genealogy held alongside in the both/and architecture the volume’s three strands cannot perform from inside the either/or that organizes them.

The viability of Christianity’s future depends on the profound revealed truths maintained by the contemplative and revelatory tradition. Central to this is the acknowledgment of divine revelation as a tangible event — a grace-filled engagement with the divine life that the Christian faith has honed over two millennia. Progressing this legacy requires expressing these essential truths through contemporary philosophical concepts, embedded within an integral-humanist and integral-pluralist structure. Such a framework enables Christian substance to be shared meaningfully in a post-secular world alongside traditions like Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. Sean McGrath’s scholarship provides the necessary theological depth for this path, rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition described in Section III — the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian successors. His work serves as a bridge toward the philosophical-anthropological and political-philosophical landscape detailed in Section V.

V. Integral Humanism, Integral Pluralism, & Democracy to Come

The light came through the window
Straight from the sun above
And so inside my little room
There plunged the rays of love

In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see
Out of which the nameless makes
A name for one like me

I’ll try to say a little more
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door
Then love itself
Love itself was gone

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance

I’ll try to say a little more
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door
Then love itself
Love itself was gone

Then I came back from where I’d been
My room, it looked the same
But there was nothing left between
The nameless and the name

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance

I’ll try to say a little more
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door
Then love itself
Love itself was gone
Love itself
Love itself was gone

— Leonard Cohen - Love Itself (Official Audio)

Section IV established the necessity of substantive theological content: the reality of divine revelation as an ontological and transformative event that reorients one’s being in the world and the mediation of this mystery through the Church’s sacramental life. However, the remaining challenge is defining the horizon where this content can be communicated within a post-secular, pluralist public sphere — a space where it is neither relegated to a private form of religiosity nor forced into a particularist Christian or cultural framework that is untenable.

The broader Catholic intellectual landscape, specifically the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian successors — the Davis-Baum-Lalonde-Despland lineage influencing my own research — has preserved this horizon throughout the post-conciliar era. This architectural framework is anchored by two key pillars: Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936), addressing philosophical anthropology, and Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010), addressing political philosophy.

Maritain’s Integral Humanism

Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936) names the philosophical-anthropological horizon. The book was written against two threats at once. On one side, the bourgeois-liberal humanism of the inter-war period, which Maritain read as a humanism that had absorbed the surface of Christian moral commitments while severing them from their theological ground — a humanism without the imago Dei, the human person reduced to economic individual or rational subject without the transcendent ordering toward God that the Christian tradition had held since the Patristic period. On the other side, the totalitarian humanisms that were already visible in 1936 — the Marxist-materialist humanism that would reach its catastrophes in the Soviet experiment, and the racial-nationalist humanism that would reach its catastrophe in National Socialism. Maritain’s wager was that a robust Christian and integral humanism, drawing on Aquinas without retreating into neo-scholastic insulation, could hold the human person as imago Dei within a pluralist civilizational frame that engaged the modern condition with full seriousness.

The integral humanism Maritain named is integral in a precise sense: it integrates the supernatural and natural dimensions of the human person rather than letting either be absorbed by the other. The natural dimensions — reason, freedom, embodied life, the structures of family and political community — are real, are good, and are taken with full seriousness as natural goods. They are not absorbed into the supernatural in the way a triumphalist Christian humanism would absorb them; the autonomy of the natural order is preserved. But neither are they autonomous in the bourgeois-liberal sense that severs them from their transcendent ordering. They are oriented toward God as their final end, and the human person flourishes only when both dimensions are held together. This is the philosophical anthropology that the Nouvelle Théologie would carry forward, that Charles Taylor would inhabit, and that the present paper takes up.

What I have been calling, across the Lost Road essay and On Enchanted Flatland, a new integral humanism — new in the sense that it engages the death-of-God reckoning the twentieth century made unavoidable and holds the religious traditions on their own terms in the post-secular pluralist public sphere — extends Maritain’s project rather than replaces it. Maritain’s Christian humanism remains. What is added is the explicit pluralist horizon: the integral humanism holds Christian substance alongside the full contents of Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious traditions, with divine revelation of all stripes and flavors held as actual content where each tradition has been tested across centuries. And it holds robust non-religious commitments — Enlightenment-humanist reason and freedom, materialist commitment to embodied flourishing, the universal-rational-emancipatory inheritance of the post-Enlightenment moment — alongside the religious traditions as their own real contribution.

Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism

Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010) names the political-philosophical horizon. Where Maritain works at the level of philosophical anthropology, Dallmayr works at the level of political philosophy — what does real engagement across civilizational and religious substrates look like in the post-Habermasian moment, after the failure of procedural-rational consensus to deliver the intercultural understanding it promised? Dallmayr’s wager is that genuine pluralism requires full engagement across the traditions rather than the bracketing of theological-philosophical content in favour of a thin procedural framework. The actual contents of the world’s religious and philosophical traditions are not obstacles to dialogue; they are what dialogue is for.

The integral pluralism Dallmayr names is integral in the same precise sense Maritain’s integral humanism is integral: it refuses both syncretism and relativism. Syncretism would blend the traditions into an undifferentiated mystical or political substrate, dissolving the substance each tradition has held. Relativism would treat each tradition as merely a provisional cultural formation, equally available for adoption or revision, with no real truth-claims at stake. Dallmayr refuses both moves. The Christian tradition makes truth-claims about divine revelation through the Cross and Resurrection. The Buddhist tradition makes truth-claims about anatta and śūnyatā and the Bodhisattva path. The Jewish tradition makes truth-claims about covenant and Torah and the messianic horizon. The Islamic tradition makes truth-claims about the prophetic revelation and the sovereignty of God. The Hindu tradition makes truth-claims across its many lineages. Each of these can be held in its own full form and engaged dialogically without being dissolved into the others or relativized away.

Dallmayr’s horizon inherits the Derridean register of a democracy to come — a democratic horizon that is not the actually-existing procedural-liberal democracy of the present moment, with its impoverished public reason and its constitutive bracketing of theological-philosophical content, but a democracy oriented toward genuine engagement across substrates, oriented toward a future of real intercultural and interreligious life that the present has not yet realized. The democracy to come holds the religious traditions on their own terms within a political-philosophical horizon that lets them speak to each other and to the wider public sphere as full interlocutors. It is the alternative to both the secularist exclusion of religion from public reason and the religious-particularist domination of the public sphere by one tradition’s terms.

The Integral Horizon and the Living Traditions

Together — Maritain on the philosophical-anthropological side, Dallmayr on the political-philosophical side — they articulate the horizon within which the theological case Sections II and III have been building becomes communicable across the pluralist divides of post-secular public life. The Christian content I have been defending — divine revelation as actual transformative event, the Paschal Mystery as actually mediated by the sacramental life of the Church, the supernatural life of grace as actually present in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit — is held within this horizon as one full tradition’s substantive content, alongside the analogous full contents of the other religious traditions.

Buddhism enters this horizon not as Žižek’s “ideological supplement” to global capitalism, but as the full religious-contemplative tradition that has tested anatta and śūnyatā and the Bodhisattva path across two and a half millennia, with its own contemplative-revelation receptions (Zen kensho, Tibetan dzogchen recognition, Theravāda awakening) held as actual content in their own forms. Judaism enters as the living tradition of covenant and Torah and the messianic horizon, with its own mystical-revelation lineage (the prophetic encounter, the Hasidic devekut, the Kabbalistic ascent through the sefirot) held as actual content. Islam enters as the living tradition of prophetic revelation and divine sovereignty, with the Sufi mystical lineage (fanā, baqā, the Akbarian articulation of the unity of being) held as actual historical truth claims. Hinduism enters as the living tradition of darshan and dharma and the manifold paths, with the Advaitic non-dualist recognition and the Tantric realization-traditions held as their own contemplative and revelatory historical truths. Each tradition holds its own full contents on its own terms, in its own grammar, with its own contemplative and revelatory truth claims and tested practice across centuries.

The horizon also holds full non-religious traditions. Enlightenment-humanist commitment to reason, freedom, and emancipation as universal-rational human capacities — the inheritance from Kant to Hegel through Marx and the Frankfurt School and into the present — is preserved as a real contribution from the post-Enlightenment moment, alongside the religious traditions rather than against them. The materialist commitment to embodied human flourishing in the conditions of the present, as a robust ethical-political horizon, is similarly held. The integral horizon does not require its inhabitants to be religious.

Democracy to Come & Integral Political Praxis

The integral-humanism and integral-pluralism horizon is not only a philosophical-anthropological position; it requires operational articulation in the political-philosophical register as well. The democracy to come names that political-philosophical horizon — the horizon within which full religious commitments and full non-religious commitments can be engaged on their own terms, in the same public sphere, without either being reduced to the other and without the public sphere itself being captured by any one tradition’s particularist terms.

Integral political praxis is the operational layer that lets this horizon become workable in the conditions of the present. The work I have been developing across the IACT research program — Integral Awareness and Commitment Therapy — names this operational scaffold. IACT draws on Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and its underlying Relational Frame Theory, on the integral human developmental tradition, on the depth-psychological substrate, and on the philosophical-conceptual frames of integral facticity and enactive fallibilism that I have articulated across the recent essays in this series. IACT is open to all the religious and contemplative paths — Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and others — and to the full non-religious commitments of Enlightenment-humanist, materialist, and atheist subjects for whom no contemplative-religious path is operative. Its strength is the integrative architecture itself rather than any particular religious commitment: depth-psychology, the integral framework, and operational praxis held together as a single clinical methodology within which whatever lived path the user holds becomes traversable.

The democracy to come and integral political praxis name two sides of what the horizon requires for its full articulation. The democracy to come is the political-philosophical horizon toward which the integral position is oriented. Integral political praxis, operationalized through IACT and grounded in the philosophical-conceptual work of integral facticity and enactive fallibilism, is what lets the horizon become operative not only as the position a scholar or contemplative subject inhabits, but as an institutional and intellectual reality in the post-secular pluralist public sphere. That is the demand the post-metaphysical challenge names, and that is the work the integral-humanist position I am defending takes itself to be in service of.

Having established this conceptual horizon, I will now examine three contributors to the Rosy Cross anthology who engage the boundaries of the collection’s primary framework from unique vantage points. These individuals include Bryce Nance, who stands at the threshold of pluralism; Edie Hitchcock, who brings a background in psychoanalysis to her exploration of Christian Atheism; and John Feldmann, who investigates Christian Atheism through the lens of the “Žižekian Trifecta”. While their respective chapters do not explicitly advocate for the integral-humanist and integral-pluralist perspective I am proposing, I intend to analyze their work through this specific lens. By doing so, I will demonstrate how their insights reveal areas that an integral position can effectively address, even when the authors themselves do not adopt that stance.

VI. Voices at the Threshold: Nance, Hitchcock, and Feldmann

Show me the place where you want your slave to go
Show me the place, I’ve forgotten, I don’t know
Show me the place, for my head is bendin’ low
Show me the place where you want your slave to go

Show me the place, help me roll away the stone
Show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone
Show me the place where the word became a man
Show me the place where the suffering began

The troubles came, I saved what I could save
A thread of light, a particle, a wave
But there were chains, so I hastened to behave
There were chains, so I loved you like a slave

Show me the place where you want your slave to go
Show me the place, I’ve forgotten, I don’t know
Show me the place, for my head is bendin’ low
Show me the place where you want your slave to go

The troubles came, I saved what I could save
A thread of light, a particle, a wave
But there were chains, so I hastened to behave
There were chains, so I loved you like a slave

Show me the place
Show me the place
Show me the place
Mmm, mmm

Show me the place, help me roll away the stone
Show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone
Show me the place where the word became a man
Show me the place where the suffering began

— Leonard Cohen - Show Me the Place (Official Lyric Video)

Žižek’s framework of Christian Atheism is anchored by a structural commitment that positions Christianity as the sole historical and philosophical gateway to the universal. By treating the Cross as an exclusive, proprietary event, this perspective frequently marginalizes other faiths — most notably Buddhism — resulting in a triumphalist Christian particularism. In contrast, the integral-humanist and integral-pluralist models, influenced by Jacques Maritain and Fred Dallmayr, oppose such needless clashes. This approach asserts that traditions such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, as well as non-religious viewpoints, must be understood according to their own distinct integrity rather than being dissolved into a single religious hagiography. Such a commitment to balanced preservation serves as the definitive trait of a genuine post-secular pluralism.

Bryce Nance challenges this pluralist boundary from a radical materialist vantage point. He argues that the death of God was not a theological event in Judea but a material and intellectual one driven by the Cogito, the Critique, and the Commodity. Nance critiques Žižek’s Christian Atheism as a fetish — a melancholic attempt to salvage Christian particularism while pretending to transcend it. He uses Buddhism as a primary counter-example, noting that Siddhartha was already realizing the Void and deconstructing the self centuries before Nicaea, a depth Žižek’s framework is unable to acknowledge.

Meanwhile, Edie Hitchcock and John Feldmann skirt the boundaries of contemplative revelation. Hitchcock, utilizing her clinical psychoanalytic experience, argues that Žižek’s reduction of the Holy Spirit to a “solidarity-community” ignores the physical body and its raw psychic intensities, rendering it a form of wish-fulfillment. Feldmann, identifying as an “Andy Warhol Catholic,” contrasts a “maximalist” Pyrotheology that replaces sacramental life with the Real against a “minimalist” approach that holds the Real in tension with the Symbolic Order of liturgy. He insists that the material reality of Roman Catholicism should not be evacuated. When viewed through this integral horizon and the operational framework of IACT, the contributions and omissions of these voices become visible.

The Pluralism Threshold: Bryce Nance

Bryce Nance’s The Corpse in the Machine — Interlude 2, immediately following my own A Rosy Cross of a Book in the architecture of the volume — sits at the pluralism threshold. Nance’s chapter is a sustained materialist critique of Žižek’s Christian Atheism from a position more radically committed to the death of God than Žižek himself is willing to be. Nance’s diagnosis of where God was killed is explicit and material: not on a hill in Judea but by the Cogito, the Critique, and the Commodity. By Descartes’s displacement of the Subject’s anchor from divine authorship into self-reflexive interiority. By Kant’s exile of God from knowledge to a “practical postulate.” And above all by the material forces of industrial capitalism that, as Marx had it, melted all that was solid into air. To focus on the theological dialectic of atheism, Nance argues, while ignoring the material reality of the steam engine, the assembly line, and the fibre-optic cable is “a failure of basic historical literacy.” The chapter is bracing in its directness, sharper than most of the volume on the structural-philosophical specifics of where Žižek’s frame gives way, and genuinely important for the argument I am making here.

Nance’s positive resolution and mine differ profoundly in their content. He resolves the structural critique of Žižek not toward integral pluralism but toward a radical Inhumanism — what he calls “the capacity for reason, negation, and freedom that transcends our biological and cultural programming,” explicitly against both “the Human of the Renaissance” and “the Human of the Gospels” as “weights around our necks as we try to navigate the twenty-first century.” His positive program goes further: total negation of “Substantial Identity,” abandonment of inherited cultural-religious heritage as just another set of “brands of slavery,” and a cosmic-materialist orientation toward “going forth to multiply among the stars.” Nance reads Christian Atheism alongside Singularitarianism, RSAI cults, the Simulation Hypothesis, and UFO Disclosure as all flights from the Death of God — all attempts to “rebuild a Big Other in the vacuum left by the Enlightenment.” The position I am defending is the integral-humanist horizon: a horizon that holds the substantive divine and revealed reality of the Catholic contemplative tradition alongside the divine and revealed contents of Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious traditions, each on its own terms — divine revelation of all stripes and flavors included — and alongside an Enlightenment-humanist commitment to reason, freedom, and emancipation as real contribution from the post-Enlightenment moment. Nance’s Inhumanism, taken on its own terms, would refuse the integral horizon too — as one more attempt to rebuild a Big Other out of inherited traditions. What Nance and I share is not the resolution but the diagnosis: where Žižek’s frame fails.

Nance’s central critical move is to read Žižek’s Christian Atheism as a fetish — a melancholic preservation of Christian particularism in the very gesture that claims to overcome it. Žižek, Nance argues, “creates a proprietary gateway to the universal,” requiring the seeker to “first don the mask of the Christian tradition” This, Nance says, is not universalism. It is “a melancholic preservation of the European symbolic order... the theoretical equivalent of keeping your ex’s sweater just to keep smelling their perfume, a refusal to move on.” The diagnosis is sharp because it operates structurally and functionally. Žižek’s commitment to Christianity as a unique historical and philosophical achievement of the universal — Christianity elevated to a universality that every other religious tradition on his frame fails to reach — re-installs the very particularist hierarchy his framework claims to dissolve. The Universal, on Žižek’s frame, is reached only by Christianity; therefore the framework cannot meet other religious traditions as full interlocutors who might be addressing the same depth-structures from their own traditions and cultures.

The diagnostic test-case Nance presses is Buddhism. Žižek, across multiple works, dismisses Western Buddhism — and by extension the Buddhist tradition more broadly — as the ideal ideology for global capitalism: a “cool” void of meditative inwardness that allows late-capitalist subjects to maintain composure while participating in a destructive economic system. The “hot” trauma of the Cross, Žižek argues, is what is required to shatter the Symbolic Order; Buddhism’s psychological-meditative space offers only escape. Nance’s response is to name what the dismissal misses. “Siddhartha Gautama,” Nance writes, “was deconstructing the self, staring into the Void (Sunyata), and realizing that there is no Big Other (Samsara) long before the Council of Nicaea ever sat down to argue about whether or not to canonize the Trinity.” The Buddhist tradition’s millennia-long testing of soteriological claims, its philosophical articulation of depth-structures the Christian Atheist project is attempting to address, its actual contemplative and philosophical resources — none of this enters Žižek’s framework as actual theological content. From Nance’s side this is “Žižek’s failure of nerve” — the framework’s inability to engage the religious traditions on their own terms and other pathways rather than just Christianity.

This is exactly the pluralism failure Section II named from the integral-humanist side. Nance’s positive resolution moves in a different direction from the integral-humanist position I am articulating — toward an Inhuman universal in which the Universal is reached through the refusal of all inherited cultural attachments, both religious or humanist. Nance writes that “the Inhuman — the capacity for reason, negation, and freedom that transcends our biological and cultural programming — is the only thing that can save us”; that contemporary culture-war identity politics is the logic of Capital itself (”Capitalism abhors a Universal... It thrives on fractal segmentation. It loves Identity because Identity is a product”); and that the “Human of the Renaissance” and the “Human of the Gospels” alike are weights around our necks as we try to navigate the twenty-first century. His Buddhism reference, it is worth being precise about, is not pluralism-friendly either: Buddhism enters Nance’s argument not as a religious tradition deserving engagement on its own terms but as historical evidence that “Siddhartha Gautama was deconstructing the self, staring into the Void (Sunyata), and realizing that there is no Big Other (Samsara) long before the Council of Nicaea ever sat down to argue about whether or not to canonize the Trinity” — Buddhism instrumentalized as Inhumanist precursor against Žižek’s claim that Christianity uniquely achieves universality. The integral-humanist horizon I am articulating preserves an Enlightenment-humanist commitment to reason and freedom as real contribution within itself.

Nance’s positive position — the embrace of an Inhuman capacity for reason, negation, and freedom that explicitly transcends both biological and cultural-religious heritage as what the death of God leaves available — is more radical than what my integral horizon can include without distortion. The integral-humanist horizon I am articulating preserves the Enlightenment-humanist commitment to reason and freedom as a genuine contribution from the post-Enlightenment moment; it does not preserve Nance’s full Inhumanist position, which would refuse the integral framework as one more attempt to rebuild a Big Other out of inherited cultural-religious material. What it does preserve from Nance’s chapter — and what I am genuinely grateful for in his contribution — is the diagnostic precision. Nance registers, from his radical-materialist Inhumanist side, exactly the structural failure of Žižek’s frame the integral-humanist diagnosis also registers: the elevation of Christianity to universality that forecloses genuine engagement with religious traditions on their own terms. Same diagnosis; profoundly different positive resolutions; partial convergence on the route into the failure of Žižek’s frame, with deep divergence on the route out. IACT itself — open as it is to atheist and humanist users for whom no contemplative-religious path is operative — is the integral political praxis that an Enlightenment-humanist position concerned with reason, freedom, and emancipation could operationalize without compromising those commitments. Whether Nance’s full Inhumanist position could operationalize IACT or would refuse it as one more inherited framework is an honest question; the integral framework leaves room for the answer to be Nance’s to give.

The Psychoanalytic Mirror: Edie Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s A Dangerous Curiosity: A Christian Atheist Response to Overwhelm operates from inside a long history of psychoanalytic practice. She is a practicing psychoanalyst whose own intellectual development was shaped by escape from a fundamentalist Christian upbringing, by long psychoanalytic training, and by a sustained reading of Žižek and Nietzsche. Her chapter is the most autobiographically grounded in the volume, and the most psychologically perceptive. She traces the dynamics of overwhelm as a psychic place-event that produces three characteristic responses — defensive numbing, narcissistic over-identification with God, and mastery-through-optimization — and she develops an account of tarrying with overwhelm as the ethical and clinical alternative.

What makes Hitchcock’s chapter genuinely important is her direct critique of Žižek’s pneumatology. She writes that Žižek concludes his argument in Christian Atheism with an overly clean faith in what he terms the Holy Spirit — a community of believers in solidarity who achieve co-responsibility in caring for one another in the absence of God. She is unflinching: this solution, she says, rings of simple wish-fulfilment. She is left dissatisfied with its facile presumption of universal ethical commitment when, as Nietzsche argues, so much aggression is disavowed, then either directed inward in resentful melancholia or split off and projected outward onto the Other who must be punished with exile. Žižek’s idea of vulnerability, she observes, rests solely on the Lacanian notions of constitutive lack and the fantasies of the big Other. What it leaves out is the vulnerability of being an embodied subject, who, when weakened, may react viciously in destructive self-protection. The body falls out of Žižek’s framework, and with it the actual psychic substance that the Holy Spirit, in any tradition that has taken the Holy Spirit seriously, has had to address.

Hitchcock identifies a particularly modern failure mode in what she names the culture of mastery-through-optimization — the contemporary male wellness landscape exemplified by Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, and Tim Ferriss. She reads this culture as a sophisticated Christian-Atheist defense mechanism that disavows the body’s vulnerability through an endless accumulation of “protocols” and “habit stacks”. The optimizer frantically polishes the mirror of biometric data — tracking sleep cycles, measuring cortisol, quantifying supplement intake — yet remains utterly trapped within what the mirror reflects: an ego desperately trying to escape its own fragility and death.

This flight from vulnerability via optimization is, at its root, a refusal of what we must term integral facticity. Facticity is the heavy, unyielding, and unalterable baggage of the relative-embodied subject: our specific genetic wiring, our personal histories of childhood trauma, and the inescapable somatic limitations of a physical form that breaks, ages, and dies. While optimization culture seeks to bypass these limits through technological and behavioral mastery, an integral approach uses present-moment awareness to anchor the subject directly within them. One does not practice psychological defusion to float away from their facticity; one defuses precisely so they can look at the raw, messy, and unvarnished truth of their conditioned somatics without blinking, and without fleeing into the defensive numbing or hyper-optimization Hitchcock diagnoses.

From this vantage point, Hitchcock’s clinical prescription of “tarrying with overwhelm” emerges as the lived manifestation of enactive fallibilism. When the raw psychic intensities of overwhelm strike, the ego’s immediate structural reflex is to generate a masterful narrative or a detached spiritual script to restore control. Enactive fallibilism acts as the sudden, sobering interruption of this defensive loop. It is the visceral acknowledgment that the mind’s attempt to map its way out of distress is inherently partial, biased, and structurally defensive. When we tarry with overwhelm through an enactively fallible lens, we strip away the illusion of the “Master Mind-Controller”. We accept that our current interpretation of our suffering — and even our frantic attempts to mindfully observe it — is fundamentally limited. It forces a radical somatic humility, preventing mindfulness from mutating into a highly sophisticated, intellectual armor.

Hitchcock finds the sacred — and she preserves the sacred as a live category — inside the strict ritual of psychoanalytic practice: regular fixed sessions held multiple times per week, the rules of neutrality and abstinence and free association that suspend ordinary social relations, and the asymmetry of analyst and analysand. Here, the body acts as a transformer of unmetabolizable intensity through the disciplined trial of embodied speech. Her closing self-description is precise about what her chapter does and does not affirm: “I have,” she writes, “mostly unconsciously reimagined Christian values, transforming them to forms that can tolerate the lack of not-knowing, the terror of the new and different, and the humility of valuing above all else the subject’s singularity”. Her faith, she writes in her chapter’s last lines, is “not faith in a God who will save me from present-discomfort; it is in presence, following, listening, and speaking with as much honesty as I can muster”.

When read through an integral lens, this psychoanalytic ethics can be directly operationalized by the IACT (Integral Awareness and Commitment Therapy) framework. IACT bridges the gap between deep psychoanalytic excavation and behavioral agility by mapping Hitchcock’s relative-embodied subject onto the practical architecture of the ACT hexaflex. The functional loop of this praxis operates as a real-time defense against the ego’s self-deceptive “stinking thinking”: it begins when somatic overwhelm hits the subject, prompting the ego to immediately spin an “advanced observer” fantasy to escape the threat; IACT interrupts this loop as enactive fallibilism unmasks the defensive lie, allowing the ACT present-moment anchor to drop the subject back into the heavy, unvarnished reality of the embodied self and integral facticity.

Through the IACT scaffold, the components of self-as-context and present-moment awareness are stripped of any New Age or hyper-optimized detachment. Instead, they become the precise operational tools required to execute Hitchcock’s “tarrying with overwhelm” on a second-by-second basis. When the mind catches itself playing a highly sophisticated, “Master-Controller” game to escape discomfort, enactive fallibilism exposes the ruse, and present-moment awareness drops the anchor back into the heavy, physical reality of the body. IACT thus democratizes these clinical insights, offering a systematic methodology for anchoring the subject in raw reality without requiring a decade-long residency on a psychoanalyst’s couch.

What the integral horizon finally adds to Hitchcock’s clinical precision is the capacity to hold both the relative-embodied subject and the absolute-unitive subject within a single architecture. The relative-embodied subject Hitchcock articulates is real, and constitutive: the body that lives, mediates, suffers, and dies. The integral position holds this fully. But it is also open to the absolute subject that contemplative and revelatory traditions have tested across millennia as a structurally nondual and unitive layer — what the integral architecture names as the I of Spirit, and what Christian apophatic mystics, Zen Buddhists, Sufis, and Hindu non-dualists have each tested in their own traditional forms.

Hitchcock invokes Cleo Kearns toward her chapter’s close on the question of apocalyptic deferral and the incapacity to tarry with the sacred. She refuses the simple solidarity-as-Holy-Spirit move that Žižek offers, and she insists that the body is the mediator without which the symbolic-real dialectic cannot be lived. Her reformulation of Christian values at the level of process rather than content is honest about what her chapter does and does not articulate. The integral-humanist horizon holds Hitchcock’s embodied-clinical contribution with profound gratitude, placing it alongside the tested, substantive depths of the world’s great contemplative-revelation traditions within a single pluralist framework that honors the singularity and nuance of praxis.

Pyrotheological Minimalism: John Feldmann

Where Hitchcock works from inside Christian Atheism via long psychoanalytic practice, Feldmann works from what he calls the Žižekian Trifecta — Roman Catholic aesthetic formation, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis — and articulates from this substrate a Pyrotheological minimalism that holds the productive Symbolic Order of the Roman tradition against the maximalist Pyrotheological drive toward the pure Real. He, too, refines Christian Atheism rather than refusing it, but from a substantially different angle than Hitchcock takes.

Feldmann describes himself, in his chapter’s opening pages, as an Andy Warhol Catholic — a Catholic who sometimes frequents the Mass but does not receive Communion and does not dare call himself a believer. His self-described ground, which he is careful to name, is what he calls the Žižekian Trifecta: “the three primary discourses which live inside my head” are “the Roman Catholic interpretation of Christianity, Marxism as communist politics and psychoanalysis of the Lacanian variety.” His architectural move within Pyrotheology is the distinction between maximalist and minimalist approaches. The maximalist Pyrotheologian treats the Real of subjective destitution as another sola — to be radically pursued, to be substituted for traditional ecclesial practice, to be evangelized as the truth of Christianity in a way that displaces the Church’s sacramental life. The minimalist, by contrast, treats Pyrotheology as a technique that operates alongside and within the Church’s existing liturgical and sacramental practice, as an internal critic that deconstructs the logics of certainty and satisfaction from within rather than substituting for the structure that holds them. Real plus Symbolic, in Feldmann’s formulation, against the maximalist temptation to Real minus Symbolic. He quotes Yves Congar — that “the whole of Christianity is contained in a sign of the cross; no theory of the Redemption expresses half as much as a simple crucifix hung on a wall” — and the quotation matters to him. The materiality of the Roman tradition — the incense, the rosary, the votive candles after Mass, the beads of the rosary in one’s hands — is, in his phrasing, “the very substance of faith for the Roman subject,” not its accidental ornament. Pyrotheology at its best, in this minimalist register, is a technique for tarrying with the abyss of the Cross within this sacramental Symbolic Order, not for its abolition.

Feldmann’s chapter contains, I think, the most theologically sophisticated diagnosis of what has gone wrong with Pyrotheology. He reads the maximalist position as the secular afterlife of Protestant subjectivity — the same sola logic that drove the Protestant Reformation, now operating as the iconoclastic desecration of the Church as Symbolic Other in a register that has lost even the Protestant theological commitments that originally justified the iconoclasm. The maximalist Pyrotheologian, in this reading, is Protestant subjectivity without Protestantism: pursuing the purity of the Real with all the iconoclastic intensity of the Reformation tradition, but without the theological grounding that made the Reformation’s iconoclasm something other than mere subjective negation. Feldmann’s diagnosis here is sharper than I have seen made anywhere else.

What Feldmann’s minimalism preserves — and it is important to be precise here, because the chapter is easy to misread as moving toward full Roman Catholic sacramental theology when it does not — is the Roman tradition’s productive Symbolic Order against a maximalist Pyrotheological drive toward the pure Real. Feldmann reads Congar through a Lacanian-psychoanalytic frame in which the Roman tradition’s materiality is “the very substance of faith for the Roman subject” as productive Symbolic Order, not as actual sacramental mediation of divine life. The Symbolic in his reading is precisely not what the full Catholic contemplative tradition holds it to be — the means of grace, sacramenta efficiunt quod significant, the actual conduit of divine reality. It is, in Feldmann’s framing, the productive fiction, the masquerade, the Wizard-of-Oz Signifier that continues to substitute for the Real even after the curtain has been pulled back. His Wizard of Oz closer makes this explicit: even after Toto reveals the Wizard as a man, the Wizard continues to function in his role, bestowing a diploma on the Scarecrow, a heart on the Tinman, a medal on the Lion. “God is not only God of the Real, but also the God of the Symbolic.” For Feldmann, both registers are productive — productive emptiness at one register, productive masquerade at the other — and the mirror of the Symbolic Order continues to function as mirror even after the curtain has been pulled back and the man revealed. Pyrotheology in the minimalist register, in this reading, is the discipline of holding the mirror — the Roman tradition’s productive Symbolic Order in which the Roman subject sees herself reflected — against the maximalist temptation to shatter the mirror in pursuit of an unmirrored Real that, in Feldmann’s Lacanian-psychoanalytic frame, was never available as Real to begin with. He places the Church and the Communist Party in explicit structural parallel as productive Symbolic Orders, each requiring its quilting points to function.

Feldmann’s contribution is therefore real and serious within its own register, and I want to be honest about preserving it as he has articulated it rather than as a reading convenient to my own argument. He preserves the Roman tradition’s productive Symbolic Order with seriousness and pastoral generosity against the maximalist temptation to abolish it. He is careful to mark the distinction between his Lacanian-psychoanalytic-Marxist framing and full Roman Catholic theological commitment. He does not call himself a believer; he does not receive Communion; he holds the Žižekian Trifecta as his actual ground.

The integral-humanist horizon I am articulating makes room for what Feldmann is preserving — the Roman tradition’s productive Symbolic Order held with the seriousness Feldmann’s chapter testifies to — and it also holds, alongside that preservation, the actual contemplative-revelation reception of divine reality through the body that the Carmelite tradition has tested across centuries: what John of the Cross articulated in The Dark Night of the Soul and The Spiritual Canticle, what Teresa of Ávila articulated in The Interior Castle. The integral horizon holds these together with the analogous contemplative-revelation traditions Buddhism (Zen, Tibetan), Judaism (Hasidic, Kabbalistic), Islam (Sufi), and Hinduism (Advaita, the Tantric traditions) have each tested in their own full forms — divine revelation of all stripes and flavors, each on its tradition’s own terms. The integral horizon does not require Feldmann to occupy full contemplative-revelation territory in order to preserve the Roman form he preserves, and it does not require the contemplative-revelation traditions to accommodate Feldmann’s Lacanian-Marxist framing in order to preserve their actual work towards divine revelation. Both are held — together with the analogous substrates and traditions across the religious and non-religious world — within a single integral-pluralist framework that is a democracy to come rather than a forced unification. IACT, as integral-developmental praxis architecture, is the operational scaffold that holds the territory open for subjects in the present moment — whether they hold the Roman aesthetic-Lacanian-Marxist substrate Feldmann does, or a lived contemplative-revelation substrate from any tradition, or no contemplative-religious path at all.

Beyond the Threshold

Ultimately, Nance, Hitchcock, and Feldmann emerge as the volume’s most diagnostically illuminating witnesses precisely because they crowd the very edge of the threshold. Each, from a distinct and unyielding angle, maps a structural rupture that Žižek’s framework is fundamentally unable to heal: Nance exposes the stubborn, provincial particularism of a Christian-Atheist engine pretending to be a universal machine; Hitchcock unmasks the bloodless, phantom solidarity of its pneumatology, demanding a return to the vulnerable, heavy reality of the flesh; and Feldmann clutches the material architecture of the Roman Symbolic Order, refusing the maximalist urge to dissolve historical form into an iconoclastic vacuum. They do not refuse Christian Atheism; they refine it from within, holding its broken pieces up to the light.

Yet, as they stand at the absolute boundary of this discourse—a boundary shared by Cleo Kearns’s rare, deliberate reach toward the scriptural reality of a desiring God—a collective paralysis sets in. They track the fissure with immense precision, but they remain perched at its lip. None of them makes the radical, dangerous pivot toward a genuinely integral horizon. None is willing to hold the ancient, tested truth-claims of the religious-contemplative traditions on their own sovereign terms alongside the secular inheritances of the Enlightenment within a post-secular public square. They map the architecture of the trap, but they decline the leap. They leave the territory cleared, but empty—refusing to throw themselves into the void and prefer linguistic riddles or political metaphors, rather than embracing the disruptive event of grace and divine revelation.

VII. From the Vulture to the Bird on the Wire

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

Like a worm on a hook
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee

If I, if I have been unkind
I hope that you can just let it go by
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you

Oh, like a baby, stillborn
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me

But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

Oh, like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

— Leonard Cohen - Bird on the Wire (Official Audio)

To understand why a theological interrogation of Christian Atheism must turn toward political zoology, one must look to the internal architecture of the Rosy Cross anthology itself. Having traced the theoretical limits of the volume—and having watched its threshold voices stall at the lip of a conceptual abyss—the book takes a sudden, metaphorical turn. It shifts from abstract doctrine to a visceral examination of the intellectual’s structural posture in a stalled world. This is where Benjamin Studebaker’s chapter, On Vultures, enters the frame, taking up the lineage of bird metaphors in political theory to diagnose contemporary cultural stagnation. Hegel’s owl flies at dusk; Marx’s rooster crows at dawn; both presuppose a history in motion—a sun traveling toward a predictable destination that the philosopher can interpret or announce. But for the stalled time of late modernity, an era in which historical progress seems to have ground to a halt, Studebaker introduces the vulture: a creature that tracks systemic malaise from a patient distance, declining vain political action while waiting for the modern state apparatus to slowly dehydrate. The intellectual’s task, on this account, is no longer to herald a new dawn, but to build more observation towers and prey on the weak and dying.

Read through the psychological and contemplative register this paper has been developing, Studebaker’s imagery exposes a deeper pathology. The vulture is the perfect proxy for the hyper-intellectualizing ego—the detached observer that secures its own safety by remaining cleanly above the field of decay, surveying the suffering and death of others without ever undergoing its own. This structural altitude functions as a defense mechanism; distance is preserved precisely so that the theorist is never truly touched by the historical realities he analyzes. In this view, there is no room for vulnerability, and therefore no open threshold through which an actual transformation or the gift of revelation could be received.

Against this temptation of intellectual detachment, Leonard Cohen introduces a radically different posture through his song Bird on the Wire. Composed on the island of Hydra as he watched wild birds settle on newly strung telephone lines, the image captures a subjectivity completely exposed to the elements. The position is explicitly fragile and precarious. The song confesses a history of wounding others, of stumbling attempts to be free, and of an unyielding vow to an unnamed beloved. It does not observe mortality from an invulnerable height; it sits entirely inside the mess of human exposure and devotion. Where Studebaker’s figure represents the intellect operating at a safe remove, Cohen’s imagery embodies the relative-embodied subject—the self that has surrendered protective distance for the vulnerable condition in which an event of grace can actually occur.

Cohen as Pinnacle and Master

Cohen is more than a poignant poet of modern displacement. He stands as the biographical embodiment of the integral pluralism and integral humanism this paper defends—not because he theorized the position, but because he lived it whole for more than five decades. His pluralism was not a theoretical stance reached by argument, but a lived reality.

He was born in 1934 into a prominent Westmount Jewish family of unusual rabbinic and communal weight, a Kohen of the ancient priestly line whose youth was steeped in Talmudic text and Hebrew grammar studied directly with his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline. This Jewish observance was constitutive, and it lasted; it was never something Zen came to replace. For onto that foundation, Cohen layered more than twenty years of rigorous Rinzai practice under Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, including a five-year residency at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center and his 1996 ordination dharma name Jikan, or “Ordinary Silence”.

Crucially, this monastic ordination was not an act of religious conversion. Cohen never abandoned Judaism, nor did he ever convert to Buddhism, Christianity, or any other faith. He remained an unwavering, observant Jew until his death, famously stating from the monastery itself that he was not looking for a new religion because he was perfectly satisfied with his old one. For Cohen, Zen was a contemplative practice of silence and mental mechanics undertaken strictly within his Jewish life, not a replacement for it. The Torah did not foreclose the zazen; the zazen did not displace the Torah. Likewise, while he carried a third engagement—a sustained, serious dialogue with Christian theology, weaving Christological, scriptural, and sacramental content through Suzanne, Story of Isaac, and Hallelujah—this dialogue was held with the gravity of an artist exploring deep, shared theological content, never as a personal apostasy or conversion.

This is what the integral position looks like when a person holds it in the flesh rather than in a meta-theory: Judaism as the absolute religion of a whole life, Zen contemplative discipline practiced from within that Jewish identity, and Christian theological content carried across the pluralist public sphere in song. It reaches that public as scholarship cannot. What Cohen achieves is what Hans Urs von Balthasar named as the most catastrophically neglected dimension of modern theology: beauty, the third transcendental, the radiance of the form itself. Through the Gestalt of the song—the form whose great radiance from within draws perception before any discursive argument is possible—Cohen carried the substantive depths of the contemplative tradition to millions of listeners who never sat in a pew or opened a Talmudic commentary. He did not merely explain those depths; he made them alive.

The Post-Metaphysical Challenge Remains

And yet, an unsparing honesty requires the admission that every figure in this landscape ultimately falls short of the post-metaphysical challenge, each within the strict limit of the form its contribution took. Slavoj Žižek falls short by smuggling Christian particularism back into his materialism, positioning the Cross as the one proprietary historical gateway that every other tradition merely approaches. The postmodern theology of Rollins, Taylor, and Caputo hovers perpetually at the threshold of deconstructive negation, never crossing over into substantive theological content. McGrath recovers the contemplative-revelation tradition with rare and necessary rigor, but reaches only the insular reader already formed in its complex historical grammar. And Cohen, by the very form his gift took, embodied the synthesis without articulating it conceptually; he carried beauty across the world, but did not render its truth and its goodness as a systematic argument.

The shortfall is most precisely named through Balthasar’s own architecture. His major trilogy makes the structure explicit: The Glory of the Lord explores beauty, Theo-Drama examines the goodness of divine and human freedom, and Theo-Logic articulates the truth of being and revelation. These three constellations form the unified horizon through which substantive theological content reaches public life. When beauty is separated from her sisters, Balthasar warned, she departs, taking them with her “in an act of mysterious vengeance”. Cohen carries beauty in song. What the present moment asks for is the explicit articulation of truth and goodness that the form of song could not supply on its own: the philosophical-conceptual case, the integral-humanist and integral-pluralist horizon held as an intellectual argument, and the rigorous alignment of integral facticity and enactive fallibilism that our post-metaphysical era now demands and requires.

It is here that this paper has offered its own framework—IACT, grounded in enactive fallibilism and integral facticity—as an attempt at systemic integration. And it is here, at that exact word, that the framework meets its gravest temptation. For there is a way of supplying truth and goodness to Cohen’s beauty that betrays the entire undertaking: turning the framework into an elite meta-theory that surveys the other positions from a safe distance, congratulating itself on its own wholeness. This simply resurrects the detached observer posture in academic form. It reduces a living, somatic practice to a static conceptual edifice, rebuilding an illusion of mastery in the exact place where vulnerability is demanded.

Coming Age of the Rose

Therefore, the work still ahead is not the construction of a finished system, but the keeping of a discipline that actively refuses to close itself off. If the framework is to articulate truth and goodness without mutating into the fortress that betrays them, it can do so only as Cohen held beauty: in the flesh, across a life, and entirely exposed. Enactive fallibilism and integral facticity are not doctrines to be possessed from a position of security; they are the active mechanics of a second-by-second return to our humanity. They constitute the somatic practice by which the relative-embodied subject is dropped, again and again, out of the optimized map of its own awareness and back into the heavy, unvarnished reality it keeps trying to rise above. The present moment operates as the anchor that ruthlessly interrupts this intellectual ascent. Each time the mind catches itself refining the map or admiring its own flexibility, the discipline requires an immediate return to the precarity of the lived moment.

For the framework itself is nothing but a fragile position, not an invulnerable vantage point. It is a precarious position within an evolving world, anchoring the subject inside the biological, cultural, and spiritual facticity that breaks, ages, and dies. This is what the coming age demands: not an abstract mastery of wholeness, but the willingness to stand in the light, and always be exposed to the fall.

You came to me this morning
And you handled me like meat
You’d have to be a man to know
How good that feels, how sweet
My mirrored twin, my next of kin
I’d know you in my sleep
And who but you would take me in
A thousand kisses deep

I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat
You see I’m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second hand physique
With all he is and all he was
A thousand kisses deep

I know you had to lie to me
I know you had to cheat
To pose all hot and high
Behind the veils of sheer deceit
A perfect born aristocrat
So elegant and cheap
I’m old but I’m still into that
A thousand kisses deep

I’m good at love, I’m good at hate
It’s in between I freeze
Been working out, but it’s too late
It’s been too late for years
But you look good, you really do
They love you on the street
If you were here I’d kneel for you
A thousand kisses deep

The autumn moved across your skin
Got something in my eye
A light that doesn’t need to live
And doesn’t need to die
A riddle in the book of love
Obscure and obsolete
To witness tear and time and blood
A thousand kisses deep

And I’m still working with the wine
Still dancing cheek to cheek
The band is playing Auld Lang Syne
But the heart will not retreat
I ran with Dez, I sang with Ray
I never had their sweep
But once or twice they let me play
A thousand kisses deep

I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat
You see, I’m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second hand physique
With all he is and all he was
A thousand kisses deep

But you don’t need to hear me now
And every word I speak
It counts against me anyhow
A thousand kisses deep

— Leonard Cohen - Recitation w/ N.L. (Official Live in London 2008)

Suggested Reading

Cadell Last and Daniel L. Garner (eds.), Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity (Philosophy Portal Books, 2026)

Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (MIT Press, 2003)

Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (MIT Press, 2009)

Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2012)

Slavoj Žižek, Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis Schmidt (SUNY Press, 1927/2010)

Sean McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Catholic University of America Press, 2006)

Sean McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2012)

Sean McGrath, The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling: The Turn to the Positive (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

Sean McGrath, The Lost Road (Christian Alternative, 2025)

Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (University of Chicago Press, 1984)

Mark C. Taylor, After God (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana University Press, 2006)

John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana University Press, 2013)

Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God (Paraclete Press, 2006)

Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Religion Without Religion (Paraclete Press, 2008)

Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (George Braziller, 1961)

Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966)

Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966)

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843)

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846)

Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: études historiques (Aubier, 1946)

Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (Sheed and Ward, 1949)

Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages (Aubier, 1944)

Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, three volumes (Geoffrey Chapman / Cerf, 1979–80)

Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1992/1997)

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (T&T Clark / Ignatius Press, 1961/1982)

Sarah Shortall, Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Charles Davis, Theology and Political Society (Cambridge University Press, 1980)

Marc P. Lalonde, Critical Theology and the Challenge of Jürgen Habermas: Toward a Critical Theory of Religious Insight (Peter Lang, 1999)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom (1936; trans. University of Notre Dame Press, 1968)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul and The Spiritual Canticle, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1991)

Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1980)

Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World (Integral Books, 2006)

Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change, 2nd edition (Guilford Press, 2012)

Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, revised edition (MIT Press, 1991/2016)

Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (Dover, 1955)

Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (Ecco / HarperCollins, 2012)

Leonard Cohen, The Flame: Poems, Notebooks, Lyrics, Drawings (McClelland & Stewart, 2018)

Abstract

This essay began as a prolonged reflection on my contribution to the Philosophy Portal Books anthology Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. That earlier piece worked through the tension between the Žižekian-Hegelian tradition surrounding parts of the contemporary left and the religious and cultural critiques increasingly associated with the right. Here I approach the same problem from another direction by returning to Iain McGilchrist, whose work has become one of the most important philosophical reference points within the contemporary meaning-crisis, liminal-web, and sensemaking milieu. My argument is deliberately divided. The Master and His Emissary remains, in my view, an important contribution to the study of attention, embodiment, and the limits of reductive accounts of cognition. The deeper difficulty emerges as the hemispheric hypothesis expands into the cultural history of the West and, more decisively, into the metaphysical synthesis of The Matter With Things.

McGilchrist’s project restores relation, value, interiority, and participation to a world flattened by reductive materialism, but the different forms of inquiry through which neurological, phenomenological, cultural-historical, and metaphysical claims become available are not always sufficiently differentiated before they are drawn together into a comprehensive picture. I use enchanted flatland to describe this problem. The phrase does not name an absence of interiority or a disguised materialism in the ordinary sense; McGilchrist’s cosmos is emphatically alive with interiority, meaning, value, beauty, and relation. The difficulty is epistemological and methodological. Re-enchantment alone does not tell us how the perspectives through which those dimensions are disclosed relate to one another, which methods are appropriate to which claims, or what kinds of evidence, argument, or experience would require a metaphysical conclusion to be revised.

The political difficulty goes further. McGilchrist’s account of modernity remains deeply organized around a narrative of loss: a richer, more participatory, relational, and religiously resonant mode of life has been progressively displaced by abstraction, instrumental reason, bureaucracy, and technological control. There is considerable truth in this diagnosis, but the recovery of premodern forms of religion, symbolic life, or communal belonging cannot by itself answer a crisis generated through specifically modern institutions and forms of power. Religion has not disappeared; it remains culturally and politically potent throughout the modern world. The harder problem is that neither inherited religion nor secular liberalism has proved adequate to governing the economic, technological, bureaucratic, and pluralistic conditions modernity has produced.

The political significance of this problem becomes clearer when McGilchrist is situated within the larger cultural formation Galen Watts calls romantic liberalism and Jeremy Carrette and Richard King approached earlier through their critique of privatized spirituality. Its dissatisfaction with instrumental reason, bureaucratic modernity, secular materialism, and liberal proceduralism is often justified, but dissatisfaction with modernity does not determine what should follow it. Georg Lukács’s critique of irrationalism helps identify one danger: philosophical attempts to recover intuition, wholeness, immediacy, or organic life can, under certain conditions, weaken the mediations through which claims become publicly contestable and politically situated. Aleksandr Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory represents an explicit philosophical and geopolitical attempt to answer liberal exhaustion through ethnos, traditionalist metaphysics, multipolarity, and civilizational blocs.

The alternative developed here moves in another direction. Habermasian post-metaphysical thought, Gramscian institutional analysis, Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism, Jacques Maritain’s integral humanism, and the practical work of IACT and Enactive Fallibilism suggest a politics of reconstruction rather than restoration: one capable of taking religion and metaphysics seriously while preserving the differentiations, democratic criticism, and pluralism that cannot simply be undone. In conversation with Michel Bauwens’s work on commons-based peer production, I describe this emerging orientation as a new integral humanism: post-secular, democratic, integral-pluralist, and directed toward forms of human flourishing that cannot be reduced either to the market or to the romanticized recovery of an idealized past.

Tags: Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, The Matter With Things, Hemispheric Hypothesis, Raymond Tallis, Enchanted Flatland, Romantic Liberalism, Galen Watts, Robert Bellah, Lifestyle Enclaves, Jeremy Carrette, Richard King, Meaning Crisis, Liminal Web, Perspectiva, Jonathan Rowson, Rebel Wisdom, David Fuller, CIIS, Matt Segall, Integral Life, Ken Wilber, John Vervaeke, Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Charles Taylor, Instrumental Reason, Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, Daniel Tutt, Indirect Apologetics, Antonio Gramsci, Integral State, Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism, Jürgen Habermas, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, Communicative Rationality, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Richard Bernstein, Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation, Michael Brooks, Matthew McManus, Aleksandr Dugin, Fourth Political Theory, Michael Millerman, Traditionalism, ACT, IACT, Psychological Flexibility, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, George Grant, Canadian Philosophy, New Integral Humanism, Metapattern Institute

I. Coming to McGilchrist

I first read The Master and His Emissary in 2010, near the end of my studies at Concordia. By then Ken Wilber had already been my primary philosophical reference point for more than a decade. My father introduced me to Wilber in 1998, and I arrived at Concordia having absorbed much of his developmental and integral approach: the attempt to hold together psychological development, contemplative practice, cultural interpretation, science, and social analysis without allowing any one domain to become the explanatory ground for the rest. Concordia complicated that inheritance in ways that have continued to shape my work. Through Marc Lalonde and Michel Despland, and through the Catholic critical-theological tradition surrounding Charles Davis, I encountered Habermas not simply as another thinker to be incorporated into an already expansive integral framework, but as a challenge to the epistemological confidence with which such frameworks could be constructed in the first place.

Lalonde’s doctoral work under Davis developed a critical theory of religious insight in direct conversation with Habermas, and it was through him that the post-metaphysical problem became unavoidable for me. The question was not whether religion, contemplative experience, or metaphysics had somehow been rendered obsolete by modernity. Nor was it whether Wilber’s developmental distinctions were simply wrong. The challenge concerned the conditions under which substantive claims could continue to be made once no single metaphysical worldview could plausibly claim final authority over how different domains of knowledge should be interpreted. Religious insight might disclose something real; contemplative practices might transform perception; developmental psychology might identify genuine differences in cognitive or moral complexity. Yet none of these claims acquired public validity merely because the tradition or method from which they arose possessed an internally coherent account of itself. The problem became how such forms of knowledge could retain their specificity while also remaining exposed to criticism, competing perspectives, historical change, and modes of inquiry they could not simply subsume.

That challenge altered the way I understood integral theory. Wilber’s great strength had always been his refusal of reduction: psychology could not simply be reduced to biology, culture to economics, religion to psychology, or contemplative realization to conventional cognition. Habermas introduced another question alongside that achievement. Once different domains had been differentiated, what governed the movement between them? How were validity claims adjudicated when traditions disagreed about the nature of reality itself? What prevented an integrative framework from becoming an unusually sophisticated form of metaphysical privilege, capable of assigning every rival perspective a place within its own map while remaining less exposed to reciprocal transformation than the perspectives it organized? The Wilber-Habermas problem that opened for me at Concordia has remained one of the principal threads running through my work ever since.

Reading McGilchrist happened inside this wider intellectual formation. His account of hemispheric attention was fascinating, but I was encountering it alongside thinkers who had already complicated the question of modernity beyond anything a cognitive or neuro-philosophical account could settle on its own. Robert Bellah was one of the most important. Bellah gave me a developmental and sociological account of religion that resisted its reduction to private belief or subjective experience. His work on religious evolution, modernization, and the historical formation of moral communities treated religion as one of the principal ways human communities have organized their relationship to ultimate concern across different forms of social and cognitive development. The Robert Bellah Reader, his 1964 essay on religious evolution, Beyond Belief, and his work on Tokugawa religion all mattered to me during this period, partly because Bellah was trying to understand modernization without accepting the assumption that modernization itself supplied a neutral standard through which all previous religious and social forms should be judged.

Religion in Human Evolution, published the year after my first encounter with McGilchrist, eventually gave this argument its broadest form by bringing Bellah into explicit conversation with Merlin Donald’s account of episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic cognition. That developmental dimension remains important for the argument I am making here because a theory of attention is not yet a theory of development, and similarities in phenomenological texture do not erase developmental differences. Pre-conceptual immediacy and mature contemplative awareness can both involve forms of non-analytical attention while nevertheless representing very different achievements within the development of a person or culture. A contemplative practitioner who has passed through complex symbolic, conceptual, moral, and interpersonal development may recover a form of immediacy without simply returning to the cognitive organization of early childhood or pre-theoretic culture. Bellah and Donald supplied resources for asking questions of this kind that a contrast between analytical and contextual modes of attention, however sophisticated, could not answer on its own.

Bellah’s civic sociology mattered just as much. Habits of the Heart, written with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, described the “lifestyle enclave” as a social form in which community becomes organized around shared private tastes, experiences, and practices rather than durable participation in civic and institutional life. I later used that concept in “The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves” to criticize the institutional development of the American integral movement. The problem was never that contemplative practice, personal development, or spiritual community lacked value. It was that they could become increasingly detached from the institutional and political questions through which their commitments would have to become publicly consequential. A community can possess a rich internal vocabulary of transformation while remaining remarkably weak at the level of the public sphere, political economy, and institutional reconstruction, and this tension would later become central to how I understood the wider meaning-crisis ecosystem.

George Grant supplied another part of the picture. Lament for a Nation taught me to see modernity not only as a transformation of consciousness or moral culture but as a political-economic and technological process capable of absorbing entire societies into systems they no longer substantially control. Grant’s critique of continental integration, technological civilization, and the disappearance of Canadian sovereignty gave the abstract problem of instrumental reason a different gravity. The 2008 financial crisis was still unfolding through its social consequences when I first read McGilchrist, and the political environment in Quebec and Canada was already making it difficult to treat modernity simply as a story about ideas. The arc Grant had diagnosed—from the erosion of Canadian economic sovereignty to the wider technological and continental systems within which political choice increasingly took place—meant that questions of meaning and consciousness could not be separated from institutions, ownership, political power, and the material conditions under which cultural possibilities become available.

McGilchrist therefore entered my intellectual life alongside Habermas, Bellah, and Grant, and the significance of that constellation only became clearer to me later. Each recognized that reductive modernity had excluded or distorted something essential, but they disagreed over where the decisive problem was located and therefore over what kind of response it required. Habermas forced the question of public validity, communicative rationality, and the institutional conditions of democratic life. Bellah brought development, religion, moral culture, and civic institutions into the same historical frame. Grant made technological rationality inseparable from political economy and sovereignty. McGilchrist added a powerful account of attention and embodiment, but he entered an already crowded field of problems whose relationships could not be settled by cognitive science alone.

After Concordia, McGilchrist largely disappeared from my reading as my own research moved elsewhere. I opted out of graduate school and continued the work independently while supporting myself through IT and later moving more deeply into health, recovery, and behavioural science. From 2016 onward, correspondence with Guy Du Plessis and William White around addiction, recovery, and integral approaches to treatment pushed the work in a more explicitly practical direction. The question was no longer simply how different philosophical or psychological frameworks could be synthesized conceptually, but what happened when those frameworks were asked to organize actual practices of recovery, development, and institutional care. The gap between an elegant theory and the resistance of lived experience became increasingly difficult for me to ignore.

It was during this period that I returned intensively to Habermas, Richard Bernstein, and Fred Dallmayr. The 2017 Bernstein-Dallmayr turn became especially important because it forced me to confront two limits within the kind of integral synthesis I had inherited: the problem of fallibility and the problem of historical difference. Bernstein’s pragmatism and engaged pluralism challenged the fantasy that philosophical comprehensiveness could eliminate the contingency and risk involved in judgment, while Dallmayr’s work on cross-cultural dialogue complicated any developmental framework that implicitly treated one civilizational history as the standard against which others were to be located. Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism emerged gradually from that return as ways of holding developmental and contemplative claims within a framework that remained situated, revisable, and answerable to encounters capable of changing its terms.

McGilchrist returned to my attention only after the surrounding cultural landscape had itself changed. The post-2016 period produced a growing ecosystem concerned with the meaning crisis, sensemaking, metacrisis, spirituality, cultural fragmentation, and the exhaustion of inherited political categories. I encountered much of it through Rebel Wisdom and David Fuller’s documentary work around the Peterson phenomenon, and then, tracing some of those conversations backward and outward, through Jonathan Rowson and Perspectiva. By the time Perspectiva published The Matter With Things in 2021, McGilchrist occupied a very different cultural position from the writer I had first read in 2010. The hemispheric hypothesis had developed into a comprehensive account of culture, consciousness, value, and reality itself, while an institutional ecosystem had formed around many of the questions his work addressed.

Two books gave me a more precise sociological vocabulary for interpreting that development. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King’s Selling Spirituality had already described, in 2005, how historical religious traditions were being privatized and reorganized into forms compatible with neoliberal capitalism. “Spirituality” could preserve contemplative techniques, experiences of depth, therapeutic benefits, and languages of authenticity while losing the ethical, institutional, and political demands of the traditions from which those resources had been drawn. Practices once embedded within accounts of liberation, obligation, community, ascetic discipline, or metaphysical truth could be detached from those contexts and reintroduced as techniques for managing the self within institutions whose purposes remained untouched.

Galen Watts’s The Spiritual Turn deepened that analysis by describing romantic liberalism: the post-1960s moral and spiritual formation organized around authenticity, experiential religion, individual self-development, expressive freedom, and suspicion of external authority. Watts’s argument is not that this formation is simply false or politically reactionary. It is that romantic liberalism has become a coherent moral imaginary among educated liberal populations in the Anglophone world, one capable of incorporating diverse spiritual and philosophical resources while retaining recognizable assumptions about the person, authority, freedom, and the good life. I discussed these themes with Watts on the Integral [+] Facticity podcast in October 2022, and the category has stayed with me because it names something more specific than “New Age spirituality,” “metamodernism,” or the “meaning crisis.”

Romantic liberalism describes a social and moral formation capable of moving across political affiliations while preserving a recognizable philosophical anthropology: the authentic self, inner experience, personal development, spiritual depth, resistance to bureaucratic conformity, and the search for forms of community that do not reproduce the deadening structures of institutional modernity. McGilchrist increasingly appeared to me as one of the most philosophically sophisticated articulations available to that formation. The question was therefore no longer simply whether his account of hemispheric attention was persuasive. It was what happened when that account became part of a much larger attempt to explain what had gone wrong with modernity, why existing cultural and political institutions seemed unable to repair it, and whether the recovery of older forms of meaning could really answer problems those older forms had never themselves been required to solve.

II. McGilchrist and Enchanted Flatland

Before pressing that critique, I want to register clearly that McGilchrist remains a joy to read. His prose has a literary intelligence and quality of attention that very few contemporary philosophical writers possess. He moves across neuroscience, philosophy, poetry, art, psychiatry, and phenomenology with a breadth that is difficult to imitate without becoming superficial, and the aesthetic pull of the work is not incidental to its philosophical influence. For readers exhausted by bureaucratic life, instrumental rationality, and a culture increasingly organized around abstraction, measurement, and management, McGilchrist offers a sustained argument that these conditions are not merely unfortunate features of modern life but symptoms of a culture that has lost contact with important dimensions of reality. What makes the argument compelling is its insistence that quantitative description, however powerful, does not exhaust what is real. Beauty, relation, embodiment, metaphor, attention, and value are not secondary embellishments added to an otherwise complete picture; they belong to the world we are trying to understand.

The Master and His Emissary made that case through the hemispheric hypothesis, though the actual argument is far more careful than the pop-psychological opposition between a supposedly logical left brain and creative right brain suggests. McGilchrist is explicit that both hemispheres participate in virtually everything human beings do. His distinction concerns the manner of attention through which the world appears. The right hemisphere is more responsive to context, embodiment, novelty, relation, metaphor, ambiguity, and the irreducible particularity of what is encountered, while the left hemisphere isolates, categorizes, stabilizes, abstracts, and renders aspects of that world available for manipulation. What is at stake is therefore not a division of human capacities into two separate cognitive machines, but the different worlds disclosed when attention takes one form rather than another.

The “master” and “emissary” metaphor follows from this asymmetry. Analytical representation is indispensable, but it depends upon a prior contact with a world that has not yet been reduced to the categories through which it becomes manipulable. The left hemisphere performs essential work by isolating features, rendering them explicit, and making them available for calculation and action; the problem begins when the representation produced through this process is mistaken for the whole of what is represented. McGilchrist’s cultural argument extends this cognitive relation into a history of the West. Western civilization, he argues, has progressively allowed the abstractions of the emissary to dominate the richer contextual world from which those abstractions were originally derived, producing characteristic forms of bureaucratic management, technological domination, fragmentation, proceduralism, and estrangement from embodied reality.

There is much in this diagnosis that I continue to find compelling, which is precisely why I do not want the disagreement that follows to become a generic defense of modern rationalism against romanticism. A useful comparison can be made with Charles Taylor, whose critique of behaviourism and naturalistic social science likewise begins from the claim that human life cannot be exhausted through third-person causal description. Human beings are self-interpreting animals who inhabit moral horizons, social imaginaries, and frameworks of strong evaluation through which certain goods become worth pursuing in the first place. Instrumental reason becomes pathological when means-end calculation is detached from substantive reflection on ends, and the modern “malaise” is not simply that people have stopped believing particular doctrines but that the frameworks through which questions of worth and purpose become intelligible have themselves been weakened.

McGilchrist and Taylor therefore share a family resemblance without making the same argument. Both resist reductive naturalism by recovering dimensions of human existence that cannot be adequately captured through an exclusively objectifying method. Taylor does so through philosophical anthropology and hermeneutics; McGilchrist through attention, neuropsychology, and eventually metaphysics. Taylor’s account of modernity is historically and sociologically more differentiated, particularly in A Secular Age, where the emergence of the immanent frame is not narrated simply as a catastrophic fall from a more unified premodern consciousness. McGilchrist’s civilizational story is more sweeping, and the hemispheric structure gives the narrative a sharper polarity between the mode of consciousness associated with fragmentation and the one associated with recovery.

That difference becomes decisive because McGilchrist’s account of modernity is repeatedly organized through the language of loss. Something more relational, participatory, embodied, symbolically dense, and spiritually alive has been displaced by abstraction. The master has ceded authority to the emissary; living presence has been subordinated to representation; the qualitative world has been progressively reconstructed through the abstractions by which it is measured and manipulated. Much of this description is persuasive, but the historical form of the argument can quietly shift the problem from the domination of instrumental rationality toward the loss of an older mode of life, as though recovering what preceded modern differentiation could provide the answer to what followed it.

I am considerably less persuaded by that implication. Religion has not disappeared from modern societies, nor have modern societies ceased to possess ritual, symbolism, metaphysical conviction, communal identities, ecstatic experiences, or powerful conceptions of the sacred. The United States remains deeply religious while also standing near the centre of technological capitalism. Orthodox Christianity has survived and revived within societies shaped by bureaucratic state power and oligarchic political economy. Hindu nationalism demonstrates that religious symbolism and technological modernity can coexist without difficulty. Evangelical Christianity can flourish alongside market individualism, mass media, and corporate organization. Religion is not simply what instrumental rationality destroyed; it can persist inside instrumentally rationalized societies, accommodate itself to them, legitimate them, resist them, or become reorganized through them.

The problem, then, cannot be reduced to the disappearance of religion or the loss of a participatory consciousness. Traditional religious worlds were themselves historically limited. They generated extraordinary symbolic, ethical, contemplative, and communal resources, but they also existed alongside hierarchy, exclusion, inherited authority, patriarchy, sectarian conflict, and political forms that no serious reconstruction of contemporary democratic life should romanticize. Nor were premodern communities confronted by multinational corporations, algorithmic attention markets, global financial systems, nuclear weapons, planetary ecological limits, mass bureaucratic states, technologically mediated publics, or societies in which multiple religious and nonreligious traditions must coexist under common institutions. The traditions inherited from the past remain indispensable resources, but they cannot simply supply ready-made answers to problems whose historical conditions are radically different from those under which the traditions themselves developed.

This is where the distinction between restoration and reconstruction becomes central to my disagreement with McGilchrist. The task is not to reverse modern differentiation as though the plurality of social spheres, the growth of scientific inquiry, individual freedom, democratic criticism, religious pluralism, and the loosening of inherited authority were themselves mistakes. The problem is that many of these achievements have been increasingly subordinated to an instrumental rationality that is extraordinarily effective at choosing means while remaining incapable, on its own, of determining which ends are worth pursuing. Markets, bureaucracies, technologies, and administrative systems are capable of coordinating enormous complexity; they are much less capable of answering what human beings ought to do with that capacity.

Seen this way, instrumental rationality is not simply a symptom of the wrong hemisphere having taken command. It is embedded in institutions that modern societies require but have difficulty normatively governing. The problem is not solved by becoming more right-hemispheric, just as it is not solved by reviving religious belief. What is required is a way of placing instrumental capacities back within forms of ethical, democratic, spiritual, and political judgment capable of determining the purposes those capacities should serve. That is a reconstructive problem, not a restorative one.

It is at this point that The Matter With Things presents a substantially different philosophical problem from The Master and His Emissary. The 2009 book makes neurological, phenomenological, and cultural-historical claims that, however controversial their relationship may be, can at least in principle be distinguished and assessed within their respective domains. The later work expands much further. Attention becomes one route into a comprehensive account of relation, consciousness, value, purpose, and eventually a panentheistic metaphysics in which mind and meaning belong intrinsically to the structure of reality. McGilchrist is no longer merely asking how different modes of attention disclose the world; he is increasingly asking what the world must be like for those disclosures to possess the significance he believes they do.

I do not object to this expansion because metaphysical speculation has somehow become illegitimate. I have argued elsewhere, particularly in “On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn”, that the claim that science has rendered metaphysics obsolete often disguises one metaphysical picture as the absence of metaphysics. Reductive materialism does not cease to be philosophical merely because its assumptions have become culturally familiar. Nor do I think contemplative, religious, or speculative inquiry should be admitted only after its claims have been translated into the language of third-person science. Such a demand would merely reproduce the reduction McGilchrist is right to resist.

The more difficult issue concerns the relationship among different modes of disclosure. Wilber’s mature integral framework remains useful to me here because its most important epistemological contribution is not, in my view, the construction of one more comprehensive cosmology, but the differentiation of perspectives through which phenomena become available. Subjective, intersubjective, objective, and interobjective dimensions co-arise; none can simply be derived from another without losing something that becomes visible only from the perspective being excluded. His later 8 Zones architecture makes the methodological implications more explicit. A first-person phenomenological investigation, a third-person neurological study, an intersubjective hermeneutic interpretation, and an analysis of social systems can concern dimensions of the same event while nevertheless producing claims whose validity conditions are not interchangeable.

The point is not that one of these domains possesses the truth while the others merely provide partial representations of it. Each can disclose something real according to the phenomena and modes of inquiry proper to it. Neurological investigation can disclose something about hemispheric organization that introspection alone cannot establish. Phenomenology can disclose something about how attention is lived and how the world appears through different forms of engagement that brain imaging cannot provide. Historical and cultural interpretation can identify patterns of meaning and institutional development that neither neuroscience nor phenomenology can reconstruct on their own. Metaphysical reflection can ask questions about the character of reality that empirical description cannot simply settle. A serious integral approach has to preserve the truth disclosed within each domain while resisting the temptation to let the method appropriate to one become the explanatory ground for the others.

This is why the restoration of interiority does not, by itself, resolve the problem reductionism created. These domains need not be sealed off from one another, and any worthwhile synthesis will necessarily move between them, but integration requires preserving the distinctions among the kinds of claims being made and the forms of inquiry through which they become available. Neurological findings therefore do not by themselves establish a metaphysics of consciousness, just as phenomenological descriptions of attention do not automatically establish a philosophy of history. Cultural criticism may reveal important historical patterns without thereby establishing ontology, while metaphysical intuitions about participation or panentheism cannot retrospectively confirm neurological or historical claims simply because the resulting synthesis appears coherent.

Raymond Tallis’s description of McGilchrist’s project as a “reductionist critique of reductionism” is useful because it draws attention to this tension, although I would formulate the problem somewhat differently. McGilchrist is plainly not reducing consciousness to matter; he is deliberately trying to escape that reduction. Nor is his metaphysics flat in the ordinary sense. It contains precisely the dimensions—interiority, value, relation, beauty, participation—that materialist flatland excluded. What remains at issue is whether the different perspectives and methodologies through which these dimensions become available have been sufficiently differentiated before being reintegrated into a comprehensive description of reality.

This is the context in which I use the phrase enchanted flatland. The term adapts Wilber’s longstanding criticism of process philosophy, particularly Whitehead, rather than accusing McGilchrist of reproducing reductive materialism in a disguised spiritual vocabulary. Whiteheadian thought already escapes the most obvious form of flatland because it does not treat the universe as inert matter governed only by external causation. Experience, value, creativity, relation, and interiority run much deeper into the structure of nature. Yet from a Wilberian perspective the restoration of those dimensions remains incomplete if they are coordinated primarily through a single cosmological description. The problem is not that interiority has been denied; it is that interior and exterior, individual and collective, first-person and third-person dimensions cannot simply be derived from one explanatory account without losing the perspectival differences through which they are disclosed.

McGilchrist poses an analogous problem from another direction. His world is anything but disenchanted. It is alive with relation, value, depth, beauty, and consciousness, and the attractiveness of The Matter With Things follows partly from how thoroughly it refuses the picture of reality as dead matter awaiting the accidental emergence of subjective life. The problem lies in the transitions through which an account of hemispheric attention develops into a theory of Western cultural history and then participates in a metaphysics of reality. Each movement may be philosophically defensible. What requires greater differentiation are the methodological steps between them, because a compelling convergence among neurological, phenomenological, historical, and metaphysical descriptions is not yet the same thing as a common procedure through which the claims made in each register can be tested.

A second difficulty emerges when the hemispheric account is placed beside Wilber’s Pre/Trans Fallacy. The rejection of analytical or conventional rationality does not tell us whether a form of consciousness has moved beyond rational differentiation or has remained prior to it. Pre-rational immediacy and trans-rational contemplative awareness can both resist analytical representation while differing fundamentally in developmental organization. The child’s pre-conceptual immersion in the world and the contemplative practitioner’s cultivated capacity to encounter experience without excessive conceptual mediation may share phenomenological features, but the latter has passed through forms of cognitive, ethical, symbolic, and interpersonal development the former has not yet acquired.

Bellah and Donald make this developmental question particularly difficult to ignore because human cognition and religious life have histories. Mimetic, mythic, theoretic, and contemplative forms of knowing cannot simply be placed along one hemispheric axis. The right hemisphere may participate powerfully in religious symbolism, embodied ritual, contemplative absorption, aesthetic perception, interpersonal presence, and pre-conceptual experience, but the fact that these all recruit forms of contextual and relational attention does not erase the developmental differences among them. A culture can reject abstract rationalism by recovering forms of meaning that genuinely transcend its limitations, but it can also reject rational differentiation by returning to forms of authority or identity that rational development had previously subjected to criticism.

This is where the political naiveté of the loss-and-recovery narrative becomes more consequential. A renewed symbolic world is not necessarily a more democratic one. A more religious society is not necessarily less instrumentally rational. Strong communal identities can coexist with technological domination, authoritarian political organization, capitalist exploitation, and highly developed bureaucratic states. The right hemisphere, however important as a description of attention, cannot tell us which traditions should be retrieved, which forms of authority should remain open to criticism, which inherited exclusions should be rejected, or how a pluralistic society should adjudicate among communities that understand reality in fundamentally different ways. Once these political and institutional questions are posed directly, a hemispheric narrative of civilizational decline and recovery begins to look much less comprehensive than its cultural reach initially suggests.

The challenge, then, is not to recover a lost whole but to construct forms of life capable of integrating what modern differentiation has made available without allowing those differentiations to be dominated by the logic of instrumental control. That distinction matters enormously for everything that follows, because the meaning-crisis ecosystem surrounding McGilchrist often oscillates between reconstruction and a more romantic longing for forms of social, religious, and symbolic integration associated with a world imagined to precede the modern crisis.

III. Romantic Liberalism and the Meaning-Crisis Ecosystem

Ideas do not enter public life independently of institutions, audiences, technologies, and forms of mediation. One reason McGilchrist matters more now than he did when The Master and His Emissary appeared is that his work has been carried through a digital and institutional ecosystem that scarcely existed in its present form in 2009. Perspectiva, Rebel Wisdom, the wider meaning-crisis discourse, CIIS, Integral Life, podcast networks, Substack, retreats, online communities, publishing projects, and conference circuits have all participated in translating difficult philosophical material into a broader cultural conversation. This does not mean that these institutions form a single ideological bloc, nor that the appearance of a thinker within one network determines the political meaning of the work. It does mean that reception belongs to the social life of philosophy, and that the form in which ideas circulate cannot be entirely separated from what those ideas come to mean politically.

Perspectiva emerged from a serious attempt to bring systems thinking, spiritual practice, philosophical anthropology, and social change into closer relation. Jonathan Rowson’s work at the RSA and later through Perspectiva has repeatedly returned to the problem of how political and institutional approaches to social change remain impoverished when they exclude questions of spiritual depth, developmental formation, and the quality of attention. Tomas Björkman’s involvement brought another strand of the European Bildung and metamodern-developmental conversation into the project. Perspectiva’s eventual publication of The Matter With Things was therefore not accidental. McGilchrist’s work spoke directly to an effort to relate systems, souls, and society without accepting the disciplinary divisions through which these questions are normally separated.

Rebel Wisdom developed through a different medium but responded to many of the same conditions. David Fuller and Alexander Beiner treated the post-2016 cultural crisis partly as a crisis of interpretation: established media and political categories seemed increasingly incapable of explaining why figures such as Jordan Peterson had acquired such extraordinary cultural force or why audiences dissatisfied with mainstream institutions were assembling around heterodox combinations of psychology, spirituality, systems theory, political critique, and religious symbolism. Rebel Wisdom’s early engagement with Peterson, the Intellectual Dark Web, psychedelics, sensemaking, embodied practice, systems thinking, and the emerging discourse around the “meaning crisis” helped create an audience for conversations that did not fit comfortably within the dominant left-right media structure.

The subsequent trajectory of Rebel Wisdom also complicates any simple political narrative. Fuller and Beiner became increasingly attentive to the problems of audience capture, ideological rigidity, and algorithmic incentive that accompanied the online ecosystems they were documenting, eventually deciding to close the project while it still possessed a substantial audience rather than converting it into another permanent content machine. Rowson likewise became an increasingly explicit critic of the pathologies that developed around Peterson. These facts matter because Perspectiva and Rebel Wisdom should not be conflated with the Daily Wire, just as CIIS should not be treated as another version of either. CIIS carries the Aurobindonian and process-relational lineage I discussed in my essay on Matt Segall, while Integral Life emerges from the American Wilberian movement. Vervaeke’s work on the meaning crisis has its own cognitive-scientific and philosophical genealogy. Pageau’s Symbolic World is explicitly Orthodox and theological. Peterson’s later institutional home at the Daily Wire places his work within a much more clearly partisan media ecology. The borders among these projects are porous, and figures move across them, but those differences are analytically important.

What connects these otherwise distinct projects is less a common politics than a shared field of dissatisfaction with the dominant forms of modernity. Secular materialism appears incapable of accounting for dimensions of life that continue to orient human beings at the deepest level. Institutional religion has lost authority for substantial parts of the educated population without the questions historically carried by religion having disappeared. Bureaucratic states and corporations organize increasingly large parts of life through impersonal systems of measurement and administration. Digital platforms fragment attention and public discourse while simultaneously becoming the principal infrastructure through which people search for community, explanation, and meaning. Political polarization weakens shared epistemic standards, while institutions that once claimed to mediate public knowledge are themselves treated with growing suspicion.

The language of a “meaning crisis” captures something real in this situation, but it can also obscure as much as it reveals if the crisis is interpreted primarily as the disappearance of meaning from an otherwise intact social order. Meaning has hardly disappeared. Contemporary societies are saturated with competing moral, political, religious, national, therapeutic, conspiratorial, and commercial systems of meaning. The problem is not an empty cultural field waiting to be filled with religion again. It is that the institutions capable of mediating among these meanings, determining shared purposes, and subordinating instrumental systems to publicly defensible ends have become extraordinarily weak.

Religion illustrates the distinction particularly well. Christianity did not disappear from the United States before the rise of platform capitalism, financialization, or the managerial state. Russian Orthodoxy did not prevent the emergence of oligarchic capitalism or an increasingly authoritarian political system. Hindu religious revival does not dissolve the contradictions of industrial development, caste, nationalism, or digital modernity. Religious vitality can coexist with precisely the forms of instrumental rationality McGilchrist criticizes because religion and instrumental systems operate through different institutional and social logics. Recovering religious belief, ritual, or symbolic depth may therefore address one dimension of human alienation while leaving the structures producing other dimensions almost completely untouched.

This is where Watts’s account of romantic liberalism and Carrette and King’s analysis of spirituality become indispensable. Romantic liberalism privileges authenticity, personal experience, expressive self-development, and suspicion of external authority. These commitments can generate serious spiritual experimentation, resistance to oppressive forms of conformity, and a welcome refusal to reduce the person to an economic or bureaucratic function. Under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, however, the same commitments can be absorbed with remarkable ease into markets organized around self-development, wellness, retreat culture, therapeutic consumption, and individually curated meaning.

Carrette and King understood this political-economic mechanism well before the contemporary meaning-crisis vocabulary had taken shape. Mindfulness can be separated from Buddhist ethical and institutional contexts and reorganized as stress reduction for workers whose conditions remain unchanged. Contemplative traditions can be converted into technologies of self-optimization. Spirituality can become a language through which structural conflict is translated into personal imbalance. A corporation can encourage employees to regulate their nervous systems more effectively while leaving untouched the labour process producing exhaustion in the first place. None of this means that mindfulness, psychotherapy, contemplative practice, or self-development are fraudulent. It means that practices acquire part of their political meaning through the institutions into which they are inserted, and that an intervention capable of producing genuine relief for an individual may simultaneously participate in a system that privatizes the source of the distress.

Bellah’s lifestyle enclave helps identify the corresponding social form. Communities organized around meaning, spiritual practice, philosophical exploration, or personal development may be intellectually and relationally rich while remaining weakly connected to durable civic institutions. Their members can develop increasingly sophisticated languages for describing transformation while the public sphere, labour organizations, parties, churches, schools, local associations, and other institutions through which collective life is materially organized continue to decline. The lifestyle enclave is not simply an accusation of selfishness or withdrawal. It describes the difficulty of converting private or subcultural goods into forms of common life capable of surviving beyond the preferences of the people already committed to them.

This was the problem I tried to identify in the American integral movement in “The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves”, and the broader meaning-crisis ecology raises the same question at a larger scale without being reducible to precisely the same diagnosis. Podcasts can diagnose the fragmentation of attention through platforms whose business models monetize attention. Retreats can answer the loss of community through temporary communities available primarily to those with the resources to participate. Spiritual-development cultures can criticize instrumental reason while reproducing its emphasis on individual optimization. The contradiction is not necessarily hypocrisy. It is a consequence of attempting to construct alternatives from within the political-economic infrastructures whose limits those alternatives are trying to overcome.

McGilchrist does not create that condition, nor can his work be reduced to it. His philosophical anthropology nevertheless offers the formation an exceptionally sophisticated account of what it already senses: something has gone wrong with the modern relationship between abstraction and life, representation and presence, management and meaning. The difficulty appears when the depth of the philosophical diagnosis allows the institutional question to recede. If bureaucratic fragmentation, technological domination, and alienation are interpreted primarily as expressions of a hemispheric imbalance or a civilizational loss of participatory consciousness, then capitalism, ownership, state power, labour relations, financialization, and platform monopolies risk becoming secondary manifestations of a deeper cognitive disorder.

At that point the political naiveté becomes more than an omission. The model begins to suggest that cultural and spiritual transformation somehow reaches beneath politics to the deeper source from which political dysfunction arises. Yet the causal relation can run in the other direction as well. Forms of attention are produced by institutions. A platform engineered to maximize engagement trains attention in particular ways because doing so is profitable. A workplace governed by metrics encourages people to see themselves and others through quantifiable performance indicators because those indicators organize managerial control. A bureaucratic state develops abstract categories partly because large-scale administration requires them. None of these processes is explained simply by saying that the left hemisphere has become culturally dominant.

The political ambiguity becomes more visible where the meaning-crisis diagnosis encounters the contemporary right. Peterson’s engagement with McGilchrist is the most obvious case because Peterson’s broader project combines a critique of modern abstraction with stronger claims about hierarchy, tradition, religion, order, and the failures of post-1960s progressive culture. Jonathan Pageau supplies a more explicitly symbolic and Orthodox-Christian register through which the recovery of meaning becomes the recovery of a sacramental and hierarchical cosmos. McGilchrist’s own work does not entail either politics, and it would be intellectually irresponsible to infer his commitments from the people who interview him. Yet it would be equally inadequate to conclude that reception becomes philosophically irrelevant simply because appropriation does not establish authorial intention.

What interests me here is not the accusation that these figures wish to “bring religion back.” Religion never went anywhere. The more consequential question is what kind of religion, which forms of authority, and what political order become associated with the retrieval. A recovered symbolic world can be rich, meaningful, aesthetically compelling, and spiritually serious while also reinforcing forms of hierarchy or civilizational identity poorly suited to democratic pluralism. The existence of sacred depth does not answer the political question of how people who inhabit different sacred worlds are to share institutions, adjudicate conflicts, distribute power, or decide which inherited forms of authority deserve preservation and which require transformation.

Romantic liberalism is politically ambiguous for the same reason. Its critique of modernity does not determine its political destination. It can turn toward ecological politics, democratic socialism, religious renewal, commons-based institutions, or forms of post-secular public life. It can remain suspended in therapeutic individualism and cultural consumption. Under other conditions, it can move toward the recovery of tradition, sacred order, hierarchy, and civilizational particularity. The relevant divide is therefore increasingly between restoration and reconstruction. One looks to recover forms of coherence thought to have been lost; the other asks how the truths preserved within inherited traditions can be transformed and reinstitutionalized under conditions those traditions did not originally confront.

McGilchrist matters because his work sits close to the philosophical centre of this ambiguity. He provides one of the strongest contemporary arguments for why re-enchantment is intellectually serious, but the same strength makes the weakness of the restorative impulse more important rather than less. The problem is not whether modernity has lost something. It clearly has. The problem is whether what has been lost can simply be recovered, or whether the transformations modernity has produced require forms of religious, political, and institutional reconstruction that cannot be derived from the past.

IV. Lukács, Dugin & the Politics of Re-Enchantment

Georg Lukács becomes useful at this point, provided The Destruction of Reason is read critically rather than treated as an infallible Marxist genealogy. Lukács’s argument is famously sweeping. He traces a line through post-Hegelian European philosophy—Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Lebensphilosophie, phenomenology, Heidegger—and attempts to connect the growth of philosophical irrationalism to the political conditions culminating in fascism. Much of the historical argument is too linear, politically overdetermined, and inseparable from the Stalinist context in which the book was completed. The tendency to read large parts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy primarily through the question of whether they prepared the way for fascism flattens real philosophical differences and underestimates the critical resources contained within the very traditions Lukács attacks.

Daniel Tutt’s contemporary recovery of Lukács has been important to me precisely because it allows the structural method to be separated, at least partially, from these closures. What remains valuable is the question Lukács asks about the political availability of philosophical forms. A thinker does not need to endorse a later political movement for concepts developed in one context to become resources within another. Philosophies participate in the organization of what can be named as a problem, which kinds of explanation appear compelling, what forms of mediation are treated as legitimate, and which modes of authority become attractive when established institutions lose credibility. The political effect of a philosophy therefore cannot be read directly from the intention of its author, but neither can it be inferred merely from the politics of whoever later cites it.

Bergson is particularly important because the structural comparison with McGilchrist is difficult to miss while still requiring careful qualification. Bergson distinguishes analytical intelligence, which spatializes and divides, from intuition, through which duration and living movement become available without being reduced to static conceptual units. Lukács objects not simply to intuition as such but to the hierarchy established between intuition and analysis. If one mode of apprehension becomes the privileged route to the living whole while conceptual mediation is increasingly treated as a distortion, then rational criticism can begin to appear external to the form of truth under discussion rather than part of the process through which claims are tested and revised.

McGilchrist’s right/left distinction resembles this structure without being identical to it. His right hemisphere is contextual, relational, embodied, responsive to novelty and particularity; his left hemisphere abstracts, categorizes, manipulates, and re-presents. McGilchrist repeatedly insists that both are necessary, which already distinguishes him from any crude rejection of analysis. The emissary is indispensable. Yet the master/emissary hierarchy still gives normative priority to one mode of attention, and the cultural history attached to the model associates many of the defining pathologies of modernity with the mode that abstracts, analyzes, formalizes, and renders explicit.

The political issue becomes sharper when this hierarchy is joined to the larger narrative of loss. If abstraction, rationalization, bureaucratic mediation, and modern differentiation appear together as symptoms of the emissary’s ascendance, then the opposite pole begins almost inevitably to gather the qualities believed to have been displaced: embodiment, symbolism, religion, tradition, organic community, presence, and participation. McGilchrist himself is far too sophisticated to reduce his argument to a simple return to the past, but the conceptual structure makes such a reading unusually easy because it provides a philosophical grammar through which modern complexity can be experienced primarily as estrangement from something more whole.

This is why I would resist simply classifying McGilchrist as an “irrationalist.” Such a judgment would erase important philosophical differences and reproduce the flattening the critique is supposed to resist. The more precise question is whether certain structural features of his argument make restoration appear more philosophically attractive than reconstruction, particularly once the framework enters cultural environments already suspicious of Enlightenment rationality, liberal institutions, secularism, and modern forms of differentiation. The answer depends neither solely upon McGilchrist’s intentions nor upon the politics of his readership. It requires examining the conceptual affordances of the framework itself and the institutional conditions under which particular aspects of it become amplified.

Lukács’s concept of indirect apologetics becomes useful in this more restricted sense. Philosophical work can perform political labour without explicitly advocating a political program because concepts help determine which diagnoses become intelligible and which alternatives appear plausible. The term must be handled carefully, because otherwise it becomes unfalsifiable: any objectionable appropriation could simply be read backward into the philosophy being appropriated. A reactionary thinker citing Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jung, McGilchrist, or any other figure is not sufficient evidence that the original work secretly contained the later politics. The relevant question is whether identifiable structures within the philosophy become useful to a political formation for reasons that can be specified rather than merely asserted.

The philosophical and geopolitical stakes become explicit in Aleksandr Dugin, although the relation needs to be stated with equal care. McGilchrist does not lead straightforwardly to Dugin, and nothing in my argument depends upon constructing such a genealogy. Dugin matters because his Fourth Political Theory represents one of the clearest and most politically consequential attempts to answer the crisis of modernity through retrieval. If liberal modernity has dissolved substantive forms of belonging, if universalist rationality has flattened civilizational difference, and if the political ideologies of the twentieth century have exhausted themselves, Dugin proposes that the answer lies in recovering deeper historical and metaphysical subjects suppressed by liberal individualism.

That answer moves through Heidegger, Guénon, Evola, Traditionalism, ethnos, multipolarity, and civilizational geopolitics. The liberal individual is displaced as the privileged political subject, while civilizations become the bearers of fundamentally different historical and metaphysical possibilities. Liberal universalism is reinterpreted as the expansion of one civilizational formation masquerading as humanity itself, and multipolarity becomes more than a redistribution of geopolitical power. It carries a philosophical claim that different civilizations may embody different ontologies, political forms, religious inheritances, and historical destinies, none of which should be subordinated to a single Western account of modernization.

What makes Dugin relevant to this essay is therefore not that he shares McGilchrist’s theory of the hemispheres, but that he demonstrates where a politics organized around restoration rather than reconstruction can lead when translated into civilizational and geopolitical terms. The past becomes more than a historical inheritance to be critically retrieved; it becomes a reservoir of identities, metaphysics, and forms of authority capable of grounding an alternative modernity. The pluralism of civilizations then risks becoming a pluralism of hardened blocs whose very authenticity depends upon resisting transformations generated through deeper encounter with one another.

The attraction of this position becomes easier to understand once the weakness of liberal proceduralism is acknowledged. Liberal societies have often acted as though questions of religion, metaphysics, ultimate purpose, and civilizational inheritance could be indefinitely privatized while markets and administrative systems handled the substantive coordination of social life. They could not. But the failure of that settlement does not establish that the solution lies in returning political authority to religious traditions, ethnos, national myths, or civilizational identities. Those formations have their own histories of domination and their own difficulties in dealing with the pluralistic societies modern history has already produced.

This is why the contemporary struggle over re-enchantment cannot be treated simply as an internal dispute among philosophers of religion or participants in spiritual subcultures. It is unfolding inside a geopolitical transformation in which competing accounts of civilization, sovereignty, religion, universality, and modernity are becoming politically active. The meaning-crisis literature correctly perceives that the postwar liberal order no longer commands the cultural legitimacy it once possessed. Secular proceduralism alone has proved inadequate to many of the substantive moral and spiritual questions people continue to ask. Technocratic governance has not produced a shared account of human flourishing, while the institutions through which liberal democracies once mediated political disagreement have themselves undergone profound erosion.

The cultural left has often compounded the problem by treating religion, tradition, and metaphysical questions either as private preferences or as residues destined to disappear under sufficiently progressive conditions. Yet the collapse of one horizon does not guarantee the emancipatory character of whatever follows it. A critique of liberal universalism can open toward integral pluralism and civilizational dialogue, or harden into a politics in which civilizational difference is increasingly organized through antagonism and clash. A recovery of religion can generate new forms of post-secular public life or become a restoration of inherited authority that cannot adequately respond to pluralism. A critique of instrumental reason can deepen democratic judgment or become a critique of rational differentiation itself. A recognition of historical and civilizational difference can become the basis for reciprocal encounter and transformation, or be organized politically in ways that help usher in a clash of civilizations.

Habermas becomes more important at precisely this point than he often appears within meaning-crisis discussions because his critique of modernity does not rest upon the claim that modern differentiation itself should be reversed. The growth of science, law, markets, democratic institutions, individual rights, religious pluralism, and differentiated spheres of cultural life created real emancipatory possibilities. The problem emerges when the forms of instrumental and strategic rationality appropriate to certain domains expand beyond their legitimate range and begin organizing domains of life that require other forms of judgment.

This changes how the crisis of religion should be understood. A post-secular society does not need religion because religion disappeared and now has to be restored. It needs to reconsider the public significance of religious traditions because the differentiation of religion from the state did not eliminate the moral, existential, and metaphysical questions those traditions continue to address. At the same time, religious traditions themselves have to confront the fact that modern differentiation has transformed the conditions under which their claims can exercise public authority. Neither side can simply return to an earlier arrangement.

A post-secular public sphere must therefore be capable of learning from religious traditions rather than confining them to the private sphere and denying their substantive contribution to public life. But the requirement is reciprocal. Religious, metaphysical, and civilizational traditions must be able to enter public life without first being reduced to psychology or neutralized into cultural symbolism, while remaining capable of giving reasons, encountering criticism, and being transformed through dialogue with others. Communicative rationality does not mean that every religious or metaphysical insight can be converted without remainder into secular propositions. It introduces the requirement that claims to truth, rightness, and legitimacy remain exposed to forms of criticism capable of changing how those claims are understood.

Seen from this angle, the problem raised by McGilchrist belongs to a much larger political question. The issue is no longer simply whether the right hemisphere deserves rehabilitation, whether reductive materialism has adequately described reality, or whether modernity has lost access to forms of meaning that human beings continue to require. The question is how the differentiated achievements of modernity can be reconstructed around richer accounts of human flourishing without pretending that the conditions of modernity themselves can simply be undone. That is the line separating the integral pluralism I am arguing toward from the restorationist temptation increasingly visible across the contemporary right.

V. Beyond Romantic Liberalism: Toward a New Integral Humanism

The alternative I have been developing therefore does not begin from the search for a better comprehensive metaphysics capable of replacing the impoverished worldview of modernity. Nor does it begin from the assumption that the task is to restore a religious or civilizational unity believed to have existed before differentiation fragmented the social world. It begins from the recognition that modernity produced genuine achievements and genuine pathologies together, and that any viable response has to distinguish between them rather than treating modernity as a single historical mistake.

Scientific differentiation gave human beings forms of knowledge unavailable to earlier societies. The differentiation of religious and political authority created space for freedom of conscience and pluralism. Modern rights traditions made inherited hierarchies available to forms of criticism they could not simply dismiss. Democratic institutions widened the field of political participation. Individuality itself became a moral achievement in ways that older organic communities frequently failed to recognize. None of these developments should be surrendered because markets, bureaucracies, and technological systems have subsequently colonized more and more dimensions of life.

The difficulty is that modern differentiation has not generated, by itself, an adequate account of how the differentiated parts should be related or toward what ends their growing powers should be directed. Science can tell us an extraordinary amount about what is possible without determining what is worth doing. Markets can coordinate distributed decisions without deciding which goods should never become commodities. Bureaucracies can administer populations without answering what kind of human beings those institutions should enable people to become. Technological systems can dramatically enlarge human capacity while remaining indifferent to whether that capacity deepens freedom, domination, solidarity, or ecological destruction.

This is the context within which I understand Integral Facticity. Heideggerian facticity supplies one starting point because inquiry always begins within bodies, languages, institutions, histories, and traditions we did not choose. Those conditions do not settle the truth of a philosophical claim, but they help determine which problems become intelligible, which conceptual resources appear available, and which assumptions remain hardest to see from within a given historical and intellectual formation. Facticity therefore establishes both a limit and a task. We cannot achieve a view from nowhere, yet neither are we simply imprisoned within the horizon from which inquiry begins. The fact that a perspective is historically situated does not make truth impossible; it makes encounters capable of revising that perspective philosophically necessary.

Wilber adds another kind of differentiation. The AQAL framework remains valuable to me less as a completed map of reality than as a discipline against reduction. First-person experience, third-person behaviour and biology, intersubjective meaning, and institutional or systemic structures disclose dimensions of events that cannot be collapsed into one another without loss. Developmental distinctions add another layer, provided they are not converted into a universal philosophy of history through which whole civilizations are ranked according to a sequence abstracted from one particular modern experience. The point of developmental knowledge is not to establish which civilization has arrived at history’s highest stage, but to distinguish forms of complexity and capacity whose differences may matter within persons, institutions, and cultures while remaining open to correction through encounters the developmental model did not anticipate.

Habermas contributes the reconstructive dimension that is often missing from both romantic criticism of modernity and more triumphalist versions of integral developmental theory. The challenge is not to abolish modern differentiation but to prevent the forms of instrumental and strategic rationality proper to markets, bureaucracies, and technical systems from becoming the measure of every other domain of life. Moral questions cannot be settled as engineering problems. Political legitimacy cannot be reduced to administrative efficiency. Religious meaning cannot be evaluated through market success. Human flourishing cannot be measured adequately through productivity, consumption, or the aggregate preferences of individuals treated as consumers.

Communicative rationality therefore introduces a different requirement: claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity must remain open to justification, criticism, and revision through discourse with others. This does not eliminate facticity, religion, tradition, or forms of knowledge that arise through first-person experience; nor does it require that every mode of disclosure be reduced to the same epistemic standard. The point is precisely that different domains make different forms of evidence available to us and provide different ways of assessing the reliability of the claims that arise within them. Scientific inquiry can establish the reliability of empirical claims, intersubjective traditions and forms of life can be examined in relation to normative rightness and shared meaning, and first-person reports can be assessed in relation to sincerity and the fidelity with which experience is articulated. What matters is that none of these domains is placed beyond criticism. Their claims can be provisionally warranted, their limits can become visible, and they can be revised when evidence, argument, experience, or encounter shows that what appeared reliable was partial, distorted, or wrong.

Peircean fallibilism and enactivism push this problem from epistemology toward practice. Enactive Fallibilism, as I have been developing it, treats conceptual frameworks as things tested in lived engagement rather than merely compared at the level of abstraction. The resistance of the body, the consequences of action, interpersonal encounter, anomalous evidence, and the experience of failure all become ways in which a theory meets something it did not fully anticipate. A framework may remain internally elegant while repeatedly failing to organize sustainable action or account for experiences that resist its categories. Fallibility therefore cannot be added as a declaration of modesty at the end of an otherwise closed system; it has to become part of the method through which the framework continues changing.

This is where the project connects back to ACT and IACT. Psychological flexibility matters because philosophical and political pluralism depend upon capacities that procedural theory alone cannot generate: defusion from one’s own narratives, tolerance for uncertainty and discomfort, perspective-taking, value-guided action, and the ability to remain committed without allowing commitment to determine the meaning of every new encounter. Habermasian discourse presupposes participants capable of inhabiting disagreement without experiencing every challenge to a belief as an existential threat. Dallmayrian dialogue presupposes enough stability to encounter another tradition without either assimilating it immediately or defending one’s own identity through withdrawal. IACT is my attempt to connect those demands of democratic and civilizational dialogue to practices through which psychological flexibility can actually be cultivated.

Yet psychological flexibility, contemplative development, and epistemological pluralism do not supply a politics by themselves. The institutional question has to return, and Antonio Gramsci helps explain why intellectual and spiritual formations cannot be evaluated only through the intentions of individual thinkers. Cultural life is organized through institutions in which intellectuals, media, educational systems, civil associations, religious communities, firms, and state structures participate in the production of common sense. Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals becomes useful because it makes visible the social location of forms of thought that present themselves as politically autonomous. An intellectual does not need to receive instructions from a political class in order for the categories through which that intellectual interprets the world to perform a function within a larger social formation.

Gramsci’s concept of the integral state deepens the point by refusing to identify political power exclusively with government narrowly conceived. Civil society, cultural institutions, corporations, schools, media, religious bodies, and forms of intellectual production participate in the organization of consent and the reproduction of social power. Stephen Maher’s Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State brings that analysis into contemporary political economy by examining the dense relationships through which corporate power, state organization, industrial policy, finance, and institutional governance have developed together. The result is not a picture of corporations simply capturing an otherwise neutral state from outside, but of political and economic power being organized through institutional networks in which the distinction between public and private becomes much harder to sustain analytically.

This matters enormously for the meaning crisis because a philosophy that attributes modern alienation primarily to a mode of consciousness can miss the institutions that continually reproduce that consciousness because they materially reward it. Algorithmic attention capture is not merely left-hemispheric cognition run amok; it is a business model produced through particular structures of ownership and advertising. Corporate wellness is not simply a spiritual misunderstanding; it is an institutional adaptation through which the costs of unsustainable work can be returned to individuals as problems of self-regulation. The disappearance of local communities, labour organizations, public institutions, churches, voluntary associations, and democratic participation cannot be repaired through better attention alone because the conditions under which attention itself is formed are institutionally organized.

Religion presents the same problem from another direction. Religious renewal can transform persons, regenerate communities, and recover forms of moral language that secular institutions have allowed to atrophy. But religious revival does not automatically alter ownership structures, democratize workplaces, regulate platform monopolies, reform bureaucracies, or create institutions capable of governing technological power. A church can be spiritually alive and politically reactionary; it can be ethically serious while economically naive; it can preserve extraordinary contemplative and symbolic resources while reproducing authority structures poorly suited to the pluralistic world outside it. To say this is not to reduce religion to politics. It is to refuse the equally reductive assumption that religion becomes an adequate politics merely by remaining religious.

Carrette and King’s critique of privatized spirituality therefore converges with Gramsci and Maher in ways that romantic liberalism does not always recognize. A spiritual practice may genuinely improve a person’s life while simultaneously functioning within an institutional arrangement that leaves the source of suffering politically untouched. The appropriate response is not to condemn the practice but to enlarge the frame within which its effects are understood. Interior transformation and institutional transformation belong to different but interacting dimensions of social reality. The inability to reduce one to the other is precisely why an integral approach remains necessary, but integration here has to mean more than assembling multiple vocabularies into one theoretical synthesis.

Fred Dallmayr becomes indispensable once the same reconstructive problem is extended from social institutions to civilizations. His integral pluralism refuses two symmetrical errors that contemporary politics repeatedly reproduces. One is the absorption of different traditions into a supposedly universal developmental or civilizational trajectory, in which dialogue merely becomes the process through which others gradually recognize truths already possessed by the more “advanced” side. The other is the treatment of civilizations as self-contained formations whose differences become the basis for antagonistic geopolitical blocs. Dallmayr’s hermeneutic approach rejects both. Dialogue is not a polite exchange between already completed identities but an encounter capable of changing the horizons through which participants understand themselves, the other, and the issue that brought them together.

The contrast with Dugin is therefore fundamental rather than incidental. Dugin’s civilizational plurality tends toward geopolitical differentiation: distinct civilizations organized through their own historical, cultural, and metaphysical principles against the universalizing claims of liberal modernity. Dallmayr begins from historical plurality but refuses to turn difference into a logic of antagonistic blocs. Civilizations are not required to become the same, yet neither are they destined to remain what they were before encountering one another. A tradition can retain historical depth while discovering through encounter that some of the categories through which it understood itself were partial, distorted, or incomplete. Civilizational difference, on this account, becomes the starting point for dialogue and reciprocal transformation rather than the basis for a politics that helps usher in a clash of civilizations.

This distinction gives political form to something I have been trying to describe throughout my recent work as synthesis without absorption. Development may be real without becoming a universal philosophy of history. Religious traditions may disclose substantive truths without possessing exclusive authority over the terms through which those truths are publicly interpreted. Civilizations can preserve historical particularity without turning plurality into a geopolitical logic of antagonism and clash. Metaphysics can return without claiming a view from nowhere. Dialogue can transform participants without requiring one side to disappear into the conceptual vocabulary of the other. Integration, understood this way, becomes an achievement produced through differentiated encounter rather than the starting assumption that every perspective already has an assigned place within a completed whole.

Jacques Maritain’s integral humanism adds another essential dimension because the whole that politics has to serve is not simply the state, nation, market, civilization, or developmental process. It is the human person understood in relation to communities, institutions, moral goods, and forms of transcendence that exceed both bourgeois individualism and totalitarian collectivism. Maritain’s attempt to recover a substantive account of the person while accepting the political fact of pluralism remains useful precisely because the contemporary crisis of liberalism has reopened the problem he was trying to answer: how can political life possess substantive moral depth without requiring the state to impose one comprehensive metaphysical doctrine upon everyone who inhabits it?

Placed beside Dallmayr, Maritain points toward an integral humanism that is simultaneously personalist and pluralist, and this is one reason Michael Brooks continues to matter to me. Brooks understood that the left could not surrender religion, moral development, internationalism, and substantive questions of human flourishing to the right. Against the Web was never simply an argument against particular internet personalities. It was an attempt to imagine a cosmopolitan socialism intellectually serious enough to address the needs those personalities had identified without accepting the politics through which they proposed to answer them. The unfinished character of that project has become more visible rather than less since his death.

Brooks’s internationalism is especially important in this context because cosmopolitanism cannot simply mean extending the moral and political categories of one society outward until historical difference disappears. His sustained engagement with Brazil, Lula, India, religion, nationalism, class, and imperial power pointed toward a politics in which solidarity required understanding political traditions from within their histories rather than treating them as delayed or distorted versions of an American sequence. That unfinished project intersects directly with Dallmayr’s insistence that dialogue remain capable of changing the participants rather than merely integrating others into a framework whose terms have already been settled elsewhere.

The political vacuum Brooks identified has only become clearer. Dugin offers one answer to it: recover civilizational difference through a geopolitical and traditionalist alternative to liberal modernity. The postliberal and religious right offer related answers organized around stronger forms of theological and communal authority. Romantic liberalism frequently remains suspended between therapeutic individualism and cultural re-enchantment without developing a corresponding institutional politics. The conventional left remains considerably stronger on political economy but often weak in philosophical anthropology, religion, development, and the civilizational questions now returning to political life.

The integral humanism I am developing begins from the conviction that none of these problems can be solved by going backward. It is integral in Maritain’s sense insofar as politics must remain answerable to the dignity and development of the whole person rather than reducing human beings to economic units, consumers, identities, or representatives of civilizations. It draws on Wilber insofar as subjective, objective, intersubjective, and institutional dimensions must be differentiated without being isolated, and insofar as development has to be taken seriously without converting a developmental map into a universal philosophy of history. It is post-metaphysical in the Habermasian sense insofar as no substantive worldview can simply impose itself as the unquestioned ground of democratic life, while religious and metaphysical traditions retain the right to enter public dialogue in their full substantive depth. It is pluralist in Dallmayr’s sense insofar as encounter with the other remains capable of transforming the horizon from which the encounter began rather than organizing cultural difference into fixed geopolitical antagonisms. And it is fallibilist in the enactive sense insofar as every framework, including this one, remains revisable when lived experience, political consequences, another tradition, or another person discloses something its categories cannot adequately hold.

Michel Bauwens’s work offers an important political-economic dialogue partner for this project because his writing on commons-based peer production and the P2P Foundation approaches many of the same questions from the institutional side. How might forms of cooperation emerge that are neither reducible to capitalist exchange nor dependent upon centralized command? How might shared knowledge and productive capacities be organized as commons rather than enclosed as private property? His Rosy Cross contribution, Breaking the Third Information Barrier, points toward forms of social organization in which new modes of production and shared knowledge can become politically consequential rather than remaining cultural experiments at the margins. Bauwens therefore begins from a different point than Maritain, Dallmayr, Habermas, or the psychological framework of IACT, but the convergence is precisely what makes the dialogue useful.

A new integral humanism cannot remain another philosophical synthesis whose principal achievement is the conceptual integration of more material. If it is incapable of entering institutional life—workplaces, associations, public spheres, schools, digital infrastructures, religious communities, commons, welfare institutions, political organizations—then it risks becoming precisely the kind of lifestyle enclave this essay has criticized. A philosophy that integrates everything conceptually while leaving the institutions organizing ordinary life untouched has not yet accomplished the kind of integration politics requires. The move from integral philosophy to integral praxis therefore cannot be an afterthought added once the theoretical map is finished; the institutional consequences of the framework belong to the test of the framework itself.

This is also why the alternative to romantic liberalism cannot simply be anti-romantic rationalism, and why the alternative to McGilchrist cannot be a return to reductive materialism. McGilchrist is right that something has been lost when instrumental representation becomes the dominant way a culture encounters reality. He is right that attention matters, that relation cannot be reduced to mechanism, and that human beings require contact with dimensions of meaning and value that bureaucratic modernity routinely obscures. The Master and His Emissary remains valuable to me precisely because it gives an unusually rich account of this loss without requiring us to deny science, cognition, or embodiment.

Where I finally part company with McGilchrist is over what follows from that diagnosis. The fact that something has been lost does not mean it can be restored in the form in which it previously existed. Religion has survived modernity and continues to shape political and cultural life, yet its survival has not arrested instrumental rationalization. Traditional communities still exist, yet their existence has not solved the institutional problems generated by capitalism, bureaucratic states, technological systems, and pluralistic societies. Symbolic consciousness remains available, but symbols themselves cannot adjudicate among competing claims to political authority. The past contains resources without containing the institutional form of the answer.

A theory of attention cannot substitute for political economy, even when forms of attention are politically consequential. A phenomenology of relation cannot substitute for institutional analysis, even when institutions shape how relations are experienced. A metaphysics of participation cannot by itself generate the procedures and dispositions required for democratic pluralism. Religious depth cannot determine by itself how power should be distributed, how disagreement should be adjudicated, how economic institutions should be organized, or how civilizations should encounter one another without allowing difference to become antagonism.

The political and philosophical task is therefore reconstructive. It asks how the truths carried by religion, contemplation, metaphysics, developmental inquiry, science, democratic criticism, and political economy can be brought into relation under conditions none of them can master alone. It asks how the extraordinary instrumental capacities of modern institutions can be subordinated to substantive conceptions of human flourishing without abolishing the differentiation that made modern freedom possible. And it asks how civilizational and religious traditions can remain sources of identity and meaning without being transformed into geopolitical destinies that help usher in a clash of civilizations.

That is the point at which the distinction between re-enchantment and integral reconstruction becomes decisive. McGilchrist has given one of the most compelling contemporary accounts of what modern abstraction can conceal, and The Matter With Things has made a participatory, value-laden cosmos philosophically imaginable again for a readership that had been told such questions were no longer intellectually respectable. What it cannot provide on its own is an adequate account of how modern societies should reconstruct the institutional, political, and civilizational relationships through which those recovered dimensions of meaning become publicly consequential.

The task is not to abandon enchantment, intuition, metaphysics, religion, or the recovery of depth in the name of a renewed secular rationalism. Nor is it to imagine that the religious or communal worlds preceding modernity can simply be retrieved as an answer to the conditions that followed them. It is to carry what remains true within those inheritances through the developmental, epistemological, institutional, and civilizational transformations modernity has already made unavoidable. Romantic liberalism has helped recover questions modernity tried unsuccessfully to privatize or discard, and McGilchrist has given some of those questions their most compelling contemporary philosophical expression. What remains is the harder political question: how to change the world we actually inhabit rather than recover one that no longer exists.

Suggested Reading

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009)

Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2 vols. (Perspectiva Press, 2021)

Galen Watts, The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (Routledge, 2005)

Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press, 1985)

Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Belknap Press, 2011)

Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (Harper & Row, 1970)

Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1991)

Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964)

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989)

Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Anansi, 1991)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2007)

Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, translated by Peter Palmer, with an introduction by Enzo Traverso (Verso, 2021 [1954])

Daniel Tutt, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (Repeater Books, 2024)

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (International Publishers, 1971)

Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger (MIT Press, 1989 [1962])

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., translated by Thomas McCarthy (Beacon Press, 1984/1987 [1981])

Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, translated by William Mark Hohengarten (MIT Press, 1992 [1988])

Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, translated by Ciaran Cronin (Polity, 2008 [2005])

Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, translated by Ciaran Cronin (Polity, 2023 [2022])

Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (State University of New York Press, 1996)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Fred Dallmayr, Democracy to Come: Politics as Relational Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, translated by Joseph W. Evans (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996 [1936])

Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Shambhala, 1995)

Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion (Random House, 1998)

Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World (Integral Books, 2006)

Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (Avery, 2019)

Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven C. Hayes, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (Context Press, 2019)

Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Michael Brooks, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right (Zero Books, 2020)

Matthew McManus, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (Routledge, 2024)

Michael Millerman, Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political (Arktos Media, 2020)

Michael Millerman, Inside “Putin’s Brain”: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin (2022)

George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (McClelland & Stewart, 1965)

Cadell Last and O.G. Rose, eds., Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity (Philosophy Portal Books, 2026)

Abstract

A direct sequel to “Philosophy & Religion after Habermas,” this essay applies György Lukács’s diagnostic method from The Destruction of Reason to the present emergency of American imperial expansion and the threat to Canadian sovereignty. Where the Habermas essay traced the recurring philosophical pattern — the move to posit a mystical, cosmic, or divine depth beneath rational discourse, and the political catastrophes that follow when specific communities claim privileged access to it — this essay asks the harder question: how that pattern reproduces itself in the lives of millions of people, and why the dominant intellectual formations of both the contemporary right and left are structurally unable to resist or stop it.

The essay begins with John Ralston Saul’s March 2026 address on the unbroken line of American imperial violence and the normalization technique being deployed against Canadian sovereignty. Saul’s historical argument — that forty years of continental integration have systematically dismantled Canada’s east-west economic spine and left the country exposed to annexationist pressure — provides the political and institutional ground the diagnostic requires. But Saul’s framework stops at the political surface. It does not explain why American imperial violence keeps arriving dressed in the language of divine mission and sacred fury, or why it can mobilize mass spiritual allegiance to what is ultimately an imperial project.

That explanation requires two moves. The first is a constitutional contrast between American possessive individualism and Canadian communal stewardship — drawing on Macpherson, Tocqueville, and Saul — to show why the United States is structurally more vulnerable to irrationalist political formations than societies built on different philosophical foundations. The American constitutional philosophy of individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness creates a spiritual vacuum that irrationalist formations — from the evangelical Great Awakenings through nativist and white supremacist movements to the culture wars and MAGA — have filled cyclically with the promise of sacred belonging and divine national destiny. The Canadian constitutional tradition of peace, welfare, and good government encodes a different philosophical anthropology: community as the condition of human flourishing rather than the constraint on individual aspiration.

Lukács's concept of indirect apologetics — the mechanism by which irrationalist philosophy makes political catastrophe available regardless of anyone's intentions — is recovered as the diagnostic instrument that survives the book's Stalinist limitations. Daniel Tutt's sustained engagement with Lukács, including his interview with John Bellamy Foster for Historical Materialism, is credited as the work making this diagnostic newly urgent.

The diagnostic is then applied across six contemporary formations, traced through two genealogies. The first runs through twentieth-century Catholic theology: from Sarah Shortall's history of the nouvelle théologie, through Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy, to the Catholic Integralists now in the White House. Žižek's Christian atheism and Peter Rollins's pyrotheology are examined as the left expression of the same structural logic — formally atheist but structurally theological, positioning democratic accountability as a derivative rather than foundational. The Peterson-Žižek debate of April 2019 is read as the point where the convergence became publicly legible. Finally, the Tutt-Cutrone debate — conducted on Tutt's Emancipations podcast, with Cadell Last's Philosophy Portal serving as a wider node in the conversation — is examined as the most consequential exchange currently taking place on the Marxist left about whether the Lacanian ontological frame or the Lukácsian historical method provides the adequate diagnostic architecture for the present emergency.

The second genealogy traces the vitalist and process lineage running from Bergson through Whitehead through Gebser into the spiritual marketplace, and from there into the two integral formations that inherit it: the California Institute of Integral Studies and the process-relational tradition associated with it, and Ken Wilber’s integral theory. These movements and sociological formations are examined as the most ambitious attempts in the Anglophone world to hold contemplative depth and rational accountability together — and therefore the formations whose failure in the present emergency is most consequential. Wilber’s sustained endorsement of Andrew Cohen and Marc Gafni is read not as an accident but as a structural consequence of the nondual position overriding the post-metaphysical corrective.

The essay concludes on a constructive project. Drawing on Jacques Maritain’s integral humanism, the Canadian critical theology tradition of Charles Davis and Gregory Baum as documented by Marc Lalonde, Armour’s philosophic federalism, and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, it articulates a post-metaphysical alternative capable of carrying genuine contemplative depth into the democratic norms and procedures of justice where democratic life actually takes place — rather than holding it above that space as a sacred reserve exempt from accountability. The Canadian speculative philosophical tradition — with its founding commitment to peace, welfare, and good government, its philosophical anthropology of community over possessive individualism, and its century-long inquiry into how diverse communities hold themselves together without domination — is argued to be not merely a historical inheritance but a live philosophical resource adequate to the present emergency: one that could, if clearly articulated, demonstrate to the world that a democratic federation built on stewardship rather than power, on community rather than the sovereign individual, has resources for holding contemplative depth and democratic accountability together that the dominant formations of both the right and the left have failed to provide.

Tags: Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, Indirect Apologetics, Irrationalism, Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, Democratic Norms, Justice, John Ralston Saul, Canadian Sovereignty, Canadian Philosophy, Possessive Individualism, C.B. Macpherson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Constitutional Philosophy, Leslie Armour, Philosophic Federalism, George Grant, Harold Innis, Ken Wilber, Integral Theory, AQAL, Pre/Trans Fallacy, Andrew Cohen, Marc Gafni, California Institute of Integral Studies, CIIS, Haridas Chaudhuri, Sri Aurobindo, Alan Watts, Matt Segall, Process Philosophy, Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Jean Gebser, Jeremy Johnson, Spiritual Marketplace, Meaning Crisis, John Vervaeke, Sarah Shortall, Nouvelle Théologie, Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank, Catholic Integralism, Patrick Deneen, JD Vance, Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Charles Davis, Gregory Baum, Marc Lalonde, Concordia University, Critical Theology, Slavoj Žižek, Christian Atheism, Peter Rollins, Pyrotheology, Lacanian Real, Jordan Peterson, Daniel Tutt, Chris Cutrone, Cadell Last, Philosophy Portal, Marxism, Frankfurt School, Trumpism, MAGA, Monroe Doctrine, Canadian Speculative Philosophy, Sean McGrath, German Idealism, Schelling, Heidegger, Fichte, Volksgeist, Kyoto School, Michael Brooks, Matthew McManus, Postmodern Conservatism, Nietzsche, McMindfulness, Enzo Traverso, Richard Tarnas, Brian Mulroney, Free Trade Agreement, John Turner, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, Robert Baldwin

I. Mysticism, Irrationalism, & the Present Emergency

This essay is a direct sequel to “Philosophy & Religion after Habermas: From Zen Buddhism to Post-Metaphysical Theology,” published on March 17, 2026. That essay traced a recurring structural pattern across the history of Western philosophy: the postulation of a cosmic, mystical, or divine depth beneath the reach of rational discourse, and the political catastrophes that follow when specific communities claim privileged access to it. Habermas spent his intellectual life resisting that move. The essay concluded by pressing the hardest version of his argument against Ken Wilber’s integral theory, and left the central question deliberately open.

But there was something the Habermas essay kept circling without being able to grasp directly — the question of how the philosophical pattern it traced actually reproduces itself in the lives of millions of people. Not at the level where Fichte posits a Volksgeist and Heidegger reaches for Being, but at the level where millions of people interpret their suffering through frameworks of spiritual longing and sacred national destiny rather than through frameworks of democratic demand and institutional accountability — where the escape from that suffering is offered through divine realization and striving rather than through the political transformation of the conditions producing it. The philosophical pattern the Habermas essay traced needed a different instrument — one that could track the same structural logic from the seminar room to the megachurch, from Schelling’s late metaphysics to the prosperity gospel preacher telling a working-class congregation that their poverty is a spiritual trial rather than a consequence of economic policy.

That instrument is Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason — completed in 1952, first published in German in 1954, translated by Merlin Press in 1980, and reissued by Verso in 2021 with a historical introduction by Enzo Traverso. It is a nine-hundred-page polemic tracing what Lukács calls “Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy”: the post-Hegelian tradition running from Schelling’s late turn after 1848 through Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, and the broader currents of vitalism and life-philosophy, arriving at Heidegger. Lukács’s argument is not that these philosophers consciously prepared the ground for fascism. It is that their frameworks shared a structural logic — the systematic elevation of intuition, myth, and divine depth over rational critique; an aristocratic epistemology reserving genuine insight for the initiated few; the cultivation of national, spiritual, and cosmic myths that fill the space left by the abandonment of reason — and that this logic made fascism philosophically available regardless of anyone’s intentions. This is what Lukács means by indirect apologetics: not conspiracy but structural consequence. Bergson’s philosophy of morality and history did not lead to fascist conclusions — but without falsifying Bergson’s philosophy, as Lukács put it, Mussolini was able to develop a fascist ideology out of it. That National Socialism was not to the personal taste of Spengler no more exculpates him than it does Bergson. The philosopher may not intend the political consequence. But the structural logic of the framework makes it available, and once available, it can be used.

It is also the most contested thing Lukács ever wrote. The book’s Stalinist framework — the confident assignment of the Soviet Union as the apex of rational historical development — produces real distortions. The treatment of Schelling misses genuine philosophical importance. Some of the accusations against Wittgenstein and the pragmatists are indefensible. Daniel Tutt, whose sustained engagement with Lukács through his online seminars, his Emancipations podcast, and Tutt’s interview with John Bellamy Foster for Historical Materialism had been shaping my thinking for some time, has given the fullest honest account of these limitations. What survives them is not a comprehensive theory of intellectual history but a diagnostic method: the capacity to identify structural convergence across apparently disparate formations — philosophical, theological, cultural, popular — and name the consequences for democratic norms and justice when that convergence erodes the conditions under which rational public discourse can function.

Lukács was in the background the entire time I was writing on Habermas. I could feel the weight of it pressing against the edges of the essay, but the piece was already enormous and I made the decision to hold Lukács for a separate treatment. The philosophical argument alone was not enough. It needed a specific historical and political ground — something that could show the irrationalist formation not as an intellectual genealogy but as a live threat operating on actual democratic institutions in real time.

In March, 2026, John Ralston Saul stepped to a podium in a Toronto church and provided that ground. Addressing the Compassionate Justice Speakers Series, Saul delivered what I had not found in any purely philosophical account of the present crisis. He gave a historically grounded, institutionally precise analysis of the unbroken line of American imperial violence, the forty years of continental integration that had systematically dismantled Canada’s east-west spine, and the normalization technique now being deployed against Canadian sovereignty: the casual, repetitive invocation of Canada’s non-existence until the idea no longer registers as outrageous.

By the time Saul spoke, the emergency was already operational. In January 2026, the United States had launched strikes on Venezuela and installed a puppet regime, threatened Greenland with military force, codified the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine — the explicit claim that the entire Western Hemisphere is an American sphere of dominion — as national security strategy, and imposed an oil blockade on Cuba that the New York Times called the first effective American blockade of the island since the Cuban Missile Crisis, pushing the country toward humanitarian collapse while Trump declared he would have “the honor of taking Cuba” and proposed what he called a “friendly takeover.” It was bombing Iran in its largest Middle Eastern military operation since Iraq under the name “Operation Epic Fury” — language drawn not from military planning but from the vocabulary of sacred national destiny: the fury of a divinely authorized people carrying out what they understand as God’s work. And it was telling Canada, with increasing seriousness, that it should become the 51st state. Former US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder put it plainly: under Trump, the rules-based international order has effectively ceased to exist. The normalization Saul was diagnosing was not an isolated provocation but one front in a hemispheric imperial project.

Saul shows you the unbroken line of American imperial violence and the forty years of continental integration that left Canada exposed to it. What he does not show — because it is outside his analytical scope — is why that violence keeps arriving dressed in the language of divine mission and sacred fury, why it can mobilize mass spiritual allegiance to what is ultimately an imperial project, and why the dominant intellectual formations of both the contemporary right and the academic left are structurally unable to resist or stop it. That is where Lukács becomes indispensable — and where the present essay begins its diagnostic work.

II. Democracy on the Line

is not well known in the United States, and that fact is itself part of the problem this essay is diagnosing. Born in Ottawa in 1947, the son of a D-Day veteran, Saul earned his PhD at King’s College London on civil-military relations in post-Algerian War France, then spent years in the oil industry and intelligence world before turning to writing. His philosophical trilogy — Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), The Doubter’s Companion (1994), and The Unconscious Civilization (1995, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award and originated as his Massey Lectures) — established him as the most sustained diagnostician of the crisis of democratic reason produced by any Canadian thinker. He served as International President of PEN from 2009 to 2015 — the first Canadian to hold the position — championing freedom of expression and endangered languages. He co-founded the Institute for Canadian Citizenship and the LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures, both designed to cultivate the active democratic citizenship his philosophical work argues cannot be taken for granted. He is married to Adrienne Clarkson, who served as Governor General of Canada from 1999 to 2005. He has been, for four decades, the public intellectual who has insisted most persistently that Canada does not know what it is — and that this ignorance is existentially dangerous.

The core of Saul’s March, 2026 address is a claim most Canadians have never heard clearly stated: that Canada is the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world, and that it does not know this about itself. The country has been told for so long that it is young, derivative, still getting going, that the actual historical foundation — March 11, 1848, when Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine and Robert Baldwin, a Montrealer and a Torontonian, formed the Great Ministry that worked through riots and the burning of parliament buildings to establish what Saul argues are still the humanist foundations of modern Canada — has been simply erased from the story. Not argued away, not contested on the merits, but absent: replaced by frameworks of interest groups and trade-offs that have no room for the claim that a country was founded on humanist and ethical forms of leadership.

This is not the first time Saul has made this argument — he has been building it across four decades and multiple registers. Voltaire’s Bastards (1992) traced how the Enlightenment promise of reason-as-liberation was perverted into reason-as-management across Western institutions: the military, the corporation, the professions, the bureaucracy. The Unconscious Civilization (1995) gave the thesis its most concentrated form, diagnosing what Saul calls corporatism: the capture of democratic life by organized interest groups — commercial, professional, administrative — which reduce citizens from active democratic participants to passive functionaries within institutional structures. Saul’s argument is not that a conspiracy runs the system. It is that corporatism produces a kind of civic unconsciousness — a state in which individuals are, as he puts it, “relieved of personal, disinterested responsibility” for their society, going through the motions of democratic participation while the substantive decisions about how their world is organized have been transferred to managerial and technocratic systems that operate according to their own logics. The civilization becomes unable to see what has been done to it, because the very capacity for critical civic consciousness — the ability to step outside the corporatist structure and ask whether it serves human flourishing — has been hollowed out. A Fair Country (2008) extended the argument into Canadian specificity, insisting that Canada is fundamentally a Métis society built on the encounter of Indigenous, Francophone, and Anglophone traditions, and that the Indigenous philosophical foundations of Canadian political culture are not peripheral but constitutive. The institutional work — the LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures, the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, a decade as PEN International president — expresses a conviction Saul shares with Habermas: that democratic traditions do not sustain themselves but require the active, ongoing cultivation of the institutions through which democratic life becomes possible and reproducible. The convergence between their projects has not been adequately named in the scholarship on either figure, and it is deeper than shared conclusions. Both diagnosed the same pathology from entirely different intellectual traditions and different continents: the hollowing out of democratic substance by systems that claim rational legitimacy while systematically excluding the substantive judgment that gives democratic frameworks their meaning. What Habermas called the colonization of the lifeworld by system imperatives — the displacement of communicative reason by market and administrative logics — is structurally identical to what Saul called corporatism: the capture of the democratic public sphere by organized interest groups whose internal rationality serves institutional perpetuation rather than human flourishing. Habermas’s insistence that the public sphere must remain the space where democratic norms are contested and renewed is Saul’s insistence that citizens must remain active participants in governance rather than passive consumers of managerial decisions — stated in different philosophical vocabularies but converging on the same non-negotiable claim: that democracy is a practice requiring continuous institutional cultivation, not a stable achievement that maintains itself. That two thinkers of this calibre, working independently from Frankfurt and from Toronto, arrived at the same structural diagnosis through such different intellectual routes is itself evidence of the diagnosis’s validity.

The Normalization Technique and the Forty-Year Surrender

Building on the La Fontaine-Baldwin foundation, Saul addressed the existential threat posed by the Trump administration’s annexationist rhetoric. He contends that the repeated suggestions of Canada’s non-existence are not mere outbursts but a calculated normalization technique. By constantly invoking these ideas, the notion that Canada should cease to exist eventually becomes something people stop reacting to. And Canada is not the only target. The same administration that tells Canadians they should become the 51st state has captured the president of Venezuela and installed a puppet regime, threatened Greenland with military force, imposed an oil blockade on Cuba while declaring his intention to “take” the island, and codified the claim that the entire Western Hemisphere is an American sphere of dominion. The annexation threat against Canada is not an isolated provocation — it is one expression of a hemispheric imperial project that has dispensed with even the procedural pretence of international law.

The weight of Saul’s address lies in his exposure of a persistent historical trajectory: an unbroken continuity of American imperial aggression and violence. He cites the 1847-48 seizure of half of Mexico’s territory, the 1914 incursions, and dozens of twentieth-century interventions across Latin America where supporting coups and enforcing government transitions became standard policy rather than anomaly. Beneath these geopolitical actions lies a deeper trajectory: the enduring impact of the slave economy and the Civil War — a conflict resulting in 700,000 fatalities and 1.5 million casualties — within a society where even the Northeast was economically dependent on slave-labor products. Saul argues that the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction and the institutionalization of segregation were essentially the reinvention of slavery, a cycle only challenged by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. This four-hundred-year history of foundational violence has never been fully resolved; it merely retreats from view when political necessity dictates, only to reappear when social structures begin to fracture.

Saul also addressed — and this was the sharpest passage of the lecture — how Canada arrived at its current dependency. The east-west economic and cultural infrastructure that once gave Canada its independent character was systematically dismantled. Walter Gordon’s 1963 budget attempted to make Canada function as an economically independent country; Bay Street mobilized against it until Lester Pearson caved. Gordon — one of the greatest political figures of post-war Canada in Saul’s estimation — was destroyed. Trudeau tried again in 1973 with the “third option,” diversifying trade away from the United States; it found no mainstream business or academic support. And then came 1988 — what Canadians still call the Free Trade Election, and what Saul insists was really a referendum on continental economic integration and the surrender of the east-west spine that had given Canada its independent character. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had negotiated a comprehensive free trade agreement with the Reagan administration and staked his re-election on it. Liberal leader John Turner, in a televised debate that remains one of the most watched moments in Canadian political history, accused Mulroney of selling out the country: “With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us, I am sure, to a colony of the United States, because when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow.” A majority of Canadian voters agreed — more Canadians voted for anti-free-trade parties than for Mulroney’s Conservatives. But the opposition vote split between the Liberals and the NDP, and Mulroney won a second consecutive majority government with 43 percent of the vote and 169 seats. The free trade agreement came into effect on January 1, 1989, expanded to include Mexico as NAFTA in 1994, and Canada spent the next forty years reorienting every industry, every career path, every elite aspiration toward the American market — until the entire structure of economic and intellectual life ran north-south rather than east-west. And then Trump weaponized the dependency. In February 2025, he imposed sweeping 25 percent tariffs on most Canadian imports and 10 percent on energy, invoking emergency economic powers never before used for trade policy, on the fraudulent pretext that Canada was a fentanyl corridor — when US Customs agents had seized a total of 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border in the previous fiscal year, compared to 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border. Canada retaliated with tariffs on $155 billion of American goods. The trade war escalated through 2025 — steel tariffs doubled, automobile tariffs hit the integrated continental supply chain, softwood lumber duties reached 35 percent — and by early 2026, Trump was threatening tariffs of 50 percent on all Canadian goods, blocking the opening of the new Gordie Howe International Bridge, and cancelling trade negotiations after the Ontario government ran a public service announcement featuring Ronald Reagan’s own words warning against protectionism. The US House of Representatives voted to repeal the tariffs. Trump ignored the vote. The roughly $700 billion annual bilateral trade relationship — the largest in the world — entered its most volatile period in decades, and every Canadian who had built a career, a business, or an institutional life on the assumption that the American market would remain open discovered what Turner had warned about in 1988: when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow.

Saul’s closing argument draws the consequence. The call for Canadians to pivot and diversify — to rebuild the east-west economic spine that forty years of continental integration dismantled, to reconstruct the transportation, energy, and industrial infrastructure that once gave Canada its independent character — is not a strategic trade adjustment. It is a generational project requiring the kind of nation-building ambition that has been absent from Canadian politics since the Trudeau-era National Energy Program. What is required is not merely new trade agreements but the reconstruction of sovereign economic capacity: east-west rail and port infrastructure, domestic supply chains for critical minerals, a national energy strategy that treats Canadian oil and gas as a strategic asset to be developed for Canadian benefit rather than exported raw to the nearest American refinery — and, at the limit, the willingness to consider the re-nationalization of energy infrastructure that previous generations understood as a condition of sovereignty rather than an ideological extravagance. The Carney government has begun the military dimension of this project — reaching the NATO 2 percent of GDP defence spending target for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, committing over $81 billion over five years, launching NORAD modernization, and beginning to build the Arctic infrastructure and domestic defence industrial base that decades of American dependency had rendered unnecessary. The philosophical question Saul was pressing — whether Canadians can articulate what their country is well enough to defend it — has found at least a partial institutional answer in the defence buildup.

What remains conspicuously absent is a left that can hold the sovereignty question and the social justice question together. The NDP — the party of Tommy Douglas and the CCF, the party that once understood that national sovereignty and social democracy were inseparable — collapsed to six seats in the April 2025 election, its worst result in history, after running a campaign that its own internal review described as failing to respond to voters’ primary preoccupation: Trump, the tariffs, and threats to Canadian sovereignty. Its platform was assessed by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy as largely absent on “major national infrastructure, security and defence” and on the “macro level economic actions to incent sustainability and resilience.” The party that should have been arguing most forcefully for the re-nationalization of strategic industries, for sovereign energy policy, for the east-west infrastructure that would reduce American dependency — the party whose founding tradition understood that economic sovereignty is the precondition of the social programs it claims to defend — was nowhere on the question that defined the moment. The NDP’s silence on sovereignty is itself evidence of the Lukácsian diagnostic: a left that has lost the capacity to connect its analysis of economic injustice to the institutional and infrastructural conditions that make democratic self-governance possible.

Canadians must be present in the streets, visible to their MPs, active in the public square. They must be, as Saul put it, calm, determined, and firm in public. Because what is at stake is not a trade dispute. It is whether this country continues to exist as a sovereign democratic federation grounded in the principle of peace, welfare, and good government — and whether the philosophical traditions that built it can be articulated clearly enough to make that existence non-negotiable.

The historical record Saul assembles is devastating. But it stops at the political and economic surface — and this is not a criticism, simply the limit of his analytical scope. He identifies the unbroken line of violence, the corporate capture of democratic citizenship, the normalization technique being used against Canadian sovereignty. What he does not do is explain why the United States is so chronically susceptible to irrationalist political formations in the first place — why Trumpism arrives dressed in the language of divine mission and sacred national destiny, why it is able to mobilize mass spiritual allegiance to what is ultimately an imperial project. That requires two moves Saul’s framework does not make: the constitutional contrast that reveals the structural susceptibility, and the Lukácsian diagnostic method that names what fills the void.

III. Possessive Individualism and the Politics of Sacred Destiny

The constitutional contrast is the place to begin the philosophical analysis, because it reveals the structural susceptibility at its most fundamental level. The Declaration of Independence grounds American political life in “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The British North America (BNA) Act grounds Canadian political life in “peace, order, and good government.” Saul has pointed out, across his body of work, that the original pre-BNA formulations actually read “peace, welfare, and good government” — the well-being of the citizenry was the founding intention before it was bureaucratized into the more neutral “order.” But even in its bureaucratized form, the Canadian constitutional tradition encodes a fundamentally different philosophical anthropology than the American one.

The American formulation centres the individual and individual aspiration. Happiness is something each person pursues according to their own conception of it, protected from interference by the state and by other individuals. Liberty is primarily liberty from — from constraint, from collective obligation, from the demands of community. This is the possessive individualism that C.B. Macpherson traced in the liberal tradition, and Alexis de Tocqueville already diagnosed its paradox in the 1830s: radical individualism atomizes citizens, and atomized citizens become spiritually hungry. They lose the communal traditions, the civic associations, the shared moral frameworks that give life its meaning and belonging. And into that spiritual hunger — that vacuum left by the evacuation of genuine democratic community — the irrationalist formation moves. Divine revelation, national destiny, the promise of sacred belonging to a chosen people or a blessed nation: these provide exactly what individualism destroys and cannot replace from within its own philosophical resources. The appeal to God and cosmic meaning fills the void that “the pursuit of happiness” opens and cannot close.

The Canadian formulation centres the community and collective governance. Peace is a shared condition requiring active maintenance. Order is not mere conformity but the institutional framework within which diverse communities can coexist without domination. Good government is stewardship — governance oriented toward the common good rather than the protection of individual liberty from collective obligation. This is not a perfect tradition, and Saul has been more honest than most about where it has failed: the suppression of Indigenous peoples, the treatment of French Canadians, the betrayals of the 1988 free trade integration. But the philosophical anthropology it encodes is structurally different. It does not create the same spiritual vacuum. It does not generate the same hunger for divine authorization of political life, because it does not begin from the premise that individuals are sovereign atoms whose only legitimate political relationship is the protection of individual liberty from collective obligation. It begins from the premise that community is the condition of human flourishing — a premise that has Indigenous philosophical roots, as Saul argued in A Fair Country, that predates Confederation.

The mechanism that Habermas identified as the colonization of the lifeworld operates differently in a society built on possessive individualism than in one built on communal stewardship. When communicative rationality is hollowed out by market and administrative logics in the American context, citizens do not become neutral secular individuals. They become atomized individuals stripped of the communal and civic traditions that once gave their lives meaning — and therefore available for the irrationalist formation in ways that a more communitarian tradition is not.

What gets weaponized politically in this condition is the promise of divine revelation — the claim that God, the Absolute, the national spirit, the sacred community has spoken, and that certain people have privileged access to that metaphysical knowledge. When workers are told that their suffering has redemptive spiritual meaning, that their national or ethnic or religious identity connects them to something sacred and transcendent, that their real enemy is the cosmopolitan financier or the godless liberal rather than the system that actually generates their conditions of life — the appeal to God and national destiny has performed a specific political function. It has replaced solidarity with spirituality, economic demand with spiritual belonging, class consciousness with mysticism.

This mechanism is not unique to America, but the American constitutional philosophy of individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness makes the United States structurally more vulnerable to it than societies built on different philosophical foundations. It is why American political culture cycles through irrationalist formations with a regularity and intensity that has no real parallel in the Canadian political tradition — from the Great Awakenings that periodically swept evangelical Protestantism into the political sphere, through the nativist Know-Nothing movement, through the Klan’s fusion of racial terror with Protestant revivalism, through McCarthyism’s anti-communist crusade, through the culture wars that reorganized American politics around mythologized moral absolutes, to the Q-adjacent cosmologies now circulating in the MAGA movement. Each formation is historically distinct. What they share is a structural logic: the substitution of sacred belonging for democratic solidarity, and the promise that divine or national destiny will deliver what political organizing and institutional accountability have failed to provide. It is why MAGA could mobilize a mass movement around a billionaire real estate developer by giving him the aura of divine mission and national destiny. And it is why the annexation threat against Canada is not simply a policy position but a theologically inflected imperial claim: God, liberty, and destiny require the completion of the American project. This is the formation Lukács was diagnosing — not as an American peculiarity but as the political expression of irrationalism at the imperialist stage of capitalism, surfacing when the procedural constraints weaken and the cultural infrastructure of mystical substitution is already in place.

IV. Georg Lukács and the Destruction of Reason

György Lukács (1885–1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, widely regarded as the founder of the Western Marxist tradition. Born into a Jewish banking family ennobled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he lived through two world wars, a brief tenure as Hungary’s People’s Commissar for Education during the 1919 Soviet Republic, years in Stalinist Moscow, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and subsequent Soviet house arrest. He was a philosopher who had lived inside the catastrophes he was diagnosing.

History and Class Consciousness (1923), his most celebrated work, developed the concept of reification — the way the commodity form structures not just economic relations but the very form of objectivity through which people experience the world — and had enormous influence on the Frankfurt School. Habermas engaged directly with it in The Theory of Communicative Action, crediting it as a foundational contribution while arguing it remained trapped within the philosophy of consciousness, unable to account adequately for the intersubjective and communicative dimensions of social life. The Young Hegel (1948) was a major contribution to Hegel scholarship. The late Ontology of Social Being attempted to ground Marxist theory on irreducible levels of being — material, biological, social — without the reductive materialism of Soviet orthodoxy.

But the work that concerns this essay — introduced at length above — is The Destruction of Reason. It is the most contested thing Lukács wrote, the work his admirers most often wish he hadn’t, and the one that Tutt’s work has been making newly urgent.

The book’s stated purpose is tracing “Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy.” Its argument is that the post-Hegelian philosophical tradition — beginning with Schelling’s late turn after 1848, running through Schopenhauer, through Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, through Nietzsche’s aristocratic vitalism, through Bergson’s life-philosophy and the broader irrationalist currents of neo-Kantianism, to Heidegger’s Being — constitutes a structurally coherent development of what Lukács calls irrationalism: the systematic disparagement of reason and rational critique; the uncritical glorification of intuition, myth, will, and instinct; an aristocratic epistemology that reserves genuine insight for the initiated few; the rejection of historical progress; and the cultivation of myths — national, spiritual, biological, cosmic — that fill the space left by the abandonment of rational critique.

What Lukács shows — and what is most directly relevant to Saul’s argument — is the specific political mechanism by which irrationalist philosophy connects to political catastrophe. It is not that philosophers consciously prepared the ground for Hitler. It is that when philosophy elevates myth, intuition, and divine depth over rational critique, and when that elevation enters the cultural atmosphere, it provides the intellectual and spiritual infrastructure for a very specific political maneuver: the replacement of class solidarity with mysticism, of economic demand with national or cosmic destiny, of democratic accountability with deference to divine authority. Workers who might otherwise demand decent wages, political representation, and institutional change are instead offered sacred meaning — membership in a chosen people, a destined nation, a cosmic order — and the demand for justice dissolves into spiritual aspiration. The ruling class benefits from this substitution without necessarily engineering it. The irrationalist formation provides the cultural condition. History provides the political vehicle.

This is what Lukács means by indirect apologetics — not that Nietzsche or Schelling or Heidegger intended to enable fascism, but that the structural logic of their frameworks made it available. The diagnostic instrument that survives the book’s Stalinist framework is this: apparently disparate cultural, mystical, and philosophical formations can share a structural logic that systematically undermines the democratic norms — the space between facts and norms, as Habermas would put it — through which justice is pursued and political accountability maintained, regardless of the intentions of individual actors within those formations.

What survives the book’s limitations is the capacity to trace structural convergence across formations that appear unrelated and identify how that convergence dissolves the normative foundations on which democratic justice depends. Applied to the American formation in 2026, through Saul’s historical argument about the unbroken line of violence, this method yields a diagnosis considerably more alarming than either Habermas’s procedural critique or Saul’s institutional analysis can provide alone.

V. Postmodern Theology and Its Failures

The first application of the Lukácsian diagnostic to the contemporary landscape begins not with the vitalist and process formations Lukács himself analysed — those will come — but with a genealogy he could not have traced, because it was still taking shape as he wrote: the twentieth-century Catholic theological revolution and its unexpected political descendants. Sarah Shortall’s Soldiers of God in a Secular World provides the indispensable map.

Shortall’s central argument, developed through her history of the twentieth-century French Catholic theological renaissance, is that the forced exile of the Jesuits under the Ferry Decrees of 1880 had a productive rather than destructive effect on Catholic thought. The Jersey exiles — Henri de Lubac, Gaston Fessard, Yves de Montcheuil among them — developed, in conditions of intellectual isolation from both ecclesiastical control and French mainstream culture, a critical theological project that was simultaneously a counter-politics: addressing fascism, human rights, and the collapse of secular modernity by retrieving the resources of patristic and medieval theology rather than accommodating to Enlightenment frameworks. This movement — the nouvelle théologie or ressourcement — reached its institutional apex at Vatican II.

What Shortall’s epilogue demonstrates is that this same theological lineage branched after Vatican II into formations that appear opposed but share a common genealogy. Gustavo Gutiérrez and the liberation theologians drew on de Lubac to value human action in history and the building of a just society. John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy movement drew on the same de Lubac — and on the same patristic ressourcement — to develop a sophisticated postmodern theological critique of secular modernity, arguing that secular reason itself is a heretical theological position and that genuine justice requires the recovery of Augustinian participatory ontology. And a third branch extended into what Shortall calls the “theological turn” of contemporary continental philosophy — the newfound interest in Paul among leftist philosophers like Badiou, Žižek, and Agamben, who share with Catholic antimodernism a deep suspicion of Enlightenment universal reason and historical progress.

All three formations — liberation theology, Radical Orthodoxy, and the theological turn of the academic left — emerge from the same mid-twentieth-century Catholic intellectual revolution. All three represent what can properly be called postmodern theology: the deployment of pre-modern and patristic theological resources against the alleged failures of secular Enlightenment rationalism. And all three posit a theological or quasi-theological depth — divine revelation and participatory ontology, the grace of God preceding and exceeding rational justification, the Pauline Event — that secular public reason cannot reach and cannot correct.

The political trajectory from this shared genealogy to the present requires careful tracing, because the formations that emerge from it are distinct even as they share a common root.

It is crucial to be precise about who is and who is not a Catholic integralist. Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy is not Catholic integralism in the technical sense. Catholic integralism proper — the position of Deneen, Vermeule, and Vance — is a more recent and specifically American political theology that has drawn on, but is not identical to, Milbank’s project. The political trajectory running from the nouvelle théologie through Radical Orthodoxy to the Catholic Integralists now in the White House is real and traceable.

’s The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism (2020) provides the political genealogy that makes this trajectory legible. McManus argues that the postmodern epoch has produced a distinctly new form of conservative politics — one that relies on alienation and resentment rather than rational argument, deploying appeals to tradition and identity in place of the rational standards for adjudicating facts and values that both classical liberalism and democratic socialism presupposed. What McManus documents is not merely a political strategy but a structural condition: when the postmodern left abandons universal rational standards (the Habermasian performative contradiction), the cultural space that opens is filled by formations that weaponize tradition, hierarchy, and sacred belonging for reactionary ends. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is the most sophisticated philosophical expression of this formation — a sustained argument that liberalism is not merely flawed but constitutively self-undermining, and that its failure requires the recovery of pre-liberal communal life rooted in Christian civilization. As I argued in “Beyond the Master Signifier,” drawing on McManus’s framework, the postmodern conservative pattern operates across registers: from Peterson’s mass-cultural mythological retrieval through Deneen’s academic critique of liberalism to the Catholic integralists who now occupy positions in the White House. Each retrieves pre-modern resources — Jungian archetypes, Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue, Augustinian political theology — without the post-metaphysical means to test those retrievals against the democratic norms they claim to serve.

What Milbank’s postmodern theology provides — intentionally or not — is the philosophical infrastructure that makes a Catholic integralist politics feel like it has genuine theological depth rather than mere political ambition. When Vance frames his politics in terms of the restoration of a social order rooted in Christian civilization, he is drawing on a postmodern theological tradition that has spent thirty years arguing, in the most sophisticated academic vocabulary available, that secular liberal democracy is itself a theological heresy. That argument did not produce Vance. But it built the intellectual road he walks on.

Sean McGrath’s Secular Christ podcast — which I engaged at length in “The Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge” — diagnoses this vacuum from the contemplative side with a precision none of the formations traced above can match. McGrath’s Episode 3, a sustained critique of Peterson’s archetypal reading of Christianity, insists that “Christ is not an archetype” — that the contemplative Christian tradition offers something Peterson’s Jungian retrieval cannot: not “rules for life” but the radical grace of a self that cannot help itself, a transformation that begins precisely where self-help ideology breaks down. His Episode 4 takes on Žižek’s “gnostic” Christian atheism, identifying with equal precision what Žižek’s Lacanian framework refuses to follow to its contemplative conclusion. McGrath was already diagnosing, from within the Western contemplative tradition, the same structural pattern McManus documents from political theory and this essay traces through Lukács: the irrationalist formation fills the vacuum that democratic reason’s self-inflicted collapse has opened, and neither the mythological right nor the dialectical left can close it.

The Žižekian Left: Christian Atheism and Pyrotheology

On the left, the Žižekian-Lacanian framework shares the structural feature Lukács identified, and shares the postmodern theological genealogy Shortall traces — but it has developed, over the past two decades, into a theological project of its own that makes the irrationalist structural logic most visible. Žižek’s sustained engagement with Paul — the Event, the rupture that exceeds ordinary historical causation, the moment of grace that cannot be deduced from prior conditions — is not a strategic deployment of theological vocabulary. It is a genuine intellectual inheritance from the same mid-twentieth century theological revolution, now filtered through Lacan and Hegel rather than through Augustinian ressourcement. The Lacanian Real functions politically in exactly the same structural position as divine revelation on the right: a depth beneath rational discourse that cannot be submitted to democratic deliberation without being falsified.

Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (2024) — Žižek’s most extended theological work — makes this structural logic explicit. The argument is that the only authentic path to atheism runs through Christianity: that Christ’s cry of abandonment on the cross — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — is not merely a moment of doubt but the moment in which God himself becomes an atheist, abdicating his own sovereignty and leaving an egalitarian community of believers thrown into radical freedom without a transcendent guarantor. What Žižek calls Christian atheism retains the Event structure of Pauline theology while emptying it of its transcendent referent: the death of God is real, the Holy Spirit is transposed onto the human community, and what remains is an emancipatory collective that must act without any “big Other” to underwrite its commitments. Walking in the path of Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, and the death-of-God theologians like Thomas Altizer, Žižek presents this as radical materialism. What the Lukácsian instrument identifies is the irrationalist structural signature: the insistence that genuine political transformation requires passage through a theological register — that secular democratic reason is insufficient, that the Pauline Event exceeds what communicative rationality can process, that something must rupture the symbolic order from a depth it cannot contain. The framework is formally atheist but structurally theological, and the political consequence is the same: democratic accountability is positioned as derivative rather than foundational.

The reception of Žižek’s theological project has been consequential. Peter Rollins — the Belfast-born philosopher whose work draws directly on Žižek, Lacan, and Hegel — has developed what he calls pyrotheology: a “religionless” interpretation of Christianity that views faith not as a set of beliefs about the world but as a particular way of engaging with the world, centered on the experience of God’s absence rather than God’s presence. Rollins’s project — developed across Insurrection (2011), The Idolatry of God (2013), and The Divine Magician (2017), and performed through experimental communities and festivals — takes Žižek’s Christian atheism and builds from it a practice: a liturgy of lack, a communal confrontation with the void at the center of the sacred. The influence has been reciprocal; Žižek’s own work on radical theology has drawn on the Durruti phrase — “the only church that illuminates is a burning church” — that gives pyrotheology its name. What Rollins demonstrates is that Žižek’s theological framework is not merely a theoretical curiosity. It is producing communities, practices, and formations — what Rollins explicitly calls “subversive community freed from contemporary ideology” — that reproduce in a left register the same structural move the vitalist and integralist formations reproduce on the right: a depth posited beyond democratic deliberation, exempt from accountability, and offered as the ground on which genuine community can be built — as though the space between facts and norms where democratic life actually takes place were not deep enough.

The Convergence Made Visible

The convergence of Milbank and Žižek — which their dialogue in The Monstrosity of Christ (2009) made briefly visible before both retreated from it — is the structural signature of the contemporary irrationalist formation in its most philosophically sophisticated academic expression. Both refuse the Habermasian post-metaphysical threshold. Both treat democratic deliberation as philosophically insufficient — as unable to reach the divine revelation or ontological depth that genuine human flourishing or genuine political transformation requires. Both posit something sacred or quasi-sacred that must remain prior to the forum of public reason. And as Shortall’s genealogy suggests, this is not coincidental: both are drawing from the same early-twentieth century theological revolution that positioned itself against Enlightenment secular reason, and both carry the structural features of that revolution even where they appear to oppose each other.

Jordan Peterson makes the mass cultural version of this irrationalist move most visible — and the famous Peterson-Žižek debate of April 2019 in Toronto, billed as “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism,” demonstrated the structural convergence in real time. Peterson’s Jungian-mythological framework substitutes the promise of sacred cosmic order and divine meaning for the demand for democratic accountability, positioning democratic egalitarianism itself as the spiritual pathology from which authentic life must be recovered. Žižek, who was expected to defend the Marxist position, instead refused to defend Marx at all — identifying himself as a Hegelian, agreeing with Peterson on the inadequacy of happiness as a political telos, and finding common ground precisely where the Lukácsian analysis would predict: in the shared conviction that human suffering is ontologically given rather than politically produced. As Jacobin observed, neither participant outlined a specific alternative to capitalism. What the debate revealed was not a clash between irrationalism and its critique but a convergence: two formations, one mythological and one psychoanalytic, united in their refusal of the Habermasian post-metaphysical threshold — the insistence that democratic accountability, not ontological depth, must remain the non-negotiable ground of political life. As I explored in my review of Cadell Last’s Real Speculations (”A Rosy Cross of a Book,” August 2025), this convergence between the Žižekian framework and the cultural right it claims to oppose is one of the most consequential features of the contemporary intellectual landscape, and one that the Lukácsian diagnostic method is uniquely equipped to name.

The irrationalist structural logic, then, operates across the political spectrum. It is not a property of the right alone. When depth is posited beyond democratic deliberation — whether as divine revelation, the Lacanian Real, or Pauline Event — the normative conditions under which justice can be pursued are systematically eroded. But the Lacanian framework examined above raises a further question that the preceding analysis of Žižek and Rollins has made urgent: if the Real functions as another depth beyond democratic accountability, can it serve as the diagnostic instrument the Marxist left needs for the present emergency — or does it reproduce, in its own philosophical register, the very irrationalist move it claims to name?

VI. The Trumpian Real: Tutt, Cutrone, Last, and the Limits of the Lacanian Frame

The debate between Daniel Tutt and Chris Cutrone — conducted on Tutt’s Emancipations podcast in January 2025 — is the most consequential exchange currently taking place on the Marxist left about what Marxism requires in the present emergency. The question at stake is not which formation to diagnose but which diagnostic method is adequate to the task: the Lukácsian historical instrument or the Lacanian ontological frame.

Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal has become an important node in this wider conversation, hosting Cutrone, Tutt, Žižek, and Rollins in separate engagements, and Last’s own Lacanian-Hegelian framework provides the theoretical environment in which much of the debate unfolds. But it is the direct Tutt-Cutrone confrontation — their unmediated disagreement about what Marxism requires in the present moment — that makes the structural problem most legible.

Cutrone’s structural analysis of Trump is more analytically precise about the economic genealogy of Trumpism than most available commentary. His argument that Trump and Sanders are parallel figures of neoliberal crisis, both emerging from a dissent against Reaganism rooted in 1987’s Black Monday and deepening through the Obama disappointment, cuts through the personality-driven liberal reading and identifies something structural. Trump’s entire political career has been organized around tariffs and executive economic action — instruments the liberal centre treated as political aberrations rather than coherent positions with a long genealogy. This is genuinely illuminating.

Last’s engagement through the Lacanian frame of the “Trumpian Real” attempts to give the disruption its proper ontological weight: something has erupted that the symbolic order of neoliberal globalism could not contain. The parallel to Saul’s argument about the American unconscious surfacing is real — both are arguing that Trumpism reveals something that was always structurally present beneath the procedural surface. The Lacanian vocabulary gives this a theoretical precision the political science literature lacks.

But this is precisely where the tension with Tutt’s Lukácsian approach becomes most consequential. Last’s most recent essay — “The Fantasy of Sanders Socialism and the Bitter Pill of Trump’s Revolution” (March 28, 2026) — extends the analysis in ways that make the structural problem most legible. He writes of “conservative communism” and “Christian atheism” as dialectical concepts through which the direction of world society might still point toward emancipation. He wonders whether the right-wing counter-culture — Trump, Peterson — represents a “necessary moment in a larger movement that is doomed to swing back around towards the direct challenge of global capitalism itself.” He concedes he might still be “trapped in a necessary transcendental illusion.” This is honest. It is also exactly the political consequence of a framework that posits the Real as its ground: the Lacanian Real cannot be submitted to democratic deliberation without being symbolized, and symbolization always fails. The result is a framework that can diagnose Trumpism with genuine sophistication while being unable, from within its own commitments, to insist that it must be stopped.

Tutt’s Lukácsian framework produces a fundamentally different political orientation.

For Tutt, the irrationalist formation is not a Lacanian Real erupting through the symbolic order’s inconsistency. It is a historically specific phenomenon tied to the imperialist stage of capitalism, in which the inability to sustain progressive ideological formations produces a systematic retreat into irrationalist cultural politics: mythology, national destiny, divine revelation, mystical community — anything that can substitute spiritual belonging for class solidarity and prevent the working class from developing the rational consciousness that would actually threaten the system. The Trumpian disruption, on this reading, is not the irruption of the void but the latest expression of a formation that has been building since the post-1848 political retreat of the European bourgeoisie, and that has taken specifically American forms through the evangelical, occultist, and nationalist currents that constitute the country’s distinctive irrationalist inheritance.

The political consequence of this difference is not abstract. The Lacanian frame gives the disruption ontological priority: the Real cannot be submitted to democratic deliberation without being symbolized, and symbolization always fails. The result is a framework that cannot hold the disruption democratically accountable, because the disruption’s ontological status places it prior to and beyond the accountability structures democratic deliberation requires. What Saul is asking Canadians to do — be firm in public, present to the argument, hold the democratic line — is simply not conceivable within a framework for which the political moment is primarily an encounter with the void.

Tutt’s Lukácsian framework, by contrast, names the irrationalist formation as a historical and political phenomenon with specific conditions, sustained by specific cultural formations, and available to be politically contested. The darkness Saul names in the American unconscious is not an encounter with the void. It is the American irrationalist tradition surfacing when the procedural constraints weaken — a formation with a specific genealogy traceable from the slave economy’s foundational violence through successive waves of nativist, revivalist, and anti-communist mobilization to the MAGA movement’s fusion of all three — and one that requires active democratic resistance rather than ontological theorization.

The neoliberal genealogy of Trumpism that Cutrone is developing — and that Last is hosting and engaging through the Philosophy Portal — is serious work. The question is whether the Lacanian ontological frame is the right architecture for that analysis — or whether it ends up, despite its genuine insights, reproducing in its own philosophical register the very irrationalist move it set out to diagnose: a depth posited — the Real, the void, the abyss of pure negativity — that cannot be submitted to democratic accountability without being falsified.

The theological and Lacanian formations examined in the preceding two sections have been diagnosed primarily through their philosophical and political consequences. But there is a second genealogy of the irrationalist formation — one that Lukács himself was already tracing and that has produced its own distinct cultural infrastructure in the Anglophone world. Where the theological genealogy runs through twentieth-century Catholic thought and its Lacanian inheritors, this second lineage runs through the vitalist and process traditions that emerged from European Romanticism and found new institutional homes in North America. It is this lineage that feeds directly into the two formations that have attempted most ambitiously to synthesize contemplative depth with rational accountability — and whose failure in the present emergency is therefore most consequential.

VII. The Revival of Irrationalism: Vitalism, Process Cosmology, and the Spiritual Marketplace

Something has been happening in the Anglophone philosophical world over the past decade. The German Idealist tradition — the philosophical lineage running from Kant through Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel — has come back to life, not primarily as a subject of historical scholarship but as a living resource, treated by a growing network of independent philosophers, theologians, and contemplatives with a devotion that resembles a religious revival movement more than an academic trend. Discord servers, podcasts, YouTube channels, reading groups organized around Schelling’s positive philosophy and Hegel’s logic — this infrastructure did not exist fifteen years ago. It exists now, drawing an audience far beyond the academy.

The revival has a genealogy. It emerges from a cultural formation that has been building since the mid-twentieth century — one that Lukács was already beginning to diagnose even as it was taking shape. The lineage runs from the German Romantic and Idealist traditions through the Theosophical and Anthroposophical movements, through Henri Bergson’s life-philosophy and its vitalist descendants, through Alfred North Whitehead’s process cosmology and the American appropriation of European speculative philosophy, through Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness and their influence on integral theory, and into the contemporary spiritual marketplace where these currents have found new distribution channels and new audiences.

Bergson is the figure Lukács identified as the key transmitter of irrationalism into the register of biological and temporal experience. Bergson’s philosophy of the élan vital, of creative evolution as the fundamental reality beneath the mechanical abstractions of natural science, of intuition as the authentic mode of knowing that analysis always falsifies — this was enormously influential across European culture from the 1890s through the 1920s. It established the conceptual infrastructure that made vitalist and organicist thinking available simultaneously across philosophy, biology, politics, and aesthetics. Lukács’s argument is that this provides indirect apologetics: it positions biological authenticity, racial vitality, and organic national community as categories of genuine philosophical depth, making their political weaponization easier — not because Bergson intended this, but because his framework displaces the rational-critical discourse through which democratic norms are contested and justice is pursued, replacing it with an appeal to vital depths that cannot be held accountable in the space between facts and norms.

The Bergsonian formation did not remain in Europe. It crossed the Atlantic, and in its American reception it found institutional homes and new philosophical idioms that carry the structural logic forward into the present.

Whitehead’s process cosmology, which has become one of the primary intellectual resources for the contemporary spiritual revival in the Anglosphere, is the American inheritor of this Bergsonian formation. His critique of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” is philosophically important, and his attempt to restore experience, feeling, and aesthetic value to the fabric of nature responds to real limitations in mechanistic materialism. ’s process-relational panexperientialism — developed at the California Institute of Integral Studies and in his Physics of the World-Soul (2021) — represents the most philosophically rigorous contemporary expression of this Whiteheadian lineage. But in “On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn: Revisiting My Dialogue with Matt Segall on Michael Brooks & CIIS,” I pressed on the specific epistemological problem this creates: the process cosmology distributes experience throughout all of nature and posits, at its apex, a God who is in reciprocal creative advance with the world — a cosmic ground of divine experience that has precisely the structural features Habermas spent his career warning against. The framework absorbs all counter-evidence as moments in its own self-development, and the political question of what follows from the divine ground is left radically underdetermined.

Jean Gebser represents another branch of the same formation. His magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin (1949), mapped the structures of human consciousness — archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral — as successive mutations in humanity’s relationship to what he called the Origin, arguing that the contemporary crisis represented the irruption of an integral consciousness capable of transparency to that Origin in the present moment. , the current president of the International Jean Gebser Society and a PhD candidate at CIIS, has done the most sustained work in making Gebser available to an English-speaking audience through Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness (2018). Segall’s 2015 presentation at the Jean Gebser Society conference — “Towards an Integral Cosmology, with Help from Bergson and Whitehead” — makes the lineage between these formations explicit: Gebser, Bergson, and Whitehead constitute a single intellectual formation, each approaching from a different angle the claim that cosmic consciousness, divine life, or sacred Origin is the ground of reality to which genuine knowing provides access. As I argued in the Segall essay, this formation has not passed through the post-metaphysical crucible.

What happens when these philosophical formations leave the academy and the study group and enter the broader culture? The answer is already visible.

When these formations intersect with the popular spiritual marketplace — the New Age industry, the McMindfulness phenomenon, the contemporary occult, German Idealist, (neo)Platonic, and Stoic revivals flourishing across social media — the Lukácsian irrationalist formation becomes most legible in its mass cultural form. What John Vervaeke has called the “meaning crisis” — the pervasive sense of disconnection, purposelessness, and spiritual hunger that accompanies the collapse of shared moral and narrative frameworks in late modernity — creates the cultural conditions in which these formations thrive. Millions of people, stripped of the communal and civic traditions that once gave their lives coherence, turn to frameworks of spiritual awakening, cosmic alignment, divine revelation, or energetic transformation rather than to frameworks of class interest, democratic demand, and institutional accountability. What they are seeking is real: genuine communion, a sense of belonging to something larger than the isolated self, relief from the atomization that possessive individualism produces and cannot cure. But the political function of that seeking — regardless of its sincerity — is the substitution Lukács diagnosed: the promise of sacred belonging replacing the solidarity of democratic citizenship, the appeal to cosmic destiny replacing the demand for justice in the space between facts and norms where democratic life actually takes place. The ruling class does not need to engineer this substitution. It only needs to let it happen — and it is happening now, at scale, across every platform and in every register, from the philosophy podcast to the megachurch to the wellness retreat to the Discord server where young men read Evola and call it self-improvement.

But the spiritual marketplace is the diffuse expression of the formation. The vitalist and process lineage traced here — from Bergson through Whitehead through Gebser into the mass cultural meaning crisis — has its most ambitious philosophical expression in two formations that have attempted to take these currents of contemplative depth and hold them within a framework of rational accountability. These are the formations that believed they had solved the problem this essay has been tracing — and whose failure in the present emergency is therefore the most consequential test of the Lukácsian diagnostic.

VIII. Two Integral Formations and the Present Emergency

The first — and historically prior — is the California Institute of Integral Studies and the process-relational philosophy tradition associated with it. CIIS was founded in 1968 by Haridas Chaudhuri and his wife Bina, growing out of the American Academy of Asian Studies that had been established in San Francisco in 1951 with Alan Watts, Frederic Spiegelberg, and Chaudhuri himself on the founding faculty. Sri Aurobindo — the Indian philosopher of integral yoga whose vision of the evolution of consciousness through the integration of material and spiritual dimensions shaped the institution’s founding — had personally recommended Chaudhuri for the position before his death in 1950. The genealogy is important because it predates and is independent of Ken Wilber’s integral theory: the “integral” in CIIS’s name refers to Aurobindo’s integral yoga, not to Wilber’s four-quadrant model, and the relationship between the two traditions has been genuinely conflictual rather than continuous. Through Chaudhuri’s Aurobindo lineage, through the connection to Esalen (whose cofounders Michael Murphy and Richard Price first met at Chaudhuri’s Cultural Integration Fellowship), through Thomas Berry’s new cosmology and Brian Swimme, and through the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness program founded by Richard Tarnas in 1994, CIIS developed a tradition of process-relational philosophy that draws on Whitehead, Schelling, and the broader vitalist lineage this essay has been tracing. Matt Segall’s process-relational panexperientialism represents the most philosophically rigorous contemporary expression of this tradition. But as I argued in “On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn,” it contributes to the structural problem from a different angle than Wilber’s formation. What is being posited here is not transpersonal realization through initiatory practice but divine cosmic creativity: God incarnate in every galaxy, a living cosmos saturated with experience and persuasive love, participatory knowing of an animate universe. By leaving perspective-differentiation and the Pre/Trans distinction undertheorized, process-relational cosmology produces what I called an enchanted flatland — warmer and richer than mechanistic materialism, genuinely committed to the reality of experience throughout nature, but still leaving the political question of what follows from divine cosmic creativity radically underdetermined.

Wilber’s Integral Theory and the Guru Problem

The second formation is Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, which draws from many of the same sources — Aurobindo, the perennial philosophy inheritance running through Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith, the developmental psychology current through Piaget, Kohlberg, Graves, and Gebser, the contemplative depth through Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, Vedanta, and neo-Platonic Christian sources — but synthesizes them into a single four-quadrant integral model that took Habermas’s three modes of knowledge-inquiry more seriously than almost any other figure working in this synthesis tradition. That seriousness is real and should be named before what follows. As I argued at length in “Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up?“ (February 2026), drawing on Zachary Stein’s placement of Wilber within American Pragmatism and R. Michael Fisher’s documentation of three decades of systematic misreading, there is a philosopher behind the cultural packaging who has never received the serious engagement his post-metaphysical architecture deserves. The post-metaphysical Wilber — who engaged Habermas carefully in A Sociable God (1983), insisted on the Pre/Trans Fallacy as the discipline preventing developmental frameworks from confusing regressive with progressive, and in Integral Spirituality (2006) explicitly attempted to hold contemplative depth within the epistemic constraints Habermas had articulated — represents a genuinely serious philosophical project, one that most thinkers examined in this essay never attempted.

But the perennial philosophy inheritance carries its structural features regardless of how sophisticated the synthesis. The integral framework posits nondual awareness — states of formless mystical union, prior to and foundational for all quadrants, levels, and lines — as the ground of reality to which genuine knowing provides access. The guru principle enters here not as an accident but as structural consequence. Wilber’s sustained endorsement of Andrew Cohen — the American spiritual teacher credibly accused of serious and sustained physical, psychological, and financial abuse of his followers, documented in books such as American Guru and on the critical blog WHAT enlightenment??!, and whose own EnlightenNext magazine (formerly What Is Enlightenment?) served for nearly two decades as the institutional voice of the integral spirituality movement, featuring the “Guru and Pandit” dialogues between Cohen and Wilber as its flagship content — was not external to the integral framework. It was an expression of its structural logic: if someone has genuinely accessed the transpersonal ground through mystical realization, how could ordinary citizens evaluate that claim from within ordinary developmental coordinates? Cohen was a founding member of Wilber’s Integral Spirituality initiative. The pattern repeated with Marc Gafni, the self-styled integral spiritual leader credibly accused of sexual misconduct spanning decades, with whom Wilber co-founded a Wisdom Council at the Center for Integral Wisdom and for whom he wrote the foreword to Your Unique Self — maintaining support even after allegations surfaced, describing Gafni as a “gifted teacher” and “genuine spiritual leader,” and never substantively distancing himself despite sustained public pressure. The nondual position, posited as the condition of possibility for all quadrants, effectively suspends the accountability structures the post-metaphysical framework would otherwise require. The guru is not an anomaly. The guru is where the framework’s own logic leads when the nondual ground is allowed to override the post-metaphysical corrective.

What the Integral Silence Reveals

The guru problem is not incidental to either formation — it is the structural consequence of positing a ground of reality that transcends the accountability structures democratic life requires. Both CIIS’s process-relational cosmology and Wilber’s integral theory carry genuine philosophical achievements. But both contribute, through different structural logics, to the condition Lukács was diagnosing. The promise of belonging to something sacred and cosmic substitutes for the demand for democratic accountability. The cultivation of transpersonal realization or participatory cosmic consciousness substitutes for the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that can actually constrain power. The initiatory community — whether the integral sangha gathered around a realized teacher or the cosmological community of fellow creatures awakening to the world-soul — provides the warmth of sacred solidarity without the accountability structures that genuine democratic solidarity requires.

Trump and a Post-Truth World (2017) shows what this means when the structural logic meets an actual political emergency. Wilber’s response to Trump’s election frames it as an evolutionary self-correction: a backlash necessitated by the failure of the postmodern “green” leading edge, whose elitism, political correctness, and internal contradictions had produced an explosive reaction. Some of this diagnosis is accurate. The progressive leading edge does suffer from the rigidities Wilber names, and the failure to engage all of Haidt’s moral foundations rather than only Care and Fairness is a real problem that integral theory was particularly well positioned to name.

The problem is not the diagnosis of what provoked the backlash. The problem is what the framework does with the backlash once it has been named. What the Lukácsian instrument identifies in Trump and a Post-Truth World is not a political position but a structural maneuver: by framing the backlash as an evolutionary self-correction — Spirit adjusting its own unfolding, nondual Kosmic consciousness working through the current period of disruption — the framework absorbs the rise of Trumpism into a developmental narrative that grants it quasi-metaphysical legitimacy. This is indirect apologetics in Lukács’s precise sense. Not intention but structural consequence. The integral framework’s account of evolution, in which the Kosmos self-corrects through whatever disruption is presently underway, makes that cover available regardless of Wilber’s intentions. When Spirit is understood to be self-correcting through disruption, the suffering of those on the wrong end of that correction can be absorbed into a developmental narrative that grants it a meaning they never consented to. The question of who is harmed, which emancipatory gains are being dismantled, whose democratic rights are being revoked — these become downstream questions, answerable once the evolutionary moment has run its course, rather than the primary accountability questions that democratic reason — the space between facts and norms that Habermas spent his career defending — is specifically designed to keep at the centre.

In 2017, this was troubling but still deferrable as a theoretical concern. In 2026, the deferral has ended. The United States has captured the president of Venezuela and installed a puppet regime. It is bombing Iran in its largest Middle Eastern military operation since Iraq under the name “Operation Epic Fury.” It has threatened Greenland with military force, imposed an oil blockade on Cuba while proposing a “friendly takeover,” and codified the claim that the entire Western Hemisphere is an American sphere of dominion. It is telling Canada — a sovereign democracy, its closest ally — that it should become the 51st state, and imposing sweeping tariffs to force the point. The theoretical has become operational. And the integral community’s response — its relative silence, its continued developmental stage mapping of the “post-Trump American Right,” its application of horseshoe theory to suggest Trump and Sanders are parallel anti-establishment alternatives — is now itself evidence. The framework that claimed to hold transpersonal realization and democratic justice together has not, in the present emergency, demonstrated the capacity to do so.

What the Lukácsian instrument reveals about integral theory in the present moment is not fascism in its 1930s form. It is the conviction that nondual Spirit is self-correcting — that the Kosmos tends toward greater depth and complexity regardless of what any particular disruption destroys — applied as a licence to watch democratic institutions be dismantled and frame the watching as developmental sophistication. That posture, applied to the present political emergency, is not a philosophical achievement. It is mysticism where democratic action is required.

Heidegger’s politics were not a distortion of his philosophy — they were a consequence of its structural logic, because the appeal to Being’s disclosure through a specific people’s historical destiny activated the same erosion of democratic norms as the Fichtean Volksgeist. The Kyoto School’s politics were not a distortion of their Buddhist philosophical synthesis — they were the same structural logic applied in a different national context. What integral theory’s structural logic produces is not Heidegger’s political catastrophe. It is the posture that watches democratic institutions be dismantled from above, that frames the watching as a sign of developmental maturity, and that cannot generate the political will to resist because the framework it inhabits has already absorbed the disruption into a narrative of cosmic self-correction.

Whether this is integral theory’s final word remains formally open. The post-metaphysical Wilber pointed beyond it. But the framework needs to say clearly — not as a personal political opinion but as a consequence of its own post-metaphysical commitments — that some disruptions are not evolutionary self-corrections. That the democratic accountability structures Habermas spent his career defending are not procedural afterthoughts to nondual realization but the condition of possibility for any genuine post-metaphysical integral politics. That question has not been answered. The silence is its own evidence.

The theological and Lacanian formations of Sections V and VI, the vitalist formations of Section VII, and the integral formations examined here converge on a single structural finding: when contemplative depth — however genuine, however sophisticated — is allowed to override the democratic accountability structures through which justice is pursued, the political consequence is the erosion of the normative conditions on which democratic life depends. The question is no longer whether the irrationalist formation can be named. It has been named. The question is what can be built in its place — and whether there exists a philosophical tradition capable of carrying genuine contemplative depth into the democratic space of peace, welfare, and good government rather than holding it above that space as a sacred reserve exempt from accountability.

IX. Canadian Sovereignty and the Philosophical Stakes

Saul’s March 23 address is not primarily about trade policy or military readiness. It is a philosophical argument about what democratic continuity requires and what threatens it. A country that does not know its own philosophical and democratic tradition cannot articulate what it stands for. And a country that cannot articulate what it stands for will be absorbed — not by military force alone, but by the normalization technique Saul described: casual, repetitive invocation of its non-existence until the population itself loses the capacity to respond. The country does not fall because it is conquered. It falls because it has forgotten the philosophical grounds on which resistance makes sense — because its citizens can no longer say, with precision and conviction, what distinguishes their democratic tradition from the imperial formation that seeks to absorb it. The annexation succeeds not when the border is erased but when the idea that the border protects something worth defending has been worn away.

When Trump announces that Canadians would be better off as the 51st state, he is not making an economic argument. He is asserting the superiority of one constitutional philosophy over another — the American model of individual liberty, divine national destiny, and the pursuit of happiness over the Canadian model of peace, welfare, and good government. The irrationalist formation traced throughout this essay is structurally continuous with this constitutional imperialism. Both substitute a grand narrative of destiny and spiritual authenticity for the slow, accountable, unglamorous work of maintaining the institutions through which democratic life becomes possible and reproducible. The annexation threat is not just a policy position. It is a theologically inflected imperial claim: divine revelation and national destiny require the completion of the American project. And “Operation Epic Fury” is not a military campaign that happens to have a dramatic name. It is the irrationalist formation at full operational scale.

The speculative philosophical tradition that runs from Watson and the nineteenth-century Canadian idealists through Armour’s philosophic federalism through Taylor’s moral pluralism through Saul’s democratic and reconstructive project — documented in detail in my earlier essay “On Speculative Philosophy & the Idea of Canada: Revisiting the Work of Leslie Armour“ — has been asking for over a century how a community holds itself together across deep difference without forcing premature resolution. Armour called this philosophic federalism: the many faces of reason, held in productive tension, without collapse into a single overarching system. As I argued in that essay, Armour’s achievement was to work across the divide between Anglophone idealism and Francophone Catholic thought while maintaining both speculative depth and intellectual humility — demonstrating that one can insist on the reality of value and meaning without claiming certainty about it. Saul enlarged the tradition to include the Indigenous philosophical foundations that Armour’s primarily European-descended framework did not fully map. What the present emergency reveals is that this tradition is not simply a historical inheritance to be admired. It is a live philosophical resource. And the question of whether it can be formally articulated, in post-metaphysical terms adequate to a plural democratic public sphere, is now a question with urgent political consequences.

But the Canadian speculative tradition, on its own, lacks the theological and contemplative depth the present emergency also requires. Armour’s philosophic federalism draws on the British idealist inheritance mediated through Canadian conditions. It is philosophically rigorous on the epistemological and political questions. It is not a theology. It does not carry the contemplative depths that motivate democratic resistance in the face of despair, or the theocentric account of human dignity that — as the alternative formations understood — provides grounding that secular humanism has repeatedly discovered it cannot hold through its own resources alone.

This is where Jacques Maritain enters — not as a Catholic authority to be deferred to, but as the philosopher who worked out most rigorously the architecture the present moment requires. Maritain’s integral humanism is the post-conciliar tradition’s most sustained attempt to carry theological depth into democratic pluralism without making that depth a trump card that closes deliberation. The central move in Integral Humanism (1936) is an explicit rejection of both options that keep reasserting themselves in the contemporary landscape: the integralist subordination of political life to ecclesiastical authority, and the secular humanist evacuation of the spiritual dimension of the person. His fourfold formula — personalist, communitarian, pluralist, theocentric — refuses both the possessive individualism that constitutes the ground of American structural susceptibility and the collective dissolution that the integralist right proposes as its cure.

The specifically political mechanism Maritain developed is what he called the practical cooperation of persons of different metaphysical traditions toward shared democratic goals. Believers and non-believers, Christians and Jews and Muslims and those with no religious commitment, can agree on the practical content of human dignity without requiring agreement on the theoretical foundations that ground those commitments for each tradition. The UNESCO consultation on the foundations of human rights demonstrated this practically: representatives of incompatible metaphysical traditions could sign a common declaration because each could affirm the practical conclusions from their own premises, without needing to agree on a single philosophical foundation. This is the model for how theological depth enters democratic public life without becoming a trump card: it contributes its cognitive and moral content to the shared practical project while holding its metaphysical foundations available for internal dialogue among those who share them.

Maritain is also the strongest available Catholic philosophical resource against the integralism now occupying the White House. He rejected Action Française before the Vatican condemned it. He broke with the Garrigou-Lagrange school precisely on the question of whether Thomism must produce authoritarian politics. He helped Saul Alinsky organize communities in Chicago. He co-authored the framework for the UN Declaration of Human Rights with scholars from incompatible metaphysical traditions. The integralists of Deneen and Vance’s stripe are not building on Maritain — they are, in the Lukácsian sense, one of the political consequences that became available when his post-conciliar reception was captured by formations that refused his fundamental pluralism. He is the counter to them, because he understood that the Church’s proper role in democratic life is to witness through the quality of its community rather than to impose through the authority of its hierarchy.

Maritain provides the architecture. But carrying that architecture into the post-metaphysical challenge of the present requires the specifically Canadian theological tradition that developed in his wake — the critical theology worked out at Concordia University in Montreal by Charles Davis and Gregory Baum, documented by Marc Lalonde, and constituting the institutional and intellectual ground on which my own formation took place. That lineage needs to be traced, because it carries resources the present emergency requires and that the formations diagnosed in this essay have not been able to produce.

Charles Davis arrived at Concordia in 1970, three years after A Question of Conscience had made him simultaneously the most famous and most controversial theologian in the English Catholic world. His public departure from the Roman Catholic Church in 1966 had been understood by many as an act of apostasy. What his subsequent career demonstrated — and what Lalonde’s editorship of The Promise of Critical Theology (1995) documents with precision — is that it was in fact an act of precisely the kind that the Lukácsian diagnostic method identifies as the opposite of irrationalism: the refusal to let institutional loyalty substitute for truth. Davis’s stated grounds were an “intellectual rejection of the Papacy” — a rejection of papal infallibility as a doctrine, and of what he identified as the systematic subordination of truth to institutional authority. As he told TIME magazine at the time: “There is concern for authority at the expense of truth, as I am constantly shown by instances of the damage to persons by the workings of an impersonal and unfree system.” Davis saw the Church as having become “a vast, impersonal, unfree, and inhuman system” — not because the theological tradition it carried was false, but because the institution had reversed the proper relationship between truth and authority, subordinating the former to the preservation of the latter.

This is the institutional form of the irrationalist move. Not the vitalist mysticism of Bergson, not the Pauline Event of Žižek, not the nondual Spirit of evolutionary integral theory — but something more banal and more pervasive: the conversion of an institution’s claim to truth into an instrument for its own perpetuation, the substitution of institutional solidarity for genuine inquiry. Davis’s subsequent work — culminating in Theology and Political Society (1980), the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge — developed a political theology that explicitly engaged Habermas, that worked through the relationship between religious community and democratic political life, and that did so with a candor about the institutional failures of religious bodies that the post-conciliar Catholic mainstream could not sustain. Davis was doing post-metaphysical political theology before the term existed, and doing it in Montreal.

Gregory Baum’s trajectory from the same conciliar moment goes in a different but complementary direction. Where Davis broke institutionally while deepening his engagement with political theology, Baum remained within the Church while subjecting it and the entire theological tradition to the methodology he had learned from the Frankfurt School and Liberation theology: ideology critique, the systematic analysis of how theological claims function socially and politically regardless of their intended meaning. Baum’s appropriation of the Frankfurt School’s “end of innocent critique” — the recognition that no cultural or intellectual tradition is exempt from analysis of its social functions — produced a form of critical theology that shared its deepest commitments with the movement Davis had been developing: the insistence that theological claims must be tested against how they actually function in the lives of those they purport to serve. Both Davis and Baum were doing what Lalonde would later document as a single, if internally diverse, intellectual project — one that insisted the Church could only carry its genuine cognitive and moral content honestly if it submitted its institutional expressions to the same rigorous critique it applied to the world. Baum’s Massey Lectures, Compassion and Solidarity: The Church for Others (1988), represent this methodology in its most accessible form: the Church is only authentic insofar as it is genuinely oriented toward the flourishing of others, most especially the most vulnerable.

Baum’s connection of the Frankfurt School’s ideology critique with Liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor is the post-metaphysical corrective that neither Maritain’s integral humanism nor Wilber’s integral theory can generate — the sustained self-critical apparatus for examining how contemplative depth, developmental framing, and integral synthesis themselves function ideologically, how they too can become instruments for the perpetuation of privilege, the management of the oppressed, the substitution of spiritual elevation for political accountability. The preferential option for the poor is not just a theological commitment. In the context of the present argument, it is the empirical test of whether a framework that claims to hold depth and justice together has actually done so.

Lalonde’s scholarship — the editorial work that produced The Promise of Critical Theology, the sustained effort to keep the Davis-Baum tradition visible within the Canadian academic context — represents precisely the kind of institutional memory that Saul was insisting Canada needs: a country that knows its own intellectual history, that can name its own tradition, that can articulate what it stands for because it has maintained the living connection to the formation that produced it. That this tradition was transmitted to me directly, through Lalonde’s teaching and through the Concordia environment where Davis and Baum worked out the post-conciliar Canadian critical theology in conditions of genuine intellectual difficulty, is not just a biographical decoration. It is the specific material and institutional location through which the post-metaphysical theological project being developed here is grounded — and it is the reason this essay can draw on resources that the formations it diagnoses have not been able to reach.

What does this synthesis look like, articulated as a positive alternative to the irrationalist formations diagnosed in the preceding sections?

It looks like Maritain’s theocentric personalism without his Thomistic metaphysical closure — carried through the post-conciliar critique that both Davis and Baum made available, and extended through the enactive fallibilist methodology of this project. The person has both material and spiritual dimensions, and a political community exists to serve the full flourishing of the person rather than to manage the individual. Human dignity is not self-grounding — it is grounded in something that transcends the political order and therefore cannot be revoked by political decisions. But that transcendent grounding does not authorize any single institution or tradition to speak for God in the public sphere. It authorizes the demand for human dignity from every direction — theological, secular, Indigenous, contemplative — and requires that each tradition carry that demand into the practical cooperation that democratic life makes necessary.

It looks like Davis’s insistence that truth must remain prior to institutional loyalty — extended from the ecclesiological to the integral context. No formation, including the integral one, is exempt from the question of whether its truth claims survive honest inquiry or merely serve its own perpetuation. The enactive fallibilist posture — testing frameworks against the lived experience of those within them and reporting honestly when systems fail — is Davis’s demand, applied to the integral project itself.

It looks like Baum’s ideology critique directed inward — the insistence that the contemplative depth carried by the integral synthesis be examined for how it actually functions in the lives of those who practice it. Does transpersonal realization produce a posture that watches democratic institutions be dismantled from above — framing the watching as developmental sophistication rather than political failure? The preferential option for the poor as the empirical test: if the synthesis being developed here serves the flourishing of those most vulnerable to the irrationalist formations it critiques, that is evidence in its favour. If it provides sophisticated cultural cover for a stratum already insulated from the consequences of Trumpism and Canadian annexation, that is evidence against it — evidence the project must report honestly rather than absorb into a developmental narrative that grants the failure a spiritual meaning it has not earned.

It looks like Armour’s philosophic federalism — the many faces of reason held in productive tension without premature synthesis — as the epistemological architecture that allows this synthesis to remain genuinely pluralist rather than collapsing into a new comprehensive doctrine that replaces the ones it critiques. And it looks like Wilber’s insistence on perspective-taking and psychological flexibility held to the post-metaphysical standard he articulated but did not consistently apply — the insistence that contemplative depth, including genuine transpersonal realization and nondual awareness, must remain answerable to the question of its ideological function, must submit to the preferential option for the poor as an empirical test, must be carried into democratic accountability rather than above it.

The Canadian grounding is constitutive here, in both the political and philosophical senses. The peace, welfare, and good government that Canada’s founding document encodes as the foundation of political life is not a less compelling vision than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is a different philosophical anthropology: community as the condition of human flourishing rather than the constraint on individual aspiration, stewardship as the political form of that commitment, and the slow, accountable, unglamorous work of maintaining the institutions through which diverse persons can coexist and develop without domination. That philosophical anthropology — carried in the specific Canadian intellectual tradition from La Fontaine and Baldwin through the speculative philosophers through the critical theologians through Saul — is not adequately defended by nostalgia or by asserting its historical priority. It requires articulation. It requires the philosophical architecture that can make its deepest commitments legible in a plural public sphere where many different metaphysical traditions converge. That is the project — incomplete, and made urgent by the present emergency.

X. What Canada Can Show the World

This essay has not argued for secular rationalism against the depth of the religious and contemplative traditions. Habermas was right: secular reason cannot generate its own motivational resources. The great traditions carry genuine cognitive and moral content that democratic life needs and cannot produce on its own. What this essay has argued is that when that content is allowed to do foundational political work in a plural public sphere without submitting to the corrective of democratic accountability, it systematically erodes the normative conditions under which justice can be pursued and democratic life sustained. Lukács saw it in Germany. Habermas spent seven decades building the philosophical architecture to hold the line against it. And the line is now being tested — not in the seminar room but in the real world, by an administration that names its wars after sacred fury and tells a sovereign democracy it should become a state.

The irrationalist formation has been named — by Lukács, by Tutt, by Saul, and now in this essay. The question is no longer diagnostic. It is constructive. Can the traditions that carry genuine contemplative depth submit that depth to the democratic norms and procedures of justice that Habermas spent his career defending — carry it into the space between facts and norms where democratic life actually takes place, rather than holding it above that space as a sacred reserve exempt from accountability?

Canada is where this question becomes concrete — and where it becomes an example. The country that encoded peace, welfare, and good government as its founding philosophical commitment, that built its democratic federation not on the sovereign individual pursuing happiness but on the community pursuing the common good across impossible geography and irreducible difference, that produced Armour’s philosophic federalism, Taylor’s moral pluralism, Davis’s critical theology, and Saul’s democratic reconstruction — that country is now being told, by an administration that names its wars after sacred fury, that it should not exist. The philosophical tradition that built it is being tested by forces that have already dismantled the sovereignty of Venezuela, threatened Greenland with military force, blockaded Cuba while proposing its annexation, and codified the claim that the entire Western Hemisphere belongs to a single power authorized by destiny to complete its project.

But Canada has something to show the world — not merely to defend, but to demonstrate. A democratic federation grounded in peace, welfare, and good government rather than in the pursuit of individual happiness. A philosophical anthropology that begins with community rather than the sovereign individual. A speculative tradition that has been asking for over a century how diverse peoples hold themselves together without domination. A critical theology that insists truth must remain prior to institutional loyalty. A constitutional practice of holding differences in productive tension rather than forcing premature resolution. These are not merely Canadian inheritances. They are resources the world needs — resources that the dominant formations of both the right and the academic left have failed to produce, and that the growing tyranny south of our border has made urgent for every democracy on earth.

If Canada can articulate what it carries — clearly enough, rigorously enough, with the philosophical architecture adequate to a plural public sphere — it will not only resist the normalization of its own absorption. It will offer the world a living demonstration that contemplative depth and democratic accountability can be held together, that stewardship is a more adequate ground for political life than aspiration, and that the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions worthy of persons is the only work that finally matters. That is the project this essay and this body of research exist to build. It is unfinished. And the emergency that makes it urgent is also the occasion that makes it possible.

Suggested Reading

Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada 1850–1950 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981)

Gregory Baum, Compassion and Solidarity: The Church for Others (CBC Massey Lectures, House of Anansi, 1988)

Gregory Baum, Essays in Critical Theology (Sheed & Ward, 1994)

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Macmillan, 1911)

Chris Cutrone, The Death of the Millennial Left (Sublation Press, 2023)

Chris Cutrone, Marxism and Politics (Sublation Press, 2024)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Charles Davis, A Question of Conscience (Hodder & Stoughton, 1967)

Charles Davis, Theology and Political Society (Cambridge University Press, 1980)

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018)

Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (Ohio University Press, 1985)

George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Carleton Library, 1965)

George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (House of Anansi, 1969)

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. (Beacon Press, 1984–87)

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, 1987)

Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (MIT Press, 1996)

Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Polity Press, 2008)

Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization (Ignatius Press, 2006)

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2012)

Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 1951)

Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (University of California Press, 1984)

Marc Lalonde, ed., The Promise of Critical Theology: Essays in Honour of Charles Davis (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1995)

Cadell Last, Real Speculations (Philosophy Portal, 2024)

Cadell Last, “The Fantasy of Sanders Socialism and the Bitter Pill of Trump’s Revolution,” Philosophy Portal Substack (March 28, 2026)

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (MIT Press, 1971)

Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (MIT Press, 1975)

Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Merlin Press, 1980; Verso, 2021, with introduction by Enzo Traverso)

C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)

Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1951)

Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good (University of Notre Dame Press, 1966)

Sean McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2012)

Sean McGrath, The Lost Road (Christian Alternative, 2025)

Matthew McManus, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Matthew McManus, ed., What Is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays On Our Hugely Tremendous Times (Zero Books, 2019)

John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell, 1990)

John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (Routledge, 1999)

Ron Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (Repeater Books, 2019)

Peter Rollins, Insurrection: To Believe Is Human; To Doubt, Divine (Howard Books, 2011)

Peter Rollins, The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction (Howard Books, 2013)

John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Free Press, 1992)

John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (House of Anansi, 1995)

John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (Viking, 2005)

John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Viking, 2008)

John Ralston Saul, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin (Penguin, 2010)

John Ralston Saul, The Comeback (Viking, 2014)

Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Matt Segall, Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (SacraSage Press, 2021)

Sarah Shortall, Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Michael J. Thompson, The Domestication of Critical Theory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)

Michael J. Thompson, Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2022)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (Repeater Books, 2024)

Daniel Tutt and John Bellamy Foster, “Georg Lukács and The Destruction of Reason“

Slavoj Žižek, Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)

Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (MIT Press, 2009)

Abstract

The initial tributes following Jürgen Habermas’s death on March 14, 2026, were largely incomplete and focused predominantly on his political persona: the liberal-socialist, the anti-fascist proceduralist, and the thinker who reconstructed critical theory after Adorno by grounding its emancipatory ambitions in communicative rationality rather than negative dialectics. Largely overlooked was the profound philosophical and theological dimension of his life’s work. Habermas’s intellectual journey was far broader than his public image suggests. It began with an engagement with Schelling’s Absolute, included a challenge to Heidegger’s support for fascism, and involved a reinterpretation of Hegel and Marx through the lens of American pragmatism, Piaget, and Kohlberg. His later decades were dedicated to a crucial question: whether secular reason is truly self-sufficient for sustaining democratic life without the moral substance drawn from religious traditions.

The theological dimension of Habermas’s work, which persisted throughout his career and reached its apex in his final three-volume history of philosophy, was largely absent from public discussion. This oversight is epitomized by the widespread neglect of the fifty-year intellectual culmination represented by the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue. Ultimately, the public reception of Habermas favored the political and legal theorist, overshadowing the philosopher who wrestled with profound questions of faith and reason. This essay aims to recover a forgotten dimension of Habermas’s work by tracing his post-metaphysical turn from two distinct angles. The first is an internal philosophical trajectory, moving from Fichte’s Volksgeist through Hegel’s Geist to Heidegger’s Being, highlighting its disastrous political culmination of fascism in Germany. The second is an external perspective, rooted in the author’s own background in Zen Buddhism in Montreal, which reveals a structurally parallel catastrophe in the Kyoto School and can be found in various forms of modern Buddhism today.

Charles Davis’s framework of religion’s four temptations — the lust for certitude, the pride of history, cosmic vanity, and the wrath of morality — serves as the critical link between these two paths. Both lines of inquiry ultimately converge on the crucial insight that divine revelation and religion, when left to its own devices, is insufficient to resolve the problems of democratic society and provide a robust theory of justice. That convergence, however, arrives at a moment of acute pressure. The essay then maps the theological fault line now running from Milbank and McGrath through Peterson, Vance, and Vermeule — before confronting a darker recognition: that the post-liberal project is not simply dismantling the procedural architecture Habermas built, but occupying the precise philosophical structure he spent his career mapping. Habermas did not merely oppose the claim that political order must be grounded in a revealed, sacred inheritance that precedes and exceeds rational justification. He diagnosed it as the recurrent pathology of modern political thought — the move that had already run from Fichte through Romanticism to its catastrophic destination in Heidegger — and spent fifty years building the case against its return. That the post-liberal project now advances precisely these moves — through various forms of theological discourse, the organized ascent of regressive political formations, and their eventual occupation of the White House — is not a development Habermas's analysis failed to anticipate.

Finally, that confrontation extends into territory Habermas himself never fully mapped. Ken Wilber's integral theory represents the most philosophically serious attempt in the Anglophone world to hold contemplative depth and post-metaphysical rigour together. The ambition is to carry both the wisdom of the great religious traditions and axial civilizations and the full weight of Habermas's demanding theory of communication, justice, and the evolution of societies — and to hold them within a single coherent framework without collapsing either into the other. Whether that ambition has been met is precisely what is now at stake. The political ambivalence of integral theory today — its tendency to interpret democratic decline as a necessary evolutionary step, its reluctance to fully address issues of justice — reflects the core structural problem this essay diagnoses: whether depth and justice can be held together at all, or whether every framework that reaches for both will find a way to sacrifice one for the other. Ultimately, the essay presses a question Wilber's admirers have avoided and his critics have never quite earned: whether integral theory represents the framework that finally holds depth and justice together — or whether, as post-liberal authoritarianism advances and his followers offer nothing, Wilber will be remembered as another Heidegger, having built the most sophisticated philosophical architecture of our time only to repeat the precise capitulation Habermas spent his life warning against.

Tags: Habermas, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, German Idealism, Critical Theory, Communicative Action, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger, Volksgeist, Frankfurt School, Post-Secular Theology, Religion and Politics, Catholic Integralism, Radical Orthodoxy, Sean McGrath, Jean-Luc Marion, John D. Caputo, John Milbank, Kyoto School, Nishida, Nishitani, Tanabe, Zen Buddhism, Robert Bellah, Charles Davis, Marc Lalonde, Ken Wilber, Integral Theory, Adi Da, Perennial Philosophy, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, New Age, Occult, Traditionalism, Julius Evola, René Guénon, Alexander Dugin, Jason Wirth, Bret Davis, McMindfulness, Slavoj Žižek, Michael Brooks, Matthew McManus, Daniel Tutt, Peter Verovšek, Jordan Peterson, JD Vance, Postmodern Conservatism, MAGA, Democratic Theory, Justice, Moral Foundations Theory, Jonathan Haidt, Virtue Ethics

The death of Jürgen Habermas on March 14, 2026, delivered a profound and distinctly personal blow, particularly as it occurred during a period of intense study of his vast intellectual output. I had recently been following his latest work closely — working through Stefan Muller-Doohm and Roman Yos’s book-length interview Things Needed to Get Better, which captured my interest by focusing on Habermas’s early political and intellectual foundations. While Philipp Felsch’s more accessible biography, The Philosopher: Habermas and Us, was on my reading list, a compelling discussion between and Felsch on the Emancipations podcast finally convinced me to pick it up. I was halfway through it when the announcement came.

What followed was something I hadn’t anticipated, and which has preoccupied my thoughts ever since: a deluge of tributes that, despite their good intentions, were nearly all incomplete in similar ways.

The Habermas who arrived in the obituaries is the one most people recognize. The political Habermas. The Frankfurt School Habermas. The Habermas who confronted the Historians’ Debate in the 1980s, who opposed the Iraq War, who spent his last years warning against the collapse of democratic norms. That Habermas is real and his contributions on those fronts deserve to be named. But the tributes represent three distinct readings of his work, and all three of them flatten him — in different directions, for different reasons.

The first reading comes from the sympathetic liberal left: the Frankfurt School inheritors, the social democrats, the figures who genuinely loved and learned from Habermas and are now mourning him with full sincerity. The most representative of these tributes is Seyla Benhabib’s — “Carrying on His Legacy” — which is moving precisely because of how much she genuinely received from him over five decades. She gives an honest account of his formation, his gifts as a discussion leader, his ability to hold productive disagreement together in a seminar room. But even Benhabib moves quickly through The Theory of Communicative Action before arriving at his political interventions — the Ukraine essay, the Israel-Gaza question, his deep mistrust of German rearmament. The picture that emerges is of an indispensable public figure whose philosophical work was largely in service of that public role: Habermas as the defender of Enlightenment rationality against the authoritarian right, the anti-fascist intellectual who gave the liberal public sphere its philosophical backbone. It is a generous portrait. But it is a portrait of the political Habermas almost exclusively, and it is entirely silent on the philosophical and theological project this essay is all about. Peter Verovšek’s tribute in Social Europe — published alongside his new Columbia University Press biography, whose very title, Jürgen Habermas: Public Intellectual and Engaged Critical Theorist, announces its frame — is perhaps the most scholarly representative of this reading, and it suffers from exactly the same reduction: seven thousand words on the public intellectual, the Historians’ Debate, the European Union; a single sentence on the Ratzinger dialogue; nothing on the final three-volume history of philosophy. The biography title is, in this sense, almost too perfect an encapsulation of what this reception gets wrong about what Habermas was doing.

’s tribute in Jacobin — Jürgen Habermas Showed What Philosophy Could Be — is more philosophically ambitious, and I say that as someone who has followed his work closely and had the privilege of interviewing him on my podcast. McManus occupies an interesting and genuinely uncomfortable position in this conversation, because he stands with one foot in each of the first two readings I am describing. By training he is a critical legal theorist, and his sympathetic Habermas is shaped accordingly: the proceduralist, the defender of democratic norms, the Frankfurt School inheritor who gave liberal-socialist politics its most rigorous philosophical architecture. That is the McManus who wrote his 2018 article “Post-Postmodernism on the Left” — his engagement with Habermas as a resource for a left politics capable of answering the irrationalist right, a project he developed in close intellectual partnership with the late Michael Brooks — and that is the McManus whose Jacobin tribute emphasises Habermas’s role as defender of democratic modernity. But McManus has also spent considerable time in the orbit of the Žižek-Lacanian tradition — through his work on postmodern conservatism, through an engagement with the Frankfurt School that is never quite free of the suspicion that Habermas’s proceduralism evacuates something the tradition needed to preserve. The resulting tribute, while honest in its scope, suffers from the same bias: it focuses on the Habermas known for opposing fascism and upholding liberal-democratic principles. His proceduralism is highlighted as both his major achievement and, from the persistent Lacanian-Marxist perspective, his most significant shortcoming.

That second, more hostile reading has its clearest representatives in Žižek and figures like Daniel Tutt, for whom Habermas represents the Frankfurt School’s great capitulation: the philosopher who abandoned Adorno’s negative dialectics, traded the genuine radicalism of immanent critique for the insipid fantasy of the ideal speech situation, and ended up providing philosophical cover for liberal proceduralism rather than challenging it. From this angle, The Theory of Communicative Action is not a philosophical achievement but a philosophical retreat — an attempt to ground democratic legitimacy in rational discourse that naively abstracts from power, capital, and the structural conditions under which communication always already takes place. I find this reading philosophically interesting, but ultimately it fails for the same reason as the sympathetic liberal version: both treat the post-metaphysical turn as a political choice rather than a philosophical conclusion, and neither has seriously reckoned with what Habermas was actually building in the works between Knowledge and Human Interests and The Theory of Communicative Action — or with the theological dimension of his project that both camps ignore entirely.

The third reading is the most unexpected, and in some ways the most instructive. In the days following Habermas’s death, a cluster of conservative commentators — most representative among them Tobias Teuscher writing in The European Conservative — discovered Habermas as a resource for the right. The argument runs like this: Habermas’s insistence that political claims must be translatable into publicly accessible reasons, defensible through argument rather than identity or authority, is a discipline that the left has abandoned and that the right should now wield against it. “Habermas does not teach conservatives how to shout down the Left,” Teuscher writes. “He teaches them how to make the Left answer.” There is something philosophically correct in this reading — the zwanglose Zwang des besseren Arguments, the unforced force of the better argument, does apply universally, and the progressive left’s retreat into moral pressure and administrative fiat is a genuine legitimacy problem that Habermas himself named. But this conservative appropriation takes the procedural shell and leaves everything else behind: the developmental account of communicative competence, the reconstruction of Hegel and Marx, the theological dimension of the post-metaphysical project, and above all the recognition — reached at enormous philosophical cost over seven decades — that the procedural framework cannot stand alone, that it needs the motivational resources the religious traditions carry, and that those traditions must in turn submit to the corrective of reason. What this reading receives is a debating technique. What it discards is the philosophical architecture that gives that technique its meaning.

What all three readings share — and what I want to name before moving forward — is a pattern that Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations framework illuminates with uncomfortable precision. Each reading receives Habermas through a subset of moral foundations and filters out the rest. The liberal-left reading operates through Care and Fairness: the Habermas who protects vulnerable citizens, upholds equal dignity, defends procedural justice against the authoritarian right. The Lacanian-Marxist reading adds Liberty to the mix — Habermas betrayed emancipation by surrendering radical critique for procedural comfort. The conservative reading activates Authority and Loyalty: Habermas as a tutor in disciplined argumentation, a resource for giving conservative instincts the form of public reason. What none of the three can access — what all three systematically suppress — is the Sanctity dimension, the register in which Habermas spent his final decades working: the question of what the great traditions carry that secular reason cannot generate, what is owed to the victims of history that no procedural discourse can redeem, what ground justice requires that argument alone cannot provide. This is not an accident. It is the precise shape of the reception failure. And it is, in a sense, the Habermasian problem enacted in the reception of Habermas himself: a philosopher who spent his career showing how communicative rationality gets colonized by strategic action, systematically reduced to a strategic instrument by each of the communities claiming his legacy.

What makes all three readings worse — and what pushes the philosophical Habermas even further from view — is the way his reception in the English-speaking world became dominated by the debates with Rawls, Dworkin, and the Anglo-American legal theorists. Those exchanges were important on their own terms. But they had the effect of translating Habermas into the idiom of liberal political philosophy, where the questions that defined his actual project — about the metaphysical legacy of German Idealism, about the relationship between secular reason and religious traditions, about what philosophy could look like after the catastrophe the tradition had helped produce — became almost entirely invisible. In the Anglo-American academy, Habermas became a sophisticated interlocutor in debates about justice, public reason, and constitutional democracy. The philosopher who had begun in Schelling and ended in a sustained dialogue with theologians simply did not appear in that conversation. That is the Habermas this essay is about.

I. The Philosopher Before the Public Intellectual

There is a biographical fact about Habermas that nearly everyone knows and almost nobody takes seriously: his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1954 at Bonn, was a study of Schelling. The title — Das Absolute und die Geschichte: Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken — translates as The Absolute and History: On the Ambivalence in Schelling’s Thought. This detail tends to appear in intellectual biographies as a piece of early context before the real story begins — before Adorno and the Frankfurt School, before The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, before the mature project of communicative rationality. Treated this way, it means nothing. Treated seriously, it changes everything.

Habermas began his career inside the same tradition Heidegger had inhabited and radicalized — not as an outsider borrowing philosophical vocabulary for political ends, but as a philosopher formed in German Idealism who had read the tradition from the inside, traced its philosophical logic, and arrived at a verdict about what that logic had authorized. His dissertation on the ambivalence in Schelling’s thought is not a preliminary exercise. It is the site of an encounter: a young philosopher coming to understand, through careful reading, both the genuine resources in the tradition and the specific point at which those resources had historically overreached. The concept of the Absolute in Schelling — the positing of an unconditioned ground from which all differentiation proceeds, the reaching past the finite structures of knowledge and discourse to the foundation beneath them — was philosophically serious, and Habermas knew it was serious. He was not dismissing it from ignorance. He was beginning to understand why it could not do what it claimed.

That understanding had already begun to surface publicly before the dissertation was complete. In July 1953 — still a doctoral student — Habermas published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung confronting Heidegger over his decision to republish his 1935 lectures on metaphysics without retracting or even annotating his reference to the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement. Heidegger was then the most celebrated philosopher in Germany, at the height of his postwar prestige. Habermas was a no-name student from the provinces. The move was intellectually courageous and personally risky. But it was not primarily a moral accusation against an individual. It was the opening move in a philosophical argument that would take Habermas seven decades to complete: that Heidegger’s politics were not an aberration of his philosophy but an available destination of it — that the structural features of his thought that made it so compelling were the same features that had made it so available for political catastrophe. That argument would deepen and ramify over the following three decades, issuing in the political and cultural essays collected in The New Conservatism (1989).

The New Conservatism is the book through which most English-speaking readers encountered the political Habermas — and it is, consequently, the book that has most consistently been mistaken for the whole project. Drawn from his Kleine politische Schriften of the mid-1980s and translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, it brought together his interventions in the Historians’ Debate, his attack on the revisionist German historians working to normalize and domesticate the Nazi past, his engagement with Heidegger’s entanglement with National Socialism, and the landmark essay “The New Obscurity” on the exhaustion of welfare-state utopianism. In the English-speaking world, this collection crystallized a particular image: Habermas as anti-fascist intellectual, defender of democratic memory, Frankfurt School heir who understood better than anyone what happens when a tradition fails to reckon honestly with its own past. That Habermas is real. But The New Conservatism was never the culmination of the project — it was a series of interventions written in the heat of the moment, while the deeper philosophical work was still fully in development.

What has gone almost entirely unremarked — and what makes this the right place to say it — is how far ahead of the curve Habermas was in diagnosing what the 1980s neoconservative turn was actually drawing on. The revisionist historians he targeted in the Historians’ Debate were not simply making a political argument about German memory. They were operating within an intellectual formation that had deeper roots: in the nationalist and völkisch traditions of German thought, in the esoteric and occult currents that had fed into fascism and that never fully disappeared from the cultural right after 1945, in the broader European reaction against Enlightenment rationalism that was beginning, in the 1980s, to find new political vehicles. Habermas saw the structural logic connecting these formations more clearly than almost anyone writing in that moment. He understood that the appeal to cultural depth, historical rootedness, and collective spiritual identity against the supposed coldness of liberal proceduralism was not a new argument. It was the same argument that had been running through German Idealism since Fichte, through the occult revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the Volkish movements and into fascism — and it was now being laundered back into respectable conservative intellectual discourse under the guise of historical revision and cultural criticism.

This is a dimension of The New Conservatism that the Anglophone reception has never fully processed, in large part because the intellectual formations Habermas was responding to remained poorly understood outside Europe. The occult and esoteric currents that fed into twentieth-century European reactionary politics — from Guénon’s Traditionalism through Evola’s esoteric fascism to the post-war networks that kept these ideas circulating on the cultural right — were largely invisible to Anglo-American readers in the 1980s. They are only now beginning to be seriously discussed in the Anglosphere, driven in part by the rise of the new right and the recognition that figures like Alexander Dugin — whose Eurasianism draws directly on Guénon and Evola — are not eccentric outliers but representatives of a coherent, long-running intellectual tradition. Matthew McManus, whose work on postmodern conservatism has done more than anyone writing in English to map the philosophical genealogy of the contemporary right, has tracked these connections with increasing precision. Yet even McManus’s meticulous genealogies, for all their depth, have not fully credited what Habermas was already naming in the 1980s: that the new conservatism was not primarily a reaction to specific policy failures or cultural provocations, but a structural recurrence of the move Habermas had been analyzing since his dissertation — the substitution of depth, rootedness, and ground for the slow, exposed work of rational argument. Habermas had a name for what was coming before it fully arrived. That he is not recognized for this — that the tributes credit the anti-fascist interventionist without crediting the philosopher who understood why fascism kept returning in new forms — is perhaps the most telling symptom of the reception failure this essay is trying to diagnose.

What exactly the structural diagnosis meant, and why it required the post-metaphysical turn that followed, is a thread I will develop throughout what follows. What matters here is that this act — and the Schelling dissertation it ran alongside — establishes the philosophical starting point that the obituaries have missed. Habermas did not arrive at his project as a sociologist of modernity or a Frankfurt School critical theorist. He arrived at it as a philosopher who had spent his formative years inside the tradition he would spend his career reconstructing.

The first major fruit of that reconstruction is The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), and it is worth pausing on it before moving to the more explicitly philosophical works, because it establishes the social and historical architecture within which everything else develops. The book’s argument is that the bourgeois public sphere — the network of coffee houses, salons, and print media that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, in which private citizens came together to reason publicly about matters of common concern — represented a genuine historical achievement: the first institutional form in which communicative rationality, the force of the better argument rather than the authority of tradition or power, could in principle govern public life. The argument is not nostalgic. Habermas documents the structural transformation of that public sphere under the pressure of mass media, consumerism, and the colonization of public life by market and administrative logics — its degradation from a space of genuine rational-critical debate into a managed arena of opinion formation and political marketing. But the normative standard it establishes — that democratic legitimacy requires a public sphere in which citizens can genuinely reason together, rather than simply have preferences managed — is the foundation on which everything that follows is built. This is Habermas still within the Frankfurt School orbit, deploying the tools of historical sociology in service of a normative diagnosis. But the question driving the project — what conditions allow communicative rationality to actually function in modern societies, and what systematically undermines it — is already, unmistakably, his own.

Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) marks the turn toward a more explicitly philosophical engagement with the tradition, and it is where the reckoning with Marx begins in earnest. Habermas’s argument here is that Marx had illegitimately reduced the full range of human cognitive interests to a single paradigm — labour, instrumental action, the metabolism of humanity with nature — and in doing so had foreclosed the dimension of communicative action that any adequate theory of emancipation had to include. Working through Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx alongside Peirce and Dilthey, Habermas identifies three irreducible cognitive interests: the technical interest in prediction and control, which governs the empirical-analytic sciences; the practical interest in mutual understanding, which governs the historical-hermeneutic sciences; and the emancipatory interest in liberation from ideologically distorted communication, which governs critical theory. The point is not that Marx was wrong about capitalism. It is that his reduction of all human interests to the productive paradigm had foreclosed the communicative dimension that any genuinely adequate theory of emancipation required. The critique of capitalism was necessary but insufficient. Emancipation was not only a matter of transforming the relations of production. It also required the transformation of the structures of communication — the conditions under which human beings could genuinely hear each other, challenge each other, and arrive at the kind of mutual understanding that instrumental action, by itself, could never produce. Habermas was updating Marx, not discarding him — and in doing so recovering the normative dimension that economistic readings of Marx had systematically suppressed.

Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976) is the crucial bridge that most readers skip, and skipping it is precisely what produces the misreadings of both The Theory of Communicative Action and the post-metaphysical project as a whole. This is the work where the engagement with Piaget and Kohlberg becomes decisive, and where the American pragmatist tradition — above all Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead — enters the project in a way that permanently reorients it. The key move is the transposition of Piaget’s model of individual cognitive development and Kohlberg’s model of individual moral development onto the level of social evolution. Piaget had shown that individual cognitive development follows an invariant sequence of discrete stages — each more complex and comprehensive than the last, each building on but irreversible from the previous — governed not by biological maturation alone but by a logic of learning that has its own internal structure. Kohlberg extended this to moral judgment: the development of moral consciousness in individuals follows an analogous sequence, from pre-conventional through conventional to post-conventional reasoning, in which each stage represents a genuine cognitive achievement, a more adequate way of handling moral problems, not merely a different cultural preference. What Habermas did — and this is the move that changes everything — was to argue that societies, like individuals, develop through analogous stage sequences in their normative structures: the institutional frameworks through which they organize social integration, handle conflict, and legitimate authority. Social evolution, on this account, is not only driven by changes in the forces of production, as Marx had argued. It also has another logic, rooted in the development of communicative competence — the capacity of members of a society to coordinate their actions through genuine mutual understanding rather than through force, tradition, or instrumental calculation.

The American pragmatist tradition is what makes this move philosophically coherent rather than merely speculative. Peirce’s account of the community of inquiry — in which truth emerges not from individual cognition but from the indefinitely extended process of communal inquiry, subject to ongoing revision and correction — gave Habermas a model of rationality that was neither subjective nor foundationalist. Dewey’s insistence that intelligence is always already embedded in social practice, that knowing and doing cannot be cleanly separated, and that democracy is itself a form of inquiry — a way of collectively solving problems through communication rather than authority — deepened this. And Mead’s social psychology, with its account of how the self is constituted through the internalization of the attitudes of others, provided the micro-level theory of intersubjective identity formation that the macro-level developmental account required. Together, these resources allowed Habermas to ground communicative rationality not in a philosophical Absolute — not in Hegel’s Geist, not in Marx’s productive forces — but in the immanent logic of communication itself: in what speakers necessarily presuppose whenever they attempt to reach genuine understanding with one another.

The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) is where these threads converge, and where the reconstruction of both Hegel and Marx is finally executed at full scale. To read it as a retreat from Frankfurt School radicalism — the Lacanian-Marxist charge — is to fundamentally misunderstand what it is doing. Hegel’s project, at its core, was the attempt to think the reconciliation of subject and object, particular and universal, the finite and the infinite — not as a presupposition handed down from prior metaphysics, but as something philosophy could demonstrate through the immanent movement of thought itself. The Absolute, for Hegel, was not a thing standing behind the world. It was the process of the world coming to know itself through the dialectical movement of Spirit. What Hegel achieved, and what made the tradition after him so generative and so dangerous, was the integration of history into philosophy: the recognition that reason is not ahistorical, that it develops, that what counts as rational is always already situated in a historical moment that shapes what can be thought and said. This insight — the historicity of reason — is one Habermas never abandoned. What he refused was the particular philosophical architecture Hegel used to secure it: the appeal to Geist as the subject of history, the claim that history’s movement could be comprehended from the standpoint of the Absolute. The Theory of Communicative Action is, in this precise sense, a reconstruction of Hegel’s project under post-metaphysical conditions. The reconciliation Hegel sought is still the goal. But its site is relocated: from Spirit coming to know itself through history, to the actual, imperfect, always-contested process by which human beings coordinate their actions, challenge each other’s validity claims, and arrive — fallibly, revisably, never finally — at shared understandings.

What Communication and the Evolution of Society had made possible is now fully visible: the reconciliation Hegel sought no longer needs to be grounded in the movement of Absolute Spirit through history. It is grounded in the developmental logic of communicative competence — the capacity of human beings to achieve, through the slow and fallible work of argument and mutual accountability, forms of social integration that are genuinely more adequate — more inclusive, more reflexive, more capable of handling moral complexity — than the ones they replaced. History has a normative direction, but that direction does not require a metaphysical subject to carry it. It is immanent in the structure of communicative action itself. Similarly, the emancipatory dimension Marx identified — the possibility of social arrangements genuinely accountable to the needs and interests of their members — is not abandoned but relocated: from the forces of production to the normative structures of communication, from the dialectic of labour to the developmental logic of moral consciousness. This is what the Lacanian-Marxist critique consistently misses. Habermas was not retreating from emancipation. He was providing it with a philosophical architecture that did not depend on either the Hegelian Absolute or the Marxist dialectic of productive forces — both of which, as he had learned from the inside, opened doors that good intentions could not keep closed.

This is the context within which the post-metaphysical turn has to be understood — and the context within which it is most consistently misread. Post-metaphysical thinking, in Habermas’s sense, does not mean the rejection of the questions Schelling, Hegel, and Marx were asking. It means the refusal of the specific philosophical move through which each of them tried to answer those questions: the appeal to a foundational ground — whether the Absolute, Geist, or the dialectic of productive forces — that stands beneath rational discourse and from which the whole can be surveyed and legitimated. To understand why Habermas regarded that refusal as philosophically urgent rather than merely cautious, you have to follow the logic of the tradition from Fichte through Hegel to Heidegger — and see how the move from the Absolute to fascism was not a distortion but a development.

The problem runs from the very structure of German Idealism’s central ambition. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1808), delivered under French occupation, drew a direct line from his philosophical system — in which the Absolute “I” constitutes itself through its own self-positing activity — to the cultural and political mission of the German people. For Fichte, the nation was not merely a political unit. It was the concrete historical form through which the universal spirit of humanity expressed itself at a particular moment. The Germans, with their “original language” and their uncorrupted relationship to the sources of human spiritual life, bore a special responsibility for the next stage of Spirit’s development. This is not a distortion of Fichte’s philosophical system. It is an application of it: if the Absolute expresses itself through particular forms, and if philosophy can identify which particular form is presently carrying the advance of Spirit, then cultural and national identity becomes metaphysically significant in a way that makes it available for political mobilization.

Hegel systematized this slide and made it philosophically respectable. In Hegel’s mature system, the Absolute Spirit (Geist) moves through history by expressing itself through the particular Volksgeister — the national spirits — of successive peoples. Each great civilization is the bearer of a stage in Spirit’s self-realization: Greece for the birth of freedom, Rome for law and institution, and in Hegel’s own telling, the Germanic Protestant world for the full actualization of rational freedom. The state, for Hegel, is not a mere political mechanism but “the actuality of the ethical idea” — the concrete institutional form in which the spirit of a people achieves rational self-expression. What makes this philosophically dangerous, as many of Hegel’s commentators observed, is precisely the problem of “the infinite in concreteness”: the tendency for Absolute Spirit, which should remain a philosophical category pointing beyond any particular historical realization, to slip into identification with actually existing political arrangements — as it did, notoriously, in Hegel’s near-deification of the Prussian state. The absolute legitimacy of the state becomes inseparable from the national culture that gives it life. And national culture becomes, in turn, the medium through which Spirit speaks.

Heidegger’s move is the most sophisticated version of this pattern, and the most consequential. He replaced the Absolute with Being — a deeper, more originary ground, less encumbered by the Hegelian apparatus of dialectical development. But the structural logic remained. Being discloses itself not to abstract rational subjects but to particular peoples through their language and historical situatedness. In his lectures on Hölderlin, Heidegger was explicit: the poetry of Hölderlin is reserved for the Germans, not the French or the British or the Americans — because Being sends different impulses to different national communities, and German is the language in which Being’s disclosure is most primordially possible. The philosopher’s task is not to argue from universal premises to universal conclusions, but to attend to the call of Being as it sounds through a specific cultural and linguistic heritage. Dasein in Being and Time begins as individual existence, but by the early 1930s Heidegger had extended it to the collective: the authentic existence of a Volk achieving its historical destiny, its genuine selfhood, against the flattening forces of modernity. As Rector of Freiburg University in 1933, he told his students that the Führer alone was “the present and future German reality and its law” — not as a private political opinion that he happened to hold alongside his philosophy, but as a conclusion that followed from the philosophical framework he had been developing.

This is what Habermas had understood by the time he published his 1953 article, and what he spent the next seven decades working through. The problem was not Heidegger’s personal failings. The problem was structural: what happens when you remove God — or the procedural constraints of rational argument — from the framework of disclosure, but keep the framework itself? What you are left with is a structure in which some particular community, language, or cultural identity becomes the privileged medium through which ultimate reality speaks. “Humanism without God,” in this specific sense, does not produce Enlightenment universalism. It produces the Volk as a quasi-theological category — the bearer of authentic Being, the custodian of the ground, the community whose cultural identity has been elevated to metaphysical status. This is the move that fascism required philosophically, and the German Idealist tradition — from Fichte’s Addresses through Hegel’s Volksgeist to Heidegger’s Being-in-language — had been rehearsing it for over a century before the Nazi seizure of power. Heidegger’s Being was not a distortion of a healthy tradition. It was one of that tradition’s available destinations. And what Habermas saw clearly, from inside that tradition, was that every time philosophy reached for the ground beneath rational discourse, it opened that door — and good intentions were not sufficient to keep it closed. The ground, once posited, could be occupied by anyone.

It is important to say at this point that the problem Habermas was diagnosing is not confined to German Idealism, or to academic philosophy, or even to the major institutional religious traditions. The structural move — positing a depth beneath argument that some community, lineage, or initiate has privileged access to — runs through the entire spectrum of Western esoteric and occult traditions, through the New Age movements that drew on them, and through the various neo-traditional and perennialist spiritualities that have shaped contemporary alternative culture. Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, Julius Evola’s esoteric fascism, René Guénon’s Traditionalism — these are not fringe curiosities. They are the intellectual infrastructure through which the appeal to occult depth entered twentieth-century political imagination, often with catastrophic results. Evola’s influence on Italian fascism, Steiner’s racial-spiritual hierarchy, the Traditionalist current’s migration from Guénon through Dugin into Russian imperial ideology — these are not distortions of the esoteric traditions. They are available destinations of the structural logic those traditions share: the claim that initiatory knowledge of the ground authorizes political conclusions that merely rational argument cannot reach. The New Age domestication of this logic — the privatization of occult depth into personal transformation, spiritual growth, and consciousness expansion, stripped of explicit political content — does not escape the structure. It merely defers it, leaving the political question underdetermined and available for whoever arrives next with a use for the depth that has been cultivated. And traditional institutional religion, as Davis showed, carries its own version of the same temptation in every one of his four forms. The certitude, the historical pride, the cosmic vanity, the moral wrath — none of these are the property of bad religion or corrupt institutions. They are available to any tradition that takes seriously the claim to have touched ultimate reality. Habermas’s post-metaphysical framework was built to hold the line against the political weaponization of that claim in all its forms — philosophical, theological, esoteric, and popular. The breadth of the problem is why the framework had to be as rigorous as it was.

And here is where the most persistent misreading of the post-metaphysical turn needs to be named directly: Habermas was not against religion. He was not against the Absolute as a philosophical or spiritual reality. He was not dismissing the cognitive and moral content of the theological tradition. The post-metaphysical turn is not atheism, and it is not the Enlightenment polemic against superstition. What Habermas argued — and what almost none of the current tributes have followed — is something considerably more precise and considerably more philosophically serious: that in a plural, multi-faith public sphere, after the Holocaust, no single comprehensive doctrine — religious or secular-philosophical — can serve as the foundational ground of democratic legitimacy and a shared theory of justice. This is not because those doctrines are false. It is because the political conditions of modernity — genuine plurality, the coexistence of radically different comprehensive worldviews, the historical evidence of what happens when philosophy or theology claims the authority to resolve political questions by appeal to a ground beneath rationality and a theory of justice — make it impossible for any such doctrine to perform that foundational function without foreclosing the conditions democratic legitimacy requires. Religion has an indispensable role in the public sphere. It simply cannot play the role of metaphysical foundation for a theory of justice that must be accountable to everyone.

This distinction — between rejecting religion and refusing to let religion (or secular metaphysics) do foundational political work — is what the tributes have almost entirely failed to register. And the failure is not incidental. It is the precise shape of the reduction: reading Habermas as the Enlightenment liberal keeping religion out of the public square, when what he was actually arguing was considerably more nuanced, considerably more respectful of what the religious traditions carry, and considerably more interesting philosophically.

Because the dimension of Habermas’s work that gets buried most thoroughly — buried under the debate with Rawls, under the Historians’ Debate, under the political interventions — is his sustained, serious, and often deeply collaborative engagement with theologians and sociologists of religion. This engagement is not a late-career detour. It runs through the entire ideas of his career and philosophical project, and it is the dimension the current political moment most urgently needs.

The deeper theological engagement — with the tradition that produced the Browning-Fiorenza anthology Habermas, Modernity and Public Theology, which I engaged with at length in “Between Facticity & Grace” — was not Habermas managing theology as a problem within a secular framework. It was Habermas taking seriously the possibility that the religious traditions carry genuine cognitive content — moral and spiritual resources — that secular philosophy had not been able to generate from within its own terms. The central question this tradition pressed him on — whether communicative rationality could account for the victims of history, the dead, those whose suffering could not be retrospectively validated by any future reconciliation — was a theological question in the deepest sense, and Habermas knew it. What can be done with suffering that no future discourse can redeem? The theological tradition had been thinking about that question for centuries. Philosophy kept running up against it without being able to resolve it.

This is the thread that leads, over thirty years, to the 2004 dialogue with Cardinal Ratzinger at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria — a dialogue that the tributes treat, when they mention it at all, as a surprising biographical late turn rather than as the culmination of a project that had been oriented toward this question from the beginning. In that dialogue, Habermas made a concession that the political readings of his work had made almost unthinkable: secular reason cannot generate its own motivational resources. The values that sustain democratic life — solidarity, human dignity, the sense that justice matters, the obligation to those who have suffered — have deep historical roots in religious traditions, above all in the Judeo-Christian understanding of the person. Secular philosophy has not found a way to replicate or replace those roots. He argued for what he called a “complementary learning process” — a relationship in which secular reason and religious tradition each carry what the other needs and each submit to the corrective the other provides. Ratzinger, for his part, conceded that faith must submit to the corrective of reason — a concession that should not be taken for granted coming from the man who would become Benedict XVI.

What is philosophically significant about this exchange is not that Habermas converted to any form of theism. It is that he arrived, through seven decades of post-metaphysical philosophy, at the recognition that the central question the theological tradition had been asking — what actually grounds the claim that justice matters when no empirical fact compels it — was not a question that procedural rationality could answer from within itself. The post-metaphysical philosopher had followed his own argument all the way to its edge, and at that edge found that the tradition he had been carefully refusing to let do foundational political work was carrying something secular reason could not do without. That is a remarkable philosophical conclusion. It is also almost entirely invisible in the obituaries.

The prioritizing of the political debate involving Habermas over his theological dialogue is a deliberate, non-neutral editorial choice. The former, focused on Rawls, aligns well with Anglo-American political philosophy, allowing academia to easily engage with and evaluate its discussions on justice and public reason. The theological dialogue, however, presents a greater challenge. It necessitates considering that philosophy has genuine limitations, that religious traditions hold vital cognitive content secular reason requires, and that the post-Holocaust, post-metaphysical philosopher — a staunch defender of democratic discourse’s procedural conditions — ultimately embraced an intellectual humility before the deep tradition he had previously refused to let do foundational work. This is a more complex Habermas than political interpretations allow, but it is the figure whose work is now most significant.

His final major project — the three-volume Also a History of Philosophy, completed in his nineties — makes this explicit in a way that the tributes have not engaged. That work is not simply a history of ideas. It is an attempt to recover the spiritual and religious potential of the metaphysical tradition — the cognitive and moral content that philosophy has carried since the Axial Age — and to ask what of that content can survive the post-metaphysical turn and what cannot. It is the work of a philosopher who has spent his career bracketing the Absolute and has arrived, in his final years, at the question of what was actually in what he was bracketing, and how much of it secular reason actually needs. That project, more than any political intervention, more than any debate with Rawls or Dworkin, is where Habermas was working at the end of his life. Almost no one writing about his death this week has mentioned it.

It is also worth being clear about what Habermas’s openness to religion was not. He was never simply a champion of religion in the public sphere, and his caution here was deliberate and principled. His position was not that religious voices should be excluded from democratic deliberation — precisely the opposite. It was that they must translate their insights into publicly accessible reasons, ones that do not presuppose the truth of any particular comprehensive doctrine and that can in principle be heard and evaluated by citizens who do not share the underlying faith commitment. Religion carries genuine cognitive and moral content that secular reason needs. But the moment a religious tradition claims the authority to resolve political questions by appeal to revelation, natural law, or the will of God — the moment it short-circuits the slow, accountable work of public argument by appealing to a ground that only the faithful can access — it reproduces, in theological form, exactly the structural move Habermas spent his career diagnosing in German Idealism. The appeal to depth as a substitute for argument. The claim that some community, tradition, or people has privileged access to the ground from which political authority flows.

This is the defining political problem of the present moment. The rise of Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism in the United States — represented most visibly by JD Vance in the White House, by legal theorists like Adrian Vermeule arguing for a “common good constitutionalism” that subordinates liberal proceduralism to a substantive Catholic natural law framework, by Patrick Deneen’s sustained philosophical case in Why Liberalism Failed that Enlightenment proceduralism is itself the source of civilizational decay — is precisely the political form of the philosophical move Habermas identified. These are not fringe positions. They represent a serious, intellectually coherent, and increasingly politically empowered attempt to place one comprehensive religious doctrine in the position of foundational ground for democratic legitimacy — to do, in twenty-first century America, what the Volksgeist did in nineteenth-century Germany: elevate a particular cultural and religious identity to metaphysical status and claim that the political order flows from it. Habermas’s post-metaphysical framework, with all the limitations that Dallmayr and Davis rightly identified, was built precisely to hold the line against that move. His death arrives at the moment that line is most under pressure.

This is the philosopher whose death lands differently for me than the one being memorialized. Not the anti-fascist political theorist — though he was that too, and it mattered enormously. Not the proceduralist sellout — a reading that consistently fails to grasp what he was actually doing with Hegel and Marx, or what Piaget, Kohlberg, and the American pragmatists made possible. But the philosopher who began where Heidegger began, traced the philosophical logic of that tradition to the catastrophe it had authorized, built a post-metaphysical alternative that was never anti-religious but always insisted that religion could not do foundational political work in a plural public sphere, and arrived — through the Browning-Fiorenza tradition, through the Ratzinger exchange, through the final history of philosophy — at the recognition that secular reason and the religious traditions needed each other in ways that neither had fully acknowledged. That is the Habermas whose death this week represents a genuine loss. And it is this Habermas that is almost entirely absent from the current public discourse — and that I find the most vexing.

The personal path I want to trace in what follows — through Zen Buddhism, through the Kyoto School’s parallel catastrophe, through Bellah and back to the Western tradition, through Lalonde and Davis and the post-secular theology conversation — is not offered as an autobiography. It is offered as evidence. Evidence that the problem Habermas spent his career diagnosing is not a specifically European or Christian problem. It is a structural feature of what religion does when it overreaches — in any tradition, in any cultural context.

Charles Davis identified this structure with precision in his 1973 book The Temptations of Religion. Written in the aftermath of his own rupture with institutional Catholicism, the book names four temptations intrinsic to religion as such: the lust for certitude, the pride of history, cosmic vanity, and the wrath of morality. What Davis understood — and what made this book so important to the post-secular conversation at Concordia where I studied — is that these are not failures of bad religion or corrupt institutions. They are temptations built into the structure of religious traditions itself. The deeper a tradition’s commitment to ultimate truth, the more powerful the pull toward each of them. And each one, taken far enough, produces the same outcome Habermas had identified from the philosophical side: the claim to a ground beneath rational discourse, a certainty that forecloses the slow and accountable work of argument, a community that has elevated its own particular insight into the condition of possibility for everyone else’s.

What the section that follows tries to show is that this pattern recurs not only within Christianity or within Western philosophy, but in the encounter between Buddhist thought and German Idealism in early twentieth-century Japan. The Kyoto School catastrophe is not an exotic footnote. It is the same structural failure from a different direction — and tracing it from that direction is the clearest way I know to demonstrate that what Habermas was diagnosing was not a European cultural pathology but something more fundamental about what happens when any tradition, however sophisticated and however genuine, is asked to do foundational political work in a plural world.

II. How I Backed Into Habermas — Through Buddhism

The personal background — how I came to Buddhism in Montreal, what I found there, and what eventually came apart — is told in “Albert Low & Zen at War: On Suffering, Kensho & Catholicism in Quebec” and “Critical Theology & Integral Humanism: Marc Lalonde, Charles Davis, & the Postmodern Conservative Challenge”. Readers who want the full account are invited to start there. What I want to trace here is the intellectual path that connected that formation to the post-metaphysical questions Habermas had been working on, and why the connection felt not accidental but structurally necessary.

In 2006, the contemplative work and a family crisis running alongside it drove me back to school. I enrolled at Concordia University in Applied Human Sciences and Religious Studies, and it was here that the Zen formation and the philosophical questions I had been carrying began to find a framework. The path ran through Robert Bellah before it reached Habermas — and that sequence matters, because Bellah was the thinker who first gave me a way to hold what Section I describes above: the recognition that what the great traditions carry is not reducible to individual contemplative experience, but is embedded in historical institutions, evolutionary developments, and public practices that have their own logic independent of any individual’s interior life.

Two texts were indispensable. Beyond Belief — which contains his landmark 1964 essay “Religious Evolution” — gave me a developmental account of religion as a public and historical phenomenon, tracing the movement from archaic and mythic religious forms through the Axial Age breakthroughs to the modern differentiated religious situation. What Bellah made visible was something Wilber’s framework had gestured at but not fully grounded: that the development of religious consciousness is not just an interior spiritual story but a social and historical one, shaped by the same forces that shape everything else. The Robert Bellah Reader situated his project within the larger argument that the modern separation of rational cognition from moral evaluation — fact from value, faith from knowledge — is not only philosophically untenable but practically unsustainable. Bellah stood apart from my other reading because of his insistence that religion was shaped by forces independent of pure interior experience. He was, I came to understand, working in the same intellectual space as Habermas — asking what secular modernity had inherited from the religious traditions and what it was failing to acknowledge about that inheritance.

That recognition — that Bellah and Habermas were working on the same problem from adjacent angles — was what made the Kyoto School encounter, when I came to it through East Asian studies, land as something more than an intellectual history lesson. It landed as a diagnosis.

Kitaro Nishida, Keiji Nishitani, Hajime Tanabe — these were not marginal figures. Nishida is generally regarded as the most significant Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century, and the school that formed around his work at Kyoto Imperial University was the most serious attempt in modern intellectual history to bring Buddhist insight into sustained philosophical dialogue with the Western tradition. What made the project intellectually compelling — and this is important to say before the horror — was that it seemed to offer something neither tradition could provide alone. Western philosophy, in its Kantian and post-Kantian forms, had persistent problems with the ground of experience. German Idealism’s attempts to solve this — Fichte’s absolute ego, Schelling’s nature-philosophy, Hegel’s absolute spirit — each ended in philosophical overreach, positing a foundation that could not bear the weight placed on it. Heidegger’s turn to Being was the most sophisticated of these attempts, and it attracted serious Buddhist thinkers precisely because the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā — emptiness, the groundlessness of all things — seemed to offer what Western philosophy kept failing to find: a way of thinking about the ground of experience that did not commit the same errors. Nishida’s concept of absolute nothingness — developed from An Inquiry into the Good (1911) through the late essays — was a genuine philosophical achievement. Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness extended this into a direct confrontation with nihilism, arguing that śūnyatā offered resources for a genuine response to the collapse of meaning in modernity that Western philosophy and theology had failed to find within their own traditions.

And yet what the Kyoto School built — in the years leading up to and during the Second World War — was, in significant part, a philosophical justification for Japanese imperialism. Nishida’s “place of nothingness” and Tanabe’s “logic of the species” were mobilized in support of the Japanese expansionist project. The Kyoto School, with all its philosophical sophistication and genuine Buddhist depth, provided intellectual cover for a militarist state in precisely the way Heidegger’s invocation of Being had provided intellectual cover for National Socialism. The structural parallel is exact: in both cases, the appeal to a ground beneath rational discourse — a mystical or ontological foundation that transcended the merely procedural — became the philosophical idiom through which atrocity was legitimated.

What this meant, in practical terms, was this: the contemplative depth was real. The philosophical achievement of Nishida’s absolute nothingness was real. None of that resolved the question of justice. None of that provided traction on the material and political question of what should happen to the people of Korea, China, Southeast Asia. The depth and the politics lived on entirely different tracks, and when they were forced to intersect, it was the politics that determined what the depth would be used for.

Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War completed the picture. What collapsed was not the contemplative experience. What collapsed was the idealization: that Zen was somehow above history, transmitting a pure wisdom uncorrupted by the forces that shape everything else. And with that idealization collapsed a certain kind of confidence — the confidence that if we could just go deep enough, if we could just touch the ground beneath ordinary consciousness, the political and justice questions would somehow resolve themselves. They wouldn’t. They hadn’t. The most sophisticated Buddhist philosophical tradition in modern intellectual history had proven that they wouldn’t.

What makes the Kyoto catastrophe more than historical is that its structural logic — depth as substitute for argument, the appeal to an ontological ground as sufficient for political orientation — did not die with the Japanese imperial project. It migrated. It found new hosts. And tracing those migrations is where the abstract claim of the previous section becomes concrete and personal.

The most serious scholarly attempt to reckon honestly with the Kyoto School’s double legacy — its genuine philosophical achievement and its political catastrophe — is the work gathered in Jason M. Wirth, Bret W. Davis, and Brian Schroeder’s edited volume Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana University Press, 2011). Wirth, a philosopher at Seattle University who is also a Soto Zen priest, and Davis, who spent over a decade practicing Rinzai Zen at Shōkokuji monastery in Kyoto while completing doctoral work at Vanderbilt, bring to this project a rare combination of insider practice and rigorous philosophical accountability. Their approach does not simply celebrate the Kyoto School’s synthesis of Buddhist and Western thought. It holds the synthesis to the critical standard the synthesis itself demands — asking what the appeal to absolute nothingness actually authorizes, and what it forecloses. Wirth’s Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2019) extends this further, putting Dōgen, Linji, and Hakuin into genuine philosophical confrontation with Nietzsche and Deleuze — not to manufacture a convenient convergence, but to press on what each tradition is actually doing when it claims to have dissolved the ground problem. The honest answer, in both books, is that the dissolution is never complete, and that the political question — what follows, institutionally and democratically, from the nondual insight — remains perpetually underdetermined by the insight itself.

The Western appropriation of Buddhism that grew out of the same mid-twentieth-century context as the Kyoto School’s influence carried a different but structurally related problem. Slavoj Žižek’s diagnosis — however polemically overstated and however insufficiently grounded in actual Buddhist philosophy — tracks something real: that Western Buddhism, as it has developed in the consumer societies of North America and Europe, has too often functioned as what he calls “capitalism’s perfect ideological supplement.” The contemplative turn inward, the cultivation of equanimity in the face of structural injustice, the privatization of suffering into individual spiritual practice — these are not distortions of the Zen and Tibetan traditions as Western practitioners received them. They are available destinations of those traditions under specific social conditions, just as the Kyoto School’s politics were available destinations of Nishida’s absolute nothingness under the specific social conditions of 1930s Japan. The “McMindfulness” phenomenon — the reduction of Buddhist meditative practice to a productivity tool and stress-management technique, stripped of its ethical and soteriological context — represents the endpoint of this trajectory: depth fully absorbed into the logic of the system it was supposed to transcend. Ron Purser’s McMindfulness (Repeater Books, 2019) gives the fullest account of this colonization, tracing how what began as a serious contemplative practice was systematically disembedded from its communal, ethical, and political context and repackaged as an individual optimization technique compatible with, indeed supportive of, the very structural conditions that generate the suffering it purports to address. But McMindfulness is only the most visible and commercially successful form of a broader pattern. The same structural dynamic — depth privatized, ground claimed, political question deferred — runs through the New Age appropriation of Eastern traditions more generally: the eclectic spirituality market that assembled Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Vedanta, Tarot, astrology, channelling, and neo-shamanism into a consumer product of inner transformation compatible with any political arrangement and critical of none. And it runs through the occult revival that has accompanied and often preceded the New Age: from Theosophical lodges and Anthroposophical communities in the early twentieth century, through the post-1960s explosion of esoteric publishing, to the contemporary internet-mediated occult culture that has developed its own political valences ranging from therapeutic self-help to outright reactionary mysticism. In each of these forms, the structural logic is the same: a depth is posited, access to it is claimed, and the political question — what follows democratically and institutionally from whatever is found at the bottom — is left entirely underdetermined.

This is the milieu in which Wilber built his integral synthesis of Buddhism, developmental psychology, and systems theory — and it matters for understanding both what his project achieved and where its structural vulnerabilities lie. It also matters to name the intellectual genealogy more precisely. Wilber’s project sits at the intersection of two lineages that are rarely traced together but that share the same structural feature. The first is the perennial philosophy tradition — from Blavatsky’s Theosophy through Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945) to Huston Smith’s Forgotten Truth — which claims that behind the surface diversity of the world’s religious traditions lies a single primordial wisdom accessible to the initiated. The second is the developmental psychology and systems theory tradition he drew on through Piaget, Kohlberg, Gebser, and Aurobindo. The brilliance of the AQAL synthesis is its attempt to hold these together: to subject the perennial depth-claim to the developmental and perspectival disciplines that give it structure and accountability. But the perennial lineage carries its structural inheritance regardless of how sophisticated the synthesis. When Wilber in his early career described Adi Da Samraj — the American guru later credibly accused of serious abuse of devotees — as the greatest living Realizer, he was not making an error external to his framework. He was applying the framework’s own logic: if genuine transpersonal realization is possible, and if it represents access to the ground that transcends ordinary developmental accountability, then the question of how to evaluate claims to have achieved it from within ordinary consciousness becomes almost unanswerable. The perennial philosophy’s ground-claim had not been dissolved by the post-metaphysical turn. It had been incorporated into the AQAL architecture, and the accountability problem came with it. the AQAL framework’s apex of formless awareness as the nondual ground of all quadrants, levels, and lines is recognizably Mahayana in its ontological commitments. His post-metaphysical turn in Integral Spirituality (2006) was explicitly an attempt to hold this Buddhist depth while subjecting it to the epistemic demands Habermas had articulated — to find a way of speaking about the transpersonal that did not commit what Habermas would recognize as the foundationalist error. That attempt is genuine and represents real philosophical progress over the McMindfulness dissolution of depth into function. But the structural vulnerability that the Kyoto School and the Western Buddhist reception both expose is visible in integral theory as well, in a form specific to its own social context: the guru problem. Wilber’s sustained endorsement of Adi Da Samraj — maintained even as evidence accumulated of serious abuse of devotees, and rationalized through the theory that genuine Realization at the spiritual line of development could coexist with severe dysfunction in other developmental lines — represents exactly the failure mode the Habermasian corrective is designed to prevent. The nondual ground, posited as the condition of possibility for all quadrants, effectively suspended the accountability structures that the procedural framework would otherwise require. If someone has genuinely accessed the transpersonal ground, the argument runs, how could ordinary citizens in good standing evaluate that claim? The guru principle, in its integral form, is not a distortion of the AQAL framework. It is an available destination of it. And the same structural logic that made Heidegger’s Being available for the Volksgeist claim — the positing of a ground that particular individuals or communities can access while others cannot — is recognizable, in a very different cultural register, in the integral community’s persistent difficulty holding its own spiritual authorities to democratic accountability.

This is why Bellah mattered so much at that moment. His account of religious evolution was precisely an argument against the idealization I had been carrying: that contemplative depth, taken on its own terms, is a reliable guide to the social and political questions. For Bellah, the Axial Age breakthroughs — in which the great traditions first achieved the kind of reflexive, universal moral consciousness that Buddhism and the prophetic religions represent — were genuine cognitive achievements. But they were achievements embedded in historical institutions and social practices, shaped by the same forces that shaped everything else, and they carried both their genuine wisdom and the ideological distortions of their historical contexts. Separating the two required exactly the kind of critical, post-metaphysical framework that Habermas had been building — a framework that could honour what the traditions carry without granting them the authority to bypass the slow, accountable work of moral and political argument.

It was that convergence — the Kyoto catastrophe as diagnosis, Bellah as the bridge, Habermas as the philosophical architecture — that sent me, through Lalonde and Davis at Concordia, into the post-metaphysical and post-secular conversation that has defined my work since. I came to Habermas from the other side of the world’s intellectual history: through a Buddhist formation that had encountered German Idealism at its furthest extension and followed it to a structurally identical catastrophe. Two routes, from opposite directions, arriving at the same impasse. It was that convergence — not Frankfurt School critical theory, not the European left — that made the post-metaphysical project feel not like an academic position to evaluate but like an answer to a question I had been living.

That question, and the shape of the answer Habermas built, is what I want to trace in what follows — through the postmodern theology debates, through the post-metaphysical theology tradition that runs through Lalonde and Davis, and finally through the Wilber question that the present political moment makes impossible to avoid. The conflict between postmodern theology — which reaches back behind the Enlightenment for a thicker metaphysical foundation, in Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy, in McGrath’s contemplative retrieval, in the natural law revival that has reached the White House — and post-metaphysical theology — which tries to honour what the traditions carry while refusing to let that content do foundational political work in a plural public sphere — is not an academic dispute. It is the philosophical form of the cultural wars now playing out at full force. Habermas understood that conflict better than anyone. His death is an occasion to understand it more clearly.

III. The Lost Road and Phenomenology for the Godforsaken

For readers who haven’t followed the German Idealism revival closely, a brief orientation is necessary before the argument that follows can land with its full weight. My essay “On Sean McGrath’s Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge” (February 2026) engages this material at length. What I want to do here is condense the essential philosophical stakes and then extend the argument into territory the earlier essay only gestured toward — the direct confrontation between postmodern and post-metaphysical theology in the current political moment.

Sean McGrath is a Canadian philosopher working at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and one of the most serious practitioners in the current revival of German Idealism — particularly the late Schelling — within a broadly Catholic contemplative framework. His work is not easy to locate on the usual political or ecclesiastical maps. He is neither a traditionalist nostalgic for pre-modern Christendom nor a liberal Catholic accommodating the tradition to secular modernity. He is something philosophically rarer: a thinker who takes German Idealism seriously from the inside, reads it with the care of someone who knows it from sustained original engagement, and draws from it toward what he calls the recovery of the Western contemplative tradition as a living way. That recovery is philosophically genuine. The question it has not yet answered is what this essay is pressing.

The key to understanding what is at stake in McGrath’s project begins not with The Lost Road (2025) but with his earlier Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (2006). This book is the most important and least discussed contribution in his entire body of work, and its argument reshapes everything that follows. McGrath demonstrates that the young Heidegger is not primarily a student of Husserl or a Greek philosopher in disguise, but a thinker whose entire early project is shaped by his rupture with Catholic Scholasticism and his deep, suppressed engagement with the Christian contemplative tradition. The “hermeneutics of facticity” — Heidegger’s insistence that philosophy begins from the concrete, thrown situation of human existence — is, McGrath shows, a secularization of Luther’s theology of the cross. The existential analytics of Dasein, the analysis of thrownness, finitude, and care, the destruction of the history of ontology — all of this is operating within a theological problematic that Heidegger had left Catholicism to escape but could not leave behind.

What Heidegger spent a career concealing, McGrath uncovers: the supposedly secular phenomenological project carries theological cargo that was never declared at the border. The philosophical achievement of Being and Time cannot be fully understood without tracing the suppressed Christian mystical inheritance that structures it from within. And this insight cuts in two directions simultaneously. Looking backward, it explains how a project apparently devoted to secular ontology could carry within it the resources for both fascism and, via the Kyoto School, for the philosophical justification of Japanese imperialism. The structural resonances that made Heidegger so attractive to serious Buddhist thinkers were real — but they were resonances not between secular phenomenology and Buddhist thought, but between a secularized Christian mysticism and Buddhist ontology. The inheritance came with its catastrophic potential attached and unacknowledged.

Looking forward to the present, the Phenomenology for the Godforsaken thesis means something even more pressing. If the structure of Heidegger’s philosophy carries the suppressed shape of the tradition he left, and if the current German Idealism revival is bringing that suppressed content back to the surface and making it explicit — which is precisely what The Lost Road does, honestly and without apology — then the revival is not simply recovering an abandoned philosophical resource. It is re-activating a theological commitment that was operative all along, one that was mobilized in catastrophic ways in the twentieth century and that has never been subjected to the full reckoning that would make it safe to re-activate.

The Lost Road is the point where the Schelling scholarship steps aside and speaks directly about what it was always in service of: a recovery of the Western contemplative tradition as a living way, against the flattening forces of secular modernity and the impoverished spirituality of late capitalism. I argued in my review that this recovery is philosophically genuine and philosophically important. McGrath is not Peterson. The intellectual depth is not equivalent. He is asking serious questions about what was lost when the contemplative tradition was dismantled, and the loss was real. But the question his project has not yet answered — the question Habermas spent his life building an answer to — is what happens when that recovered tradition meets the political world. Not in the seminar room. In the public square. Under conditions of genuine plurality, where not everyone shares the comprehensive doctrine the tradition presupposes. Under historical conditions where the philosophical architecture that carries contemplative depth has already been mobilized, twice in the twentieth century, in service of political catastrophe.

The fault line that The Lost Road exposes runs through all of contemporary theology, and understanding it requires distinguishing four positions that are frequently conflated in current debates.

Radical Orthodoxy — associated above all with John Milbank — represents the most ambitious and most politically consequential version of what I am calling postmodern theology in the restrictive sense. Milbank’s argument, developed across Theology and Social Theory (1990) and the Radical Orthodoxy series, is that secular reason is not a neutral ground from which theology can be evaluated but is itself a theological position — specifically, a heretical one, the product of late medieval nominalism’s rupture with the participatory ontology of classical Christian thought. His response to Habermas’s post-metaphysical framework is not to engage it on procedural grounds but to deny its legitimacy entirely: only a recovery of Augustinian and Thomistic metaphysics of participation can provide the ontological ground for a genuinely just social order. God is not the God who submits to the corrective of reason — as Ratzinger conceded in the 2004 dialogue. God is the ground of reason itself, and any reason that does not recognize this is, in Milbank’s analysis, nihilism dressed up as neutrality. This is the theological equivalent of the move Habermas spent his career diagnosing. It refuses the procedural question rather than answering it.

McGrath’s contemplative retrieval is philosophically more serious and more honest about what it is doing than Radical Orthodoxy, but it shares the same structural feature: it reaches back behind the Enlightenment settlement for a thicker metaphysical foundation, one rooted in the contemplative tradition of German Idealism and its medieval antecedents. Where Milbank insists on the priority of participation over procedure, McGrath insists on the priority of contemplative experience over rationalist reconstruction. The intentions are genuinely different from the Catholic integralists who have reached political power. But the structural question — what constrains the political use of what is found in the contemplative ground — remains unanswered in both cases.

Postmodern theology in the phenomenological mode — Jean-Luc Marion and, from a different angle, John D. Caputo — represents a more philosophically nuanced attempt to think beyond both secular rationalism and metaphysical restoration. Marion’s project, from God Without Being (1982) onward, is to overcome what he calls onto-theology — the reduction of God to a metaphysical “highest being” — not by abandoning theology but by recovering an older tradition of negative theology and phenomenological givenness. God, for Marion, cannot be conceptualized without becoming an idol. His phenomenology of the “saturated phenomenon” — the event of givenness that overflows all intentional categories — attempts to describe how the divine can make itself present without being captured in the metaphysical frameworks that always distort it. Caputo’s “weak theology,” drawing on Derrida, pushes this further in a deconstructive direction: God as unconditional claim without force, an event rather than a being, calling without compelling. Both Marion and Caputo are, in their different ways, trying to think theologically without reproducing the metaphysical architecture that Habermas identified as the source of the structural problem.

The critical question for both is whether their sophisticated refusal of onto-theology translates into a corresponding refusal to let theology do foundational political work. Caputo’s weak theology, with its insistence on unconditional claim without sovereign force, is explicitly designed to resist the political theology of sovereignty — the move that converts divine authority into state authority. Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, however, while philosophically anti-foundationalist, tends toward a theological confidence — a Christocentric fullness, as Caputo himself observes — that does not obviously resist the institutional forms through which theological claims enter politics. The Premio Joseph Ratzinger awarded to Marion is not incidental. His theological project, however phenomenologically sophisticated, reinforces rather than disrupts the classical neo-Platonic Christian framework that Habermas was negotiating with at the 2004 dialogue.

Post-metaphysical theology proper — the tradition of Lalonde and Davis that runs through the Browning-Fiorenza conversation — is the tradition that has most directly engaged Habermas’s framework on its own terms, and it is the tradition most consistently overlooked in the current debates. The post-metaphysical theologians do not simply accept the procedural framework and retreat into private faith. They press on what communicative rationality cannot contain — the victims of history, the unredeemed suffering that no future discourse can validate — and argue that the religious traditions carry genuine cognitive content that the post-metaphysical framework needs but cannot generate from within its own resources. What distinguishes them from Milbank and McGrath is not that they take less seriously what the traditions carry. It is that they refuse to let that content bypass the slow, accountable work of public argument. The translation requirement — religious insight must be rendered in publicly accessible terms — is not a concession to secularism. It is the philosophical condition under which the genuine content of the traditions can be heard by everyone rather than only by those who already share the comprehensive doctrine.

IV. Wilber, Integral Post-Metaphysics, and MAGA America

The thread running through this essay — from Habermas’s Schelling dissertation through the Kyoto catastrophe through the current theological fault line — arrives at a question I have been circling in my own work for years, and which the present political moment makes impossible to defer any further. I want to approach it not as a verdict but as a genuine reckoning with a tradition that formed me and that I still believe carries resources the present moment needs. The essay “Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up? A Short Journey Through Wilberland” (February 2026) addresses the recuperation of the post-metaphysical Wilber from the lifestyle enclave the integral movement has too often become. What I want to press here, drawing also on “Beyond the Master Signifier: Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility and Virtue Ethics” (February 2026), is whether integral theory has genuinely followed through on the Habermasian reckoning its founder gestured toward — or whether it has, in the current political moment, drifted toward the very structural move Habermas spent his career diagnosing.

The post-metaphysical Wilber is real. The Wilber who read Habermas carefully in A Sociable God (1983) — who brought together Habermas’s three modes of knowledge-inquiry and Bellah’s categories of religious evolution to build a sociology of depth that neither could provide alone — was doing something philosophically serious. The Wilber who insisted on distinguishing pre-rational from trans-rational, who drew on Kohlberg’s developmental stages and Piaget’s cognitive psychology, who argued in Integral Spirituality (2006) that a post-metaphysical integral theory was both possible and necessary — this Wilber was working on exactly the problem this essay has traced: how to hold depth and justice together rather than trading one against the other. And the diagnosis in “Beyond the Master Signifier” remains important: the Left’s allergy to religion — its conflation of pre-rational mythic literalism with trans-rational contemplative depth — is a developmental failure at civilizational scale. It has ceded the one institution that has historically functioned as what Wilber calls “the great conveyor belt of human development” to the very right-wing movements it opposes. That diagnosis is correct. The conveyor belt needs to be reclaimed.

But the question is whether integral theory is helping reclaim it, or whether its ambiguous political posture is in fact lending philosophical legitimacy to movements that have already decided to stop asking the justice question.

The specific evidence is Trump and a Post-Truth World (2017). Wilber’s response to Trump’s election frames it as “an evolutionary self-correction” — a backlash necessitated by the failure of the postmodern “green” leading edge, whose elitism, political correctness, and internal contradictions had produced an explosive reaction. Some of this diagnosis is accurate: the progressive leading edge does suffer from the fusion-driven rigidity the “Beyond the Master Signifier” essay describes, the Pre/Trans Fallacy at the level of moral psychology, the inability to engage all six of Haidt’s Moral Foundations rather than only Care and Fairness. These are real problems, and naming them honestly is not the same as endorsing the backlash.

The structural problem is what Wilber does with this diagnosis. By framing the backlash as an evolutionary self-correction — a movement of Spirit adjusting its own unfolding — the framework absorbs Trump’s rise into a developmental narrative that grants it a quasi-metaphysical legitimacy. The Kosmos is self-correcting. Evolution is at work. And once that frame is in place, the specific political question — who is harmed, what is being reversed, which emancipatory gains are being dismantled, on whose bodies these corrections are being enacted — recedes into the background. It becomes a downstream question, answerable once the developmental moment has run its course, rather than the primary accountability question that the procedural framework Habermas built is specifically designed to keep at the centre.

In 2017, this was troubling but arguably deferrable. In 2026, with Trump’s second administration remaking American domestic and foreign policy at speed, it is not. The threatened annexation of Canada and Greenland — announced with the language of Manifest Destiny, of historical inevitability, of civilizational expansion — is precisely the Fichtean move at scale: the nation as the concrete historical form through which Spirit expresses its next stage. The escalating confrontation with Iran, pursued with a maximalism that deliberately forecloses the slow, procedural, multilateral work of diplomatic accountability, is the post-liberal preference for decisionism over deliberation made into foreign policy. These are not aberrations on the margins. They are the systematic dismantling of the procedural architecture — multilateral agreement, international law, constitutional constraint — that Habermas identified as the only framework capable of holding democratic legitimacy together across genuine plurality.

Here is also where The New Conservatism lands with unexpected contemporary force — not as the political interventionism the tributes have celebrated, but as a diagnostic framework that Habermas was building before the phenomenon it diagnosed had fully arrived. The book’s core argument, running beneath the Historians’ Debate interventions, is that the neoconservative turn of the 1980s was not primarily a reaction to specific policy failures or cultural provocations. It was a structural recurrence: the appeal to cultural depth, historical rootedness, and collective identity against the supposed coldness of liberal proceduralism — the same move Habermas had been tracing from Fichte through Heidegger, now laundered back into respectable intellectual discourse. What Habermas saw, and named, was that this move would not stop with the revisionist historians. It would find new vehicles. The post-liberal Catholics, the MAGA nationalists, the neo-traditionalists now mobilizing around Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism,” and Vance’s post-liberal Catholicism are not a rupture from what Habermas was describing in the 1980s. They are its further development. McManus’s work on postmodern conservatism — the most rigorous Anglophone genealogy of the contemporary right’s philosophical lineage — has been building toward this same recognition: that what drives the new right is not simply populist resentment or cultural backlash, but a coherent philosophical inheritance, running from the Volkish traditions and the esoteric currents through the neoconservative moment to the present, that has always been making the same structural claim. What Habermas built in response was not a defense of the status quo. It was the argument that the answer to liberal exhaustion is not to abandon the procedural framework for a substantive telos — whether Catholic natural law, nationalist destiny, or occult ground — but to reconnect it to communicative rationality, to rebuild the public sphere institutions through which people can genuinely reason together. That distinction is what Habermas death leaves most urgently undefended.

That inheritance has a specific contemporary form, and McManus’s analysis of postmodern conservatism names it precisely — an analysis I engage at length in “Beyond the Master Signifier.” Postmodern conservatism is characterized by its indifference to the distinction between truth and falsehood, its legitimation of political claims through identity rather than argument, and its weaponization of all six of Haidt’s Moral Foundations — Authority, Loyalty, Sanctity, Care, Fairness, Liberty — in service of a structure that immunizes itself against correction. Jordan Peterson functions for the postmodern conservative right exactly as Žižek functions for the Lacanian-Marxist left: as a Master Signifier around whom communities organize, whose authority is conferred through intellectual fusion rather than earned through fallibilistic correction. Both produce brilliant partial insights. Both attract communities that cannot get beyond them. And an integral framework that frames Peterson’s cultural moment primarily as a symptom of postmodernism and Marxism’s dysfunction — rather than as a sophisticated mobilization of pre-rational ethnocentrism under the cover of depth — provides that moment with philosophical legitimacy it does not deserve.

The question, then, is what an integral political praxis that actually holds the Habermasian corrective looks like when someone embodies it rather than merely theorizes it. The clearest case I have found is Michael Brooks. As I argued in “Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” and in “Beyond the Master Signifier,” Brooks represents the clearest case study I have found of what genuine integral political praxis looks like when someone actually lives it. Brooks operated across all six of Haidt’s Moral Foundations — loyalty as solidarity, authority as education and mentorship, sanctity as the recognition that the struggle for human flourishing carries ultimate significance, care and fairness as the content of socialist politics, liberty as the resistance to structural domination — but within structures that welcomed correction rather than immunizing themselves against it. His defusion from ideological fusion was not neutrality or both-sidesism. It was the capacity to advocate passionately for democratic socialism while satirizing the rigidity of its adherents, to take seriously conservative moral intuitions without capitulating to conservative politics, to hold his own convictions lightly enough to revise them when the evidence demanded. This is what Wilber’s framework describes as its ideal but too rarely produces: a politics that is genuinely post-conventional without being allergic to what the pre-conventional and conventional stages carry.

Brooks’s early death in 2020 left that project unfinished. What “Beyond the Master Signifier” argues — and what the present moment makes urgent — is that what Brooks practiced can be made teachable, grounded in the institutional architecture that Habermas’s communicative theory and the ACT Hexaflex together provide. The need for an updated account of virtue ethics and integral political praxis — one that can hold Haidt’s moral foundations together with Habermas’s communicative framework, that can distinguish liberating structures from dominating ones, that can reclaim the conveyor belt without regressing to pre-rational forms — is not an academic project. It is the precise form that the political alternative to MAGA conservatism needs to take, and it is the project that integral theory has the resources to contribute to but has not yet consistently delivered.

The 2004 Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue gives me the frame for thinking about where integral theory stands and what it still needs to do. Habermas conceded that secular reason cannot generate its own motivational resources — that the content the great traditions carry is genuinely necessary. This makes a post-metaphysical integral theory possible in principle. Wilber’s post-metaphysical turn in Integral Spirituality is a genuine attempt at exactly this. But Ratzinger had explicitly conceded the correctness of reason. Wilber makes no equivalent concession. The nondual is posited as the condition of possibility for all quadrants, all levels, all lines. Whether this positing repeats the move Habermas diagnosed — claiming access to a ground beneath rational discourse and allowing that ground to constrain what can be said about justice — is not a question that can be answered from outside the framework. It can only be answered by pressing it from within.

What integral theory needs, to honour its own deepest intentions, is the equivalent of what Habermas built through Piaget, Kohlberg, and the American pragmatists: a developmental account of consciousness grounded in communicative competence, in the fallible and accountable intersubjective process, rather than in the appeal to a transpersonal ground that is, in principle, unaccountable to the procedural norms that make justice claims answerable to everyone. The post-metaphysical Wilber pointed in this direction. The question is whether integral theory has followed him all the way there — whether it has genuinely reckoned with what Habermas was building, rather than incorporating his framework as one quadrant among others while leaving the nondual position unchallenged and its political consequences unaddressed.

Heidegger’s politics were not a distortion of his philosophy. They were an available destination. The Kyoto School’s politics were not a distortion of their Buddhist philosophical synthesis. They were an available destination. The question I am leaving open — genuinely open, I am not making a charge — is whether the integral politics that become available when the Kosmos is understood to be self-correcting through disruption, when Trump’s rise can be framed as evolution at work, when the suffering of those on the wrong end of that correction can be absorbed into a developmental narrative that grants it a purpose they never consented to — whether those politics are a distortion of Wilber’s project or an available destination of it.

Will Wilber’s legacy be that of the philosopher who finally established the structure capable of unifying depth and justice? Or will he be seen as another figure in the mold of Heidegger — systematic, brilliant, yet ultimately incapable of maintaining ethical boundaries?

I do not know the answer. But I think it is the right question to be asking in the week that Jürgen Habermas died — and in the moment when everything Habermas spent his life building is under more pressure than it has faced since the Historians’ Debate.

Suggested Reading

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (MIT Press, 1962/1989)

Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Beacon Press, 1968/1971)

Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Beacon Press, 1963/1974)

Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Beacon Press, 1973/1975)

Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Beacon Press, 1976/1979)

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. (Beacon Press, 1981/1984–87)

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, 1985/1987)

Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (MIT Press, 1985/1989)

Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (MIT Press, 1983/1990)

Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (MIT Press, 1988/1992)

Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (MIT Press, 1992/1996)

Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (MIT Press, 1996/1998)

Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Polity, 2001/2003)

Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization (Ignatius Press, 2004/2006)

Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Polity, 2005/2008)

Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Polity, 2008/2010)

Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union (Polity, 2011/2012)

Jürgen Habermas, Also a History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking (Polity, 2019/2023)

Jürgen Habermas, Also a History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Rational Religion (Polity, forthcoming)

Jürgen Habermas, Things Needed to Get Better: Conversations with Stefan Muller-Doohm and Roman Yos (Polity, 2025)

Philipp Felsch, The Philosopher: Habermas and Us (Polity, 2025)

Seyla Benhabib, “Carrying on his Legacy,” KNA (March 2026)

Peter J. Verovšek, Jürgen Habermas: Public Intellectual and Engaged Critical Theorist (Columbia University Press, 2026)

Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological Review 29:3 (1964)

Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World (University of California Press, 1991)

Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution (Harvard University Press, 2011)

Robert N. Bellah, ed. Steven M. Tipton, The Robert Bellah Reader (Duke University Press, 2006)

Don S. Browning and Francis Schussler Fiorenza, eds., Habermas, Modernity & Public Theology (Crossroad, 1992)

Marc Lalonde, Critical Theology and the Challenge of Jürgen Habermas (Peter Lang, 1999)

Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997)

Jason M. Wirth, Bret W. Davis, and Brian Schroeder, eds., Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana University Press, 2011)

Jason M. Wirth, Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2019)

Ron Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (Repeater Books, 2019)

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Brothers, 1945)

René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World (Luzac & Co., 1927/1942)

Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Inner Traditions, 1934/1995)

Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Charles Davis, A Question of Conscience (Hodder & Stoughton, 1967)

Charles Davis, The Temptations of Religion (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (University of Chicago Press, 1982/1991)

John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana University Press, 2006)

Sean McGrath, Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Catholic University of America Press, 2006)

Sean McGrath, The Lost Road (Christian Alternative, 2025)

John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell, 1990)

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018)

Ken Wilber, A Sociable God: Toward a New Understanding of Religion (Shambhala, 2005)

Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality (Shambhala, 2006)

Ken Wilber, Trump and a Post-Truth World (Shambhala, 2017)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Abstract

This essay engages ’s three books and his political theology chapter on Carl Schmitt, offering the sustained textual encounter Segall rightly asked for in response to my earlier diagnostic claims and essays. I argue that Segall’s process-relational panexperientialism — his synthesis of Whitehead and Schelling within a post-Kantian speculative framework — is serious philosophical work that overcomes the bifurcation of nature and grounds democratic values in the persuasive love of a Whiteheadian God. But I press a structural question: can a cosmology that extends experience all the way down to every actual occasion, while leaving perspective-differentiation and perspective-taking undertheorized, realize the “democracy of fellow creatures” it envisions? Drawing on Habermas’s communicative rationality, Wilber’s perspectival architecture, Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, and the ACT Hexaflex — synthesized through Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT) — I argue that the psychological dimensions of political polarization and depolarization require resources that process cosmology and political theology have not yet provided. Michael Brooks’s integral political praxis serves as a case study of psychological flexibility operating in the political register. The argument is an invitation to collaboration: integral political praxis needs the ontological ground that process-relational cosmology provides, and process-relational cosmology needs the perspectival architecture and psychological infrastructure of Integral Facticity and IACT to realize the democratic vision it articulates.

Tags: Matt Segall, Process Philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, F.W.J. Schelling, Post-Kantian Philosophy, Political Theology, Carl Schmitt, Panexperientialism, CIIS, Philosophy Cosmology and Consciousness, Physics of the World-Soul, Crossing the Threshold, German Idealism, Sean McGrath, International Schelling Society, Rudolf Steiner, Daniel Dombrowski, Rawlsian Liberalism, Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, Bruno Latour, Gaian Political Ecology, Imago Dei, Adventures of Ideas, Democracy of Fellow Creatures, Integral Theory, Ken Wilber, AQAL, 8 Zones, Integral Spirituality, Wilber-Combs Lattice, Allan Combs, William Irwin Thompson, Jorge Ferrer, R. Michael Fisher, Zachary Stein, Jürgen Habermas, Communicative Action, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, Jonathan Haidt, Moral Foundations Theory, Addiction/Allergy Pattern, Steven Hayes, ACT, Hexaflex, Psychological Flexibility, Perspective-Taking, Defusion, IACT, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, Integral Epistemological Pluralism, Integral Political Praxis, Michael Brooks, Cosmopolitan Socialism, Matt McManus, Jordan Peterson, Postmodern Conservatism, Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Canadian Philosophy, Leslie Armour, George Grant, Charles Taylor, Concordia University, Evan Thompson, Enactivism, Prosocial, Metapattern Institute

I. A Public Process Philosopher

Matthew David Segall is among the most intellectually serious and publicly engaged process philosophers working today. Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, Segall has spent over a decade developing a distinctive philosophical vision that weaves together Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational cosmology, F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and a growing engagement with political theology, personalism, and the philosophy of science. His three books — The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency (2014), Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (2021), and Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (2023) — chart a trajectory from Schelling recovery to Whiteheadian cosmology to a mature synthesis of both within a post-Kantian speculative framework. His peer-reviewed contributions span journals including Process Studies, World Futures, Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences, and Cosmos and History, and his book chapters address subjects from psychedelic realism to political theology to the origin of life. He sits on the governing board of the International Process Network, the editorial board of World Futures, and the founding editorial board of the Institute of Applied Metatheory.

What distinguishes Segall from many academic philosophers is his commitment to public scholarship. His blog Footnotes2Plato has for years served as an open philosophical notebook, and his presence across the podcast landscape — from Revolutionary Left Radio to Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, from dialogues with John Vervaeke to conversations with biologist Michael Levin — demonstrates a genuine desire to bring Whitehead and Schelling into conversation with a broader intellectual public. He has presented at the Esalen Institute, Schumacher College, and Harvard’s Emerson Hall. He has engaged thinkers as diverse as Iain McGilchrist, Merlin Sheldrake, Bernardo Kastrup, and Ilia Delio. In July 2022, Segall joined me on The Integral Facticity Podcast for a conversation titled “Varieties of Integral, Michael Brooks, and the Next Left” — a dialogue that, in retrospect, planted seeds for everything that follows in this essay.

I am writing as someone who has read Segall’s work carefully, who has benefited from his scholarship, and who believes his project deserves wider engagement — particularly from those working in speculative philosophy, critical theory, and applied psychology. Our projects share deep structural affinities: both are oriented toward grounding human flourishing in something deeper than procedural liberalism, both take the speculative tradition seriously as a living resource rather than a historical artifact, and both insist that philosophy must remain in dialogue with the full range of human experience. What I offer here is a careful engagement with Segall’s published work, followed by an account of where my own research — rooted in health informatics, integral human development, and the Canadian speculative tradition — leads me to extend the conversation into territory I believe our projects can better map together. My hope is that this essay establishes the ground for a sustained intellectual partnership between our two research programs, since neither process-relational cosmology, integral humanism, or integral political praxis can realize its full potential in isolation.

II. The Conversation So Far

The occasion for this essay is a renewed exchange between Segall and myself that began in February 2026 and has already produced two essays on my side.

The first, “On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn”, was a direct response to Segall’s “Heaven Save Us from Metaphysics in Denial” — his defense of speculative metaphysics against Walter Veit’s scientific supersessionism. My essay conceded that Segall was right about Veit: scientific supersessionism is philosophically untenable, and Segall handles the refutation well. But I pressed a deeper concern: that Segall’s Whiteheadian framework had adopted the surface features of the post-metaphysical turn without fully internalizing its demands, producing what I called an “enchanted flatland” — richer than materialist metaphysics in denial, but still unable to protect first-person subjective and contemplative depth as irreducibly its own. I used a recent dialogue between Segall and Graham Harman to make the structural failure visible from the inside, and I situated the argument within the Canadian speculative tradition — running from John Watson through Leslie Armour to — and the integral pluralism of Fred Dallmayr and Ken Wilber, as the ground from which an alternative could be built. The essay argued that Michael Brooks’s unfinished project of cosmopolitan socialism needed precisely the philosophical architecture that neither process-relational cosmology nor the wider orbit of meaning-crisis thinkers (Vervaeke, Dempsey, McGilchrist) had yet provided.

The second, “Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up?”, examined Ken Wilber’s reception history within and beyond the integral community. Drawing on Wilber’s own intellectual autobiography, his 1983 engagement with Habermas and Bellah, R. Michael Fisher’s documentation of systematic misreadings, and Zachary Stein’s placement of Wilber within American Pragmatism, I argued that the post-metaphysical architecture of Integral Spirituality — the 8 Zones, the Wilber-Combs Lattice — deserves the serious philosophical engagement it has never received. The essay also engaged Jorge Ferrer’s participatory critique as a genuinely substantive contribution — one whose epistemological insights remain underhoused without the structural architecture that Wilber, Habermas, and Dallmayr each provide in different registers. Finally, it made explicit the connection I see between Wilber’s post-metaphysical spirituality and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s psychological flexibility model — the bridge that IACT is designed to build.

Segall responded with a substantive and direct critique — and he was right on the central point: I had made diagnostic claims about the limitations of process philosophy without engaging his actual texts, without demonstrating through sustained written work what I was claiming to see. He also clarified his intellectual formation in ways that matter for this conversation: his distance from Wilber began in 2007, well before CIIS, when he read Integral Spirituality and found it too abstractly categorical for the kind of thinking he was after. The influence that shaped his alternative was not Ferrer’s participatory critique but William Irwin Thompson, whose attention to the concrete particulars of poetry, painting, and culture offered a different model of what thinking about the evolution of consciousness could look like. These are important clarifications, and I am grateful for them.

I conceded the reciprocity point immediately. He was right. I had read his work on process philosophy but had not engaged in any written substantial form on it — I had not demonstrated, through sustained written form or text, what I was claiming to see on Whitehead or the process philosophical tradition. I committed to revisions of the original essay and to a follow-up piece engaging his primary books. We are also in the process of scheduling a dialogue. This essay is the result of that commitment — an attempt to do what Segall rightly asked me to do: engage his work on its own terms before offering my critique or own ideas. It is also, I hope, the beginning of a sustained research and collaborative dialogue on our two projects.

III. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology

Physics of the World-Soul originated as Segall’s doctoral comprehensive examination at CIIS, supervised by cosmologist Brian Swimme, and evolved through multiple editions before its 2021 publication with SacraSage Press. The book carries a foreword by John Cobb, Jr., who praises Segall’s work as “at the cutting edge” of Whitehead scholarship and credits him with presenting Whitehead’s thinking in properly Whiteheadian terms — as a developmental process rather than a finished system.

The title itself signals Segall’s governing intuition. “Physics of the World-Soul” nods to Schelling’s 1798 Von der Weltseele — his search for a “higher physics” rooted in “universal organicity” — and announces that Segall reads Whitehead as an inheritor of Schelling’s post-Kantian Naturphilosophie, whether or not Whitehead studied Schelling directly. This genealogical claim is the book’s distinctive contribution to Whitehead studies. Where most interpreters read Whitehead through the lens of British empiricism and mathematical logic — the tradition of Russell, with whom Whitehead co-authored Principia Mathematica — Segall reads him as completing a trajectory that begins with Schelling’s protest against the Kantian bifurcation of nature into noumenal and phenomenal domains.

The book’s three-part structure moves from the development of Whitehead’s cosmology (tracing his progression from mathematical physics through the philosophy of science to the mature philosophy of organism), through engagements with contemporary scientific theory (emergence, the origin of life, spacetime, quantum decoherence), to Whitehead’s theological vision (the world-soul, the function of God in cosmological process). Segall’s central argument throughout is that Whitehead’s philosophy of organism overcomes the “bifurcation of nature” — the modern separation of experienced qualities from their material substrates — by recognizing that experience pervades the cosmos at every level of organization. This is panexperientialism: not the claim that atoms think, but the claim that the experiential texture of reality runs deeper than human consciousness and that what physics calls “energy” and what lived experience calls “feeling” are descriptions of the same cosmological process from different angles.

Segall’s treatment of William James’s radical empiricism as a precursor to Whitehead’s reformed subjectivist principle is philosophically illuminating — both thinkers reject the Kantian transcendental ego while insisting that experience, properly understood, is not subjective in the sense that Descartes meant. Experience is the fundamental texture of the cosmos, not a property that mysteriously emerges from inert matter at some threshold of biological complexity. This Jamesian insight sets up what is perhaps Segall’s strongest contribution in the book: his account of Whitehead’s relationship to Kant. As he shows, Whitehead shares with Schelling the conviction that the Kantian restriction of knowledge to phenomenal appearances — the famous limitation of theoretical reason — cannot be the last word on the relationship between mind and nature. But where Fichte and Hegel responded to Kant by radicalizing the transcendental subject, Schelling and Whitehead responded by radicalizing nature itself, discovering in it an experiential depth that the Kantian framework had foreclosed. The “bifurcation of nature” that Whitehead diagnoses in The Concept of Nature — the splitting of the world into primary qualities (measurable, real) and secondary qualities (experiential, merely apparent) — is, as Segall shows, the direct descendant of Galileo’s original move and the Kantian epistemology that systematized it. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is thus not a rejection of modern science but a rejection of the impoverished ontology that has accompanied it since the seventeenth century.

The book’s engagement with contemporary science — particularly its treatment of the hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life, drawing on the work of astrobiologist Bruce Damer and biochemist David Deamer, and the implications of quantum decoherence for process ontology — demonstrates Segall’s commitment to keeping speculative philosophy in dialogue with empirical research. This is admirable and distinguishes his work from the more purely textual approach of many process scholars. His engagement with Bruno Latour’s argument that science never actually purified itself of the experiential and value-laden dimensions it claimed to exclude — a Latourian thesis that resonates with Whitehead’s own diagnosis of the bifurcation of nature — connects Physics of the World-Soul to the broader intellectual conversation about the limits of scientific materialism.

What Physics of the World-Soul does not do, and does not attempt, is address the subjective, psychological, and political dimensions of the cosmology it articulates. The book is a cosmological text, and a fine one. But cosmology alone, however integral in aspiration, does not tell us how human beings navigate the moral and political landscape they inhabit. It tells us what the cosmos is. It does not tell us how to live within it. This is not a criticism — it is a description of the book’s scope. The question is whether Segall’s later work extends into these dimensions, and this is where Crossing the Threshold and his political theology become essential.

IV. Crossing the Threshold: Schelling and Whitehead After Kant

Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore/Integral Imprint, 2023) is the mature statement of Segall’s philosophical project — the published development of his doctoral dissertation, “Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead.” Where Physics of the World-Soul is primarily a work of Whiteheadian cosmology with Schellingian overtones, Crossing the Threshold attempts a genuine synthesis of both thinkers around the problem of post-Kantian speculative philosophy.

The title’s “threshold” refers to the Kantian limit — the line beyond which, according to the critical philosophy, speculative reason cannot venture without falling into dogmatic metaphysics. Segall’s argument is that both Schelling and Whitehead crossed this threshold, not by retreating to pre-critical dogmatism, but by developing modes of speculative thinking that take Kant’s critical insights seriously while refusing to accept his restrictions as final. Schelling crossed the threshold through his philosophy of nature, his positive philosophy of mythology and revelation, and his late engagement with the “dark ground” of existence that resists rational comprehension. Whitehead crossed it through his method of imaginative generalization, his reformed subjectivist principle, and his insistence that the task of philosophy is “to conceive a complete fact” rather than to critique the conditions of possibility for factual knowledge.

The “etheric imagination” of the subtitle signals Segall’s engagement with Rudolf Steiner’s phenomenological epistemology alongside Schelling and Whitehead — a move that positions his project within the broader landscape of participatory and enactive approaches to cognition. Steiner frames the inquiry while Schelling and Whitehead provide the philosophical substance: his “esoteric ether of formative forces” is one of three ether theories woven through the book alongside Schelling’s “polarized ether of universal organization” and Whitehead’s “topological ether of creative events.” This is a bold inclusion. Steiner remains a controversial figure in academic philosophy, and Segall’s willingness to take him seriously as a philosophical interlocutor — rather than merely as the founder of Waldorf education and biodynamic agriculture — reflects the same intellectual generosity that characterizes his engagement with Whitehead. Segall’s claim is that the imagination is not merely a faculty of subjective fancy but a participatory organ through which the human being apprehends real structures of the cosmos — what Whitehead would call the ingression of eternal objects into actual occasions. This is Schelling’s intellektuelle Anschauung (intellectual intuition) translated into Whiteheadian terms: direct participation in the creative advance of nature. Whether one follows Segall into the Steinerian dimensions of this claim or not, the philosophical argument stands on its own: if experience really does pervade the cosmos at every level, then the human imagination — understood not as fantasy but as the capacity to participate in what is — must be more than a merely subjective faculty.

Deleuze plays a significant role in the book that deserves acknowledgment. Segall positions him as both a post-structuralist challenge to the cosmotheanthropic vision of Schelling and Whitehead and as one of the most powerful inheritors of their deepest insights. An entire section of Chapter 3 is devoted to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, and the Epilogue — “Incarnational Process Philosophy in the Worldly Religion of Schelling, Whitehead, and Deleuze” — engages him at length as a thinker whose commitment to immanence and worldly renewal runs parallel to the process tradition even where it diverges from its theological commitments. For readers coming from the continental tradition, Deleuze provides a crucial third voice in the book’s conversation.

Crossing the Threshold thus attempts to integrate cosmology (the nature of the physical universe), theology (the function of the divine in cosmic process), and anthropology (the nature and vocation of the human being) within a single post-Kantian speculative framework. This is an ambitious project, and Segall prosecutes it with real philosophical sophistication. He is not merely juxtaposing Schelling and Whitehead but reading each as illuminating dimensions of the other’s thought — Schelling’s developmental dynamism enriching Whitehead’s sometimes static categorical scheme, Whitehead’s logical precision disciplining Schelling’s sometimes effusive speculative flights.

I see Segall’s project as belonging within the broader German Idealism revival associated with Sean McGrath at Memorial University, Jason Wirth at Seattle University, the International Schelling Society, and the wider constellation of thinkers working to recover the speculative tradition after its marginalization by analytic philosophy. In “On Sean McGrath’s Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge,” I argued that McGrath’s recovery of the Western contemplative tradition — from his early Heidegger scholarship through the Secular Christ podcast to the confessional Lost Road — is genuine and irreplaceable, but that it requires the post-metaphysical architecture of a new integral humanism to become communicable across the pluralist divides of a post-metaphysical public sphere. That argument applies, in a different register, to what I want to say about Segall’s process philosophy here. Segall adds something novel to this conversation: a sustained integration of Whitehead and enactivism with the Schellingian inheritance, producing a kind of process-relational panexperientialism grounded in a participatory and enactive ontology. This is genuine philosophical work, and it deserves engagement from traditions beyond the process community.

V. Political Theology and the Democracy of Fellow Creatures

The most directly relevant of Segall’s writings for the argument I want to develop here is his chapter “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: A Process Theological Intervention,” published in From Force to Persuasion: Process-Relational Perspectives on Power and the God of Love (Cascade Books, 2024). This piece reveals the political implications of Segall’s cosmological and theological work and clarifies why he sent it to me specifically in the context of our exchange.

Segall’s chapter critically engages Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberal political theology — the decisionist theory that sovereignty belongs to whoever decides on the exception — not to rehabilitate Schmitt but to show that process theology can answer the challenge Schmitt poses to liberalism more adequately than liberalism has answered it for itself. Schmitt’s diagnosis of liberalism’s contradictions is genuinely brilliant — the pretence to metaphysical neutrality, the repression of the sovereign decision, the vulnerability to demagogic capture. What makes Segall’s intervention distinctive is that he takes the force of Schmitt’s critique seriously without following Schmitt into fascist dictatorship.

The chapter’s central move is a Whiteheadian inversion of the theological-political transfer that Schmitt identified. Schmitt argued that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts — sovereignty is the political analogue of divine omnipotence. Segall, drawing on Whitehead’s observation in Process and Reality that this transfer operated in the reverse direction as well — “the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar” — shows that the entire Schmittian framework rests on an idolatrous image of God as imperial ruler. Process theology replaces this with a God who persuades rather than coerces, “the judge arising out of the very nature of things,” who “dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love.” Where Schmitt reads sovereignty downward from an omnipotent God to the sovereign decider, Whitehead reads it upward from the creative process of each actual occasion to a God whose power is persuasive rather than coercive. This is not a minor theological adjustment. It transforms the entire political-theological settlement.

Segall then engages Daniel Dombrowski’s admirable process reading of Rawlsian political liberalism to argue that Whitehead’s cosmology is compatible with democratic values while grounding them in something deeper than procedural formalism. He turns to Emmanuel Mounier’s philosophical personalism, which defines the person as a “living activity of self-creation, communication, attachment” irreducible to either abstract individualism or collectivist absorption. The chapter also engages Latour’s Gaian political ecology at length, showing how the climate crisis scrambles the categories of Hobbesian political philosophy by revealing that “nature” is not the inert background against which human politics unfolds but an animate, responsive, and increasingly dangerous participant in the political process itself.

What emerges from this synthesis is Segall’s most ambitious political-philosophical claim: a cosmopolitical vision grounded in Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, where the rise of human civilization exemplifies the persuasive lure of ideas in the adventure of cosmogenesis. Segall draws on Whitehead’s conviction that civilization advances when wisdom kindles brief flashes of freedom and knowledge into the flame of virtue, making inherited customs malleable enough to light the way toward juster futures. The resulting politics is what Whitehead called a “democracy of fellow creatures” — a depth democracy that rejects modern anthropocentric individualism, totalitarian collectivism, and techno-scientific materialism in favor of a cosmopolitical vision where each of us exists as individuals-in-community. This is a genuinely compelling political ontology, and it is grounded in the Whiteheadian conviction that “the basis of democracy is the common fact of value experience, as constituting the essential nature of each pulsation of actuality.”

The chapter’s strongest passage addresses the imago Dei principle — the claim that human persons possess inalienable dignity because they are created in the image of God (or hold Buddha-nature, or participate in some comparable spiritual source). Segall argues, persuasively, that this principle enhances rather than pollutes public reason, since there is no such thing as a genuinely neutral starting point for the derivation of liberal values. He observes, following Dombrowski, that even Rawls ultimately held individual rights to be inalienable because the human person is created in God’s image — a natural rights commitment established independently of social conventions. Liberals committed to individual rights and reasonable pluralism should be more forthright about the metaphysical grounds of their commitments. The failure to affirm the divine value of persons, Segall argues through Mounier, leaves a vacuum that is inevitably filled by objectifying concepts — whether the fascist Volk, the communist re-education program, or the neoliberal reduction of persons to consumers and market units.

I find this argument entirely convincing as far as it goes. Segall is right that liberalism without metaphysics loses its justification. He is right that Whitehead’s process theology provides a more adequate metaphysical ground than either Schmittian decisionism or liberal proceduralism. He is right about the imago Dei principle. And he is right, via Dombrowski, that a process reading of Rawls can hold together individual rights and social solidarity without collapsing into either atomistic libertarianism or collectivist authoritarianism.

The question is what this process liberalism does not yet address. And here is where I want to extend the conversation into territory where I believe our projects can mutually enhance each other.

VI. Where Process Philosophy Meets Its Limit: The Turn to Habermas and a New Integral Humanism

Segall’s political theology, his cosmopolitical vision of a “democracy of fellow creatures,” and his process reading of Rawlsian liberalism all converge on a recognizable settlement: democratic pluralism grounded in persuasion rather than coercion, rooted in the spiritual dignity of persons, and open to the nonhuman world through a pan-experientialist cosmology. This is a sophisticated and attractive vision. But it shares a structural feature with a number of other contemporary projects working in adjacent intellectual space — ’s liberal socialism, the late Michael Brooks’s cosmopolitan socialism — that I want to name precisely. It was, in fact, Brooks’s vision of a cosmopolitan socialism that could take religious and moral seriousness as genuine rather than dismissing it — combined with his untimely death in July 2020 — that led me to launch The Integral Facticity Podcast and to reach out to Segall for our original 2022 conversation.

Mapped against Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, these projects all operate primarily within three of the six universal moral foundations: Care, Fairness, and Liberty. The binding foundations — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — are either absent from the analysis, treated as pathological vestiges of pre-modern social organization, or acknowledged only to be dissolved into the process-relational framework. I call this the addiction/allergy pattern in political cognition: the Left is addicted to the individualizing foundations (Care, Fairness, Liberty) and allergic to the binding foundations (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity), while the Right exhibits the inverse pattern. The metaphor is precise, not merely rhetorical. In Acceptance and Commitment Training, psychological inflexibility manifests as either excessive attachment (fusion, addiction) or excessive avoidance (experiential avoidance, allergy). Both are failures of flexibility. Both foreclose the contact with the full range of experience that psychological health requires.

The case of Jordan Peterson illustrates the point. Peterson’s cultural intervention — which I analyzed at length in my McGrath essay and which Matt McManus has diagnosed as a paradigmatic instance of “postmodern conservatism” — speaks directly to the binding foundations of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity that progressive politics has systematically neglected. When Peterson tells young men to clean their rooms and stand up straight, he is speaking the language of Authority and Sanctity. When he frames environmentalism as a threat to loyalty to family and community, he is mobilizing the Loyalty foundation against the Care foundation. The postmodern conservative movement has been winning the cultural war on precisely this point: by capturing the binding foundations and deploying them against progressive causes — framing climate activism as disloyalty, gender equity as an assault on sacred order, social safety nets as corrosive of personal authority. The progressive response has been to diagnose these appeals as pathological — as fascism, as regression, as false consciousness. But Haidt’s research demonstrates that Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity are not pathologies. They are universal features of human moral cognition, present across all cultures, grounded in evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience. Peterson’s capture of them is the problem, not their existence. The question is not whether they are real — they are — but how they are held: rigidly, through fusion with a particular ideological formation, or flexibly, through the capacity to engage all six foundations in response to context rather than from a fixed political identity. Conservative moral cognition is not defective liberal cognition. It is a different configuration of the same moral palette, emphasizing different foundations for different adaptive reasons. The process-relational framework, as Segall deploys it in his political theology, does not yet provide the conceptual tools to make this distinction — to separate the legitimate moral foundation from its authoritarian or postmodern conservative capture.

This is where my own intellectual formation diverges from Segall’s. I come to these questions not through Whitehead and Schelling primarily, but through Jürgen Habermas and Ken Wilber — and crucially, through the practical psychology of Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Training. My research at Concordia University in Applied Human Sciences and Religious Studies was shaped by the question of how human beings actually navigate moral and political complexity in practice, not only in speculative theory. The Applied Human Sciences program at Concordia is grounded in the concrete conditions of human development — health, education, community, institutional life — while the Religious Studies program placed these concerns in dialogue with the full range of theological, philosophical, and contemplative traditions. It was in this context that I first encountered the problem that has driven my research ever since: the gap between what our best theories tell us about human flourishing and what our best practices actually deliver.

Habermas’s theory of communicative action provided the social-theoretical framework: how do persons with different comprehensive doctrines achieve genuine understanding through discourse rather than through either force or mere procedural tolerance? His insistence on the “unfinished project of modernity” — the claim that the Enlightenment’s emancipatory promise has been betrayed not by reason itself but by the colonization of the lifeworld by systems of money and administrative power — resonated deeply with my own experience of institutional life and my encounter with the integral tradition. Wilber’s integral theory provided the perspectival architecture: the recognition that multiple irreducible ways of knowing — phenomenological, empirical, hermeneutic, systemic, contemplative — each possess their own validity conditions that cannot be collapsed into one another, and that navigating across these irreducible perspectives is not a theoretical synthesis but an embodied praxis.

The integration of Habermas and Wilber is not straightforward — they stand in productive tension. Habermas provides epistemological rigor, fallibilism, and a genuine account of communicative rationality, but has no access to the contemplative territory that the speculative tradition takes as its ground. Wilber provides the perspectival architecture — quadrants, zones, methodological pluralism — that differentiates irreducible ways of knowing, but can lack the epistemological discipline Habermas demands. My own position, which I have been developing under the name Integral Awareness and Commitment Training, holds this tension rather than resolving it prematurely. The tension itself is productive: Habermas keeps Wilber honest about the conditions of discourse, while Wilber keeps Habermas honest about the irreducible plurality of ways of knowing that discourse must navigate.

The meta-theoretical architecture I have been developing to hold this tension is what I call Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP). I laid out the framework in detail in “Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem”, where it emerged from an intervention into the Shaul-Žižek-Johnston-Pippin debate about the relationship between German Idealism and psychoanalysis — a debate that demonstrated what happens when genuinely different epistemic modes are forced into a single theoretical register. IEP holds that there are irreducibly different ways of knowing — phenomenological, empirical, hermeneutic, systemic, contemplative — each possessing its own validity conditions, its own standards of evidence, and its own characteristic distortions when it overreaches into territory that belongs to another mode. This is not relativism. The perspectives are not equal in every domain — empirical methods are better suited to certain questions than contemplative methods, and vice versa. But they are irreducible: none can be translated without remainder into the terms of any other. The task is not to synthesize them into a single meta-perspective — which would reproduce the very flatland the architecture is designed to overcome — but to differentiate them clearly enough that they can be held in productive relation, each contributing what it alone can see. IEP draws on Wilber’s methodological pluralism (the 8 Zones) for the structural differentiation, on Habermas’s validity claims for the epistemological discipline, and on Dallmayr’s integral pluralism for the cross-cultural and cross-traditional scope. It is the epistemological ground on which Integral Facticity and IACT stand — without it, the framework has no way of distinguishing between irreducibly different forms of access to the same experiential reality, and the pluralism it claims collapses into either a covert monism or an undifferentiated relativism.

What Habermas, Wilber, and IEP together provide, and what I find not yet adequately addressed in Segall’s process framework, is an account of perspective-taking as praxis — the recognition that persons do not simply differ in their comprehensive doctrines (Rawls’s horizontal pluralism) but differ in their capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously without collapsing them into one another. This is not about developmental stages. It is about psychological flexibility: the capacity to defuse from any single perspective, to accept the full range of experience including experiences that challenge one’s existing framework, to observe one’s own perspective as a perspective rather than as reality itself, to remain present to what is actually happening rather than to ideological scripts, and to act from chosen values rather than from rigid identification with any particular position. This is what Hayes’s ACT Hexaflex describes, and it is the practical mechanism that neither Habermas’s communicative rationality nor Wilber’s perspectival architecture provides on its own.

This is what I mean by “enchanted flatland” — a term I use carefully, aware of its polemical edge, to name a structural feature rather than a deficiency. Segall’s process-relational panexperientialism re-enchants nature, overcoming the bifurcation that has haunted modernity since Descartes. That is a real achievement. But by extending experience all the way down to every actual occasion while leaving the question of perspective-differentiation and perspective-taking undertheorized, the result is a cosmological democracy that does not yet have the psychological and political tools to realize itself. Whitehead’s God persuades rather than coerces — but the process tradition has not yet adequately addressed why persuasion so often fails, why persons remain fused with partial perspectives despite the availability of broader ones, or how the transition from fusion to flexibility actually occurs in lived experience. There may be resources within the process tradition for addressing these questions that I have not yet encountered, and I put this forward as a genuine inquiry rather than a settled verdict.

VII. Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, and IACT

My own research, conducted through the Metapattern Institute under the banner of Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT), attempts to address precisely this gap. The Metapattern Institute is a digital humanities research hub focused on knowledge mobilization through integral humanism, with roots in health informatics and integral human development. Its research program synthesizes Wilber’s integral theory with Habermas’s post-metaphysical philosophy and Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Training to produce a framework that is simultaneously cosmologically grounded, psychologically informed, and practically applicable. The institute’s orientation toward the concrete conditions of human flourishing — health, development, community, institutional life — reflects my formation in Applied Human Sciences at Concordia and subsequent research in health studies, and distinguishes this work from purely speculative approaches.

The grounding concept is what I call Integral Facticity — the irreducible givens of embodied existence (biological, psychological, social, cultural) that constitute the starting point for any genuine inquiry into the human condition. Integral Facticity is not a theory imposed from above but a description of what is already the case: we are embodied beings, embedded in relational fields, navigating multiple perspectives, and always already thrown into a world that precedes and exceeds our comprehension of it. This is Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrownness) integrated with Wilber’s AQAL quadrants and Habermas’s lifeworld — facticity understood integrally, as the full spectrum of conditions within which human flourishing unfolds.

The methodological companion to Integral Facticity is Enactive Fallibilism. Drawing on Evan Thompson’s enactivist philosophy of mind, Charles Sanders Peirce’s fallibilism, and the pragmatic tradition, Enactive Fallibilism holds that systems — cognitive, social, political, institutional — are tested not by their internal logical consistency but by whether they produce or alleviate suffering in lived experience. A system that produces systematic suffering is falsified enactively — the body registers what theory may obscure. This is not grievance. It is empirical method applied to the conditions of life. When a political ideology consistently produces dehumanization, the appropriate response is not to adjust the ideology’s internal premises but to recognize that it has been tested and found wanting by the only tribunal that matters: the lived experience of actual persons.

IACT operationalizes these principles through the ACT Hexaflex — six interrelated psychological processes (defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, present moment awareness, values clarification, and committed action) that together constitute what Hayes calls psychological flexibility: the ability to contact the present moment fully as a conscious human being and to persist in or change behavior in the service of chosen values. What IACT adds to standard ACT is the integral frame: the Hexaflex operates not only at the individual level but across all four of Wilber’s quadrants (individual interior, individual exterior, collective interior, collective exterior) and across the irreducible perspectives that IEP differentiates. Applied to politics, this means that the Hexaflex provides the mechanism for what Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory describes: the capacity to engage all six moral foundations flexibly, without fusion with any particular configuration.

Here is where I believe a practical gap remains — one that process liberalism, even in Segall’s cosmologically sophisticated version, does not yet address. Segall tells us that Whitehead’s God persuades rather than coerces and that the cosmos is a “democracy of fellow creatures.” But the question remains: how does a human being who is fused with the Care/Fairness cluster (the standard liberal configuration) defuse enough to recognize the legitimacy of the Loyalty/Authority/Sanctity foundations without abandoning their own moral commitments — or how does a person fused with the binding foundations (the standard conservative configuration) open to the individualizing foundations without experiencing that opening as a betrayal of everything they hold sacred? IACT provides one such mechanism. The Hexaflex is the practice through which persons develop the psychological flexibility to hold the full moral palette without collapsing into either relativism (nothing matters) or fundamentalism (only my configuration matters).

Jacques Maritain’s integral humanism, which I take as the anthropological ground of this work, makes the same move at the level of political philosophy that IACT makes at the level of practice. Maritain, who played a central role in drafting the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, insisted that the dignity of the human person cannot be reduced to any political program, economic system, or ideological formation. His integral humanism holds that the human being is simultaneously natural and supernatural, individual and social, material and spiritual — and that any political philosophy adequate to the full range of human experience must hold all of these dimensions without reducing any to the others. This is not personalism alone, though Maritain was a personalist. It is integral humanism — an account of the human person that includes the personalist dimension while also theorizing the developmental well-being, cultural, and institutional conditions within which persons flourish or suffer.

My grounding in Maritain is not incidental. It reflects a specifically Canadian intellectual genealogy — one that runs through George Grant, Charles Taylor, Leslie Armour, and the tradition of Canadian speculative philosophy that has always been more hospitable to metaphysical inquiry, more attentive to the communal dimensions of political life, and more resistant to the libertarian individualism of the American philosophical mainstream than its southern neighbors. Armour’s substantive moral pluralism — his insistence that genuine pluralism requires engagement with the substance of competing moral visions rather than a procedural bracketing of their truth claims — is a direct influence on my conception of Integral Epistemological Pluralism. Taylor’s argument in Sources of the Self that modern identity is constituted by moral frameworks that cannot be abandoned without self-dissolution informs my account of Integral Facticity. And Fred Dallmayr’s cross-cultural dialogue between integral humanism and non-Western traditions of political thought provides a cosmopolitan dimension that keeps this work from collapsing into European provincialism.

Segall’s political theology leans on Mounier’s personalism and Whitehead’s process theology to ground democratic values. I want to suggest that Maritain’s integral humanism does complementary work with a broader scope, precisely because it holds together the spiritual dignity of persons (which personalism affirms) with a substantive account of the social, economic, and political conditions required for that dignity to be realized (which personalism, in its purer forms, can leave underspecified). When integral humanism meets Haidt’s moral psychology and the ACT Hexaflex, the result is a framework that addresses what process liberalism has not yet taken up: a lived practice for navigating moral and political pluralism with both conviction and flexibility.

VIII. The Brooks Case Study: Integral Political Praxis Through the Hexaflex

Has anyone actually practiced what this framework describes? The late Michael Brooks (1983–2020) — political commentator, author of Against the Web, co-host of The Majority Report, and host of The Michael Brooks Show — provides the most compelling case study of psychological flexibility in political praxis that I have found. It was Brooks’s practice, not his theory, that first brought me to the analysis I am offering here. And it was my conversation with Segall on The Integral Facticity Podcast in 2022, titled “Varieties of Integral, Michael Brooks, and the Next Left,” that first put these threads in dialogue.

I developed the full Hexaflex-Haidt mapping of Brooks’s practice in “Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Michael Brooks and the Integral Left” (August 2025) and extended the theoretical architecture in “Beyond the Master Signifier: Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility and Virtue Ethics” (February 2026). What I want to do here is present the mapping in a form that makes visible what it offers to the conversation with Segall — specifically, what a perspectival-praxis account adds to the cosmological and political-theological ground Segall has laid.

What follows is not a claim that Brooks consciously employed ACT processes or Haidt’s moral foundations framework. He did not use this language. The significance lies in what the mapping reveals about the practicability of psychological flexibility in the political register — and about what becomes possible when praxis meets the kind of cosmological depth Segall provides.

The ACT Hexaflex describes six interrelated processes that together constitute psychological flexibility. Brooks exhibited all six in his political praxis, and each illuminates a dimension of the problem that process liberalism has not yet addressed.

Defusion — the capacity to hold verbal content as verbal content rather than as the final word on reality — was Brooks’s signature quality. He held strong ideological commitments (democratic socialism, anti-imperialism, materialist analysis) with a characteristic humor and lightness that set his practice apart from the fusion-driven certainty of most political discourse. He could advocate passionately for a position in one segment and satirize the rigidity of that same position’s adherents in the next. This is what it looks like when someone holds political conviction without rigidity — when the verbal network of ideology serves as a tool rather than a cage. Whitehead’s God persuades rather than coerces, but defusion is the psychological process through which a person becomes capable of being persuaded rather than locked inside their existing commitments.

Acceptance — the willingness to contact the full range of experience without avoidance — showed in Brooks’s engagement with conservative moral intuitions. He engaged Authority, Loyalty, and Sanctity with curiosity rather than contempt. His interviews with right-wing figures and his analyses of conservative movements demonstrated a willingness to contact the full moral spectrum rather than dismissing the binding foundations as pathological. He accepted that these foundations index real features of human social life, even when they were being mobilized in the service of domination. This is the process-level answer to the addiction/allergy pattern: not agreement with conservative positions, but the refusal to avoid the moral experience they carry. Segall’s process theology tells us that every actual occasion has experiential depth. Acceptance is the psychological practice through which a person stops excluding the moral experiences that don’t fit their ideological self-image.

Self-as-Context — the capacity to observe one’s own perspective as a perspective rather than as reality itself — was evident in Brooks’s ability to take the perspective of a Brazilian worker, an Indian farmer, a conservative American voter, or a Marxist intellectual without being captured by any single vantage point. This is Hayes’s observing self operating in the political register: the capacity to see systems of perspectives rather than being embedded within a single one. It is also the psychological precondition for Habermasian discourse — you cannot enter the ideal speech situation if you cannot distinguish your perspective from reality itself. And it is what Wilber’s perspectival framework makes visible: the difference between being at a perspective and being able to take a perspective.

Present Moment Awareness — contact with what is actually happening rather than with ideological scripts about what should be happening — characterized Brooks’s media practice. His commentary was marked by an immediacy and responsiveness that distinguished it from the scripted talking points of most political media. He was present to the material, willing to be surprised by it, capable of adjusting his analysis in real time rather than forcing events into predetermined templates. Process philosophy tells us that the actual occasion is always novel. Present moment awareness is the psychological process that allows a political actor to register that novelty rather than assimilating it to prior categories.

Values Clarity — the capacity to identify and articulate what matters without confusing values with rules — was visible in everything Brooks did. His values — solidarity, internationalism, the dignity of working people, intellectual honesty, humor as a mode of truth-telling — were not abstract commitments maintained at a distance from daily life but lived orientations that shaped every segment, interview, and public appearance. His values were his compass, not his cage. This is the difference between values-driven action and ideology-driven action: values provide direction without dictating the specific behavior required in every situation.

Committed Action — behaving in the service of chosen values even when it is difficult — was Brooks’s most visible quality. He built institutions, took risks, cultivated relationships across political and cultural lines, and committed to the long-term work of political transformation rather than the short-term satisfactions of ideological purity. He did not merely theorize cosmopolitan socialism. He practiced it.

Mapped against Haidt’s six foundations, Brooks’s practice engaged Care (solidarity with the vulnerable), Fairness (economic justice), Liberty (anti-authoritarianism), Loyalty (solidarity as a binding commitment, not merely a sentiment), Authority (education and mentorship as developmental structures), and Sanctity (the sacred project of human dignity within a materialist framework). He engaged all six foundations without submitting to conservative Dominator Hierarchies and without collapsing into the liberal allergy to the binding foundations that characterizes most Left political media.

The question this raises for the conversation with Segall is pointed. Brooks did all of this without any explicit theoretical framework — no ACT, no Haidt, or hexaflex. He arrived at psychological flexibility in his political praxis through practice, character, and an unusual capacity for holding contradiction. If Brooks could do this through sheer practice, what becomes possible when the praxis is supported by both the cosmological depth Segall provides and the psychological-flexibility IACT offers? The framework does not replace the practice — Brooks’s example proves that the practice can exist without it. But the framework makes the practice teachable, reproducible, and accountable to something beyond individual character.

Brooks died at thirty-six. We cannot know what his practice would have become. But what it demonstrated is precisely the kind of psychological flexibility operating as integral political praxis that this essay argues is both possible and necessary — and that neither process-relational cosmology nor integral humanism can fully realize in isolation from the other.

IX. Setting the Table

I have tried to do in this essay what Segall rightly asked me to do: engage his work on its own terms, demonstrate where it succeeds, and show — through my own framework rather than merely through critique — where I believe the conversation needs to go next.

Segall has given us a process-relational cosmology that overcomes the bifurcation of nature, a political theology that grounds democratic values in the persuasive love of a Whiteheadian God, and a post-Kantian speculative philosophy that crosses the Kantian threshold without retreating to pre-critical dogmatism. This is serious philosophical work. It deserves to be read by everyone working on the question of how to ground liberal democratic values in something deeper than procedural formalism.

What I want to lay out here — clearly, before our planned dialogue — is the full architecture of what I believe our projects need from each other.

As I argued in Section VI, ontological richness without epistemological differentiation is precisely what produces the “enchanted flatland.” Segall’s panexperientialism extends experience all the way down to every actual occasion — a genuine achievement. But it does not differentiate how different ways of knowing access that experience, or theorize the validity conditions that prevent irreducibly different epistemic modes from collapsing into one another. The physicist, the contemplative, the political actor, and the embodied sufferer each access experiential reality through irreducibly different modes — each with its own standards of evidence, its own conditions of adequacy, and its own characteristic distortions when it overreaches. IEP provides this differentiation. Without it, process-relational cosmology can affirm that experience goes all the way down, but it cannot protect the differences between ways of knowing that experience from being absorbed into a single cosmological register — however sophisticated that register may be.

IEP differentiates the perspectives. But differentiation alone does not ground them in the actual conditions of human life. This is where Integral Facticity enters. Integral Facticity names the irreducible givens of embodied existence — biological, psychological, social, cultural, institutional — that constitute the starting point for any genuine inquiry and that no theoretical framework can dissolve or transcend without falsifying lived experience. It is where cosmology meets the concrete: not in the abstract dance of eternal objects and actual occasions, but in the specific facticity of a person who is embodied in this body, formed by these traditions, navigating these institutional constraints, suffering these particular failures of recognition. Segall’s cosmology can tell us that reality is a community of subjects. Integral Facticity insists that those subjects are not interchangeable — that the irreducible givens of each person’s situation are not obstacles to cosmological participation but the very medium through which participation occurs. Without this grounding, the “democracy of fellow creatures” remains a cosmological aspiration rather than a political reality — because actual democracy requires navigating the concrete differences between situated persons, not merely affirming the experiential depth they share.

And this is where IACT becomes necessary — not as a therapeutic technique bolted onto a philosophical framework, but as the practical mechanism through which IEP’s differentiated perspectives and Integral Facticity’s embodied grounding become navigable in lived experience. The ACT Hexaflex — defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, present moment awareness, values clarity, committed action — is the technology of perspective-taking. It is how a person learns to hold multiple irreducible ways of knowing without fusing with any one of them, to remain grounded in the facticity of their own embodied situation without being imprisoned by it, and to act from chosen values rather than from the rigid identification with a partial moral configuration that Haidt’s research documents across the political spectrum. The Brooks case study demonstrates that this is not merely theoretical — psychological flexibility in the political register is practicable. What IACT adds is the architecture that makes it teachable, reproducible, and accountable to the philosophical foundations that IEP and Integral Facticity provide.

The full chain, then, is this: IEP differentiates the irreducible ways of knowing that process-relational cosmology leaves undifferentiated. Integral Facticity grounds those differentiated perspectives in the embodied givens of actual human life. IACT operationalizes the navigation between them through the Hexaflex. And process-relational cosmology — Segall’s distinctive contribution — provides the ontological ground that prevents this entire architecture from collapsing into the very procedural formalism it is designed to overcome. Without Segall’s cosmology, integral political praxis has no answer to the question of why persons possess the experiential depth and spiritual dignity that the framework presupposes. Without the IEP → Integral Facticity → IACT chain, Segall’s cosmology has no account of how the democracy of fellow creatures actually gets practiced by creatures who are psychologically wired to fuse with partial moral configurations and to treat their own perspective as the whole of reality.

This is what I bring to the table. Not a correction of Segall’s project, but its structural complement — the perspectival, embodied, and practical architecture that his cosmological and political-theological work calls for but has not yet developed. Segall’s process philosophy goes through and beyond Kant. My integral humanism goes through and beyond Maritain — updated with Wilber’s perspectival architecture and Habermas’s communicative rationality. Neither project is complete without what the other carries. Whitehead gives us the ontology. Habermas gives us the discourse ethics. Haidt gives us the moral psychology. Hayes gives us the practice. Maritain gives us the integral humanism that holds all four together. The synthesis is not yet built. This essay is my attempt to show that the materials belong on the same table — and that the planned dialogue between our two projects is where the construction can begin.

Suggested Reading

Matthew David Segall, Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (SacraSage, 2021)

Matthew David Segall, Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore/Integral Imprint, 2023)

Matthew David Segall, “Carl Schmitt’s ‘Political Theology’: A Process Theological Intervention,” in From Force to Persuasion, ed. Andrew M. Davis (Cascade Books, 2024)

Matthew David Segall, “The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead’s Process-Relational Alternative,” Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 7:1 (2020)

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed. (Free Press, 1978)

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Free Press, 1967)

Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World (Shambhala, 2006)

Ken Wilber, A Sociable God: Toward a New Understanding of Religion, revised ed. (Shambhala, 2005)

Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion (Random House, 1998)

Ken Wilber, The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions (Shambhala, 2017)

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Beacon Press, 1984/1987)

Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Beacon Press, 1979)

Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (MIT Press, 1992)

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2012)

Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (Avery, 2019)

Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2nd ed. (Guilford Press, 2012)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, trans. Joseph W. Evans (University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989)

Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981)

Sean McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2012)

Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Polity Press, 2017)

Michael Brooks, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right (Zero Books, 2020)

David Sloan Wilson, Paul Atkins, and Steven Hayes, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (Context Press, 2019)

Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Abstract

Ken Wilber has been smeared from all sides — dismissed by traditional institutions as a popularizer, and by alternative institutions as a dogmatist. Neither side has engaged the actual philosopher. This essay recovers him. Drawing on Wilber’s own intellectual autobiography, his 1983 engagement with Habermas and Bellah, Michael Fisher’s documentation of systematic misreadings, and Zachary Stein’s placement of Wilber within American Pragmatism, I argue that the post-metaphysical architecture of Integral Spirituality — the 8 Zones, the Wilber-Combs Lattice — deserves the serious philosophical engagement it has never received. The pattern Fisher identified in 1997 — misreading intentions, applying misplaced concreteness to epistemological frameworks, reacting to rhetorical style rather than engaging substantive argument — has persisted across three decades of reception, reinforced by the sociological conditions of the community that formed around Wilber’s work. The Ferrer participatory critique — which shaped a generation of CIIS-adjacent thinking on transpersonal theory and left deep institutional marks on how Wilber’s work has been received — is addressed as a genuine contribution that nonetheless remains epistemologically underhoused without the structural and developmental dimensions Wilber provides. The connection to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s psychological flexibility model is made explicit through IACT: what the 8 Zones do at the level of epistemological architecture, the Hexaflex does at the level of individual psychological process. A pre-publication exchange with Matt Segall — Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS — sharpened the argument and clarified outstanding debts to process-relational philosophy that require sustained engagement in its own right. The deeper stakes belong to Michael Brooks, whose unfinished project demanded precisely the kind of philosophical ground this essay attempts to lay — one capable of genuine encounter with the religious and spiritual dimensions of human life without reducing them to false consciousness or sociological function.

Tags: Ken Wilber, Integral Theory, AQAL, 8 Zones, Pre/Trans Fallacy, Wilber-Combs Lattice, Integral Spirituality, A Sociable God, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Robert Bellah, Sociology of Religion, Matt Segall, CIIS, Philosophy Cosmology and Consciousness, Jorge Ferrer, Participatory Turn, Jacob Sherman, R. Michael Fisher, Transpersonal Psychology, ACT, Steven Hayes, Psychological Flexibility, Hexaflex, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Relational Frame Theory, Language Parasite, Symbolic Order, Cognitive Defusion, Zachary Stein, Dancing with Sophia, Pragmatism, Peirce, Dewey, William James, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, IACT, Integral Epistemological Pluralism, Sean McGrath, German Idealism, Schelling, Naturphilosophie, Michael Brooks, Cosmopolitan Socialism, Metapattern Institute, Canadian Philosophy, Concordia University, Eminem, Slim Shady

May I have your attention, please? May I have your attention, please?

In “The Real Slim Shady,” Marshall Mathers stood in a room full of people who looked like him and asked which one was actually him. The comedy and the sting of the song came from the same place: the real person had disappeared into the performance, and the performance had spawned so many copies that the original was no longer visible.

Ken Wilber has the same problem.

There is Wilber the lifestyle brand — the consciousness-evolution branding, the “theory of everything” tagline, the Boulder workshops. There is Wilber the figure who fought bitterly with the transpersonal psychology community and whose name still triggers an allergic reaction in certain corners of the transpersonal and academic landscape a generation later. There is Wilber the online avatar — invoked, celebrated, dismissed, and caricatured across a thousand forum posts by people who have read selected passages and absorbed the rest through online osmosis and internet memes. There is the Rebel Wisdom Wilber or post-guru-fallout Wilber, weighing in on Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, reaching a younger audience that has largely never read his books and knows him primarily as a figure whose authority was already in question. And then there is the philosopher. The one who wrote The Spectrum of Consciousness at twenty-three, developed across four decades the most comprehensive framework for epistemological perspective-taking that exists in contemporary philosophy, absorbed Habermas’s communicative rationality, built a post-metaphysical reconstruction of the perennial philosophy, and — as Zachary Stein has argued in the most important piece of secondary literature on Wilber that almost no one outside the integral conversation has read — belongs squarely in the tradition of American Pragmatism alongside Peirce, James, and Dewey.

Will the real Wilber please stand up?

This essay began with a comment thread and grew through an exchange that sharpened it. On February 21, 2026, I published “On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn” — an essay pressing the question of whether Matt Segall’s process-relational framework could do what Michael Brooks’s cosmopolitan socialism required: ground a left politics capable of genuine encounter with the religious and spiritual dimensions of human life. , an Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS, responded in the comments. — who did graduate work at CIIS before studying under Wilber directly from 1995 to 2004, publishing Embracing Reality and Where’s Wilber At? — joined the thread. The exchange was collegial and genuine, and it opened up questions that deserve more space than a comment thread can provide. Before publishing this essay, I sent it to Segall for pre-publication review. He responded with substantive critique — correcting the institutional framing of my earlier essay, challenging the depth of my engagement with Whitehead and process philosophy, and raising fair questions about reciprocity. That exchange has sharpened the essay at specific points I will note below. It has also clarified what comes next. I am planning a follow-up essay — a proper review of Segall’s books and his broader contributions to public philosophical discourse — that will provide the substantive engagement he is rightly asking for. And we are planning a recorded conversation to think through the relationship between process-relational philosophy and integral epistemology in real time. The two traditions have not been in sustained conversation. All of this groundwork should make that exchange more productive.

But the comment thread and the email exchange that followed also crystallized something that has been operating for decades. Wilber has been smeared from all sides — dismissed by traditional academic institutions as a popularizer without credentials, and dismissed by alternative institutions as a dogmatist whose framework imposes hierarchy on the diversity of spiritual experience. The result is that neither side has engaged the actual philosopher. In “The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves” (December 2024), I applied Robert Bellah’s sociological framework to argue that the Integral Life community functions as a lifestyle enclave — a social group organized around shared interests and content consumption rather than deep communal bonds and shared moral commitments. That essay diagnosed the sociological conditions that have impeded the academic reception of Wilber’s work. What the Segall exchange revealed is that the impediment runs deeper than packaging. There are accumulated misreadings — of Wilber’s intentions, his epistemological architecture, even the philosophical tradition he belongs to — that have been operating for nearly thirty years. But there is also active dismissal that predates and exceeds the misreadings. The lifestyle enclave hid the philosopher. But the philosopher was already being caricatured before the enclave took its current form.

This essay is an attempt to make the actual philosopher visible. The follow-up — engaging Segall’s own work on its own terms — will provide the substantive reciprocity he is rightly asking for. There is a Wilber most people have never met: a philosopher of epistemological perspective-taking whose work has direct implications for how we understand psychological flexibility, the capacity to hold multiple frames of reference without collapsing into any one of them.

I. The Odyssey

The best place to start is where Wilber started — with his own account of how he got here.

In 1982, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology published “Odyssey: A Personal Inquiry into Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology,” Wilber’s intellectual autobiography covering his formation from undergraduate to the publication of The Spectrum of Consciousness. This essay is remarkable, particularly because it effectively dismantles the simplistic view of Wilber as merely a freelance mystic developing theoretical philosophy from a meditation cushion in Boulder.

Wilber entered Duke University in 1967 as a pre-med science student. His formation was in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. What he describes as a “drastic” shift came through an encounter with Lao Tzu’s Tao-te Ching — but the shift was not away from rigor. It was toward a different object of inquiry pursued with the same disciplined attention. He began reading voraciously in Eastern philosophy and religion alongside his science curriculum. Eventually he transferred to the University of Nebraska, enrolled in biochemistry, and dropped out to follow what he describes as his own curriculum — a full-time program of reading, writing, and contemplative practice.

The personal discipline is worth noting because it shapes the work. Wilber did not pursue this path in an institutional context. There was no tenure track, no peer community, no departmental seminar. He worked as a gas station attendant, a dishwasher, a grocery clerk. He practiced Zen meditation daily — a contemplative discipline that cultivated precisely the kind of present-moment awareness and perspective-taking capacity that would later become central to his epistemological architecture and philosophy. He wrote. To hone his prose, he copied the complete works of Alan Watts by hand — an apprenticeship method more characteristic of a monastic scriptorium than a twentieth-century American writer. His method for the decade following Spectrum was to study intensively for ten months, conceive a book in its entirety, and then write obsessively to complete it in two or three months.

What emerged from this process was not — and this matters — what the critics of the 1980s and 1990s described. It was not dogmatic metaphysics. It was not a hierarchy of value imposed on the diversity of human experience. It was an architecture for holding what different traditions had each discovered about different dimensions of human experience — without reducing any tradition to any other and without claiming that the architecture itself was anything more than a working model, a map that invited revision. As Wilber put it in Spectrum: the goal was to “provide a framework” and “gain a universal context” through a theory that was “only a theory” and “strictly metaphorical.”

The core of the architecture was what Wilber called the spectrum of consciousness — a model that mapped levels of identity and modes of knowing across the full range of human experience, from the most contracted egoic awareness to the most expansive transpersonal modes described in the contemplative traditions. The model did not argue the merits of any school over others. Its method was not argumentation but something closer to what Niels Bohr called complementarity. Different schools of psychology — from Freudian analysis to Jungian individuation to Zen — each illuminated different bands of the spectrum. Each was valid for its domain. The framework’s job was to hold the relationships between them, not to rank them.

What matters most for the argument of this essay is the epistemological move Wilber was making from the beginning. Each band of the spectrum is not merely a different content of experience — it is a different mode of knowing. The framework is not primarily a map of what exists. It is a map of how we know — an epistemological architecture that recognizes multiple, irreducible modes of inquiry and refuses to collapse them into one another. This is not the Wilber most people have encountered. But it is the Wilber who was there from the start.

The “Odyssey” also shows something crucial about Wilber’s break with the humanistic and transpersonal movements he had emerged from. He argued, in increasingly pointed terms, that both movements were making systematic errors — errors he would later formalize as the Pre/Trans Fallacy, the confusion of pre-rational and trans-rational modes of experience. The claim was essentially epistemological: these two modes of experience can look similar from the outside — both involve experiences that exceed ordinary egoic functioning — but they require different epistemic frames to understand. Pre-rational participation in a living cosmos and trans-rational participation in a living cosmos are phenomenologically overlapping but epistemologically distinct. Telling them apart requires the kind of perspective-taking capacity that the framework was designed to cultivate.

This is the philosopher who was already present in the early work — a philosopher of epistemological pluralism and perspective-taking, trained in science, formed in contemplative practice, working outside the academy with a discipline that most people inside the academy do not maintain. The lifestyle enclave came later. The institutional allergies came later. The cultural packaging came later. The philosopher came first.

II. A Sociable God and the Architecture of Discernment

If The Spectrum of Consciousness built the map, A Sociable God (1983) built the tools for navigating it — and it did so in dialogue with thinkers most people do not associate with Wilber.

In 2005, writing a new introduction to the book, Wilber reflected on the circumstances of its composition. He was still washing dishes at the Red Rooster Restaurant when the original was written. The new introduction, titled “My Life as a Dishwasher,” offers something rare: Wilber’s own assessment of where his project stood in the landscape of knowledge production. He described himself as a “methodological outlaw” — not because his work was partial or extreme, but because it was radically holistic. His approach was outlawed in both cultural and countercultural academies precisely because it refused to reduce any domain of inquiry to any other. “Everybody is right” was his shorthand — not as relativism, but as the starting point for a more demanding inquiry: if everybody is right about something, what is the framework that can hold all of those partial truths without reducing any of them?

A Sociable God made three moves that remain essential to understanding what Wilber’s project actually is — as opposed to what it has been caricatured as being.

First, Wilber demonstrated that there are at least a dozen different meanings of “religious” and “spiritual” operating in both academic and popular discourse — and that until these are unpacked, no productive conversation about religion, spirituality, or transcendence can proceed. This is not a pedantic point. It is the epistemological foundation for everything that follows. When someone says “I’m spiritual but not religious,” which of the dozen meanings are they invoking? When a sociologist dismisses transpersonal claims as irrational, which meaning of “religious” are they critiquing? When a contemplative practitioner reports a nondual experience, which epistemic frame are they reporting from? The failure to make these distinctions produces precisely the kind of cross-purpose arguments that have plagued the academic study of religion for decades.

Second, Wilber argued that there are degrees of authenticity in spiritual engagements — and that these can be adjudicated. This is the claim that triggered the most resistance, because it sounds like ranking. But the adjudication Wilber proposed was not external — not a matter of one tradition measuring another against its own criteria. It was hermeneutical: judgment from within the hermeneutic circle, using developmental holism to distinguish between pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional engagements with the same tradition. A person reciting religious formulas out of social conformity and a person who has worked through and beyond those formulas to a post-conventional appropriation of the same tradition are both “religious” — but they are not doing the same thing epistemologically.

Third, and most consequentially, Wilber argued that any adequate sociology of religion requires a vertical dimension — what he called a sociology of depth. Both modernist reductionism (religion is nothing but projection, wish-fulfillment, social control) and postmodern relativism (all religious expressions are equally valid cultural productions) excluded this vertical dimension. The reductionists collapsed everything into the pre-rational. The relativists flattened everything into a single horizontal plane. Neither could account for the observable fact that spiritual engagement develops — that there are recognizable differences between magical thinking, mythic belonging, rational theology, and contemplative realization, and that these differences matter.

What is rarely noted about A Sociable God is the intellectual company Wilber was keeping in 1983. An entire chapter — titled “Knowledge and Human Interests,” directly after Habermas’s own work — takes Habermas’s framework of three modes of knowledge-inquiry (empirical-analytic, historical-hermeneutic, and critical-reflective) and their associated cognitive interests (technical, practical, and emancipatory) as the explicit starting base, then extends them into the transpersonal domain. Wilber argued that Habermas’s horizontal-emancipatory interest — the interest in clearing up distortions within any given level of development — needed to be supplemented by a vertical-emancipatory interest: the movement to higher levels altogether. What Marx did primarily for the material sphere, what Freud did primarily for the emotional sphere, and what Habermas was doing for the communicative sphere, Wilber proposed to extend into the spiritual sphere. The book also draws on Habermas’s developmental-structuralism — using stage-structural models (following Kohlberg) to adjudicate the developmental level of various psychosocial productions, including religious expressions. And it engages Robert Bellah’s work on religious evolution — the same Bellah whose sociological framework I used in “The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves” to diagnose the conditions of the Integral Life community. Bellah’s categories of primitive and archaic religious stages appear alongside Habermas’s preconventional and predifferentiated structures as parallel developmental vocabularies. That Wilber was working with Habermas and Bellah in 1983 — while washing dishes — is precisely the kind of fact that the lifestyle enclave and the institutional allergies have made invisible.

The Pre/Trans Fallacy, which Wilber formalized during this period, emerged from examining his own errors. He began, as he recounts in the “Odyssey,” by trying to prove the Romantic view — that the pre-rational, pre-egoic states described by Rousseau and the Romantics were the same as the trans-rational, trans-egoic states described by the mystics. He failed. The data did not support the identification. Pre-rational and trans-rational modes of experience are both non-rational — which is why they are so easily confused — but they are structurally different. An infant’s undifferentiated fusion with the environment is not the same as a contemplative practitioner’s nondual realization, even though both exceed the boundaries of ordinary egoic functioning. Confusing them produces two characteristic errors: either you reduce the trans-rational to the pre-rational (Freud’s move — all mysticism is regression), or you elevate the pre-rational to the trans-rational (the Romantic move — all pre-egoic experience is spiritual). Wilber named these the two directions of the Pre/Trans Fallacy, and the distinction remains one of the most powerful diagnostic tools in the transpersonal literature.

III. A Guide to Wilberland

And the misreadings came almost immediately.

In 1997, R. Michael Fisher published a three-part analysis in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology documenting what he called “some common misunderstandings of the critics of Ken Wilber and his work on transpersonal theory prior to 1995.” Fisher is an independent scholar based in Calgary, Alberta — a Canadian thinker working outside the academy, much as Wilber himself did. Fisher holds graduate degrees in rehabilitation studies, adult education, and curriculum philosophy and design from the University of Calgary. In 1997, he produced what remains one of the most careful and underappreciated pieces of secondary literature on Wilber: a patient, detailed demonstration that the critics most responsible for shaping the academic reception of Wilber’s work had consistently misread his stated intentions, projected onto his work claims he had not made, and then critiqued the projections.

Fisher organized his analysis into three parts: Wilber’s intentions, Wilber’s major theses, and Wilber’s critical style. Each part told the same story from a different angle.

On intentions. Fisher identified two strands that critics attributed to Wilber: a “Supremist-Extremist-Idealist” view — that Wilber was claiming one perspective was categorically superior to others and that his framework constituted an absolute system — and a “Universalist-Ultimate-Absolutist” view — that Wilber was making dogmatic metaphysical claims that brooked no dissent. These attributions were consistent across critics. They were also, Fisher showed, inconsistent with what Wilber had actually written.

What Wilber had stated, repeatedly and from his first book forward, was something different. His intention was “synthetic-integrative-complementary” — not to argue the merits of any school over others, but to provide a framework that could hold multiple approaches in a principled relationship. His intention was “inclusive-coordinate-source” — to include rather than exclude, to coordinate rather than rank, and to return psychology to its etymological roots as a science of the soul. The gap between what was attributed and what was stated was, Fisher documented, enormous and systematic.

On major theses. Fisher traced the same pattern into the substance of the arguments. The critics — humanistic-existential psychologists primarily — took Wilber’s claims about hierarchical ontology, the perennial philosophy, and the possibility of transcendence and read them through a lens of what Fisher called misplaced concreteness. What Wilber described as metaphorical maps of modes of knowing, the critics treated as literal descriptions of concrete reality. What Wilber intended as an epistemological architecture — each level a different mode of inquiry with its own validity claims — the critics read as a value ranking, a hierarchy of persons rather than a hierarchy of perspectives.

Kirk Schneider’s critique is representative. He wrote that Wilber’s position amounted to saying “people are immortal and universally transcendent,” something “like claiming that people can stare directly into the sun.” As Michael Koltko responded at the time, Schneider “seriously misunderstood transpersonal consciousness and psychology” and had constructed something that the actual position did not contain.

The existentialist critics operated from a commitment to the bounded personal ego making choices under conditions of finitude. From within that epistemic frame — and it is a legitimate frame — there is no transegoic path. The body’s suffering is the floor and the ceiling of the human situation. When Wilber claimed that the perennial philosophy’s testimony about transcendence deserved serious epistemological engagement rather than dismissal, they heard dogmatic metaphysics. What they did not hear was an epistemological point: that their frame of reference was valid for its domain but could not legitimately rule on what it could not, by its own methods, access. The existential engagement with finitude was not wrong. It was one perspective among several, each requiring its own mode of inquiry.

Fisher identified something deeper running through the misreadings: the critics consistently imposed their own epistemic commitments on the totality of Wilber’s map and then reduced claims made from other epistemic positions to their own terms. This is the core epistemological problem. If you only have one frame of reference, every other frame looks either like your own (at its best) or like irrationality (at its worst). The capacity to hold multiple epistemic frames simultaneously — to see that each is valid within its domain without collapsing into relativism — is precisely what Wilber’s framework was designed to cultivate. And it is precisely what the critics lacked.

On critical style. Fisher identified something important that has never been adequately reckoned with: Wilber’s writing generates excessive reactions partly because of how he writes, not just what he argues. The rhetorical mode is dramatic, righteous, and at times sarcastic. This is not academic prose. It is closer to prophetic denunciation. It triggered — and continues to trigger — responses proportional to the rhetoric rather than the argument.

Wilber himself acknowledged this. Fisher documented that Wilber both defended his polemic tone and stated his intention to modify it in future writing. The point is not that the tone is irrelevant — it has real costs for academic reception. The point is that reacting to the tone is not the same as engaging the argument. Fisher showed that the critics were doing the former and calling it the latter.

Fisher’s analysis was published in 1997. The Ferrer-Wilber debate — which would shape the next generation of institutional relationships between Wilber and the CIIS tradition — had not yet begun. Integral Spirituality and the 8 Zones were nine years away. Fisher was documenting a pattern at a specific moment in time.

What makes the essay essential reading today is not the specifics of the 1990s critics. It is the pattern itself. The structure Fisher identified — misreading intentions, applying misplaced concreteness to epistemological frameworks, reacting to style rather than engaging substance — did not stop when the critics changed. The pattern has persisted across generations of interlocutors. And it has been reinforced, as I argued in “The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves,” by the sociological conditions of the community that formed around Wilber’s work.

IV. The CIIS Question and the Participatory Critique

A word about the institutional history, because it matters and because avoiding it does not help anyone.

A clarification is warranted. In my previous essay I used the phrase “allergic reaction” to describe the institutional reception of Wilber’s work at CIIS. Matt Segall has rightly pushed back on this framing — pointing out that CIIS offers five courses across multiple programs that constructively engage Wilber’s work, that the Wilber-Combs Lattice was co-developed by Allan Combs who taught at CIIS for decades, and that his own distance from Wilber preceded his arrival at CIIS and his encounter with Ferrer’s work. I accept these corrections. What Fisher documented in 1997 — and what I am tracing in this essay — is a general reception pattern in the broader academic and transpersonal psychology landscape, not a claim about any specific institution or individual biography. The pattern is real. Its distribution is more diffuse than my earlier framing suggested.

The relationship between Wilber’s work and the CIIS tradition has been marked by genuine philosophical disagreement and genuine institutional scarring. The Ferrer debate — Jorge Ferrer’s participatory enactivism as an alternative to Wilber’s perennial philosophy — was a substantive philosophical contribution that deserves sustained engagement rather than dismissal or allergic avoidance.

Ferrer’s Revisioning Transpersonal Theory (SUNY Press, 2002) made three core moves. First, it critiqued what Ferrer called the experiential or perennialist paradigm — the assumption that the various mystical traditions all point toward a common mystical core that is variously interpreted through different cultural lenses. Ferrer argued that this assumption presupposes an autonomous, disembodied subject having interior experiences of an objective spiritual reality, and that this framing is both philosophically untenable and subtly Cartesian. Second, Ferrer proposed a participatory alternative: spiritual phenomena are not experiences that a subject has but multilocal participatory events — cocreative unfoldings that involve intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal dimensions simultaneously. Third, Ferrer argued for genuine spiritual pluralism — not different interpretations of the same underlying reality, but genuinely different spiritual realities enacted through different traditions and practices. Richard Tarnas wrote the foreword, framing the book as the “second conceptual stage” of transpersonal theory after Wilber. The exchange that followed was bitter and shaped the CIIS-Wilber relationship for a generation.

In 2008, Ferrer and co-edited The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (SUNY Press), which expanded the participatory framework beyond transpersonal psychology into religious studies and philosophy of religion. The collection made a compelling case for the embodied, cocreative dimension of spiritual life — the insistence that the whole person (somatic, instinctive, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual) participates in spiritual knowing, not just the cognitive or contemplative faculties.

Ferrer continued to press the argument in his solo paper “Participation, Metaphysics, and Enlightenment: Reflections on Ken Wilber’s Recent Work,” published in the Transpersonal Psychology Review and later republished in Approaching Religion (Vol. 5, No. 2, 2015). This paper engages directly with Integral Spirituality and contests Wilber’s “post-metaphysical” label, arguing that Wilber’s integral post-metaphysics still privileges nondual, monistic, and formless spiritualities over theistic and visionary ones, and that the participatory critique remains applicable even after Wilber’s revisions.

These are real contributions. The participatory emphasis on embodiment, cocreation, and genuine pluralism has pushed the entire field forward. And yet — and this is where I part company with the participatory tradition — the participatory framework remains, in my assessment, epistemologically underhoused. It offers a powerful critique of perennialism and a compelling phenomenology of spiritual participation. What it does not offer is a set of diagnostic tools adequate to differentiate types and qualities of participatory enactment.

Here is the problem in concrete terms. Pre-conventional participation in a living cosmos and post-conventional participation in a living cosmos look different from the inside — but the participatory framework lacks the structural vocabulary to say how and why they differ. Without something like the Wilber-Combs Lattice — the distinction between structures of consciousness and states of consciousness, the developmental dimension that allows you to see that the same phenomenological experience held through different developmental frames yields different meanings — you cannot make these distinctions. The Pre/Trans Fallacy applies: pre-rational participation and trans-rational participation are both “participation,” and without the developmental dimension, the framework cannot tell them apart. The epistemological architecture Wilber built is precisely what the participatory critique needs and has not yet absorbed. In “Integral Epistemological Pluralism,” I developed this argument further — showing that what is needed is not a choice between Wilber’s perspectivalism and Ferrer’s participatory enactivism, but an epistemological framework capacious enough to hold both as complementary modes of inquiry, each valid within its domain, neither sufficient alone. The pluralism must be genuinely epistemological — not a diplomatic splitting of differences but a principled account of why different modes of knowing disclose different aspects of reality and how their findings can be coordinated without reduction.

This is not an accusation. It is an observation about the current state of the conversation. The Ferrer-Wilber debate was conducted primarily against a pre-Integral Spirituality Wilber. Ferrer’s 2015 paper engages with Integral Spirituality but contests the “post-metaphysical” label rather than reckoning with the full architecture — the 8 Zones, the Wilber-Combs Lattice, the zone-differentiated epistemology. Wilber’s The Religion of Tomorrow (2017) has received almost no engagement from the participatory tradition. The philosophical conversation has been held hostage by institutional memory, and the conversation we actually need — about epistemological pluralism, perspective-taking, and the integration of multiple modes of inquiry — is too important to leave in that captivity.

V. The Post-Metaphysical Turn: Integral Spirituality

Between Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995) and Integral Spirituality (2006), Wilber made what I consider his most important philosophical move: the post-metaphysical turn. He absorbed Habermas’s discourse ethics. He built the 8 Zones — a zone-differentiated epistemological architecture that forces every claim to identify its domain of inquiry and its method of testability. And he developed two architectonic innovations that changed the terms of every debate that had come before.

The first was the Wilber-Combs Lattice — the distinction between structures of consciousness (developmental stages, the “growing up” dimension) and states of consciousness (phenomenological experiences, the “waking up” dimension). The Lattice demonstrates that any state of consciousness can be experienced through any structure — that the same phenomenological experience held through different developmental frames yields different meanings, different ethical implications, different capacities for integration. This is not abstract theory. It dissolves the hierarchical ranking objection at a stroke. The Lattice does not rank traditions against each other. It maps the relationship between developmental depth and experiential breadth, showing why the same contemplative state — say, a nondual experience — is interpreted so differently by a pre-conventional practitioner and a post-conventional one. The difference is not in the experience but in the perspective through which it is held.

The second innovation was the 8 Zones — a zone-differentiated epistemological architecture in which every claim about consciousness, spirit, culture, or systems must identify its domain and its testability conditions. A first-person phenomenological claim is not the same kind of claim as a third-person neuroscience claim, even when they concern the same experience. A second-person hermeneutical claim about shared cultural meaning operates in a different zone from a third-person sociological claim about social systems. The zones do not reduce to each other. They are genuinely different epistemic perspectives, each with its own standards of evidence, its own methods of verification, its own domain of legitimate application. No zone can legislate for any other. The architecture does not tell you what to find. It tells you how to look — and insists that looking from only one zone will always produce a partial picture.

What rarely receives adequate attention is the role of Habermas in this architecture. Wilber’s engagement with Habermas in Integral Spirituality was not decorative but architecturally constitutive. Habermas’s discourse ethics — the insistence that validity claims must be redeemable in intersubjective discourse, that different domains of inquiry (truth, rightness, sincerity) require different modes of verification — provided the philosophical grammar for the post-metaphysical reconstruction. The levels of the great chain of being, in Wilber’s post-metaphysical rendering, are not pre-existing structures lying around in a Platonic heaven. They are co-constructed structures of knowing — held in place by communities of practice that can verify their claims through domain-appropriate methods. Verification requires both modernity’s commitment to objective evidence and postmodernity’s commitment to intersubjective grounding. The reconstruction cannot rest on tradition alone or on introspection alone.

And here is a genealogical point that most readers of Wilber miss entirely: Habermas himself drew extensively from the American Pragmatists — from Peirce, from Dewey, from Mead. As Habermas has acknowledged, he considered the Classical Pragmatists “the American Young Hegelians.” When Wilber absorbed Habermas’s communicative rationality and built it into Integral Spirituality, he was drawing — whether he framed it this way or not — on a pragmatist genealogy that runs back through the deepest currents of American philosophy. The 8 Zones are, in significant respects, the most rigorous contemporary expression of the pragmatist commitment to epistemic comprehensiveness — the refusal to restrict inquiry to a single method — that Peirce articulated with abduction, James with radical empiricism, and Dewey with his insistence that inquiry is continuous with the organism’s engagement with its environment.

VI. Dancing with Sophia

If the philosopher came first and the misreadings came immediately after, the philosophical recognition came last.

Dancing with Sophia: Integral Philosophy on the Verge, published by SUNY Press in 2019 as part of the SUNY Series in Integral Theory, is the first edited collection to treat integral theory explicitly as philosophy. Not as psychology, not as consciousness studies, not as personal development methodology — as philosophy, deserving of the sustained academic engagement that term implies. The book’s editors, Michael Schwartz and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, frame the collection as “the movement of integral at its own (metatheoretical) limit, on the verge of its own philosophical emergence.”

The editors are clear-eyed about the challenge. They note that Wilber “is not an academic, nor has he ever held a university teaching position,” that his “books are written purposely for a wider audience,” and that some academics “tend to complain about their populist, nonspecialist, and generalizing-sweeping tenor.” But they also make the case — and this is the case the lifestyle enclave has made it nearly impossible to hear — that Wilber’s work contains “novel insights and formulations deserving of sustained academic attention and debate.” They call him, in the Heideggerian sense, “an originary thinker” and, echoing Deleuze and Guattari, “an inventor of concepts.”

Zachary Stein’s opening chapter, “Integral Theory, Pragmatism, and the Future of Philosophy,” is the most important piece of secondary literature on Wilber that has been published. It changes the conversation because it places Wilber in a recognized and distinguished philosophical tradition — American Pragmatism — one that has been central to American intellectual life since Peirce and that Jürgen Habermas explicitly drew on when building his communicative rationality.

Stein identifies six themes linking Wilber to the Pragmatist tradition: philosophical psychology as the starting point for broader philosophical work; epistemic comprehensiveness and the insistence on multiple methodologies; action-oriented theorizing; the integration of science and religion; evolutionary metaphysics; and social emancipation. Each runs through both the Classical Pragmatists and Wilber’s work. The continuity is structural, not superficial.

For this essay, the most important of Stein’s themes is epistemic comprehensiveness. Pragmatism never accepted the restriction of inquiry to a single method. James’s radical empiricism, Peirce’s abduction alongside deduction and induction, Dewey’s insistence that inquiry is continuous with the organism’s engagement with its environment — all refuse the narrowing that both positivism and much continental philosophy imposed. Wilber’s 8 Zones are the most rigorous contemporary expression of this pragmatist commitment. Each zone is a different mode of inquiry, each with its own validity claims, its own methods of verification, its own domain of legitimate application. No zone reduces to any other. The architecture does not tell you what to find. It tells you how to look — and insists that looking from only one zone will always produce a partial picture.

Stein also identifies something crucial about why Pragmatism itself has been misread in ways that parallel the Wilber misreadings. The “typical characterization of Pragmatism as a distinctly American orientation,” he notes, overlooks the fact that key Pragmatist themes were also raised by philosophers “who are archetypally European, such as Marx, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.” Standard treatments of Pragmatism overlook these confluences and reduce the tradition to a parochial enclave. More sophisticated treatments position Pragmatism as what Stein calls a “preemptive solution to the problem of postmodernity.” That Wilber belongs to this more sophisticated Pragmatist tradition — the one Habermas belongs to — is what the lifestyle enclave and the institutional allergies have conspired to make invisible.

Cameron Freeman’s chapter, “Making Sense of Everything? Integral Postmetaphysics and the Theological Turn in Continental Philosophy,” works a complementary seam — situating Wilber’s post-metaphysical turn in relation to the broader theological turn in continental philosophy. Freeman takes seriously what many interlocutors have not: that Wilber’s engagement with Habermas in Integral Spirituality was not decorative but architecturally constitutive, producing a genuinely post-metaphysical framework that dissolves the objections the earlier Wilber could not answer.

The collection also includes contributions from on Heidegger and integral ecology, Jason Wirth on Schelling and Dōgen, Martin Beck Matuštík on integral critical theory, Michael Zimmerman on nihilism, and a suite of critical-constructive engagements from Zayin Cabot, Gregory Desilet, Nicholas Hedlund, and Tom Murray. Wilber himself provides an afterword — “Realism and Idealism in Integral Theory.” The book is not hagiography. Several contributors push back hard. That is what makes it philosophy rather than community literature.

What Dancing with Sophia represents is the philosophical conversation that should have been happening for twenty years but couldn’t, because the lifestyle enclave and the institutional allergies had made it nearly impossible for academic philosophers to take Wilber seriously. The book is the beginning of a correction.

VII. Perspective-Taking and Psychological Flexibility

I want to be precise about why the epistemological Wilber matters — not just as a question of intellectual history but as a question of practice.

The post-metaphysical Wilber — the Wilber of the 8 Zones, the Wilber-Combs Lattice, the zone-differentiated epistemology — gives us a description of what psychological flexibility looks like at the level of knowledge production. What changes across the zones is not the experience but the perspective through which it is held — and therefore its integration, its ethical implications, its capacity to inform a life.

In my own work through Integral Awareness and Commitment Training — IACT — I have been developing a framework that connects the epistemological perspective-taking at the heart of Wilber’s architecture to the psychological flexibility model at the heart of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The connection is not accidental. ACT has been described — and the description is apt — as an “existential humanistic cognitive behavioral therapy.” Steven Hayes developed ACT out of behavior analysis, but the model draws deeply from the same humanistic-existential and contemplative traditions that Wilber was formed by. Hayes has acknowledged that the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science draws practitioners from gestalt, existential, and humanistic orientations alongside behavioral and cognitive ones. The mindfulness and acceptance processes at the core of ACT — present-moment awareness, self-as-context, cognitive defusion — are not merely clinical techniques borrowed from contemplative traditions. They are the same capacities that Wilber’s daily Zen practice was cultivating: the ability to hold experience without fusing with it, to observe the observing self, to remain in contact with what is actually arising rather than with what the conceptual mind insists is happening.

Both frameworks are centrally concerned with the capacity to hold multiple perspectives without fusing with any one of them — and both recognize that the failure to do so produces rigidity, suffering, and distortion.

The ACT Hexaflex — the six core processes of psychological flexibility — describes the capacity to be present, to defuse from rigid thought patterns, to accept what is arising, to take perspective on one’s own experience, to connect with values, and to take committed action. These are epistemic capacities as much as they are therapeutic ones. Cognitive defusion is the ability to hold a thought as a thought rather than as reality — which is to say, the ability to take a perspective on one’s own epistemic frame rather than being captured by it. Self-as-context — the capacity to experience oneself as the context in which thoughts and feelings arise rather than as their content — is structurally parallel to what Wilber’s 8 Zones do at the level of knowledge production: it creates a space from which multiple perspectives can be held without collapsing into any one of them. Present-moment contact is the refusal to let abstraction substitute for what is actually happening — the same refusal that a Zen practitioner enacts on the cushion and that Wilber’s epistemological architecture demands of every zone-specific inquiry. In “The Language Parasite and the Symbolic Order,” I traced this problem to its root in Relational Frame Theory — the mechanism by which human language colonizes direct experience, substituting symbolic networks for contact with what is actually present. Defusion is not merely a clinical technique. It is the counter-move to language’s capacity to construct entire worlds of derived meaning that operate independently of the phenomena they claim to represent. The critics Fisher documented were not making perceptual errors. They were fused with their own symbolic frames — frames that had become so naturalized that the possibility of other frames was literally invisible to them.

What Wilber’s 8 Zones do at the level of epistemological architecture, the Hexaflex does at the level of individual psychological process. Both are technologies for the same fundamental human capacity: the ability to hold multiple perspectives without collapsing into one, without losing contact with the phenomena each perspective discloses, and without retreating into a relativism that treats all perspectives as equivalent. Perspective-taking is not relativism. It is the opposite of relativism. It is the disciplined capacity to see what each perspective reveals and what it conceals — and to act from the fullest possible awareness.

The Pre/Trans Fallacy itself is, at bottom, a failure of perspective-taking. When pre-rational participation in a living cosmos and trans-rational participation in a living cosmos are confused, the confusion arises because the observer cannot hold both perspectives simultaneously and distinguish between them. The phenomenology can be similar. The epistemic frame through which the experience is held is different. Detecting the difference requires the kind of flexible, multi-perspectival awareness that both Wilber’s architecture and the ACT Hexaflex are designed to cultivate.

This is where Fisher’s 1997 analysis meets clinical practice. The critics Fisher documented were not stupid. They were epistemically rigid. They had one perspective — the humanistic-existential frame — and they could not see Wilber’s claims from any other frame. The claims therefore appeared as either versions of their own position (at best) or as irrational dogma (at worst). Expanding the range of epistemic perspectives one can occupy — genuinely occupy, not merely acknowledge in the abstract — is the practical project that connects Wilber’s epistemological architecture to the psychological flexibility work I have been developing through IACT.

The capacity to hold Wilber’s map as one perspective among several, while also holding the humanistic-existential perspective, while also holding the process-relational perspective Segall works from, while also holding the participatory perspective Ferrer developed — this is not eclecticism. It is epistemic flexibility. And it is a trainable capacity, not a fixed trait.

VIII. Why This Matters

In “On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn,” I made an argument to Matt Segall and the process-relational tradition: that the epistemological structure supporting Whiteheadian panexperientialism is insufficient — that it has adopted the surface features of the post-metaphysical turn without fully internalizing its demands. The result is what I called enchanted flatland — richer and warmer than materialist metaphysics in denial, but still unable to protect first-person subjective depth or contemplative awareness as irreducibly its own. I pressed the Pre/Trans Fallacy as a diagnostic: without something like Wilber’s architecture for distinguishing pre-conventional from post-conventional participation in the life of a tradition, process philosophy cannot tell the difference between regression and transcendence, between enchantment that expands consciousness and enchantment that collapses it.

That argument assumes something this essay has tried to make explicit: that there is a philosopher behind the architecture, and that the architecture deserves serious engagement rather than institutional allergy. Fisher documented the pattern in 1997 — critics responding to a Wilber they had not read, or had read through a lens that made the actual arguments invisible. That pattern has continued for three decades. The packaging hid the philosopher. The Ferrer fight froze the institutional memory of a version of Wilber that stopped developing in the 1990s. And the secondhand reports — the ambient sense that “AQAL” is either a complete map of reality or an overly ambitious fantasy — replaced the primary sources entirely.

The deeper stakes are Michael Brooks’s. Brooks understood that cosmopolitan socialism needed a philosophical ground capable of genuine encounter with the religious and spiritual dimensions of human life — not dismissing them as false consciousness, not reducing them to sociological function, but holding them as real domains of human experience with their own developmental logic and their own validity claims. He died in 2020 before that ground was built. The work I have been doing since — from “The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves” through the Armour essay, from “Beyond the Master Signifier” through “On God, Absolute Freedom” — is an attempt to build it. “On Sean McGrath’s Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge” traced the same ground from the side of German Idealism — showing that McGrath’s recovery of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, while philosophically serious and deeply necessary, faces the same epistemological challenge the participatory tradition faces: without a post-metaphysical framework for differentiating levels and types of engagement with the absolute, the recovery risks collapsing back into the pre-critical metaphysics it set out to transform. That McGrath responded with generosity and genuine interest suggests that the kind of cross-traditional philosophical engagement this essay calls for is not only possible but already underway. Wilber’s epistemological architecture is central to that project because it is the only framework I know that holds together first-person depth, third-person observation, intersubjective meaning, and systemic structure without reducing any domain to any other.

Since sending this essay to Segall for pre-publication review, he has responded with a challenge that deserves acknowledgment. He argues — correctly — that the claims I have made about process philosophy’s epistemological limitations are diagnostic rather than demonstrative. I have identified what I take to be a structural problem — the absence of a pre/trans diagnostic, the risk of what I called enchanted flatland — without doing the textual work in Whitehead that would ground those claims rigorously. That is a fair critique, and I accept it. The Whitehead engagement needs to happen on its own terms, not as a subordinate clause in an essay about Wilber. I am planning a follow-up essay — a review of Segall’s two books and the broader contributions he is making to public philosophical discourse — that will provide the substantive engagement he is rightly asking for.

Segall’s response in the comment thread to “On God, Absolute Freedom” deserves acknowledgment as well. He describes his onto-epistemic method as pedagogical — preserving and expanding the conditions of learning rather than defending a final form of knowledge — and frames his approach as fallibilist, dialogical, and ontologically pluralist. He is right that Whitehead is not collapsing all forms of enchantment into an undifferentiated night, and he is right that Religion in the Making and Adventures of Ideas contain resources for distinguishing regressive from mature forms of spiritual engagement. This is closer to the kind of epistemological self-awareness that the post-metaphysical project requires than my earlier essay allowed. But a pedagogical posture — however genuinely fallibilist — is not yet an architecture. Without something like the 8 Zones’ demand that every claim identify its domain and its testability conditions, without something like the Wilber-Combs Lattice’s structural distinction between states and stages, the pedagogical commitment remains a disposition rather than a diagnostic. The question is not whether Segall’s approach is open to learning — it plainly is — but whether it can tell you, in a given case, what kind of learning is happening and at what level of integration.

This essay has tried to show that the framework is philosophically serious — that it belongs to the pragmatist tradition through Habermas, that it was already engaging Habermas and Bellah in 1983 while Wilber was washing dishes, that the post-metaphysical turn of Integral Spirituality absorbed the force of the Kantian and Habermasian critiques and reconstructed the integral project on genuinely post-metaphysical grounds. The tentative and ongoing dialogue with Segall is an opportunity to test these claims in real time — to bring these two traditions into a conversation that neither can have alone. The questions between us are real, and they matter beyond the two of us, because they are the questions that Brooks’s unfinished project requires us to answer.

Suggested Reading

Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological Review 29, no. 3 (1964)

Jorge N. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (SUNY Press, 2002)

Jorge N. Ferrer, “Participation, Metaphysics, and Enlightenment: Reflections on Ken Wilber’s Recent Work,” Transpersonal Psychology Review 14, no. 2 (2011). Republished in Approaching Religion 5, no. 2 (2015)

Jorge N. Ferrer, Participation and the Mystery: Transpersonal Essays in Psychology, Education, and Religion (SUNY Press, 2017)

Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman, eds., The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (SUNY Press, 2008)

R. Michael Fisher, “A Guide to Wilberland: Some Common Misunderstandings of the Critics of Ken Wilber and His Work on Transpersonal Theory Prior to 1995,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 37, no. 4 (1997)

Cameron Freeman, “Making Sense of Everything? Integral Postmetaphysics and the Theological Turn in Continental Philosophy,” in Dancing with Sophia (SUNY Press, 2019)

Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Beacon Press, 1971)

Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Beacon Press, 1979)

Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change, 2nd ed. (Guilford Press, 2012)

Sean J. McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2012)

Michael Schwartz and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, eds., Dancing with Sophia: Integral Philosophy on the Verge (SUNY Press, 2019)

Zachary Stein, “Integral Theory, Pragmatism, and the Future of Philosophy,” in Dancing with Sophia (SUNY Press, 2019)

Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Quest Books, 1977)

Ken Wilber, The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development (Quest Books, 1980)

Ken Wilber, “Odyssey: A Personal Inquiry into Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 22, no. 1 (1982)

Ken Wilber, A Sociable God: Toward a New Understanding of Religion (McGraw-Hill, 1983; Shambhala, 2005)

Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Shambhala, 1995)

Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World (Shambhala, 2006)

Ken Wilber, The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions (Shambhala, 2017)

Abstract

Matt Segall’s process-relational panexperientialism preserves a set of intuitions I regard as philosophically significant: that experience is not an accidental latecomer to an otherwise inert cosmos, that reductive materialism cannot exhaust what nature is, and that the language of God, Spirit, and participation need not disappear simply because premodern metaphysics has been superseded. My argument is that the epistemological structure supporting those intuitions remains insufficiently differentiated.

A recent dialogue between Segall and Graham Harman makes the difficulty visible from within Segall’s own project. Segall turns toward German Idealism to recover the depth of the “I,” self-consciousness, and freedom that Whitehead does not adequately secure, while hesitating before the anthropocentrism such a move might reintroduce. I describe the resulting problem as enchanted flatland: a cosmology rich enough to restore interiority, participation, and experience to nature, but not yet sufficiently differentiated with respect to the distinct perspectives and modes of inquiry through which subjective, intersubjective, objective, and interobjective dimensions become available.

Behind this disagreement lies Michael Brooks’s unfinished political project. A cosmopolitan socialism capable of engaging religion, meaning, and the sacred requires more than a richer metaphysics; it requires a framework capable of relating interior development, cultural meaning, institutional power, and material conditions without reducing one to another. My own response has emerged through the encounter between the process-relational and Aurobindonian integral tradition surrounding CIIS and a Canadian philosophical formation shaped by Charles Davis, Jacques Maritain, George Grant, Leslie Armour, and Sean McGrath. Wilber’s epistemological pluralism, Habermasian critique, Enactive Fallibilism, and Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism provide different pieces of what I now call Integral Facticity: an attempt to recover metaphysical and spiritual depth without insulating it from correction, dialogue, or historical difference.

Tags: Matt Segall, Michael Brooks, CIIS, Process Philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, Speculative Metaphysics, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, Panexperientialism, Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, German Idealism, Schelling, Integral Theory, Ken Wilber, AQAL, 8 Zones, Pre/Trans Fallacy, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, IACT, Metapattern Institute, Integral Humanism, Jacques Maritain, Charles Davis, George Grant, Leslie Armour, Sean McGrath, Canadian Philosophy, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Civilizational Dialogue, Jürgen Habermas, Critical Theory, Steven C. Hayes, ACT, Evan Thompson, Enactivism, Žižek, Lacan, John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Cosmopolitan Socialism, Religion and the Left, Spirituality and Politics, Meaning Crisis

I. Integral Politics & the Future of the Left

In the summer of 2022, I welcomed Matthew David Segall as my ninth guest on the Integral Facticity podcast. Our episode, “Varieties of Integral, Michael Brooks, and the Next Left,” turned out to be more aptly titled than either of us probably understood at the time. Matt and I were already operating with distinct, if still only partially articulated, versions of “integral,” and the conversation brought that difference close enough to the surface that I have continued returning to it ever since.

The immediate context was Michael Brooks, who had died two years earlier at the age of thirty-six. His death crystallized something for many of us who had been following what he was trying to build: a serious left politics required a philosophical anthropology adequate to the human beings it hoped to organize. Religion and the question of meaning could not be treated as merely instrumental concerns, useful insofar as they mobilized constituencies, supplied cultural cohesion, or offered psychological consolation. The sacred could not simply be surrendered to the political right. Nor could cosmopolitanism become a vehicle for absorbing distinct civilizations into a supposedly universal account of liberation, with their histories, religious traditions, and political inheritances gradually stripped of their particularity in the process. A genuinely cosmopolitan politics would have to make room for encounter and transformation without requiring historical difference to disappear.

This was part of what excited both me and Jeremy D Johnson when we first began talking about an integral left. Brooks’s Against the Web had gestured toward a cosmopolitan socialism informed by Wilber’s developmental thought, Cornel West’s insistence that the left could not abandon the spiritual and religious dimensions of human life, and Žižek’s structural critique of ideology. He was trying to hold together moral development, spiritual seriousness, material analysis, and genuine internationalism without reducing any one of those concerns to another.

The tensions inside that project were substantial. How could religion remain more than ethics, psychology, or political utility without restoring an older metaphysical certainty? Could developmental distinctions survive the postmodern critique of totalizing narratives? And could an integral left make claims about development while remaining genuinely open to traditions and civilizations whose historical trajectories did not simply reproduce the Western story of modernization?

In “Beyond the Master Signifier”, I later tried to reconstruct some of what Brooks had accomplished in practice. Mapping his work against Hayes’s Hexaflex, I argued that the counterpublic he built through The Michael Brooks Show and Against the Web could sustain substantive moral commitments while remaining structurally open to correction. In IACT terms, it operated more like a growth hierarchy than a dominator hierarchy. What Brooks never had the opportunity to develop was the philosophical structure that could make explicit and extend the synthesis he had begun to embody in his own work.

The Integral Facticity podcast began partly as an attempt to work through that problem, and my conversation with Matt already contained the beginnings of the philosophical divergence I am trying to clarify here. Segall described Wilber as the gateway through which he had discovered Whitehead, Schelling, Sri Aurobindo, and much else, while making clear that he would “probably not” return to Wilber as a governing framework. He was “allergic to theories of everything” and wanted to maintain a degree of “irony or distance” from his own cosmological vision. In that sense, he had moved through Wilber and beyond him.

My movement was almost the reverse. I found myself returning to Wilber, not out of renewed enthusiasm for the political or cultural milieu that had developed around American integral theory, but because his epistemological pluralism seemed to identify a problem that process metaphysics alone could not resolve: how to place contemplative disclosure, developmental psychology, scientific inquiry, cultural interpretation, and political analysis into relation without allowing any one of them to become the explanatory ground of the others. That question became increasingly important as I thought about what Brooks had been trying to do. The left’s difficulty with religion and spirituality was not simply that it lacked an adequate language for them; it lacked a philosophical framework capable of relating interior development, cultural meaning, institutional power, and material conditions without reducing one dimension of human life to another. Matt and I agreed on much of this diagnosis. Where we began to diverge was over whether a process-relational cosmology could itself provide the integrative structure the problem required, or whether integration depended upon a more explicit differentiation of methods, domains, and validity claims.

On February 17, 2026, Segall published “Heaven Save Us from Metaphysics in Denial”, a defense of speculative metaphysics against Walter Veit’s scientific supersessionism and a strong statement of the process-relational cosmology he has continued developing since our conversation. I agree with much of his argument, particularly the refusal to treat physicalism as though it were simply what remains once metaphysics has disappeared. Yet reading it returned me to the question that remained unresolved in 2022: does the epistemological structure of Segall’s framework provide what Brooks’s project required but never received?

A recent conversation with Graham Harman helps clarify why I think the answer remains incomplete.

II. Whitehead, Harman & Enchanted Flatland

The dialogue between Segall and Graham Harman is useful because the philosophical difficulty appears there not as an objection imposed on Whitehead from outside, but as a tension generated within Segall’s own attempt to think with him. Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology turns in part on a question concerning relation: can an entity be exhausted by the relations into which it enters?

Whitehead rejects the classical picture of enduring substances carrying accidental properties. Actual entities become through prehension and relation. Harman’s objection is that something is lost when being is rendered entirely relational. His familiar example of Socrates makes the point intuitively: Socrates may be happy at one moment and miserable at another while remaining Socrates. Neither those properties nor the totality of his present relations exhausts what he is. Harman names this excess withdrawal.

Segall attempts to locate something analogous within Whitehead’s account of concrescence, where an actual entity achieves a novel and private perspective upon the universe before perishing and becoming available to subsequent occasions. There is unquestionably a kind of privacy here, but it remains bound to the occasion. It does not obviously provide the enduring depth Harman intends to preserve when he argues that an object cannot be reduced to its relations.

The more revealing issue appears when Segall acknowledges that he has needed the German Idealists — Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel — to think adequately about something Whitehead does not fully provide: the “I,” self-consciousness, freedom, and the distinctive depth of the subject. Whitehead gives him an ontology capable of refusing the picture of an inert universe from which experience mysteriously emerges, but once the question turns toward self-conscious spirit, the conceptual resources of German Idealism begin doing work that Whitehead alone cannot.

That move immediately raises another problem. If the “I” occupies a distinctive philosophical position, what prevents human access from becoming the privileged standpoint from which the rest of being is interpreted? If spirit cannot be reduced to the cosmological process that precedes it, how do we avoid reconstructing an anthropocentric metaphysics in which nature is read retrospectively from the standpoint of human self-consciousness?

I do not think this can be solved by selecting Whitehead, Harman, or German Idealism as the final ontology. Each protects something the others have difficulty preserving. Harman secures an excess beyond relation but offers relatively little account of developmental or contemplative depth. Whitehead restores interiority to nature but distributes it through a process ontology in which the distinct status of first-person self-consciousness becomes difficult to specify. German Idealism restores freedom, spirit, and the irreducibility of the “I,” but risks reinstalling human consciousness as philosophically privileged.

The problem therefore arises prior to the search for a final metaphysical synthesis. Before deciding which ontology is most comprehensive, we need to distinguish the perspectives and modes of inquiry through which the phenomena under discussion become available. No cosmological description, however expansive, can stand in for the first-person and intersubjective perspectives through which interiors are enacted, interpreted, and investigated.

This is where Wilber’s 8 Zones remain useful to me. Their function is not to adjudicate the metaphysical dispute between Whitehead, Harman, or Schelling, but to differentiate perspectives and methodologies that cannot simply be derived from one another. A first-person contemplative disclosure, a phenomenological description, a third-person neuroscientific account, a cultural interpretation, and a speculative cosmology may all concern dimensions of the same event without constituting interchangeable forms of knowledge. The question is not simply what exists? but also from which perspective does this dimension become available, through which injunctions or practices, and under what conditions can the resulting claims be challenged?

That distinction matters because the restoration of interiority does not by itself resolve the problem of differentiation. Whiteheadian panexperientialism can reject the reduction of experience to exterior matter and insist that some form of interiority belongs to reality all the way down. But Wilber’s objection is that interior and exterior, subjective and objective, cannot be derived from a single process description without losing something essential about the perspectives through which each becomes available. A cosmology may therefore be profoundly hospitable to experience while still asking one explanatory framework to carry more weight than it can bear. The issue is not whether subjectivity has been included within the picture, but whether the distinct dimensions and modes of inquiry through which reality is disclosed have been adequately differentiated.

This is what I mean by enchanted flatland. The phrase names a tension Wilber already identifies within process thought. The cosmos has been re-enchanted relative to materialist flatland: nature is no longer dead extension awaiting the arrival of human consciousness, but a creative and experiential process in which human subjectivity emerges from a world already alive with interiority, relation, and value. Yet the richness of the ontology does not by itself guarantee a corresponding differentiation of perspectives. If interior and exterior, first-person and third-person, individual and collective dimensions are finally coordinated through a single cosmological description, the Kosmos may have become more enchanted while remaining flatter than its metaphysical richness initially suggests.

Wilber’s Pre/Trans Fallacy makes the same problem visible developmentally. Participation, unity, immersion in a living cosmos, and dissolution of the ordinary subject-object boundary can describe experiences organized at very different developmental levels. “God incarnate in every galaxy” could name a mature contemplative realization, while an undifferentiated oceanic merger with nature might produce superficially similar language. Phenomenological resemblance alone does not establish developmental equivalence.

The same principle applies more broadly. A framework may speak continually of novelty, openness, becoming, and fallibilism while remaining difficult to challenge if every objection can ultimately be redescribed within the cosmology itself. Fallibilism has to mean more than declaring a system revisable. Something encountered through another method, another perspective, another body, or another tradition must retain the capacity to force substantive revision.

This is where I think Segall’s criticism of scientific supersessionism is correct but incomplete. Physicalism does not become metaphysically neutral simply because it derives authority from the sciences. Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness remains pertinent: the extraordinary explanatory and predictive success of physics does not entail that reality is identical with the abstractions through which physics models it. Kant likewise did not render metaphysical inquiry meaningless. One can accept that dogmatic metaphysics has been superseded while remaining open to questions concerning the conditions of experience, value, consciousness, freedom, and transcendence.

Nor is Segall returning to a closed a priori metaphysics. His method is abductive, iterative, Jamesian and Peircean, and his panexperientialism is far more sophisticated than the caricature that everything possesses human-like consciousness. My disagreement is therefore narrower but, I think, more consequential. The question is whether process-relational fallibilism is sufficient by itself, or whether a post-metaphysical philosophy requires a more explicit differentiation of perspectives, methodologies, and validity claims before metaphysics can enter into genuinely reciprocal relations with contemplative inquiry, psychology, neuroscience, hermeneutics, social theory, and politics.

That question eventually returned me not only to Wilber, but to the distinct integral traditions through which I had come to think about the relationship between metaphysics, spiritual practice, human development, and political life.

III. Two Integral Traditions

I did not encounter integral thought as a single philosophical genealogy. By the time Matt and I spoke in 2022, I had already spent years moving between traditions that used the same term while carrying very different intellectual histories.

Albert Low was my first Zen teacher at the Montreal Zen Center. Low had also served as an associated lecturer at CIIS in consciousness studies, linking the contemplative world in which I trained in Montreal to the West Coast milieu in which Segall now works. Gregory Baum connected those worlds from another direction. Baum served as exterior examiner on Marc Lalonde’s doctoral work under Charles Davis at Concordia, while also participating in the cosmological conversation surrounding Thomas Berry and what would later become central to the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness tradition at CIIS.

There was also an embodied route. I travelled from Montreal to Esalen and participated in one of George Leonard’s Integral Transformative Practice workshops. Leonard and Michael Murphy had watched participants undergo powerful breakthroughs only to return quickly to established patterns once they went home. ITP emerged partly from the recognition that transformation required sustained practice across body, mind, heart, and soul rather than dependence on peak experience alone.

That intuition stayed with me. Any philosophy claiming transformative depth eventually has to answer to what happens when it encounters embodiment, relationships, institutions, ordinary life, and forms of resistance that do not disappear because the theory can interpret them coherently. Peak experience may provide evidence, but it does not by itself validate the conceptual structure within which the experience is understood.

This helps explain why CIIS has always felt intellectually familiar to me. The “integral” in CIIS is rooted explicitly in Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga rather than Wilber’s AQAL framework. Haridas Chaudhuri carried that lineage into the institutional world from which CIIS eventually developed, while figures such as Richard Tarnas, Brian Swimme, and Sean Kelly later extended the project through the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program. Its attempt to overcome modern materialistic consciousness through participatory cosmology, spiritual philosophy, and a renewed relation to cosmic history is one I understand sympathetically.

The other meaning of integral entered my intellectual life through Concordia. I studied under Marc Lalonde, whose doctoral work under Charles Davis developed a critical theory of religious insight in dialogue with Habermas. Davis had moved from the centre of British Catholic theology through the crisis of Vatican II and eventually toward a critical theology capable of taking modern social theory seriously without reducing religion to sociology or procedural reason.

When I first introduced the language of “integral theory” into Lalonde’s classroom, his immediate association was not Ken Wilber but Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism. That moment has become emblematic for me because it exposed two different intellectual histories carrying the same term.

Maritain’s Integral Humanism, published in 1936, sought a social and political order adequate to the whole human person against both bourgeois individualism and totalitarian collectivism. The Catholic tradition in which I encountered the term began therefore not with a map of consciousness but with philosophical anthropology, transcendence, political community, and the common good.

The Canadian philosophical tradition complicated that inheritance further. George Grant’s Lament for a Nation taught me to see cultural absorption as philosophical before it becomes simply economic or political: technological civilization homogenizes not only institutions and markets but the frameworks through which a people understands itself. Charles Taylor’s account of strong evaluation supplied a vocabulary for the moral horizons within which human beings decide what is worth valuing in the first place. Leslie Armour’s “community of communities” and philosophic federalism asked how real plurality could inhabit a common political and philosophical space without being dissolved into either state totality or liberal atomism.

Sean McGrath brings another strand of this Canadian formation back into direct contact with Segall. His recovery of Schelling, speculative philosophy, and the Carmelite tradition emerges from a much older Canadian engagement with German Idealism running through figures such as John Watson and later James Bradley and Armour. As I argued in my essay on McGrath, I do not think his work has fully crossed the post-metaphysical threshold either. His metaphysical commitments become most intelligible from within forms of participatory and contemplative formation that remain difficult to translate into differentiated public claims.

But that limitation is also the reason his work matters here. It confronts the same question I encounter in Segall from another direction: how can metaphysical and contemplative depth survive without either retreating into an insulated tradition or presenting one form of disclosure as the ontology within which every other form of knowledge must find its place?

The distinction between these integral traditions is therefore not simply biographical. The CIIS lineage emphasizes participation, cosmology, consciousness, and spiritual transformation. The Canadian Catholic and speculative line I inherited places greater pressure on philosophical anthropology, institutional mediation, historical particularity, public reason, and the dangers of cultural absorption. Wilber enters between them less as a final metaphysical authority than as a methodological resource for keeping different dimensions and methods in relation without prematurely collapsing them.

What I have been trying to think through ever since is the possibility of an integral philosophy capable of synthesis without absorption: differentiated enough to preserve distinct modes of knowing, traditions, and historical formations, but integrative enough that their encounter can produce more than parallel monologues.

It is out of this problem that Integral Facticity has gradually taken shape.

IV. From Integral Facticity to Integral Pluralism

Integral Facticity begins from a limit on every integral ambition. Inquiry is never conducted from nowhere. We begin already situated within bodies, histories, languages, institutions, practices, and inherited worlds whose meanings precede the theoretical frameworks we later construct. Heidegger’s language of thrownness matters to me because it refuses the fantasy that a sufficiently comprehensive map can finally escape the conditions from which it was drawn.

I am writing from Montreal, formed partly within a Catholic intellectual tradition at Concordia, shaped by particular teachers, contemplative practices, political commitments, and institutional histories. None of this establishes the truth of the claims I make. It does, however, condition which questions became visible to me, which traditions initially appeared plausible, and which blind spots I remain more likely to carry. Those conditions do not settle the truth of a philosophical claim, but they help determine which problems become intelligible, which conceptual resources appear available, and which assumptions remain hardest to see from within a given historical and intellectual formation.

Habermas enters because facticity cannot provide its own corrective. A religious, contemplative, or political tradition can disclose something of considerable existential depth while remaining mistaken about the conceptual framework through which that disclosure is interpreted. Communicative rationality introduces a different requirement: claims to truth, rightness, and legitimacy must remain open to justification, criticism, and revision through discourse with others.

The tension matters in both directions. Facticity without communicative rationality can become existentially rich but epistemologically self-sealing. Communicative rationality without factical grounding risks becoming procedural and comparatively thin, capable of specifying how disagreements should be negotiated without generating the moral, spiritual, or existential horizons that make those disagreements matter. Wilber without Habermas can become deep but dogmatic; Habermas without Wilber rigorous but flat.

Enactive Fallibilism is my attempt to give this tension a practical form. It joins Peircean fallibilism with the enactivist insight, developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, that cognition is not the activity of a detached spectator representing a pre-given world. Knowing emerges through an embodied organism’s ongoing relation with its environment.

The body therefore possesses epistemological significance beyond being another object for theory to explain. It is one of the places where theory encounters resistance. A framework that claims to support psychological, contemplative, ethical, or political transformation eventually has to answer to what happens when someone attempts to live within it. Experience is not infallible, but neither should a theory be capable of interpreting every failure, contradiction, or embodied resistance as evidence that the practitioner has simply misunderstood the theory.

Fallibilism becomes meaningful only when something encountered can force revision not merely of conclusions but of the categories through which the conclusions were reached.

IACT — Integral Awareness and Commitment Training — is where these commitments become operational for me. It places Steven Hayes’s ACT Hexaflex in relation with Wilber’s AQAL framework, Ostrom’s Core Design Principles at the prosocial level, and the 8 Zones as an epistemological spine. The point is not to create another grand synthesis in which every method finally finds its assigned box. The zones repeatedly return us to a more modest question: how do you know this, and by what method?

A first-person contemplative report and a third-person neuroscientific account may concern the same event without constituting the same kind of knowledge. A hermeneutic interpretation of a religious tradition and a systems analysis of the institution carrying it may illuminate one another without becoming interchangeable. A sociological account of ritual can disclose structures of power invisible to practitioners while still failing to exhaust what the practice discloses phenomenologically or spiritually.

This is why I continue to think epistemological differentiation has to precede integration. The aim is not to isolate domains but to preserve enough methodological and perspectival differentiation that they remain capable of correcting one another.

Similar tensions are visible across the wider attempt to move beyond reductive modernity. John Vervaeke’s distinction among propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing and his ecology of practices move in a direction I find productive precisely because no single epistemic form is asked to resolve the meaning crisis. Iain McGilchrist likewise offers a powerful critique of abstraction and decontextualization, although The Matter with Things raises the familiar problem of how one moves from phenomenological and cognitive claims about attention toward metaphysical claims about consciousness and panentheism. These projects do not fail because they attempt to recover transcendence or participation; the question is how such recoveries remain accountable to the perspectives and methods through which they become available.

But epistemological pluralism alone is not enough. A philosophy may carefully distinguish contemplative, scientific, psychological, and social forms of knowing and still carry one historical civilization’s assumptions about progress, rationality, or development into its encounters with others.

This is where Fred Dallmayr’s work has become increasingly important to me.

Dallmayr’s account of civilizational dialogue is not simply a defense of difference against development. In Beyond Orientalism, he opposes both the absorption of other traditions into a universalizing Western trajectory and the opposite tendency to treat civilizations as closed, mutually incommensurable worlds. His alternative is a hermeneutics of difference in which traditions enter dialogue from distinct historical horizons while remaining capable of being transformed through the encounter.

That distinction is crucial. Dialogue does not require freezing cultures into permanent identities. Nor does integration require reducing their differences to stages of a single story. What emerges from a genuine encounter cannot be fully known before the encounter takes place because interpretation itself may alter the horizons of the participants.

Dialogue Among Civilizations extends this by questioning the assumption that modernization provides a single normative trajectory toward which every civilization must ultimately converge. Different histories disclose different configurations of religion, community, freedom, reason, and political life. The purpose of dialogue is not to abandon every possibility of universality, but to allow whatever commonality emerges to be generated through reciprocal encounter rather than through prior absorption.

Dallmayr’s integral pluralism gives this argument a political form that resonates strongly with what I have been trying to recover from Brooks. Integration does not mean restoring plurality to a pre-existing totality, while pluralism does not mean leaving different traditions sealed beside one another. Wholeness is relational and unfinished; difference is not simply tolerated but becomes one of the conditions through which new forms of understanding become possible.

Placed beside Maritain, another meaning of integral begins to emerge. Maritain’s integral humanism seeks an order adequate to the whole person and the common good; Dallmayr’s integral pluralism asks what happens when persons, traditions, and civilizations carrying different historical horizons enter into relation. The whole is neither an atomized plurality nor a totality already waiting to absorb its parts.

This also changes how I understand development. The problem is not development per se. Developmental distinctions can disclose real differences in psychological organization, moral complexity, institutional capacity, or contemplative realization. The danger comes when those distinctions are generalized into a philosophy of history that interprets civilizational difference before dialogue has begun. Developmental knowledge can enter the encounter, but it must itself remain open to revision by what the encounter discloses.

Integral Facticity therefore becomes less a theory of everything than a discipline imposed upon every theory of everything. Facticity reminds us that the map is drawn from somewhere. Habermas requires public accountability. Wilber differentiates perspectives, domains, and methods. Enactive Fallibilism keeps the framework exposed to embodied resistance. Dallmayr prevents integration from becoming another name for historical absorption.

Together they suggest a form of integral thought in which synthesis is not the elimination of difference but a provisional achievement of dialogue.

V. The Road Through and Beyond

The political stakes of this argument return me finally to Brooks, Žižek, and the question of absolute freedom.

Brooks valued Žižek because Žižek understood how deeply ideology enters into the formation of the subject. Capitalism does not reproduce itself only through false beliefs imposed from above. Enjoyment, fantasy, contradiction, and desire attach subjects to structures they may consciously oppose. Any left politics that ignores those dimensions remains vulnerable to reproducing the very forms of domination it believes it has overcome.

The difficulty appears in what follows the diagnosis. Žižek’s account of absolute freedom repeatedly draws upon the Christian language of kenosis, divine self-emptying, while radicalizing that emptying into negativity and void. Within Christian theology, however, kenosis is not merely disappearance. Self-emptying makes relation possible. The space opened through relinquishment is a space in which the other can appear as genuinely other.

Žižek preserves the rupture but gives us comparatively little account of the developmental or practical work through which a subject might inhabit freedom differently after the rupture has been recognized. This is one reason I have repeatedly brought the Lacanian tradition into conversation with Steven Hayes. Lacan and relational frame theory converge on a powerful insight: language precedes the reflective subject and helps produce the “I” that later imagines itself to be its sovereign user. Yet ACT develops practical techniques of defusion, perspective-taking, values clarification, and committed action through which one’s relation to language can actually change.

Neither side is sufficient by itself. Žižek provides a structural warning against every easy fantasy of liberation; Hayes supplies practical resources for transformation that structural critique alone does not provide. Brooks’s politics needed both.

Segall and Žižek can therefore be read as almost opposite responses to the same post-metaphysical difficulty. Žižek retains theological language while evacuating much of the metaphysical and spiritual world to which that language once referred. Segall restores a spiritual and participatory cosmos but, in my view, does not yet adequately differentiate the perspectives and methodologies through which its claims become epistemically accountable. One preserves negativity at the cost of a richer spiritual anthropology; the other restores spirit to nature while leaving the relation among metaphysics, perspective, and epistemology insufficiently resolved.

The road through and beyond runs somewhere between them.

This is why my criticism of Segall remains an invitation rather than a rejection. I do not want to abandon the participatory universe, the refusal of dead matter, or the intuition of God incarnate in every galaxy. I want those claims placed within an architecture capable of sustaining them without asking cosmology to do the work of contemplative practice, psychology, neuroscience, theology, political philosophy, and civilizational dialogue simultaneously.

Nor do I want epistemological differentiation to terminate in a new academic pluralism where every discipline politely occupies its own domain. The point of differentiation is to make stronger forms of integration possible because the perspectives and practices involved retain enough integrity to challenge and transform one another.

The same applies politically. The Indigenous philosophical inheritances that John Ralston Saul insists are constitutive of Canada, the Carmelite contemplative tradition McGrath retrieves, the Catholic intellectual tradition through which Davis and Lalonde confronted modernity, the Aurobindonian lineage behind CIIS, and the Zen tradition Albert Low carried forward in Montreal should not become interchangeable illustrations of truths an integral framework already possesses. But neither should they be preserved as sealed historical worlds whose integrity requires immunity from encounter.

A genuinely dialogical integral philosophy would have to permit something more difficult: encounters in which the traditions involved remain recognizably themselves while also becoming capable of learning something that neither could have generated in isolation.

This, more than any final metaphysical synthesis, is what I now take the post-metaphysical turn to require.

There is a substantive conversation waiting to happen among the process-relational tradition Segall inhabits, the Canadian speculative and religious traditions I have been trying to recover, Vervaeke’s ecology of practices, Wilber’s epistemological pluralism, and the IACT framework emerging through the Metapattern Institute. I do not regard these as rival systems from which a single winner must be selected. Their philosophical value lies partly in what becomes visible when their differences are preserved long enough for the encounter itself to become transformative.

In 2022, watching the first Webb images, Segall described every galaxy as God incarnate. I believed him then, and I still think there is something deeply right in the intuition. What I have been trying to build since is not an argument against it, but a framework capable of asking what kind of claim it is, from which perspective it becomes available, what practices make such a disclosure possible, how it relates to other forms of knowledge, and what could require us to revise the terms through which we understand it.

Physicalism may indeed be metaphysics in denial. But there is a parallel danger in metaphysics that has passed through enough of the modern critique to become self-conscious while remaining insufficiently differentiated to recognize when one perspective or mode of disclosure has begun speaking for the rest. The answer is not less metaphysics, less religion, or less openness to God. It is a form of integral thought in which metaphysical depth, perspectival and epistemological pluralism, embodied fallibility, and civilizational dialogue remain capable of correcting and transforming one another.

That, at least, is the road I now see running through the unfinished conversation Matt and I began around Michael Brooks four years ago: the recovery of metaphysical and spiritual depth without either reducing it to third-person explanation or insulating it from the possibility of correction.

Suggested Reading

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (Free Press, 1978; originally published 1929)

Matthew David Segall, Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (SacraSage Press, 2021)

Matthew David Segall, Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Integral Imprint, 2023)

Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World (Shambhala, 2006)

Michael Brooks, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right (Zer0 Books, 2020)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, translated by Joseph W. Evans (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968; originally published as Humanisme intégral, 1936)

Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (State University of New York Press, 1996)

Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Sean McGrath, The Lost Road: A Search for the Soul of the West (Christian Alternative Books, 2025)

George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (McClelland & Stewart, 1965)

Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007)

Abstract

This essay argues that Canada possesses a speculative philosophical tradition adequate to the present emergency of American annexationist pressure—if Canadians can learn to recognize and activate it. Tracing a lineage from nineteenth-century idealism through Harold Innis, George Grant, John Ralston Saul, Charles Taylor, and to Leslie Armour’s speculative philosophy, I demonstrate that Canada’s intellectual heritage is not a provincial or derivative branch of European thought. Rather, it represents an original contribution to global philosophy wherein the classic problem of unity-in-plurality is wrestled with as a practical condition of historical survival, rather than an abstract debate.

At the center of this retrieval is the systematic metaphysics of Leslie Armour. Armour’s achievement was his capacity to bridge the historical divide between Anglophone idealism and Francophone Catholic personalism, building a “philosophic federalism” that preserves group rights and the common good without collapsing into totalizing state collectivism or individualistic market atomism.

I extend this speculative inheritance into the twenty-first century by connecting it to Sean McGrath’s speculative metaphysical retrieval of German Idealism and the Western contemplative tradition, alongside Saul’s argument that Canadian culture is fundamentally a hybrid partnership of Indigenous, French, and English traditions. Finally, I analyze this entire lineage and our current emergency through a practical, integrative framework called: Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT). By synthesizing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), enactive cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and Ken Wilber’s Integral metatheory, IACT functions as an analytical lens that translates Armour’s speculative community of communities into a scalable framework of collective psychological flexibility.

Written as a companion to my earlier engagement with McGrath’s The Lost Road, this essay seeks to ground contemplative retrieval in the immediate demands of our historical crisis. Ultimately, I contend that the Canadian speculative tradition is no nostalgic retreat; rather, it provides the active, constructive architecture required to cultivate a resilient, sovereign consciousness—a living answer to the continental forces currently threatening our dissolution.

Tags: Speculative Philosophy, Leslie Armour, Canadian Intellectual History, Philosophic Federalism, Sean McGrath, George Grant, Harold Innis, John Ralston Saul, Charles Taylor, John Watson, C.B. Macpherson, Fernand Dumont, Gregory Baum, Charles Davis, Merlin Donald, John Vervaeke, Jordan Peterson, Dylan Shaul, Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Enactive Cognitive Science, Prosocial Framework, Elinor Ostrom, Polycentric Governance, AQAL Metatheory, Time-Binding Facticity, Integral Facticity, Possessive Individualism, Space-biased vs. Time-biased Media, Geopolitical Sovereignty, Triangular Reality, Canadian Political Ontology, Annexationist Crisis (2026)

I. Facticity at the Margins

I do not do philosophy from nowhere. I am a French Canadian from Quebec, formed in the Catholic intellectual tradition through Concordia University, living in Montreal, and writing in English about questions that have been asked in both of Canada’s languages for over a century. This is what I mean by facticity—the irreducible, concrete, and historical conditions within which all thinking actually takes place. The idea of Canada is not a topic I chose; it is an inescapable dimension of my cultural and social facticity. It is the ground I think from, whether I acknowledge it or not.

Ever since I first read George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, the question of Canadian philosophical identity has been at the center of my intellectual life. Grant convinced me that national sovereignty is a philosophical question before it is a political or economic one—that a community which cannot articulate its own reason for being will inevitably be absorbed by whatever monocultural power stands next to it. Yet, Grant’s genius in Lament was primarily diagnostic. He mapped Canada’s absorption with devastating clarity, leaving us with the profound task of building a constructive path forward.

The tradition that could answer Grant’s question has been there all along, though it has been filed away under “Canadian idealism” and left safely buried as a nineteenth-century academic relic. Leslie Armour spent his career transforming this heritage into something far more ambitious: a speculative philosophy that works across the chasm between Anglophone idealism and Francophone Catholic thought, insisting on the reality of value, meaning, and community while maintaining the intellectual humility that modern post-metaphysical philosophy rightly demands. Where thinkers like Jürgen Habermas argued that serious philosophy after the Enlightenment must abandon speculative depth and restrict itself to the formal, procedural conditions of rational communication, the tradition Armour built holds both: speculative depth and interpretive modesty, conviction and fallibilism.

Following the publication of my previous essay on Sean McGrath’s The Lost Road, I forwarded the review to McGrath, and his subsequent feedback served as the direct inspiration and occasion for this companion essay. I was already deeply familiar with Armour’s philosophy, particularly his landmark collaboration with Elizabeth Trott on the history of the Canadian mind. McGrath’s feedback served as an immediate catalyst and the ideal opportunity to draft this companion essay, which I had been contemplating for a while. It argues that Canada’s homegrown speculative tradition is fully equipped to meet our current crisis—granted we possess the psychological flexibility, historical awareness, and institutional resolve to mobilize it.

II. Leslie Armour & Philosophical Federalism

To understand the scope of Leslie Armour’s achievement, one must understand how his life mirrored the very tensions he sought to resolve. Born in New Westminster, British Columbia, in 1931, Armour was a product of the Canadian West, completing his BA at the University of British Columbia before journeying to the heart of the British Empire to secure his PhD at the University of London in 1956. After teaching across the United States—in Montana, California, and Ohio—he returned to Canada, teaching first at the University of Waterloo and then, from 1977 onward, at the University of Ottawa. It was in Ottawa, the geographic and political fault line between Anglophone and Francophone Canada, that his philosophical project reached its maturity.

Armour’s intellectual output was not a collection of disparate interests but a singular campaign to rescue speculative thought from modern fragmentation. His work spanned systematic metaphysics, the recovery of Canada’s intellectual history, and the political philosophy of community.

In the realm of systematic metaphysics, Armour worked within the idealist tradition to map the relationship between rational principles and empirical experience. In works like The Rational and the Real (1962), The Concept of Truth (1969), and Logic and Reality (1972), he argued that metaphysics could be approached without dogmatic rigidity. His later works, such as Being and Idea (1992) and Infini-Rien: Pascal’s Wager and the Human Paradox (1993), showed that human reason, while fallible, remains our most reliable guide to the deep structures of reality. In Inference and Persuasion (2005), co-authored with Richard Feist, he defended the view that because human reason is essentially fallible, philosophy must offer suggestions rather than solutions. This fallibilism was not a surrender of truth, but its safeguard.

As a pioneer in documenting Canadian philosophy, Armour worked tirelessly to prove that the country had a mind of its own. In 1981, he and Elizabeth Trott published The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950. This landmark text was the first systematic history of English-Canadian thought. Armour and Trott demonstrated that Canada’s early thinkers—such as John Watson at Queen’s, George Paxton Young at Toronto, and John Clark Murray at McGill—were not merely importing British Neo-Hegelianism or Scottish Common Sense realism. Instead, they were forging a unique philosophy dictated by their geography: a philosophy where the problem of unity-in-plurality was treated not as a theoretical exercise, but as an existential necessity for a country trying to survive without a monocultural myth.

This historical recovery culminated in Armour’s own political ontology, which he laid out in The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (1981). Here, he argued that community is prior to individuality, famously writing, “I would not know who I was if I were alone in the universe.” Drawing on both Hegelianism and French Catholic personalism, Armour conceptualized Canada as a “community of communities”—an organic, pluralistic alliance designed for mutual preservation. This was what he termed philosophic federalism: a framework that protects group rights and shared public goods without collapsing into either the collectivism of the totalizing state or the atomistic individualism of the American market.

For Armour, these three streams were one. Speculative philosophy was the only tool deep enough to articulate what held a complex community together. If Canada was to survive, it had to understand its own mind.

III. From Watson to Saul

To understand the depth of the intellectual reservoir Armour was drawing from, we must reconstruct the Canadian canon—not as a museum of dead ideas, but as an active intellectual lineage and living tradition. This lineage traces a clear arc from the nineteenth-century moral community of Watson and Murray, through the spatial and temporal diagnoses of Innis and Grant, to the complex political ontology of Saul and Taylor.

The foundation was laid by John Watson, who arrived at Queen’s University in 1872. Over nearly seven decades of teaching and writing, Watson argued that freedom is not the absence of restraint (the American definition), but the realization of the self through active commitment to the common good (the Canadian definition). It is highly telling that Watson’s 1882 work Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism represents one of the earliest Canadian engagements with German Idealism. This idealist social ontology became the theological and philosophical backbone of the United Church of Canada, where founders like Samuel Dyde and George Kilpatrick viewed religious and philosophical living as identical commitments to community-building.

Simultaneously, John Clark Murray—whose radical work The Industrial Kingdom of God was edited and recovered by Armour and Trott—was arguing for an economic system grounded in moral philosophy rather than utilitarian exploitation. For these nineteenth-century thinkers, the market was always subordinate to the moral demands of the community.

In the twentieth century, this moral imperative took a geopolitical and technological turn. Harold Innis, working at the University of Toronto, is often compartmentalized as an economist or communication theorist. In truth, Innis was a philosopher of history and an institutional builder of the highest order. By founding the Canadian Social Science Research Council (1940) and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (1944), Innis recognized that theoretic culture requires material and a protected infrastructure.

Innis posited in Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951) that communications media are inherently biased toward either space or time. Space-biased media—which are lightweight, rapid, and commercialized (like newspapers, radio, and today, digital networks)—excel at conquering geographic distance, but they do so at the cost of flattening historical depth into a state of perpetual, hyper-accelerated “present-mindedness.” Time-biased media, conversely, are heavy, durable, and slow (like stone, oral memory, and covenants). They prioritize community, historical continuity, and generational depth. For Innis, the rapid ascendancy of space-biased communications was not merely a technological shift, but the engine of American imperial expansion, threatening to dissolve the slower, reflective, and time-biased cultures of smaller nations like Canada. In Minerva’s Owl (1947), he famously warned that a culture’s intellectual self-awareness often reaches its peak just before its collapse. Canada’s survival, therefore, is fundamentally a time-binding project—a deliberate effort to preserve historical depth and diverse cultural covenants against the spatial conquest of an empire of sheer speed.

George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965) was the realization of Innis’s worst fears. Grant increased our geopolitical self-awareness by arguing that the core Canadian moral value was “ordered community”—defined as the preservation of a good and just community—in contrast to the American value of “liberty,” which he saw as the unconstrained freedom of the individual and technology to conquer nature. Grant argued that the liberal-managerial elites of Canada had surrendered to the “universal and homogeneous state” of American technological empire. The signing of continental defense and trade agreements was not merely a political shift; it was an ontological surrender. Yet, while his diagnostic work in Lament focused primarily on mourning what was lost, Grant’s later essays in Technology and Empire (1969) began to construct an alternative, pointing toward a contemplative, non-instrumental relationship to nature and the divine, though he still left the practical, constructive political architecture of our survival largely unbuilt.

John Ralston Saul provided the necessary correction to Grant’s despair. In his trilogy—Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), The Doubter’s Companion (1994), and The Unconscious Civilization (1995)—Saul diagnosed the same imperial disease as Grant, but identified its agent as managerial rationalism: the technocratic cult of expertise that replaces democratic citizenship with process-driven administration and the instrumentalism of reason. Rather than merely lamenting, Saul chose to build. He co-founded the Institute for Canadian Citizenship and revitalized PEN International, operating on the conviction that language and active citizen engagement constitute the vital defenses of a culture.

In A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (2008), Saul expanded the Canadian canon by showing that the “community of communities” did not begin with European immigrants in the nineteenth century. He argued that Canadian governance and social habits are fundamentally shaped by Indigenous models of governance, diplomacy, and coexistence long before Confederation. The Canadian preference for negotiation over violence, for social complexity over homogeneity, and for the balance between individual and group is an Indigenous legacy. To recover the Canadian tradition, Saul insisted, we must face our systematic suppression of Indigenous peoples and recognize that our “triangular reality” (First Peoples, Francophones, and Anglophones) is our true philosophical foundation.

On the Francophone side, a parallel and equally rich conversation was taking place. Thinkers like Charles de Koninck at Université Laval wrote on the primacy of the common good over the individual with a rigor that challenged the dominant liberal models of the West. Fernand Dumont developed a profound theory of culture as “memory and distance,” arguing that without a shared historical memory, human beings are trapped in the meaningless immediacy of their actions. Gregory Baum and Jacques Grand’Maison translated these insights into a lived social theology in Quebec.

The historical conflict in Montreal between Charles Davis and Gregory Baum remains the Canadian culmination of this theological-philosophical tension. Davis, the prominent British Catholic theologian who famously broke with Rome in 1966, settled at Concordia and brought the Frankfurt School—particularly Habermas’s communicative rationality—into dialogue with the critical theory of religious insight. Baum, conversely, worked tirelessly to reconcile the Catholic tradition with critical sociology and social justice. This clash represents our native version of the global debate between the Communio and Concilium schools of Catholic thought, a conflict that defined how we understand truth and relevance.

Armour, uniquely, lived in both worlds. He wrote on Jacques Maritain’s Thomism, participated in Francophone scholarly societies, and understood that the “two solitudes” of Canada were actually two dialects of the same speculative language: a language that insisted that the common good is not the sum of private interests, but a shared reality in which individuals find their actualization.

IV. Amnesia and Time-Binding Facticity

The systemic erasure of Canada’s speculative tradition is not an accident of history. It is the direct footprint of global capitalism and the dominance of instrumental rationality. In a society captured by what George Grant called “technological technique”—the reduction of all human activity and nature to a field of calculated, marketable objects—speculative philosophy is a threat. Because speculative thought insists on purposes, on final ends, and on a common good that cannot be translated into market metrics, it represents a barrier to the demands of a capitalist social order.

In this environment, knowledge is only valued as an instrument of production and consumption. Our native speculative tradition was discarded because it was unprofitable, deemed “unscientific” or too theological for a market-driven world. By reducing education to the training of specialized, technocratic managers, the modern state ensures that our capacity for deep, non-instrumental reflection is neutralized.

As C.B. Macpherson warned in his classic critique of possessive individualism, when we reduce human nature to that of a mere “consumer of utilities” and equate human freedom with individual market choice, we surrender our developmental potential. We lose the capacity to view ourselves as active developers of our own human capabilities, ultimately capitulating to massive bureaucratic systems designed to contain and manage the chaos of our atomized isolation. This possessive framework stands in direct, stark contrast to John Watson’s idealist social ontology, which recognizes that the self is realized only through active commitment to the common moral good.

Because our official institutions have been captured by this market logic, the speculative tradition has had to survive underground. It has moved through an informal, face-to-face lineage of personal transmission—passed person-to-person in the margins of the university. We can trace this path through scholars who kept these alternative histories alive, a lineage of memory that I have sought to map and engage.

My familiarity with Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott began in this environment, growing up where these intellectual currents were active. Later, my podcast, Integral Facticity, became a natural space to discuss these traditions, exploring how different threads of Canadian thought interact with our broader identity. Through this platform, I have engaged in dialogue with thinkers who, while not part of the speculative lineage itself, offer crucial parallel insights into the margins of Canadian intellectual life.

The term Integral Facticity is the key to this time-binding survival. If “facticity” is the concrete, historical ground we exist in, “Integral Facticity” is the insistence that any holistic vision must remain anchored in that local ground. It demands that our search for deep, contemplative truths does not evaporate into abstract, rootless theories, but remains embedded in the realities of who and where we are. True comprehension of the universal is only attained when we actively embrace responsibility for our specific historical ground.

In my podcast conversations, I explored these themes with Sean Kelly, a Franco-Irish Catholic from Ottawa who studied under the great Hegel scholars Theodore Geraets and H.S. Harris. Kelly went on to coin the term “integral ecologies” to rescue the word integral from the abstract, singular framework of American writers like Ken Wilber, grounding it instead in the Hegelian-Jungian-Catholic soil of Ottawa.

Through my dialogue with Kelly, I was also introduced to the work of Francis X. Charet, a McGill-trained scholar of Jung. Charet could never find a permanent academic home in Canada and was forced to spend his career at Goddard College in Vermont before retiring back to Montreal. Our conversations illuminated how the study of religion and philosophy in Canada had been systematically stripped of its contemplative depth during its transition from the seminary to the secular university, documented in the institutional histories of Harold Coward and Robert C. Hughes.

Rather than serving as simple personal stories or academic footnotes, these conversations tangibly illustrate how cultural memory persists even when prevailing systems actively work to suppress it. In Origins of the Modern Mind (1991), cognitive scientist Merlin Donald argued that “theoretic culture”—the world of systematic philosophy and science—is fundamentally distributed, relying on external systems of symbolic storage. It cannot survive inside isolated individual heads.

When these institutions surrender to market capture, they abandon their role as keepers of living traditions, allowing culture to decay into a flat, immediate present. Against this erasure, our time-binding facticity—the face-to-face, oral transmission of memory through dialogue and shared study—becomes a quiet act of rebellion. This is what Innis understood: that preserving deep, time-biased continuity is our ultimate defense against the space-biased, imperial expansion of a purely instrumental market.

We can observe the tragic consequences of this institutional amnesia in the unique intellectual ecosystem of the University of Toronto—a locus divided against itself. At Toronto, two parallel but isolated lineages have spent decades wrestling with the same spiritual and existential starvation of modernity, entirely severed from each other and from the unifying heritage of the Canadian speculative tradition.

On one side stands the cognitive-psychological diagnostic engine of Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke. Both have built global followings by responding directly to the contemporary “meaning crisis.” Yet, lacking the speculative and political ontology of Watson, Taylor, and Armour, they have been forced to reconstruct their frameworks from scratch, relying on mythic-literalism or purely cognitive-evolutionary architectures.

On the other side stands the great Toronto speculative-theological lineage: Emil Fackenheim, Graeme Nicholson, Sean McGrath, and Dylan Shaul. Each has wrestled with God, Being, and German Idealism under the shadow of a secularizing academy. Shaul’s recent work on the Nature-Spirit transition in Hegel represents a brilliant Hegelian reconstruction, yet it highlights the contemporary academic dilemma: it remains a magnificent, self-developing system that, in its resistance to external empirical testing, risks becoming a closed hermeneutic circle.

The tragedy of the University of Toronto is that these two lineages—one psychological and diagnostic, the other speculative and theological—do not speak to one another. They mirror the exact split between the empirical-enactive and the speculative-metaphysical that our native tradition once held together. When McGrath wrote The Lost Road, he was stepping out from behind his scholarly cover to shatter this division, taking the ultimate risk of speaking directly from his five years of monastic formation in the Carmelite tradition, bridging the speculative depths of his lineage with the raw spiritual hunger diagnosed by Vervaeke and Peterson.

V. Enactive Fallibilism and Integral Awareness (IACT)

When Sean McGrath stepped out from behind his scholarly cover in The Lost Road, he exposed a fundamental truth: modern, secular consumerism is not merely an economic system, but a spiritual heresy—a distortion of our inner lives born from the systematic loss of the West’s mystical, contemplative traditions. This diagnostic matches George Grant’s warning about the “universal and homogeneous state” of technology, but it takes us deeper into the inner landscape. If our crisis is a spiritual and cognitive starvation, then our resistance cannot merely be a matter of archiving old idealist texts or passing down handcopied lineages in the dark.

How do we make sense of this contemplative inheritance and mobilize it against our current crisis? I analyze this entire situation—the historical erasure of our mind, the rise of the meaning crisis, and the immediate geopolitical threat—through a practical, post-metaphysical framework: Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT). Rather than an abstract dogma, IACT serves as an analytical and diagnostic tool designed to translate the depth of our contemplative traditions into the active, structural demands of modern collective survival.

This framework is built to address the exact intellectual vacuums that paralyze our public spaces. The famous 2019 Toronto debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek was a symptom of our hunger. Peterson spoke to a real desire for tradition, authority, and sanctity, yet his mythic-literal framework lacked the critical, self-reflective tools to prevent traditional authority from hardening into systemic domination. Žižek offered a brilliant, razor-sharp critique of ideology, yet his Lacanian “Christian Atheism” reduced the self-emptying of kenosis to a structural void, refusing to follow the mystical path to its luminous, contemplative conclusion.

This is the exact impasse that the 2004 dialogue between Jürgen Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sought to resolve. Habermas famously conceded that secular, procedural reason is too dry to motivate citizens; it lacks the rich, moral “semantic content” found only in religious traditions. Ratzinger agreed that religious faith must submit to the corrective, fallible lens of reason. Yet, what their ‘complementary learning process’ lacked was an active, reproducible psychological and institutional vehicle that could hold these dimensions together.

As B. Alan Wallace has demonstrated in Mind in the Balance, contemplative traditions carry something far more practical than intellectual concepts: they carry a rigorous first-person science of consciousness. The watchfulness (nepsis) of the Desert Fathers and the silent interior observation of the Carmelite mystics are reproducible, empirical methods of cognitive training. Through IACT, we can analyze the mobilization of this speculative inheritance across three primary pillars:

1. Enactive Fallibilism

Synthesizing C.S. Peirce’s pragmatic fallibilism with Francisco Varela’s enactive cognitive science, IACT asserts that all knowing is embodied, situated, and tested through action. We do not claim a view from nowhere. Instead, we test our theoretical, theological, and philosophical frameworks against lived, physical experience. If a metaphysical system produces human suffering, the body’s testimony holds immediate epistemic authority over the system’s internal, logical consistency. This enactive turn is our defense against the closed, unfalsifiable hermeneutic circles that threaten brilliant academic exercises, such as Dylan Shaul’s speculative reconstructions or Jens Zimmermann’s Christocentric “incarnational humanism.”

2. Scaling Collective Psychological Flexibility

To translate contemplative depth into scalable, modern practice, IACT utilizes Steven C. Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT maps six core processes of psychological flexibility: defusion, acceptance, present-moment awareness, self-as-context, values, and committed action. In IACT, these are not treated as individualistic, self-help coping mechanisms. Instead, we analyze how they scale directly to the collective level by integrating Hayes’s work with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson’s Prosocial framework and Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning Core Design Principles (CDPs) for managing common-pool resources.

There is a precise, elegant bridge here: the psychological capacity of “defusion”—learning to notice our thoughts and reactions rather than being immediately consumed by them—is the exact cognitive skill required to witness our immediate, self-interested impulses before we construct self-serving rationalizations. More deeply, the ACT concept of “self-as-context”—the silent, witnessing perspective that lies beneath our shifting stories and egos—is functionally identical to the contemplative watchfulness (nepsis) practiced by the Desert Fathers and Carmelite mystics. We are analyzing the translation of monastic training into a verifiable, secular cognitive technology.

When these individual capacities are scaled through Ostrom’s design principles—such as establishing a shared identity and purpose (CDP 1), ensuring the equitable distribution of costs and benefits (CDP 2), and cultivating fair, inclusive decision-making (CDP 3)—collective psychological flexibility becomes a lived social reality. Ostrom’s final principle of polycentric governance (CDP 8), which coordinates collaborative relations among diverse groups, is the exact structural mechanism required to sustain Leslie Armour’s “philosophic federalism.”

There is a profound historical symmetry here: Armour made an intuitive, speculative metaphysical prediction about the existential durability and moral necessity of cooperative, federated communities—a prediction he lacked the empirical tools to prove. Decades later, Ostrom’s exhaustive field research on common-pool resources practically tested and verified this very architecture, proving that polycentric, self-governing groups are evolutionarily more resilient against collapse than centralized states or atomized markets. By marrying Armour’s political ontology to Ostrom’s design principles, we transform a philosophical hope into a tested, scalable strategy for cultural and political survival.

3. Recapturing the Full Moral Spectrum

Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory shows that progressive-liberal movements tend to activate only the channels of Care and Fairness, while traditionalists activate the entire spectrum, including Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. When secular progressives restrict their moral vocabulary to Care and Fairness while abandoning Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, they create a dangerous spiritual and civic vacuum. Human beings possess an innate, evolutionary hunger for sacred order and communal belonging; when the cultural left refuses to speak this language, they cede these powerful moral foundations to reactionary, exclusionary movements.

Using the insights of George Grant and Charles Taylor, IACT reclaims the language of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity for a pluralistic, sovereign society. We analyze the need for a post-metaphysical vocabulary to articulate the sanctity of our ecosystems, the solemn authority of our treaties, and our loyalty to an organic, complex community of communities.

The Metatheoretical Architecture: Weaving the Canadian Canon

To coordinate these analytical dynamics without falling into reductionism, IACT utilizes Ken Wilber’s four-quadrant AQAL metatheory. Rather than treating this model as an abstract taxonomy, we can see that the quadrants are the natural homes of our recovered Canadian intellectual tradition, showing how speculative philosophy, mystical contemplation, and evolutionary science co-arise to form a single, living ecosystem:

• The Intentional Quadrant (Upper-Left / Individual Interior): This is the domain of personal, subjective consciousness, the quiet sanctuary where McGrath’s Carmelite contemplative retrieval, Hayes’s self-as-context, and the mystical-contemplative nepsis operate. It is the realization that resistance begins with the inner discipline of psychological and spiritual freedom.

• The Behavioral Quadrant (Upper-Right / Individual Exterior): This is the domain of objective behavior and neurophysiology. It is grounded in enactive cognitive science, where first-person contemplative practices are enactively verified and manifested through physical action, physiological resilience, and empirical feedback.

• The Cultural Quadrant (Lower-Left / Collective Interior): This is the domain of shared, intersubjective meaning and historical memory—the exact space of Fernand Dumont’s “memory and distance,” Charles Taylor’s moral horizons, and John Ralston Saul’s “triangular reality” of Indigenous, French, and English coexistence. It is where our “time-binding facticity” preserves the shared cultural narratives and moral vocabularies that keep us from dissolving into a flat, immediate present.

• The Systemic Quadrant (Lower-Right / Collective Exterior): This is the domain of objective social systems, law, economics, and ecology. It is where Harold Innis’s material communications infrastructures, Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric resource design, and Leslie Armour’s concrete model of philosophic federalism reside.

By mapping our analysis onto these four co-arising domains through IACT, we avoid “quadrant reductionism”—the common academic and political disease of trying to solve systemic crises through a single quadrant. We cannot reduce Leslie Armour’s philosophy to a mere set of individual mental coping strategies (an Upper-Left reduction), nor can we reduce our survival to a mechanical, technocratic set of policy adjustments (a Lower-Right reduction). Instead, IACT demonstrates that our subjective awareness and contemplative practices (UL) must be enactively embodied in our physiology and behaviors (UR), rooted in a rich, intersubjective historical culture of shared values (LL), and protected by polycentric, time-biased institutions (LR).

VI. The Annexationist Threat & Emergency

This philosophical project is not an academic luxury for times of peace. It is an urgent defense of our existence.

George Grant’s Lament for a Nation was written in 1965 to diagnose the quiet, economic absorption of Canada into the American empire. Over six decades later, that absorption ceased to be quiet. In early 2026, the threat became explicit, aggressive, and immediate.

In February 2026, the Trump administration imposed a sweeping 25 percent tariff on all Canadian goods, weaponizing trade to force political concessions. Donald Trump began publicly referring to Canada as a potential “51st state” and joking that the Canadian Prime Minister was merely a “Governor.” When asked if he would use military force to achieve his geopolitical goals, Trump responded: “No, economic force.” This was not mere rhetorical theater; it was a cold calculation of our material and spiritual vulnerability.

The response from the Canadian public was a revelation of latent, time-biased resistance. A sudden “rally-round-the-flag” effect swept the country. National pride surged, and public support for joining the United States collapsed to a mere four percent. Provinces that had spent decades protecting internal trade barriers suddenly dismantled them to build a unified national market. Sporting events became arenas of defiance, and public discussions turned to radical measures of self-defense, including the development of an independent nuclear deterrent.

But as Eric Wilkinson presciently warned in his landmark January 2025 APA Blog piece, “The 49th Parallel: Canadian Philosophy and American Imperialism”—anticipating the very structural vulnerabilities that the 2026 tariff crisis would ruthlessly exploit—we cannot defend a moral community with economic policies and military strategies alone. A nation is, at its root, a moral community that embeds its shared values in its laws, its institutions, and its public life.

Using the diagnostic lens of IACT, we can see exactly why a purely systemic, Lower-Right (LR) response to this crisis is destined to fail. When the Canadian state attempts to negotiate a tariff purely through economic metrics, trade agreements, and retaliatory levies, it is operating entirely within the exterior, interobjective quadrant. But an annexationist threat of this magnitude is a total-quadrant assault. It is designed to shatter our Lower-Left (LL) cultural cohesion by stoking provincial divisions, and to paralyze our Upper-Left (UL) individual psyche with the existential anxiety of economic ruin.

The values of the Canadian community—expressed in our founding constitutional phrase “peace, order, and good government” (which, as John Ralston Saul reminds us, was originally “peace, welfare, and good government” in the pre-Confederation documents)—are fundamentally distinct from the American values of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Where the American monomyth is built on individual liberty, the unconstrained conquest of space, and an epistemological stance of pragmatic mastery over nature, the Canadian speculative synthesis is grounded in peace, order, and good government, the preservation of an organic community of communities, and an enactive fallibilism that approaches difference with interpretive modesty. Where the American model seeks a monolithic state serving a homogeneous market, the Canadian model, when true to its origin, demands a triangular reality that respects the distinct identities of its founding peoples—First Peoples, Francophones, and Anglophones.

Our universal healthcare system, our complex model of cooperative federalism, our legal protection of multiculturalism, and our ongoing, difficult negotiation with Indigenous nations are not mere policies. They are the concrete, Lower-Right systemic expressions of our Lower-Left cultural and speculative philosophy: a philosophy that believes the individual is realized only within a healthy community, and that unity is achieved through the preservation of difference, not its erasure.

When we are subjected to a systemic (LR) economic shock, our capacity to resist depends entirely on our collective psychological flexibility (UL/LL). If individual Canadians (UL) lack the psychological flexibility—the defusion from immediate fear, the capacity for acceptance, and the commitment to deeper values—they will inevitably demand that their leaders make any concession necessary to relieve the economic pressure. If we do not know this philosophy exists—if we cannot name John Watson, Harold Innis, George Grant, John Ralston Saul, Charles Taylor, and Leslie Armour—then we cannot defend the moral community they described. We will be left defending Canada as if it were merely a slightly more polite version of the United States with a different tax code.

VII. Conclusion

To reduce Canada to a slightly more polite administrative zone is to capitulate to the very space-biased, technological empire that George Grant and Harold Innis warned against. Our borders are not merely lines on a map drawn to demarcate a distinct tax structure or a different healthcare system; they are the physical boundaries of a historical container within which a unique moral covenant is being negotiated. Reclaiming this covenant is not an act of nostalgic retreat, but the active cultivation of a resilient, sovereign consciousness.

I return to the ground I think from: Montreal. It is here, along the historic and bilingual fault lines of St. Lawrence, that the “triangular reality” of our existence is felt most acutely. The project of Canadian philosophy has never been to eliminate tension, but to hold it creatively—to refuse the cheap, totalizing unity of the monocultural myth in favor of a difficult, living federalism. When Leslie Armour described Canada as a “community of communities,” he was providing us with a political ontology that is uniquely suited to survive the fragmentations of the twenty-first century.

Through the integrative framework of IACT, this philosophical legacy is rescued from academic obscurity and transformed into a scalable, collective discipline. By translating first-person contemplative practices into verifiable cognitive tools, and scaling individual psychological flexibility into polycentric evolutionary structures, IACT provides the architectural plans to mobilize our speculative inheritance. It bridges the deep, mystical interiority of McGrath’s contemplative retrieval with the robust, cooperative external networks of Ostrom’s common-pool resource design.

Faced with the immediate, aggressive emergency of American annexationist pressure, we must realize that our ultimate defense is not economic or military, but ontological. We survive only if we possess the collective psychological flexibility to choose our shared values over our immediate fears. The choice before us is clear: we can surrender to the spatial conquest of an empire of sheer speed, flattening our historical depth into a state of perpetual, commercialized amnesia; or we can choose to be time-binders, preserving our diverse cultural covenants, our deep historical memory, and our native speculative mind.

The Canadian speculative tradition is a living answer to the forces that threaten our dissolution. It remains for us to recognize it, to practice it, and to activate it. It is our home, our ground, and our sovereign right to be.

Suggested Reading

Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981)

Leslie Armour, The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (Steel Rail, 1981)

William Sweet, ed., Idealism, Metaphysics, and Community (Ashgate, 2001)

Robert Meynell, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B. Macpherson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011)

George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Carleton Library, 1965)

George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (House of Anansi, 1969)

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford University Press, 1950)

Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 1951)

John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Free Press, 1992)

John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (House of Anansi, 1995)

John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (Viking, 2005)

John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Viking, 2008)

John Ralston Saul, The Comeback (Viking, 2014)

Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1991)

Sean McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2012)

Sean McGrath, The Lost Road (Cascade Books, 2025)

James Bradley, Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy, ed. Sean McGrath (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

Harold Coward, Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (1936; University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)

Eric Wilkinson, “The 49th Parallel: Canadian Philosophy and American Imperialism,” APA Blog (January 2025)

Further Reading from Integral [+] Facticity

“Sean McGrath and the Post-Metaphysical Problem: On The Lost Road and the Need for a New Integral Humanism“ — the companion essay to this one.

“A Rosy Cross of a Book“ — my review of Cadell Last’s Real Speculations.

“Beyond the Master Signifier: Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility and Virtue Ethics“ — the full Haidt-Habermas-Hayes synthesis.

“Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem“ — my intervention into the Shaul-Žižek-Johnston-Pippin debate.

“When the Body Becomes the Laboratory: Auto-Ethnography, AI-Assisted Research, and the Future of Recovery Science“ — the methodological essay grounding IACT.

“The Return of God and the Future of Integral Humanism“ — my tribute to Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism.

Abstract:

is one of the most rigorous Schelling scholars working today — a philosopher whose Dark Ground of Spirit helped catalyze the German idealism revival and whose Secular Christ podcast, produced with Jakob Lusensky through the , has already diagnosed with philosophical precision what Peterson gets wrong about Christianity and what Žižek refuses to follow to its contemplative conclusion. But The Lost Road — modeled on Augustine’s Confessions and grounded in McGrath’s five years of monastic formation in the Carmelite contemplative tradition — is something different. It is McGrath coming out from behind the scholarly cover that the German idealism revival provided, speaking directly about what had been driving his work all along.

This essay argues that McGrath’s recovery of the Western contemplative tradition is genuine and irreplaceable — and that it cannot cross the post-metaphysical threshold on its own. McGrath retrieves pre-modern contemplative resources with real philosophical sophistication and experiential authority, but without the epistemological architecture to make that retrieval communicable across the pluralist divides of a post-metaphysical public sphere. Drawing on Habermas, Wilber, Haidt, Hayes, and B. Alan Wallace’s pioneering work on contemplative science, I make the case for a new integral humanism that could hold what McGrath has recovered while making it translatable — situating this project within the distinctly Canadian philosophical lineage, from Armour and Trott’s “philosophic federalism” through the Davis-Baum theological rupture to McGrath’s own Fackenheim-Nicholson lineage at the University of Toronto. Canada has consistently produced thinkers who attempt to hold together what other traditions keep splitting apart — and the new integral humanism I am proposing grows from this soil. It takes Maritain’s original project seriously, engages Catholic Social Teaching and the integral human development tradition from Francis through Leo XIV, and argues that the contemplative depth McGrath has recovered — the Desert Fathers, Merton, the Carmelite mystics — deserves an architecture adequate to the pluralist world in which it must now speak. The Catholic intellectual tradition has always carried the resources for this. What it needs is the post-metaphysical framework that could make those resources communicable beyond the faithful — and that is what this essay attempts to provide.

Tags: Integral Humanism, Sean McGrath, Western Contemplative Tradition, Post-Metaphysical Thinking, Habermas, Ratzinger, Peterson, Žižek, Haidt, Hayes, Wilber, Maritain, Dallmayr, Catholic Social Teaching, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, IACT, Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV, Philosophy Portal, German Idealism, Communio, Concilium, Merton, Desert Fathers, Canadian Philosophy, Armour, Trott, Coward, Vervaeke, B. Alan Wallace, Contemplative Science, Gregory Baum, Charles Davis, Jens Zimmermann, Notre Dame

I. A Phenomenon, a Philosopher, and a Canadian Conversation

Something strange has been happening in the humanities over the past decade. German idealism — the philosophical tradition running from Kant through Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel — has come back to life. Not as a subject of historical scholarship, though there is plenty of that. It has come back as a living tradition, treated by a growing network of young philosophers with the kind of devotion and intensity that, from the outside, looks less like academic fashion and more like a quasi-religious movement. Online communities, podcasts, reading groups, Discord servers — an entire infrastructure of engagement has sprung up around the conviction that Schelling and Hegel are not dead thinkers to be catalogued but living voices to be heard. As a scholar of comparative religion, I found this phenomenon fascinating. I wanted to understand where it was coming from, what need it was addressing, and what it might tell us about the condition of philosophy and religion in the twenty-first century.

My investigation began with the political philosopher . McManus’s work on “postmodern conservatism” — his analysis of the post-truth, resentment-driven politics emerging on the right, where appeals to tradition and identity replace rational standards for adjudicating facts and values — drew me into the orbit of the Pill Pod, a podcast run by a group of PhD friends from York University working at the intersection of continental philosophy, systems theory, and critical theory. Through the Pill Pod I discovered , a PhD candidate at York working on Schelling’s middle period and one of the most generous connectors in this growing community of German idealism scholars. I had originally wanted to interview Chris for my podcast precisely to understand the phenomenon: what was generating all this excitement? I had assumed it was Žižek’s influence — his massive Less than Nothing had made Hegel sexy again for a generation of continental philosophers. But Chris showed me something deeper. There was an entire network of scholars pushing this material — not as Žižek’s idiosyncratic project but as a genuine philosophical renaissance. And at the center of the Canadian strand of this network was Sean McGrath.

Chris told me about McGrath’s The Dark Ground of Spirit and the work he and Jason Wirth had been doing through the North American Schelling Society. McGrath had opened something for Chris: a hidden layer deep inside German idealism, running from Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa through Jacob Böhme and the theosophical tradition into Schelling’s freedom philosophy. “Sean’s book brilliantly goes through all of this entire history,” Chris told me. “It’s a book on depth psychology — his argument is that it’s Schelling, not Freud, who created the unconscious.” As the introduction to McGrath and Joseph Carew’s edited volume Rethinking German Idealism puts it, the specter haunting Europe is not Marx but German idealism itself.

From there, my engagement with McGrath deepened. I began listening to his Secular Christ podcast — a remarkable series, produced with the Jungian analyst Jakob Lusensky through the Centre of the Cross, in which McGrath seeks the meaning of Christ in the secular world. What struck me was how directly the podcast engaged the very figures I had been thinking about: Episode 3 is a sustained critique of Jordan Peterson’s archetypal reading of Christianity (”Christ is not an archetype”), and Episode 4 takes on Žižek’s “gnostic” Christian atheism. McGrath was already diagnosing the same vacuum I was — from the contemplative side, with a philosopher’s precision. I participated in the Season 2 Q&A in November 2022, and that led to a breakfast meeting with McGrath during one of his visits to Montreal.

Over breakfast, I told him about my years at the Montreal Zen Centre and my work on the Canadian philosophical lineage I had been tracing through my Substack: Charles Davis, the Catholic theologian who left the priesthood and came to Concordia; George Grant, whose Lament for a Nation and engagement with Heidegger has shaped so much of Canadian intellectual life; John Watson, the Queen’s University idealist whose 1882 Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism represents one of the earliest Canadian engagements with German idealism. I shared with him a book that had become foundational for my own project: Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott’s The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada 1850–1950 — the first systematic history of philosophy in English Canada, endorsed by both Northrop Frye and George Grant. Armour and Trott argue that what is distinctive in Canadian philosophy is a concept of reason that interacts with experience in a new world and a cold climate to create not one grand overarching system but what they call a “philosophic federalism” — “many faces of reason,” a plurality of views that can be justified or synthesized without forcing them into a single framework. This concept — philosophic federalism — resonated deeply with what I was already developing under the name Integral Epistemological Pluralism. I was not the first Canadian to think this way. I was, I began to realize, working within a tradition.

Alongside Armour and Trott, Harold Coward’s Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective gave me the other half of my disciplinary genealogy. Coward traces the transformation of religious studies in Canada from theology in seminaries to non-sectarian departments in faculties of arts and humanities — a shift that created the very institutional conditions under which my own training at Concordia became possible. His account of the “golden decade” of 1966–1976, McMaster’s pioneering role, and the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria documents the infrastructure within which the study of religion became a genuinely interdisciplinary enterprise in Canada — the kind of enterprise my own work at the Metapattern Institute is attempting to continue.

McGrath knew this territory intimately — not as academic history but as a living inheritance. He had earned his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2002 under Graeme Nicholson, the Heidegger scholar who had himself studied under Emil Fackenheim. This lineage matters: Fackenheim, Nicholson, McGrath — three generations of Canadian philosophers wrestling with the question of God, Being, and the meaning of modernity after the catastrophes of the twentieth century. I was not part of this lineage. I was studying it — observing the resurgence of German idealism from the disciplinary standpoint of comparative religion, trying to understand what drove serious people to treat two-hundred-year-old metaphysical systems as answers to contemporary crises. But I was studying it as a scholar of Canadian intellectual life specifically, and I increasingly saw McGrath, Peterson, , the Pill Pod network, and the Philosophy Portal community as the latest chapter of the story Armour, Trott, and Coward had documented — the continuing Canadian conversation about reason, religion, and the public good.

It is McGrath’s Heidegger work that most interests me. His Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (2006) reads the young Heidegger as a “modern Luther” — a philosopher whose entire project is shaped by his rupture with Catholic Scholasticism and his deep, suppressed engagement with the Christian contemplative tradition. McGrath uncovers what Heidegger spent a career concealing: that the question of Being, as Heidegger poses it, is inseparable from the question of God as the Christian mystical tradition poses it. Heidegger’s “hermeneutics of facticity” — his insistence that philosophy begins from the concrete, thrown situation of human existence — is, McGrath shows, a secularization of Luther’s theology of the cross. I should note that the word facticity in my own project’s title, Integral Facticity, owes something to this Heideggerian lineage, even as I develop it in a very different direction.

Despite all of this — the podcast, the breakfast, the Canadian intellectual references we had in common — I have never written on McGrath. I have written on Davis, on Grant, on the Canadian idealist tradition — the lineage that Armour and Trott documented in The Faces of Reason and that Coward traces through the institutional transformation of religious studies as a discipline. My fascination with McGrath, like my fascination with Peterson, Vervaeke, and the German idealism network, stems from this same interest: I see them as continuing the distinctly Canadian philosophical conversation that Armour, Trott, and Coward mapped — the “many faces of reason” encountering new cultural conditions. This essay is my first attempt to think publicly with McGrath’s work, and I want to be candid about why it has taken me this long: I was not sure I had the right to intervene in a conversation I had been studying from the outside. My training is in comparative religion, not continental philosophy. I had no background in German idealism before encountering this network. I came to it as an observer — a scholar of religion watching what looked increasingly like a philosophical revival with genuinely spiritual stakes — and I was wary of speaking before I understood what I was observing. The Lost Road changed that, because it made the religious dimension of McGrath’s project explicit in a way his scholarly work had not.

And this is the crucial point. McGrath is one of the most rigorous Schelling scholars working today, a philosopher whose engagement with German Idealism, Heidegger, and Integral/Negative Ecology has earned him a place among the most serious thinkers in contemporary continental philosophy. He was a professed monk in a contemplative Catholic religious order from 1990 to 1995 before pursuing philosophy — a fact that gives The Lost Road an experiential authority most academic philosophers cannot claim. But The Lost Road is not simply the next book in his scholarly career. It is something that his scholarly career made possible — or rather, something that the German idealism revival, and the cultural shift Peterson triggered, finally made safe to publish.

This distinction matters enormously. McGrath’s Schelling scholarship — brilliant, rigorous, indispensable — functioned in part as academic cover for a deeper commitment that the contemporary university does not welcome: serious Christian contemplative practice as a mode of philosophical knowing. This is not a criticism of McGrath; it is a description of the institutional conditions under which serious religious thinkers have had to operate. The academy will allow you to study Schelling’s freedom philosophy as a historical object. It will not welcome you saying that the contemplative tradition Schelling drew upon is true — that it describes real states of consciousness accessible through reproducible practices. German idealism, interestingly, gets a pass that contemplative theology does not. Peterson’s massive cultural intervention — whatever its philosophical limitations — smashed the taboo against public religious seriousness. In the wake of that intervention, scholars like McGrath could come out from behind the scholarly apparatus and speak directly about what had been driving their work all along. The Lost Road is McGrath’s coming-out.

This is also why I see McGrath as occupying what McManus identifies as a “postmodern conservative” position — not in the crude post-truth sense that McManus primarily diagnoses, but in a deeper structural sense. McGrath retrieves pre-modern contemplative resources with genuine philosophical sophistication and experiential authority. But his retrieval operates within what we might call substantive ontological commitment — the conviction that the Christ event, the Western contemplative tradition, and the road itself are genuinely real. This commitment takes different forms across Catholic intellectual life: from the neo-Scholastic natural law tradition, through the Augustinian personalism and sacramental ontology of the Communio school (de Lubac, Balthasar, Ratzinger), to McGrath’s own post-Heideggerian retrieval through Schelling’s freedom philosophy. Charles Taylor occupies a similar space — accessing the sacred through hermeneutical participation rather than metaphysical demonstration. These are not equivalent positions, and the internal debates among them are real. But what they share — and what constitutes the post-metaphysical challenge this essay addresses — is that each depends on participatory formation to be fully intelligible. You must already be inside something — a practice, a tradition, a liturgical life — for the ontological commitments to resonate. That is precisely their strength as lived traditions. It is also what limits their communicability across the genuine pluralist divides of a post-metaphysical public sphere, without the architecture this essay proposes. McGrath, in this specific sense, is a sophisticated and contemplatively grounded version of the pattern McManus identifies: tradition retrieved without the post-metaphysical means to test it, translate it, and share it across genuine difference. That he is incomparably more serious than Peterson does not exempt him from the structural diagnosis. It makes the diagnosis more urgent, because what McGrath has recovered is worth translating — and the essay you are reading is an attempt to provide the architecture for that translation.

The Lost Road is something different from his scholarly work — something more personal and, I think, more important. Modeled explicitly on Augustine’s Confessions, the book opens with death. McGrath’s first cousin John — a cheerful twenty-year-old whom he loved like a brother — bought a one-way bus ticket from Montreal to a small town in Ontario, walked into a patch of woods, climbed a tree in his bare feet, and hanged himself from a rope he had purchased that day. The shoes were placed neatly at the trunk.

McGrath was eighteen. “My life is divided into two distinct and incommensurate periods: before and after John’s death,” he writes. “For better or worse, John made me a philosopher. My intellectual and spiritual journey began with his death.”

There is a kind of philosophical writing that begins in personal crisis and remains accountable to it. Augustine’s Confessions is the prototype. Kierkegaard’s authorship is another. McGrath’s Lost Road belongs to this tradition. The philosophical arguments it advances — about consumerism, about the Western contemplative tradition, about the Christ event — cannot be separated from the life that generated them. This is not a weakness. It is the book’s deepest strength and, as I will argue, also the place where it encounters a problem it cannot solve on its own.

My own research at the Metapattern Institute — which I have been documenting through my Substack, Integral Facticity — comes from a very different place than McGrath’s. I work across integral theory, critical social theory, contextual behavioral science, and the study of religion, trying to build what I have been calling a “new integral humanism.” My training is in comparative religion and applied human sciences at Concordia University, where I studied under Marc Lalonde — a philosopher of religion who completed his PhD under the supervision of Charles Davis and devoted his career to developing what he called a “critical theory of religious insight,” bridging Davis’s critical theology with Habermas’s communicative rationality. Lalonde’s sudden passing in January 2025 remains a deep loss. It was through him that I first encountered Davis, Maritain, and the intellectual tradition that eventually led me to this project. When I read The Lost Road, I did not recognize a fellow traveler on the same road. I recognized something else: that what I had been observing as a scholar of religion — an entire generation of serious philosophers reinventing German idealism in the present tense — was not primarily a scholarly phenomenon. It was an attempt to fill a deep spiritual void. The hunger driving the German idealism revival is the same hunger driving McGrath’s return to the Western contemplative tradition, and the same hunger Peterson exploits and Žižek diagnoses but refuses to address. They are all circling the same emptiness. What none of them have — not McGrath, not the network of brilliant scholars I have been studying — is the epistemological architecture that could hold what they are reaching for without collapsing it back into the metaphysical systems that modernity has already falsified. That is the argument of this essay.

Before turning to the book itself, I need to explain why I believe McGrath’s project is urgent by placing it within a broader intellectual context. That context begins with a debate that, on the surface, seems to have little to do with The Lost Road — but in fact exposes the very vacuum McGrath is trying to fill.

II. The Debate That Failed

The observation running through this entire network — that the left had ceded religion to the right — was not incidental. It runs through the work of everyone I have been engaging with over the past several years: McManus’s critique of “postmodern conservatism,” Michael Brooks’s insistence (before his untimely death in 2020) that the left needed to take seriously the human needs Jordan Peterson was addressing, ’s diagnosis of the deadlock between Hegelian-Lacanian philosophy and cultural conservatism. And as I noted above, McGrath himself has already engaged this problem directly — his Secular Christ podcast devotes entire episodes to Peterson and Žižek, diagnosing with philosophical precision exactly what each gets wrong about Christianity. All of them were circling the same problem. And it was nowhere more visible than in the event that, perhaps more than any other, defined the intellectual landscape of the late 2010s.

In April 2019, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the psychologist Jordan Peterson met in Toronto for what was billed as “The Debate of the Century.” The topic was “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.” Thousands watched. The conventional verdict was that Žižek won on philosophical substance while Peterson won on cultural resonance. I want to suggest that this verdict misses what actually happened and why it matters for McGrath’s project.

I have been thinking about this debate for years — first through my Integral Facticity podcast, where conversations with figures like Matt Flisfeder (who helped facilitate the event) and Cadell Last (whose Real Speculations I reviewed in an essay called “A Rosy Cross of a Book”) helped me see the debate as a symptom of something deeper than a mismatch of intellectual styles.

Peterson spoke to something real in the culture. His Jungian-hermeneutical retrieval of Western mythology, his emphasis on personal responsibility, his reverence for tradition and hierarchy — these resonated with millions of people whom the academic left had stopped speaking to. Alongside the Orthodox iconographer , Peterson articulated a vision of the sacred that addressed a genuine hunger. McManus’s analysis of postmodern conservatism — whose work first drew me into this entire network — shows how figures like Peterson deploy post-truth appeals to tradition and identity in place of rational standards for adjudicating facts and values. But I want to press the analysis further than McManus does. Drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations research, I would argue that Peterson’s appeal stems from something more specific: he inhabits a postmodern conservative position while speaking directly to the moral foundations — loyalty, authority, sanctity — that the left has systematically neglected. Peterson captured a cultural space the left abandoned not merely through resentment politics, but by addressing the deep human need for religious meaning and moral seriousness that progressive secularism left unmet. Brooks made the same argument from a different angle, insisting that the left needed to engage the real human needs Peterson was speaking to, even while rejecting his framework.

But Peterson’s framework is deeply flawed. His retrieval of religion operates at what I would call a mythic-literal level — he sacralizes existing hierarchies and traditional narratives without the capacity to distinguish which forms of authority serve human flourishing and which enforce domination. He and Pageau treat Christianity as a repository of archetypal wisdom rather than as a living contemplative tradition. McGrath’s Secular Christ makes this point with devastating clarity: “Christ is not an archetype,” he insists — Christ is not reducible to a Jungian symbol of individual self-actualization. The contemplative Christian tradition, as McGrath develops it across the podcast, offers something Peterson cannot: not “rules for life” but the radical grace of a self that cannot help itself, a transformation that begins precisely where self-help ideology breaks down. The result of Peterson’s approach is a cultural conservatism that can diagnose the emptiness of secular modernity but cannot offer a genuinely transformative alternative.

Žižek, meanwhile, is a formidable philosopher whose Hegelian-Lacanian system offers one of the most sophisticated diagnoses of ideology available. His concept of the “parallax gap” — the irreducible gap between irreconcilable perspectives that cannot be resolved through synthesis — has been central to my own theoretical development, as I explored in my essay “Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem.” But Žižek’s “Christian Atheism” — his appropriation of kenosis (God’s self-emptying) and the death of the divine Father as resources for dialectical materialism — borrows the structure of Christian contemplative insight while refusing its substance. McGrath, in his Secular Christ episode on “the gnostic Slavoj Žižek,” identifies exactly this move: Žižek has a “better purchase on the essence of Pauline Christianity” than Peterson precisely because he takes the tragic ground of human existence seriously — but his Lacanian atheism and cynicism ultimately prevent him from following that insight to its contemplative conclusion. He theorizes the emptiness at the heart of subjectivity but can only think that emptiness as lack, never as the luminous ground that the contemplative traditions describe. He touches the mystical tradition and immediately retreats.

The left, more broadly, was not even in the room — and here is where Habermas becomes indispensable, not as a critic of the right alone, but as a thinker who diagnosed both sides of this crisis with equal severity. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Habermas showed that the postmodern and poststructuralist thought that had increasingly dominated the humanities since the 1980s commits what he calls a performative contradiction: it uses rational arguments to undermine the very possibility of rational standards, deploying truth-claims in the service of the thesis that truth-claims are merely exercises of power. Foucault, Derrida, and their inheritors cannot offer a coherent critique of reason because they presuppose the rational norms they claim to deconstruct. The result — played out across three decades of academic culture — is an intellectual left that has undermined its own capacity to make truth-claims in public, retreating into institutional control of discourse rather than persuasive engagement with publics.

But Habermas was equally devastating on the other side. In The New Conservatism (1989), he anatomized the neoconservative reaction that was already gathering force — the attempt to “normalize” historical injustice, to weaponize tradition against the emancipatory gains of modernity, to exploit the left’s self-inflicted incoherence for reactionary ends. Both pathologies feed each other: the more the postmodern left abandons rational standards, the more space opens for the new conservatism to fill the vacuum with appeals to identity and tradition. Ken Wilber, working from a developmental psychology framework, arrived at a parallel diagnosis with what he calls the “mean green meme” — the pathological expression of postmodern pluralism that takes relativism to an extreme where no perspective can be judged better than any other, actively blocking the emergence of more integrative thinking while remaining blind to its own performative contradictions. The Peterson-Žižek debate was a symptom of this double pathology: on one side, a conservative mythologist filling the meaning vacuum; on the other, a dialectical materialist performing the very contradiction Habermas had diagnosed.

Peterson won the culture by default — not because his framework is adequate, but because nobody else was speaking to the whole human being. The debate exposed a vacuum: the absence of a framework that can hold genuine contemplative depth, intellectual rigor adequate to a pluralist world, and the capacity to address the full range of human moral experience.

McGrath already knew this. His Secular Christ podcast, across three seasons, is a sustained attempt to recover the contemplative Christianity that Peterson reduces and Žižek refuses. The Lost Road is the culmination of that effort — and the place where it encounters a problem it cannot solve on its own.

III. What McGrath Gets Right — and Where the Ground Shifts

McGrath’s journey begins in the Himalayas and ends in the Western contemplative tradition — but the journey is not what makes the book important. What makes it important is what he brings back. And what complicates it is where he brought it back to.

After his cousin’s death, McGrath traveled to India, to Buddhism, to the sacred sites of the Buddha’s life. He practiced meditation in remote monasteries in Ladakh, visited ashrams, read everything he could find on Eastern spirituality. Like so many Western seekers, he was convinced that authentic contemplative depth could not be found in the religion of his upbringing — Irish Catholicism, which seemed to him mechanical, devoid of spiritual life, manifestly inadequate to the question John’s death had forced upon him.

He did not find what he was looking for. Or rather, he found something more important: that he could not become a Buddhist without disowning his own tradition, and that he could not disown what he had never properly examined. T.S. Eliot, who had made the same discovery decades earlier, put it precisely: the attempt to penetrate Eastern thought fully would require “forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European,” and this, Eliot concluded, he could not do. McGrath goes further: it is not merely that we do not wish to abandon our tradition; it is that we cannot. “Tradition is the vehicle for understanding,” he writes. “Because cultural presuppositions are always relative and finite, they can never be the only way — but without them, there is no way.”

This argument has real force, but I want to note that it runs structurally parallel to Žižek’s own critique of Western Buddhist appropriation — a point I explored at length in my previous essay “Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem.” Žižek argues that Western Buddhism functions as a fetish supplement to late capitalism, a way of maintaining inner peace while leaving the structural conditions of suffering untouched. McGrath’s critique arrives from the opposite direction — the contemplative rather than the dialectical — but the diagnostic overlap is striking. Both see Western Buddhism as a symptom rather than a solution. And both, I would argue, underestimate the genuine contemplative depth that Buddhist traditions carry in their own right, independent of their Western appropriation.

My own years at the Montreal Zen Centre — which McGrath and I discussed over breakfast — gave me a different angle on this. Zen practice opened something essential, something I would not have accessed through any purely Western framework. The contemplative depth was real. The question was not whether Buddhism was adequate — it was what architecture could hold the genuine insights of multiple contemplative traditions without requiring practitioners to abandon their own. That is the question McGrath cannot quite ask, because his framework assumes the Western tradition is the primary road.

What followed McGrath’s return from the East was a period of monastic formation. From 1990 to 1995, he was a professed monk in the Spiritual Life Institute — an offshoot of the Discalced Carmelites founded by Fr. William McNamara in the 1960s, with hermitages in Colorado and Nova Scotia. I want to be candid about this context, because it matters for evaluating what McGrath brings back. The Spiritual Life Institute was a product of its era: a mixed-gender contemplative community with deep roots in Carmelite mysticism but also in the countercultural Catholic moment of the 1960s — McNamara’s “earthy mysticism,” his language of “the human adventure,” the institute’s self-conscious positioning at the intersection of contemplative renewal and the human potential ethos. It was not the Catholic charismatic renewal, but it breathed the same air. The community eventually disintegrated after McNamara’s health crisis in 2001, and co-founder Tessa Bielecki left to start a separate Desert Foundation. This is not a scandal — communities fracture. But it is a reminder that the “Western contemplative tradition” McGrath invokes is not a seamless inheritance; it is mediated through very particular institutional experiments, some more stable than others.

What redeems McGrath’s contemplative formation — what gives The Lost Road its genuine authority — is that his intellectual work does not stay at the level of the Spiritual Life Institute’s somewhat idiosyncratic ethos. It goes deeper, grounding itself in the patristic and medieval sources that have genuine staying power: the Desert Fathers, Augustine’s Confessions, the Carmelite mystics Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, and above all Thomas Merton. Merton is the crucial figure here — a monk who lived the contemplative life with complete seriousness while engaging with Buddhism, social justice, and the full complexity of the modern world. McGrath’s best writing channels Merton’s spirit: the insistence that contemplation is not withdrawal from the world but the deepest engagement with it. This is praxis in the fullest sense.

McGrath’s argument about consumerism — that it is not materialism but a perversion of spiritual longing — has a certain rhetorical appeal: “Consumerism works because it appeals to all aspects of human desire, both to what is lowest in us — the craving for pleasure, recognition, and power — and to what is highest in us: the drive toward the good.” But I find this less convincing than it first appears. The structural analysis of consumerism as a feature of late capitalism — the analysis that Žižek, whatever his limitations, provides with far greater precision — cannot be replaced by a spiritual diagnosis alone. The crisis is also political and economic, not spiritual “before” it is political. McGrath’s contemplative lens gives him genuine insight into the experiential dimension of consumer culture, but it lacks the tools to address the systemic conditions that produce and sustain it. This is precisely where Habermas’s analysis of the colonization of the lifeworld — the systematic replacement of communicative rationality by market and administrative logics — provides what McGrath’s contemplative framework cannot.

Where McGrath is strongest — and genuinely irreplaceable — is in his recovery of the Western concept of the person. This is not the individual of liberal theory — the autonomous, self-creating subject of the Enlightenment. The person, as the early Christian theologians developed the concept in order to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity, is constitutively relational. “The essence of the person is relationality,” McGrath writes. “To be a person is to be related to other persons such that those relations constitute one’s identity.” The divine personality itself, in Trinitarian theology, subsists in a community of love. This concept — born from the attempt to explain how Jesus could be God and yet distinct from the Father — provides, in McGrath’s account, the philosophical foundation for human dignity that no other tradition has generated with the same force.

This is powerful. And it matters because it identifies the contemplative depth that any adequate response to the Peterson-Žižek vacuum must include. Without access to what the Western mystical tradition has cultivated — the kind of lived interior transformation that Merton described, that the Desert Fathers practiced, that the Carmelite tradition refined — any framework for public life will remain motivationally thin. Habermas himself acknowledged this in a dialogue that preceded the Peterson-Žižek debate by fifteen years.

IV. The Habermas-Ratzinger Precedent

In January 2004, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — met at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria for a dialogue on the moral foundations of the liberal state. For readers unfamiliar with this exchange, it remains the most intellectually serious attempt at exactly the conversation the Peterson-Žižek debate failed to have.

Habermas made a remarkable concession. The architect of “communicative rationality” — the thinker who had spent decades arguing that rational discourse could produce normative consensus in a pluralist society — acknowledged that secular reason cannot generate its own motivational resources. The values that sustain democratic life — solidarity, justice, human dignity — are presupposed by rational discourse but cannot be grounded by it. They have historical roots in religious traditions, particularly in the Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person. Secular reason needs what Habermas called the “semantic content” of these traditions, but can only access this content through careful “translation” into terms that do not require religious commitment.

Ratzinger, in turn, conceded that faith must submit to the corrective of reason. Revelation cannot simply override rational discourse in a pluralist society. What they arrived at was a “complementary learning process” — faith and reason mutually correcting.

What they achieved was genuine. What they did not achieve — and what remains unresolved — is an architecture that can actually hold what both sides bring.

Habermas’s framework has no access to the contemplative dimension. His procedural rationality describes the conditions for rational discourse but says nothing about the interior transformation that makes genuine discourse possible. You cannot simply argue your way into the kind of moral openness that allows someone deeply committed to one moral vision to genuinely understand someone committed to a different one. Something more is needed — something the contemplative traditions have cultivated for millennia but that Habermas’s philosophy cannot account for.

Ratzinger, for his part, never fully committed to what Habermas calls “post-metaphysical thinking.” His theology operates within what I described above as substantive ontological commitment — in Ratzinger’s case, an Augustinian personalism and Logos theology in which the human person is grounded ontologically in the imago Dei. This is not the rigid neo-Scholasticism of the manuals; Ratzinger’s thought is richer than that, shaped by de Lubac and the ressourcement movement. But it depends on participatory formation — on liturgical life, on prayer, on the sacramental imagination — to be fully intelligible. These provide exactly the depth and motivational resources Habermas acknowledged secular reason needs. But they depend on commitments that cannot simply be translated into post-metaphysical terms without losing what makes them powerful.

I want to dwell on this, because it is the crux of the problem McGrath inherits — and because the problem has a dimension that neither Habermas nor Ratzinger addressed.

What the contemplative traditions carry is not merely “semantic content” — not merely concepts and values that can be translated like vocabulary from one language to another. They carry reproducible experiential practices. B. Alan Wallace — a former Buddhist monk ordained by the Dalai Lama who went on to earn a PhD in religious studies at Stanford after studying physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst — has done more than perhaps any living scholar to articulate this point. In Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity (2009), Wallace demonstrates that Buddhist and Christian meditative practices, despite their different belief systems, function as parallel methods of cognitive inquiry that produce similar insight into the nature and origins of consciousness. He traces the Christian contemplative tradition back to the Desert Fathers meditating in Egypt and shows that what they developed — and what the Buddhist traditions refined through entirely independent methods — constitutes a genuine contemplative science: a body of reproducible practices that yield verifiable, intersubjectively testable results about states of consciousness, interior transformation, and the conditions under which genuine perspective-taking becomes possible.

Wallace’s achievement is to bring this contemplative science into dialogue with contemporary cognitive science, quantum mechanics, and the philosophy of mind — linking Buddhist and Christian views to the philosophical work of Hilary Putnam, Charles Taylor, and Bas van Fraassen. The result is not syncretism but what I would call contemplative epistemology: the recognition that the great meditative traditions have been conducting first-person empirical research for millennia, and that this research has epistemic standing comparable to — though methodologically distinct from — the third-person investigations of modern science.

The Desert Fathers did not simply believe in the transformation of the person through prayer; they developed systematic methods for achieving it — methods that produced consistent, verifiable results across practitioners, across centuries, across cultural contexts. The Carmelite mystics mapped stages of interior development with the precision of empirical researchers. Zen Buddhism has its own rigorous developmental phenomenology, tested across a thousand years of practice. These are not metaphysical assertions. They are, as Wallace has shown, something closer to a contemplative science — a body of practical knowledge about states of consciousness whose results are epistemologically significant.

This is what Ratzinger brought to the table without quite naming it, and what Habermas could not receive because his framework has no category for it. The contemplative traditions are not merely repositories of “semantic content” to be translated; they are technologies of interior transformation whose results are epistemologically significant — they produce new capacities for knowing, for empathy, for moral discernment that are not available to the untrained practitioner. The post-metaphysical challenge is not to discard this experiential data but to describe it functionally and test it experientially without requiring the metaphysical scaffolding in which it has traditionally been packaged. The contemplative practices are reproducible. The metaphysical ontology in which they have been housed is not the practices themselves — it is a theory about the practices, and theories can be revised while the practices and their effects remain.

This distinction — between the reproducible contemplative science and the metaphysical packaging — is what the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue needed and did not have. It is also what McGrath’s Lost Road needs and does not provide.

V. The Post-Metaphysical Problem

To call a framework “post-metaphysical” is not to call it anti-metaphysical. This distinction is crucial and widely misunderstood.

Anti-metaphysical thinking — Žižek’s dialectical materialism, logical positivism, reductive naturalism — claims that metaphysical questions are either meaningless or answerable in purely material terms. This position is self-defeating in ways that are by now well documented. Žižek’s own “materialism without matter,” in which absolute negativity functions as the ground of reality, is transparently a metaphysical position in anti-metaphysical clothing.

Post-metaphysical thinking, as Habermas articulates it, is something different. It means conducting inquiry without presupposing a cosmic ground, a purposive Idea, or an ontological telos — while remaining open to the validity of claims that emerge from traditions that do presuppose these things. It is procedural, fallibilist, and inclusive. It doesn’t say “God doesn’t exist”; it says “we can conduct this conversation without requiring agreement on whether God exists, while taking seriously the insights of those who believe God does.”

McGrath’s Lost Road encounters this threshold and cannot cross it. His entire project depends on metaphysical claims: the Christ event as ontological reality, creation as the theater of divine revelation, the road as genuinely real. He closes with “theological hope” — hope that “does not rely on the merely human.” This is not a flaw in his argument. It is what gives his testimony its existential power. But it means McGrath can speak to those who already share, or are open to, his Christian contemplative commitments. He cannot, on his own terms, speak across the deeper divides — the divides the Peterson-Žižek debate exposed, the divides that the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue identified but could not bridge.

The philosopher Dylan Shaul’s recent work on the Nature-Spirit transition in Hegel faces the same limitation from the other side. Shaul completed his PhD at the University of Toronto — the same department that Fackenheim built and where McGrath studied under Nicholson — working under Rebecca Comay on Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. The U of T lineage is not incidental: Fackenheim, Nicholson, McGrath, Shaul represent successive generations of Canadian philosophers wrestling with the question of God, Being, and modernity, each brilliant, each unable to step outside the metaphysical architecture they inherit. As I argued in my essay “Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem,” Shaul offers one of the most lucid interventions in contemporary Hegel scholarship — but his reading re-introduces the Absolute Idea as the hidden agent of Spirit’s emergence, creating a system that is philosophically magnificent but unfalsifiable. The problem is not that no lived experience could challenge it — lived experience, including contemplative experience, is rich with epistemological content. The problem is that Shaul’s system, like the broader Hegelian tradition, does not attend to the epistemological and reproducible character of the experiences it claims to describe. It absorbs all possible experiences as moments in its own self-development without ever submitting its claims to the kind of empirical testing that a contemplative science would demand. The contemplative traditions do have reproducible methods and verifiable developmental stages. What they lack — and what Shaul’s Hegelianism equally lacks — is a framework that treats these reproducible experiences as genuine epistemic data while separating them from the metaphysical systems that claim to explain them.

This is the move that Enactive Fallibilism makes: when a framework — philosophical, institutional, political, or theological — includes all possible counter-evidence as moments in its own self-development, it has become unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable systems are epistemologically disqualified regardless of their internal elegance. The body’s testimony, the practitioner’s verified experience, the reproducible results of contemplative practice — these constitute genuine epistemic data that can test and potentially falsify theoretical frameworks. A system that cannot be falsified by such data is not a map of reality; it is a closed hermeneutic circle.

What The Lost Road opened for me was the recognition that Shaul and McGrath are working the same problem from opposite ends of the same corridor — and that neither can solve it alone. I want to be clear about something: these are the thinkers I admire most in this entire landscape. McGrath’s contemplative depth is real in a way that Peterson’s mythological retrieval is not, and Shaul’s philosophical rigor is genuine in a way that Žižek’s dialectical fireworks often are not. Both have the intellectual seriousness and the existential stakes that make their work worth wrestling with. But admiration does not exempt anyone from the post-metaphysical test. McGrath’s framework requires metaphysical commitments that cannot speak across the pluralist divides Habermas identifies. Shaul’s Hegelian system absorbs all possible counter-evidence into its own self-development, making it unfalsifiable in precisely the way that Enactive Fallibilism treats as a disqualification. Both almost get there. Both lack the epistemological architecture that Wilber and Habermas provide — the capacity to hold multiple irreducible ways of knowing without collapsing them into a single metaphysical system.

The broader landscape reveals a pattern. Each of these positions, in its own way, inhabits something structurally analogous to what McManus identifies as postmodern conservatism: not in the crude post-truth sense, but in the deeper sense that each retrieves pre-modern resources — contemplative tradition, Absolute Spirit, Jungian archetypes, Christian atheism — without the epistemological means to make those retrievals genuinely post-metaphysical. Listed in ascending order of seriousness:

Peterson retrieves religion at the mythic-Jungian level without encountering the post-metaphysical problem at all — the purest form of the pattern, and the most politically dangerous.

Žižek claims to be post-metaphysical while smuggling metaphysical commitments through the back door. His Christian Atheism is the most instructive failure: it demonstrates that you cannot simply subtract the metaphysical content from the contemplative tradition and retain anything livable.

Shaul reconstructs Hegel’s system with extraordinary rigor — the most lucid intervention in contemporary Hegel scholarship I have encountered — but the Absolute Idea functions as a hidden metaphysical agent that pre-decides the very freedom it claims to ground, and the system’s claims are never submitted to the reproducible empirical testing that a genuine contemplative science would require.

McGrath recovers the Western contemplative tradition with philosophical sophistication and genuine experiential authority — the deepest work in this landscape. But his framework remains tethered to substantive ontological commitments that, however sophisticated their post-Heideggerian mediation, depend on participatory formation to be intelligible. He can describe the contemplative experience with unmatched precision, but he cannot separate the reproducible contemplative science from the ontological framework, and therefore cannot speak across the divides his own diagnosis identifies.

Everyone in this conversation is circling the same question: how to reintegrate the contemplative and religious dimension into public life without regressing to pre-modern metaphysics or collapsing into secular flatland. The Habermas-Ratzinger “complementary learning process” described a relationship between faith and reason. It did not produce the architecture that could hold both. This is the post-metaphysical challenge. What follows — through the Catholic institutional expression and the Canadian intellectual context that has been my home — is the case for meeting it.

VI. The Catholic Institutional Expression and the Canadian Context

Before proposing the architecture I believe can bridge these divides, I need to address the Catholic institutional dimension of this conversation — because McGrath’s work does not exist in an intellectual vacuum. It exists within a living tradition that has already produced the most practically effective expressions of integral humanism available, and it exists within a distinctly Canadian intellectual context that has consistently fostered the kind of synthetic, federalist thinking this moment requires.

Pope Francis represented perhaps the most practically effective expression of the Catholic integral vision in recent memory. His encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti articulate integral human development with pastoral genius. His creation of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development institutionalized the anthropological turn that Sarah Shortall traces from the Jersey exiles through the nouvelle théologie to Vatican II — a genealogy I explored at length in my essay “Pope Francis’s Integral Vision & Legacy.” Francis’s insistence that “we do not face two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental” captures the integral impulse at its best — the refusal to separate what modernity has fragmented.

But Francis’s genius was pastoral, not theoretical. The integral human development tradition he inherited does not need to be post-metaphysical to feed the hungry or welcome the migrant. But the intellectual framework underlying it does, if it is to speak in a pluralist public sphere — if it is to address the Peterson-Žižek vacuum rather than simply minister to those already within the fold.

Pope Leo XIV has sharpened the question further. His insistence that “the challenge is not technological, but anthropological” echoes the deepest commitments of the Catholic tradition. The Vatican’s doctrinal note Antiqua et Nova (2025) insists that AI must serve “the higher criterion of human dignity.” But “human dignity” in this tradition is grounded in the imago Dei — the theological claim that human beings bear the image of God. Can this claim be articulated in post-metaphysical terms without losing its force? As I argued in “When the Body Becomes the Laboratory,” the Catholic intellectual tradition offers sophisticated resources for thinking about technology, dignity, and human flourishing — but those resources remain tethered to a metaphysical anthropology that limits their communicability in a pluralist context.

What is striking, and what connects this Catholic institutional dimension to McGrath’s Lost Road, is the Canadian context in which these questions take a distinctive shape. Canada’s relationship to Catholic intellectual life is unique: it is a country in which French Catholic and Anglo-Protestant traditions have been forced into conversation from the beginning, producing what Armour and Trott identify as “philosophic federalism” — a disposition toward synthesis rather than exclusion, plurality rather than system. This disposition runs through the entire lineage I have been tracing: from John Watson’s early engagement with Schelling, through George Grant’s Heideggerian-Christian critique of modernity, through Charles Davis’s migration from Catholic theology to critical theory at Concordia, through Lalonde’s “critical theory of religious insight,” through the defining theological rupture between Davis and Gregory Baum — the Jewish-born refugee and Vatican II peritus who drafted Nostra Aetate and devoted his career at Toronto and McGill to reconciling Catholic tradition with critical sociology and social justice. As I argued in my essay “Truth & Relevance: Revisiting the Charles Davis & Gregory Baum Debate,” the Davis-Baum conflict represents the Canadian culmination of the Communio-Concilium crisis, and its unresolved tensions continue to shape every question this essay addresses. The German-Canadian theologian Jens Zimmermann’s “incarnational humanism” — his attempt to ground human dignity, freedom, and reason in the doctrine of the incarnation — represents yet another iteration of this characteristically Canadian project, one I engaged at length in “Engaging Jens Zimmermann’s Incarnational Humanism from an Integral Perspective.” Zimmermann’s work offers genuine theological depth, but as I argued there, his Christocentric framework risks the same hermeneutical closure that McGrath’s substantive ontological commitments produce: richness of content without the epistemological architecture that could make it communicable across genuine pluralist divides. And now through McGrath’s recovery of the Western contemplative tradition from within a Canadian university system that both shaped and constrained his work.

McGrath’s situation is, in this light, characteristically Canadian. He works at Memorial University of Newfoundland — a secular institution where serious Christian contemplative commitment must be channeled through acceptable academic forms (Schelling scholarship, Heidegger studies, Negative/Integral ecology) in order to survive professionally. The Lost Road is the moment when the contemplative commitment steps out from behind the scholarly apparatus — enabled, as I argued in Section I, by the cultural shift Peterson triggered, but also shaped by the distinctly Canadian pattern of holding multiple traditions in tension without forcing premature resolution.

This Canadian pattern matters because it is, I believe, the cultural soil from which a genuinely post-metaphysical integral humanism can grow. Armour and Trott’s “philosophic federalism” is not just a description of past Canadian philosophy — it is a method: the conviction that a plurality of views can be justified or synthesized, that the “many faces of reason” need not collapse into a single face. Coward’s documentation of the transformation of religious studies in Canada — from confessional theology to genuinely interdisciplinary, non-sectarian scholarship — describes the institutional conditions under which multiple contemplative traditions can be studied, compared, and respected on their own terms. My own training at Concordia, under Lalonde, within a department shaped by Davis’s migration from theology to critical theory, is a direct product of this Canadian institutional experiment.

What I am proposing in this essay — a new integral humanism that holds contemplative depth, post-metaphysical rigor, moral-psychological breadth, and developmental sorting together — is not, then, a purely theoretical construction imported from outside. It grows from the Canadian philosophical conversation itself, the conversation that Armour, Trott, and Coward documented and that McGrath, Peterson, Vervaeke, Shaul, and I are continuing in our different ways. The difference is that I am trying to make explicit the epistemological architecture that the Canadian “philosophic federalism” has always implied but never fully articulated — the architecture that could turn this distinctive Canadian disposition into a framework adequate to the global crisis McGrath’s Lost Road diagnoses.

VII. Toward a New Integral Humanism

I want to make the case for a new integral humanism — and to show that the resources for building it already exist, scattered across disciplines that have not yet been brought into conversation. It requires bringing together resources that, to my knowledge, have not previously been synthesized — some of which will be unfamiliar to readers coming from continental philosophy or confessional theology, and which I have been developing across several essays and through my work at the Metapattern Institute. My training in comparative religion — where one learns to hold multiple traditions as genuine without absolutizing any — turns out to be the disciplinary position this synthesis requires. And the Canadian “philosophic federalism” that Armour and Trott describe turns out to be not merely a national intellectual habit but the disposition this moment demands.

When Jacques Maritain first articulated his vision of “integral humanism” in 1936, he laid a vital foundation. His personalist philosophy centered human dignity in the theological claim that the person is not reducible to the individual of liberal theory — the person is constitutively relational, ordered toward transcendence, bearing an inherent dignity that no political order may violate. Louis-Joseph Lebret extended this into practical development theory. The Jersey theologians radicalized it through ressourcement. Pope Francis brought it to institutional expression. But as I argued in my tribute to the political philosopher Fred Dallmayr, “The Return of God & Future of Integral Humanism,” Maritain’s integral humanism operates within the same substantive ontological commitments I have been tracing throughout this essay — and requires a structural upgrade to address the deep pluralism and systemic challenges of the twenty-first century.

A genuinely new integral humanism must hold four things together that no existing framework manages to combine. Let me introduce each, recognizing that several of these thinkers may be new to readers in McGrath’s intellectual world.

I should anticipate two objections here — one from McGrath himself, and one from the broader Catholic intellectual world in which his work circulates.

McGrath’s objection would not be that integral humanism is too systematic — his own Schelling scholarship is nothing if not systematic. It would be that I am housing the transcendent inside a humanist architecture. The entire thrust of The Lost Road is that the contemplative tradition leads beyond the human — beyond any framework, however sophisticated, that keeps the human person as its horizon. The encounter with God, as the Desert Fathers knew and as Merton practiced, shatters the categories through which we try to contain it. By placing contemplative depth as one component within a larger architecture — alongside Habermas’s procedure, Haidt’s moral psychology, Hayes’s behavioral science — am I not domesticating the very wildness McGrath spent five years in the mountains learning to receive?

I take this seriously, but Maritain already answered it. Integral humanism, as Maritain conceived it in 1936 and as I am developing it here, is not humanism without God. It is humanism ordered toward God — a humanism in which the transcendent is not one component among others but the horizon toward which the entire architecture opens. The “integral” means precisely that nothing is left out, including what exceeds the human. The architecture does not contain the divine; it creates the conditions under which the divine can be encountered across the divides that currently prevent genuine communication. Contemplation remains the engine. The architecture serves it; it does not replace it.

The second objection will come from the Communio theologians — figures like Larry Chapp, Tracey Rowland, and those in the tradition of de Lubac, Balthasar, and Ratzinger — who will see in this project exactly what they have spent decades warning against: the Concilium error. By synthesizing Maritain with Habermas — a Frankfurt School philosopher — and treating Catholic metaphysical commitments as revisable through Enactive Fallibilism, I am, in their reading, accommodating faith to modernity’s terms rather than letting faith challenge modernity on its own. Rowland’s taxonomy is clear: Communio theologians look at contemporary culture from the perspective of magisterial teaching; Concilium theologians look at magisterial teaching from the perspective of contemporary culture. By their lights, I am firmly in the second camp.

I want to respond to this directly. The Communio narrative holds that the Concilium accommodation — the “spirit of Vatican II” as distinct from its actual documents — is what emptied the churches. I believe this narrative is empirically wrong. What emptied the churches was corruption and scandal — decades of institutional betrayal that no amount of theological refinement can explain away. The decades-long contest between Communio and Concilium, however intellectually serious, has consumed an enormous amount of Catholic intellectual energy on ecclesial positioning — a dynamic I examined at length in my essay “Truth & Relevance: Revisiting the Charles Davis & Gregory Baum Debate” — while the contemplative tradition both camps claim to value has continued to atrophy in practice. McGrath’s work — his recovery of the Desert Fathers, his grounding in Merton, his insistence on contemplative Christianity as praxis rather than system — is exactly what serious Catholic intellectuals should be attending to, and it is striking how little attention the ecclesial combatants have paid to work like his.

This essay is, among other things, an attempt to redirect that attention. The architecture I am proposing does not reduce faith to procedure, and Enactive Fallibilism is not accommodation. It is the intellectual honesty to say: any framework — including this one, including Communio theology, including Concilium theology — is revisable when it produces suffering. That is not relativism. It is what Peirce called fallibilism — the recognition that all knowledge, including theological knowledge, is provisional and subject to revision through lived experience. Enactive Fallibilism takes Peirce’s insight further: when a framework produces suffering, the body’s testimony has epistemic authority over the framework’s internal logic. This is not relativism. It is the only epistemic stance adequate to a living tradition — one that has survived two thousand years precisely because it has always contained within itself the capacity for metanoia, for turning, for reform. The contemplative traditions themselves teach this: genuine interior transformation requires the willingness to let go of what no longer serves, including one’s most cherished formulations. What Enactive Fallibilism adds is the insistence that this willingness must extend to the institutional and theoretical frameworks that house the contemplative practices, not merely to the practitioner’s personal attachments.

Contemplative Depth

This is what McGrath recovers, what the Western mystical tradition carries, what Peterson gestures toward but cannot reach, and what Žižek theorizes but cannot inhabit. Without access to what the contemplative traditions have cultivated — states of consciousness, the witnessing perspective, the interior transformation of the person through sustained practice — any framework for public life will remain motivationally thin. This was Habermas’s own diagnosis of secular reason’s insufficiency. The contemplative dimension is not an optional supplement; it is the engine of the moral transformation that genuine dialogue requires.

But — and this is the point I developed in Section IV — the contemplative traditions carry something more than “semantic content.” They carry reproducible experiential practices that function as a contemplative science. As B. Alan Wallace has demonstrated in Mind in the Balance, Buddhist and Christian meditative traditions, despite their different belief systems, converge on parallel methods of cognitive inquiry that produce similar insight into the nature of consciousness. The post-metaphysical move is to honor this science — to describe its methods, map its developmental stages, and test its claims experientially — while separating it from the metaphysical packaging in which it has historically been housed. McGrath’s contribution here is irreplaceable. The Lost Road demonstrates that this depth is available within the Western tradition — not as a museum piece but as a living way. Wallace demonstrates that the same depth is available across traditions, through reproducible practices whose results converge. Anyone working toward a new integral humanism needs both.

Post-Metaphysical Rigor

This is Habermas’s essential contribution — the procedural, fallibilist framework that makes inquiry communicable across traditions without requiring metaphysical commitments from interlocutors. Without this, we get McGrath’s testimony: existentially powerful but not translatable across the divides that define our public life. Post-metaphysical thinking is not the enemy of contemplative depth; it is the condition under which contemplative depth can speak in a pluralist public sphere.

But Habermas’s framework, as I have noted, is incomplete. It needs to be updated — supplemented with resources he did not have access to — if it is to become adequate to the full scope of the problem.

Moral-Psychological Breadth

This is where I introduce a thinker whose work has been transformative for my own project but who remains largely unknown in the circles where McGrath’s work circulates.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind (2012), demonstrated through extensive empirical research that moral reasoning is fundamentally embodied and pre-verbal. Moral intuitions move first; the conscious, verbal mind constructs post-hoc rationalizations that feel like reasons but function as justifications. Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant (embodied moral intuition) and the rider (conscious verbal reasoning): the elephant moves, and the rider narrates.

Moreover — and this is the crucial finding — human beings operate across six irreducible Moral Foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Authority/Subversion, Loyalty/Betrayal, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. Progressives tend to rely primarily on Care and Fairness. Conservatives draw on all six. This explains, with empirical precision, why Peterson resonates with audiences the academic left cannot reach — he speaks, however crudely, to the full moral spectrum: authority, loyalty, sanctity, and liberty as well as care and fairness. The left speaks to two foundations and wonders why it keeps losing the culture.

This presents a devastating challenge to Habermas’s project. If moral reasoning is post-hoc rationalization — if the elephant moves first and the rider merely narrates — then the “ideal speech situation” Habermas envisions, in which rational agents exchange reasons and reach consensus, is built on a psychological illusion. Participants in discourse are not exchanging reasons; they are exchanging rationalizations generated by incommensurable embodied moral intuitions.

This looks like a fatal blow to the Habermasian project. I argued in my essay “Beyond the Master Signifier” that it is not — if you know where to look for the bridge. That bridge is provided by Steven C. Hayes.

Hayes developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) within contextual behavioral science — a tradition rooted in pragmatic philosophy. ACT’s core contribution is what Hayes calls the “hexaflex”: six interconnected psychological processes that together constitute psychological flexibility — the capacity to contact the present moment fully, as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior in the service of chosen values. These processes include cognitive defusion (observing your thoughts as mental events rather than literal truths), acceptance (making room for difficult experiences rather than struggling against them), self-as-context (accessing a witnessing perspective that observes experience rather than being consumed by it), present moment contact, values clarification, and committed action.

Here is why this matters for the Habermas-Ratzinger problem: defusion is precisely the psychological capacity to notice your moral intuition — your elephant’s movement — as an embodied response rather than mistaking the rider’s post-hoc narrative for truth. It does not silence the elephant. It creates space between intuition and response — space in which genuine perspective-taking becomes possible. This is the psychological precondition for Habermas’s ideal speech situation that Habermas himself could not produce. As I argued in “Beyond the Master Signifier”: Haidt tells us why communicative action fails across moral divides. Hayes tells us how to create the psychological conditions under which it can succeed. Habermas tells us what we are building toward.

No one, to my knowledge, has previously brought Haidt and Habermas into dialogue through Hayes. This synthesis updates Habermas — providing the psychological infrastructure his procedural framework was always missing.

And here is the connection to the contemplative science I described in Section IV: Hayes’s self-as-context — the witnessing perspective within the hexaflex — is functionally identical to what the contemplative traditions have cultivated for millennia. The Desert Fathers’ practice of nepsis (watchfulness), the Zen practice of shikantaza (just sitting), the Carmelite tradition of interior observation — these are all, functionally described, methods for cultivating the capacity to observe one’s own mental events without being consumed by them. Hayes arrived at this insight through behavioral science; the contemplative traditions arrived at it through millennia of practice; Wallace arrived at it through his unique position as a physicist-turned-Buddhist-monk-turned-scholar of comparative religion. They are describing the same capacity from different disciplinary angles. This convergence — between empirical behavioral science, comparative contemplative science, and the living traditions themselves — is the strongest evidence that what I am proposing is not a metaphysical fantasy but a genuine domain of reproducible human experience with epistemic standing.

Developmental Sorting

The final resource comes from the integral theorist Ken Wilber, whose work will be familiar to some readers and entirely unfamiliar to others. Wilber’s most important diagnostic tool for the conversation McGrath is engaged in is what he calls the “Pre/Trans Fallacy” — the confusion of pre-rational with trans-rational.

Here is the problem in concrete terms: Peterson’s mythic-Jungian retrieval of Christianity and McGrath’s contemplative recovery of the Western mystical tradition can look identical from the outside. Both invoke tradition, authority, the sacred, the transformative power of religion. But they are operating at fundamentally different levels. Peterson retrieves religion at a mythic-literal level — archetypes, hero narratives, the sacralization of existing hierarchies. McGrath retrieves it at a contemplative level — Augustine’s freedom and grace, the dark ground of Spirit in Schelling, the mystical witness, the personal encounter with Christ as transformative. Without a framework that can sort these — that can distinguish pre-rational engagement with the sacred from trans-rational engagement — the left’s blanket dismissal of all religion as regression appears justified, and the right’s mythic retrieval appears equivalent to genuine contemplative depth. It is neither.

Wilber’s developmental architecture provides this sorting. He also provides a crucial distinction between what he calls “growth hierarchies” and “dominator hierarchies” — a distinction I developed in my essay on Dallmayr and integral pluralism, “The Return of God & Future of Integral Humanism.” Growth hierarchies transcend and include: each stage preserves and integrates what came before. Dominator hierarchies suppress and exclude: each level maintains power by preventing the development of those below. Peterson is right that hierarchies are not inherently oppressive; the left’s blanket rejection of hierarchy cedes moral territory to the right unnecessarily. But Peterson cannot distinguish which hierarchies serve flourishing and which enforce conformity. This sorting capacity is exactly what The Lost Road needs and does not have.

The Synthesis: Integral Facticity and the New Integral Humanism

These four requirements — contemplative depth, post-metaphysical rigor, moral-psychological breadth, and developmental sorting — converge in what I have been calling a new integral humanism. It is grounded in a concept I call Integral Facticity, which I have been developing across several essays and which I articulated most fully in “When the Body Becomes the Laboratory.”

Integral Facticity synthesizes Wilber’s developmental architecture with Habermas’s insistence on irreducible givenness. The philosopher’s term “facticity” refers to the brute, unchosen conditions within which all human action occurs — the body you have (not the body you want), the history you carry (not the history you’d prefer), the material conditions you inhabit. Habermas, in Between Facts and Norms, articulates the tension between facticity (what is) and validity (what ought to be) as the fundamental structure of social life.

The core insight of Integral Facticity is this: development — including the contemplative development McGrath describes — occurs within facticity, not in escape from it. We do not transcend our biological limits, our historical situatedness, or our material conditions through spiritual awakening. We develop a transformed relationship to them. The contemplative traditions are clear on this when read carefully: Zen does not promise escape from sickness, old age, and death — it offers a transformed relationship to them. Christian mysticism does not dissolve embodiment — it sanctifies it. Augustine’s discovery of grace is not escape from the human condition but the recognition that the human condition, in all its limitation, is already held within something greater.

This is the move that holds McGrath’s contemplative depth while keeping it post-metaphysical. The interior transformation McGrath describes — the witnessing perspective, the encounter with grace, what the tradition calls the soul’s ascent — is real. It can be described functionally and tested experientially against the practitioner’s lived experience. It is part of the reproducible contemplative science I described in Section IV. It does not require ontological claims about the Logos or the Christ event to be valid as human experience, though it may also carry those meanings for those who receive it theologically. This is the bridge between Ratzinger’s contemplative realism and Habermas’s procedural fallibilism — a bridge built not by abstracting away the experiential content but by describing it with epistemological precision.

A second concept — Enactive Fallibilism — provides the epistemological engine. Synthesizing Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic fallibilism (all knowledge is provisional and subject to revision through experience) with Francisco Varela’s enactivism (cognition is not passive representation but active engagement of organism and environment), Enactive Fallibilism ensures that the new integral humanism does not calcify into another closed system. When frameworks — philosophical, institutional, political, or theological — produce suffering, they are tested and found wanting. The body serves as empirical probe. This is not grievance; it is the self-correcting mechanism that prevents any comprehensive framework from becoming what Hegel’s Encyclopedia became: a magnificent system that includes all possible objections as moments in its own self-development and is therefore unfalsifiable.

What I call Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT) is the practical operationalization of this new integral humanism — Hayes’s hexaflex (empirically validated processes of psychological flexibility) nested within Wilber’s integral architecture (developmental sorting across states, stages, and types), grounded in Integral Facticity (development within irreducible givenness) and kept honest by Enactive Fallibilism (the body’s epistemic authority over theoretical frameworks). I have described IACT’s theoretical foundations and its practical applications in “When the Body Becomes the Laboratory” and in earlier essays including “Bridging Minds & Souls” and “Towards an Integral Approach to Recovery & Beyond.” For readers interested in the clinical and practical dimensions, those essays develop what I can only sketch here.

The Catholic Resonance

I want to be explicit about something that matters deeply to me: this new integral humanism does not replace the Catholic integral human development tradition. It enriches it — providing the post-metaphysical architecture that tradition needs to speak in a pluralist public sphere without sacrificing its depth.

The semantic content that Habermas acknowledged secular reason needs? It is here — translated, not lost. The integral ecology that Pope Francis articulated in Laudato Si’ — the insistence that “we do not face two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental” — finds its post-metaphysical articulation in Wilber’s four-quadrant model, where the individual interior, the individual exterior, the collective interior, and the collective exterior are irreducible and interdependent. The human dignity that Pope Leo XIV insists must govern our relationship to artificial intelligence is honored within Integral Facticity not merely as a metaphysical assertion about the imago Dei (though it may also be that, for those who receive it theologically) but as a procedural commitment: systems must be worthy of persons, not persons worthy of systems.

Dallmayr’s integral pluralism — the hermeneutical encounter with the “other” that demands rigorous dialogue across traditions without syncretism or relativism — is built into this architecture through Haidt’s moral psychology (multiple irreducible moral foundations, each carrying genuine wisdom about social life) and through the post-metaphysical procedure that welcomes contributions from all contemplative traditions without requiring any tradition to abandon its deepest commitments or to impose its metaphysical claims on others as preconditions for dialogue.

And Armour and Trott’s Canadian “philosophic federalism” — the conviction that the many faces of reason can coexist and enrich one another without collapsing into a single system — finds its theoretical articulation in what I have been calling Integral Epistemological Pluralism: the meta-theoretical architecture that holds multiple irreducible ways of knowing in productive tension without forcing premature resolution. This is not eclecticism. It is the Canadian philosophical disposition raised to the level of explicit method.

This is an architecture within which McGrath’s Western contemplative tradition, the Buddhist contemplative traditions, the Jewish philosophical heritage, the Islamic mystical tradition, and secular humanism can each contribute their irreducible insights to a shared project of human flourishing.

VIII. The Road Within Facticity

McGrath found the road. That is not in dispute.

His testimony to the Western contemplative tradition as a living resource — not a museum piece, not an object of academic study, but a way of life capable of addressing the nihilism and false spirituality of consumerism — is among the most important contributions to this conversation in recent years. The Lost Road should be read by everyone working in the space between philosophy and theology, between the academy and the search for meaning, between the culture wars and the deeper questions they obscure.

But McGrath closes with theological hope — hope that has no limits, hope that “does not rely on the merely human.” This is where the new integral humanism both honors his achievement and goes further.

The road is real. The contemplative depth McGrath recovered is genuine. The Western mystical tradition carries resources for human transformation that no secular framework has replicated. Habermas was right to acknowledge this. And the Canadian philosophical tradition — from Watson’s early engagement with Schelling through Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust theology through McGrath’s recovery of the contemplative tradition — has been wrestling with these questions with a distinctive seriousness and a distinctive openness to synthesis that the new integral humanism both inherits and makes explicit.

But the road must be walkable together — across traditions, across moral divides, across the fractures the Peterson-Žižek debate exposed and the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue began to bridge. This requires architecture that McGrath’s testimony alone cannot provide. It requires post-metaphysical procedure that makes contemplative depth communicable without requiring metaphysical buy-in. It requires the moral-psychological breadth that Haidt’s research reveals is necessary and that Hayes’s work makes operationally possible. It requires the developmental sorting that can distinguish McGrath’s contemplative recovery from Peterson’s mythic regression — and can explain, with precision, why the difference matters. And it requires the recognition that the contemplative traditions carry a genuine science — reproducible practices producing verifiable results — that can be articulated in post-metaphysical terms without losing its transformative power.

Maritain laid the foundation. Dallmayr provided the pluralism. Habermas provided the procedure. Wilber provided the developmental architecture. Haidt provided the moral psychology. Hayes provided the functional praxis. McGrath recovered the contemplative depth. Francis and Leo XIV demonstrated the institutional expression. Armour, Trott, and Coward documented the Canadian conversation within which all of this work unfolds.

A new integral humanism holds all of this together — not as a closed system (Enactive Fallibilism prevents that), but as a living architecture within which the road can be walked. Together. One day at a time.

Further Reading from Integral Facticity

The arguments sketched in this essay are developed more fully in several previous essays available on my Substack:

“A Rosy Cross of a Book” — My review of Cadell Last’s Real Speculations, tracing the intellectual lineage from Michael Brooks through the Peterson-Žižek debate to the Philosophy Portal.

“Beyond the Master Signifier: Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility and Virtue Ethics” — The full Haidt-Habermas-Hayes synthesis, the Pre/Trans Fallacy, and the case for the ACT hexaflex as the psychological infrastructure for communicative action.

“Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem” — My intervention into the Shaul-Žižek-Johnston-Pippin debate, proposing IEP as the meta-theoretical architecture the Hegel-Lacan corridor lacks.

“The Return of God & Future of Integral Humanism” — My tribute to Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism and its structural upgrade of Maritain’s original project.

“Pope Francis’s Integral Vision & Legacy” — The Catholic anthropological turn from the Jersey exiles through Vatican II to Francis, and its resonance with integral humanism.

“When the Body Becomes the Laboratory” — IACT’s theoretical foundations, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, and the operationalization of a new integral humanism.

“Bridging Minds & Souls” — The integration of Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism into IACT’s practical framework.

“Towards an Integral Approach to Recovery & Beyond” — The 2-T’s, 3-A’s, and 4-I’s of the IACT program.

“Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” — Michael Brooks, the integral left, and the reconstruction of the public sphere.

“Engaging Jens Zimmermann’s Incarnational Humanism” — A dialogue between incarnational humanism and integral pluralism.

“Truth & Relevance: Revisiting the Charles Davis & Gregory Baum Debate” — The Canadian culmination of the Communio-Concilium crisis and its unresolved legacy.

Suggested Reading

Sean McGrath, The Lost Road (Christian Alternative, 2025)

Sean McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2012)

Sean McGrath, Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Catholic University of America Press, 2006)

Sean McGrath, The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007)

George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1965)

George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Anansi, 1969)

Charles Davis, A Question of Conscience (Hodder & Stoughton, 1967)

Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada 1850–1950 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981)

Harold Coward, Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014)

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2012)

B. Alan Wallace, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2009)

Gregory Baum, The Credibility of the Church Today: A Reply to Charles Davis (Herder and Herder, 1968)

Jens Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism: A Philosophy of Culture for the Church in the World (IVP Academic, 2012)

Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (Ignatius Press, 2006)

, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (Avery, 2019)

Ken Wilber, The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions (Shambhala, 2017)

Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

Sarah Shortall, Soldiers of God in a Secular World (Harvard University Press, 2021)

Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican, 2015)

Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (Vatican, 2009)

Matthew McManus, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

David Sloan Wilson, Paul Atkins, and Steven Hayes, Prosocial (Context Press, 2019)

Dylan Shaul, “From Nature to Spirit in Hegel’s Encyclopedia,” Crisis & Critique 12:1 (2026)

, Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Abstract

Dylan Shaul’s “From Nature to Spirit in Hegel’s Encyclopedia” offers one of the most lucid interventions in contemporary Hegel scholarship, reconstructing the debate between Pippin, Žižek, and Johnston and proposing the animal organism’s “undecidable decision” as the pivot of the Nature-Spirit transition. This essay argues that the entire debate — for all its brilliance — cannot deliver what it promises. It lacks a meta-theoretical architecture capable of holding the irreducible perspectives each thinker identifies, and it lacks a functional praxis capable of making the philosophical insight testable and reproduceable. I propose Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP) as the framework that transforms Žižek’s parallax gap from a tragic conclusion into a starting point, drawing on Wilber’s AQAL and Habermas’s post-metaphysical philosophy. Žižek’s absolute negativity is a genuine philosophical achievement — but it is an incomplete one, trapped in emptiness as lack, unable to reach the nondual ground where freedom and fullness are inseparable. This ground is available within the contemplative depths of traditions Žižek himself engages, including Christianity — yet his Lacanian commitments prevent him from arriving where the mystics and contemplatives do. Habermas offers the epistemological rigor Žižek lacks but has no access to this territory either. I then show that Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) provides the functional praxis the debate is missing, and propose Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT) — grounded in Enactive Fallibilism (Peirce + Varela) — as the framework that operationalizes IEP at the level of daily life.

Tags: Hegel, Žižek, Pippin, Johnston, Parallax Gap, AQAL, Integral Theory, Integral Facticity, Integral Epistemological Pluralism, Five Ranks, Genpo Roshi, Big Mind, ACT, Hexaflex, Psychological Flexibility, IACT, Prosocial, Habermas, Communicative Action, Enactive Fallibilism, Varela, Peirce, Wilber, Philosophy Portal

Dylan Shaul’s recent article “From Nature to Spirit in Hegel’s Encyclopedia: Sex, Death, and Quantum Physics” (Crisis & Critique, Vol. 12/1) is one of the most lucid interventions in contemporary Hegel scholarship I’ve encountered. I first came across Shaul’s work through his appearance on ’s podcast, and then had the opportunity to follow his month-long seminar at ’s Philosophy Portal, where his command of the Hegel-Lacan-Žižek terrain was immediately apparent. In the article under discussion, Shaul reconstructs the debate between Robert Pippin’s neo-pragmatic naturalism and Slavoj Žižek’s speculative materialism, adjudicates the internal dispute between Žižek and Adrian Johnston over whether quantum physics or neuroscience best accounts for the emergence of Spirit from Nature, and then offers his own compelling alternative: the transition happens through the animal organism’s “undecidable decision” (Entschluss) to break with the deadlock between sex and death and become human — become Spirit.

It is a genuinely illuminating reading of Hegel. And it is, I will argue, almost perfect. What it lacks — what the entire conversation lacks — is both a meta-theoretical architecture capable of holding what all these thinkers are reaching for, and a functional praxis that makes the philosophical insight testable and truly post-metaphysical.

The core philosophical proposal of this essay is what I am calling Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP): the recognition that multiple irreducible ways of knowing — phenomenological, empirical, hermeneutic, systemic, contemplative — each possess their own validity conditions that cannot be collapsed into one another, and that navigating across these irreducible epistemologies is not a theoretical synthesis but an embodied praxis. IEP is what Žižek’s parallax gap becomes when you stop treating irreducibility as a tragic ontological conclusion and start treating it as an epistemological starting point. It is what Wilber’s quadrants and methodological zones become when read through Habermas’s facticity and fallibilism: not a God’s-eye map of everything, but a provisional, revisable framework for moving across genuinely plural ways of knowing without collapsing them into one.

I want to show that Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT) operationalizes IEP at the level of daily praxis, and that the resources for this have been available for decades in the work of Ken Wilber and Jürgen Habermas, supplemented by the contextual-functional psychology of Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) as developed by Steven Hayes and extended to group-level processes through Prosocial (Atkins, Wilson, and Hayes 2019).

I. The Terrain: What Each Position Gets Right

Before arguing that the Nature-Spirit debate requires resources none of its current participants possess, I want to take seriously what each position has achieved. These are not confused thinkers flailing in the dark. They are among the most sophisticated philosophers working today, and the problems they are wrestling with are real. Any framework that claims to complete their work must first demonstrate that it understands it.

Pippin: The Irreducibility of Reasons

Pippin’s neo-pragmatic naturalism makes a genuinely important move. By distinguishing the space of causes from the space of reasons — borrowing from Sellars — Pippin identifies something that any adequate account of the Nature-Spirit transition must preserve: the explanatory irreducibility of normative self-consciousness. When a human being acts for reasons, the explanation of that action cannot be reduced to prior physical causes without losing precisely what makes it a reasoned action. You can give a complete neurological account of what happens in someone’s brain when they decide to keep a promise, and you will have explained nothing about why they kept the promise — the normative commitment, the social expectation, the self-understanding that makes promise-keeping intelligible as a human act.

This is not a trivial insight, and Pippin is right that Hegel shares it. The domain of Spirit — culture, law, art, religion, philosophy, mutual recognition — operates with its own logic that cannot be derived from biology. Pippin is also right that this does not require positing any supernatural entities. Humans are animals who developed certain capacities; the space of reasons is a real domain opened up by those capacities; and philosophy’s task is to understand the normative structure of that domain, not to speculate about the cosmic conditions of its emergence.

Where Pippin falls short — and where Žižek’s critique is justified — is in his refusal to ask how the space of reasons emerged from the space of causes. Pippin treats this as a non-philosophical question, to be answered someday by evolutionary biology and neuroscience. But as Žižek observes, this concession contains an “obscene secret”: if the space of reasons can in principle be fully explained by natural-scientific causes, then its irreducibility is merely provisional — an artifact of our current ignorance rather than an ontological feature of reality. Pippin wants the irreducibility of Spirit without paying the metaphysical price for it. That is an unstable position.

What Pippin preserves that must not be lost: the genuine irreducibility of normative, reason-giving activity to causal explanation. Any framework that collapses this distinction — whether through reductive neuroscience or through a speculative metaphysics that makes Spirit merely a moment in the Idea’s self-development — fails to account for what is distinctively human about human existence.

Žižek: The Ontological Break

Žižek’s speculative materialism addresses precisely the gap Pippin leaves open. If Spirit is genuinely irreducible to Nature, then there must be something about the structure of reality itself that makes this irreducibility possible. Žižek’s answer — drawing on Lacan’s notion of the “non-All” (pas-toute) — is that Nature is constitutively incomplete. Reality does not form a seamless, fully determined whole. There are gaps, inconsistencies, points of ontological indeterminacy that cannot be resolved by adding more information. Subjectivity — Spirit — just is the living manifestation of this incompleteness. The subject is not something added to substance from outside; it is the point where substance fails to coincide with itself.

This is a profound philosophical claim, and it captures something that both Pippin’s deflationary naturalism and traditional metaphysical readings of Hegel miss: the transition from Nature to Spirit involves a genuine break, not a smooth evolutionary gradient. Something happens in that transition that cannot be explained by what came before it. Spirit retroactively constitutes its own conditions of emergence — it is, as Hegel says, what it makes itself to be. Žižek is right that any account which smooths over this break, whether through gradual evolution (Pippin) or through continuous biological emergence (Johnston, at least on Žižek’s reading), risks reducing Spirit back to Nature.

Žižek is also right — and this point is often underappreciated — that this ontological incompleteness has political implications. If reality were fully determined, there would be no room for genuinely transformative political action. Revolution would be impossible; at best we could rearrange existing elements. The “gap” in substance is what makes it possible for subjects to intervene in their world in ways that are not determined by prior conditions. The abyssal act — the groundless decision to create a new form of life — depends on this ontological structure.

Where Žižek falls short is in two related ways. First, his privileging of quantum physics as the paradigmatic illustration of Nature’s incompleteness places the ontological ground of subjectivity at the furthest remove from the actual site of the Nature-Spirit transition. As Johnston points out, quantum mechanics belongs to the earliest, most rudimentary levels of Nature in Hegel’s system — Mechanics or at most Physics — whereas the transition to Spirit happens through the most advanced form of Nature, the animal organism. Quantum indeterminacy may be a necessary condition for the possibility of freedom, but it is not a sufficient account of how Spirit actually emerges from organisms embedded in biological and social worlds. Second, Žižek’s emphasis on the “abyssal” character of the transition — ex nihilo, miraculous, without natural preconditions — leaves him without any account of how organisms actually make the transition. The abyssal act is theoretically dramatic but practically empty. It tells you that a genuine break must occur; it cannot tell you what anyone should do.

What Žižek preserves that must not be lost: the insistence on a genuine ontological break between Nature and Spirit, the recognition that reality is constitutively incomplete, and the political stakes of maintaining this break against both naturalist reductionism and idealist closure.

Johnston: The Embodied Subject

Johnston’s intervention is the most underappreciated of the three, and in some ways the most convergent with the framework I will propose. Johnston shares Žižek’s commitment to speculative materialism and to the Hegel-Lacan synthesis, but he insists that the emergence of Spirit from Nature must be grounded in the concrete biology of the animal organism — specifically, in the self-organizing, self-modifying feedback structures of the human brain and nervous system.

Johnston’s appeal to “strong emergentism” captures a genuine philosophical insight. Emergent properties are real: the wetness of water cannot be found in individual H₂O molecules; the purposive behavior of organisms cannot be derived from the chemistry of their constituent molecules; and the normative self-consciousness of human beings cannot be reduced to the firing of individual neurons. At each level of complexity, genuinely novel properties arise that are irreducible to their lower-level constituents, even though they depend on those constituents for their material realization. Johnston argues that this is how Hegel himself thinks about the transition: Spirit is a genuinely novel emergent property of sufficiently complex biological organization, not a descent from the Absolute Idea.

More importantly for my purposes, Johnston has increasingly drawn on 4E cognitive science — the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended framework — to ground his account of the subject. This is where Johnston converges most significantly with the enactivist tradition of Francisco Varela. For Varela, cognition is not computation performed on internal representations; it is the organism’s active, embodied engagement with its environment, through which both organism and environment are mutually constituted. The subject does not emerge from a gap in Being; it emerges from the organism’s structural coupling with its world — a coupling that is always already embodied, always already embedded in an environment, always already enacted through perception and action, and always already extended through tools, language, and social practices.

Johnston is right to push Žižek toward this territory. The 4E framework provides what quantum physics cannot: a concrete, empirically grounded account of how organisms actually develop the capacities that constitute subjectivity. Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to reshape itself through experience — gives a non-reductive materialist account of how biological structures can give rise to genuinely novel capacities without those capacities being determined in advance by their biological substrate.

Where Johnston falls short — and where Žižek’s caution is warranted — is in the risk of making the transition from Nature to Spirit too continuous. If Spirit is “just” an emergent property of sufficiently complex neural organization, then the break between Nature and Spirit is a matter of degree rather than kind. Johnston insists this is not the case — strong emergence preserves genuine novelty — but the explanatory weight of his account falls on biological processes that are themselves natural. The danger is a sophisticated naturalism that, for all its talk of emergence, still locates Spirit within Nature rather than recognizing that Spirit constitutes a genuinely new domain.

What Johnston preserves that must not be lost: the insistence that any account of the Nature-Spirit transition must pass through the actual biology of the living organism, the convergence with 4E cognitive science and enactivism, and the recognition that subjectivity is embodied, not merely logical or speculative.

Shaul: The Undecidable Decision

Shaul’s contribution is to show that none of these three positions — Pippin’s deflationary naturalism, Žižek’s quantum-ontological speculation, Johnston’s neuroscientific emergentism — tracks what Hegel himself actually argues at the end of the Philosophy of Nature. The transition from Nature to Spirit happens through the animal organism’s encounter with the deadlock between the sex-drive and the death-drive.

The sex-drive impels the organism to externalize itself into another — but the other is simply another animal, and the same process repeats. The death-drive impels the organism to negate its own life — but this simply destroys the organism, and no exit is achieved. The two drives are locked in what Hegel calls the “bad infinite” (schlechte Unendlichkeit): the endless alternation of birth and death, generation after generation, going nowhere. Neither drive can resolve the deadlock on its own. Nature is trapped within its own circle.

Shaul’s key move is to read the transition from Nature to Spirit on analogy with the prior transition from Logic to Nature, drawing on the work of Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda on the role of “decision” (Entschluss) in Hegel. Just as the Absolute Idea, trapped within the closed circle of pure thinking, makes an undecidable decision to release itself into the externality of space and time, so too the animal organism, trapped within the closed circle of natural repetition, makes an undecidable decision to break with Nature and become Spirit. This decision is “undecidable” in the precise sense that no established rules, norms, or prior determinations can dictate it — it is genuinely free, genuinely novel, and genuinely transformative.

This is a powerful reading, and it corrects Žižek’s tendency to bypass the biological specificity of the transition in favor of quantum-cosmological speculation. Shaul shows that you do not need to go below Nature (to quantum physics) or around Nature (to the brain alone) to account for Spirit’s emergence. You need to attend to what Hegel says happens at the end of Nature: the organism encounters a deadlock from which it cannot escape through natural means, and it decides — abyssally, undecidably — to become something more.

What Shaul preserves that must not be lost: fidelity to Hegel’s own text, the structural analogy between the Logic-Nature and Nature-Spirit transitions, and the concept of the undecidable decision as the pivot point of the transition.

I affirm all four of these achievements. Any framework that claims to go beyond them must incorporate what each gets right: Pippin’s irreducibility of reasons, Žižek’s ontological break and its political stakes, Johnston’s embodied and enacted subject, and Shaul’s undecidable decision grounded in the organism’s encounter with deadlock. The question is whether there is a framework that can hold all four without the limitations each carries on its own.

II. The Regression Problem: Post-Metaphysical Claims, Pre-Metaphysical Moves

I have argued that each position achieves something genuine. But each also carries a limitation that, I want to suggest, stems from the same structural source: the absence of both a meta-theoretical architecture adequate to the complexity of what is being described, and a functional praxis capable of operationalizing the philosophical insight. Before introducing that architecture and praxis, however, I need to identify the specific way in which Shaul’s reading — for all its virtues — risks undermining its own post-metaphysical aspirations.

The problem is not unique to Shaul. It runs through the entire speculative materialist tradition, and it takes a specific form: the attribution of subjective agency to trans-subjective principles.

Shaul’s argument, having redirected the debate away from Žižek’s quantum metaphysics and Johnston’s neuroscientific emergentism, nevertheless re-introduces a robustly metaphysical architecture through his reading of the Encyclopedia system. The Absolute Idea “decides” to release itself into Nature. Nature’s “goal” is to destroy itself like a phoenix. The Idea is “driven toward novelty” for the sake of “enjoyment” (Genuß/jouissance). The whole circular self-movement of Logic-Nature-Spirit culminates in the Absolute Idea “enjoying itself as Absolute Spirit.” The entire trajectory from Logic through Nature to Spirit — and back again — is narrated as the Idea’s own self-movement, self-alienation, and self-recovery.

Now, one might object that this is simply Hegel’s own language, and that Shaul is faithfully reconstructing Hegel’s position rather than endorsing it uncritically. Fair enough. But Shaul does endorse it. He argues that this reading is superior to both Pippin’s deflationary naturalism and Žižek’s quantum-ontological speculation. He takes the Absolute Idea’s “drive toward novelty” and “enjoyment” as genuine philosophical explanations, not merely as Hegel’s idiosyncratic vocabulary for something that could be cashed out in more modest terms. And he concludes by comparing the animal’s undecidable decision to Žižek’s “abyssal act” as “both the groundless ground of the material world, and as the political creation of a new form of life” — language that presupposes the very metaphysical architecture it claims to be working within.

This matters because it affects what the framework can actually do. If the Absolute Idea is the true agent of the Nature-Spirit transition — if the organism’s “decision” is really the Idea’s own self-movement working itself out through the organism — then the individual organism is not the genuine site of agency. It is a vehicle for something larger. The undecidable decision turns out to be decided after all, by the Idea’s own immanent logic. And the political implications follow: genuine transformation is not something agents achieve through praxis and coordination, but something that happens to agents when the Idea reaches the appropriate point in its self-development.

Habermas identified this problem decades ago in his critique of the philosophy of the subject — from Hegel through Heidegger. Any framework which grounds intersubjectivity in a single macro-subject (Spirit, Dasein, absolute negativity) inevitably collapses the plurality of validity claims into a monological structure. The diversity of perspectives — objective truth, normative rightness, subjective authenticity — is subsumed under one master logic. Communicative action theory replaces the philosophy of the subject with the intersubjective coordination of these three validity claims, each of which is irreducible to the others and each of which can be challenged, revised, or redeemed through ongoing discourse. This is genuinely post-metaphysical because it is procedural and fallibilist: no cosmic Idea underwrites the process.

But I want to be precise about the nature of the regression, because it is not a simple error. Shaul, Žižek, and Johnston are all trying to preserve something that Pippin’s deflationary naturalism sacrifices: the ontological significance of the Nature-Spirit transition. They are right that something real happens when organisms become subjects — something that cannot be captured by saying “well, these particular animals happened to develop certain reasoning capacities.” The question is whether preserving ontological significance requires re-introducing a cosmic subject — the Absolute Idea — as the hidden agent of the transition. I will argue that it does not. What it requires is an architecture that can hold ontological depth without ontological agency — that can affirm the reality and irreducibility of Spirit without attributing Spirit’s emergence to a purposive Idea driving the process from behind.

Žižek himself senses this problem when he insists on “materialism without matter” and on the Lacanian dictum that “the big Other does not exist.” His entire project can be read as an attempt to preserve ontological depth (absolute negativity, the gap in Being, the constitutive incompleteness of substance) while refusing any positive metaphysical principle that would serve as the ground or guarantor of the process. But the tension between this refusal and his actual philosophical praxis — in which absolute negativity functions as precisely such a ground — is one that he has never fully resolved. Shaul inherits this tension and, by returning to the Encyclopedia system with its circular self-movement of the Idea, makes it more rather than less acute.

The resources for resolving this tension, I will now argue, lie outside the Hegel-Lacan corridor entirely.

III. The Deadlock in Praxis: ACT and the Bad Infinite

Before turning to the meta-theoretical resources I believe are needed, I want to pause on the structural parallel between Shaul’s philosophical argument and a finding in contemporary clinical psychology that none of the participants in this debate appear to know about.

In Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT), the therapeutic process often begins with what is called “creative hopelessness” — the moment where the client recognizes that their existing strategies for escaping suffering are themselves perpetuating the suffering. The person caught in addiction discovers that every strategy of avoidance (substance use, isolation, rigid self-narratives) temporarily relieves the pain but deepens the deadlock. The person fused with anxious thoughts discovers that every attempt to suppress or control the thoughts amplifies them. The depressed person discovers that withdrawal from valued activity, meant to conserve depleted energy, produces the very depletion it was meant to address. The strategies are locked in a “bad infinite” — an endless repetition that goes nowhere.

This is structurally identical to what Shaul describes as the animal organism’s encounter with the sex-death deadlock. The sex-drive and the death-drive are mutually requiring and mutually contradicting: each needs the other and each undermines the other, and their alternation produces an indefinite sequence of finite generations without transformation. No exit is available within the terms of the deadlock itself.

The “undecidable decision” in ACT — and this is the crucial point — is the pivot toward psychological flexibility: the choice to stop struggling against experience and instead turn toward valued living. This choice cannot be derived from the prior pattern. It is not a logical consequence of the deadlock. It is genuinely novel, in the precise sense that Shaul means when he says the animal’s decision to become Spirit cannot be determined by any prior natural conditions. And yet — and this is what distinguishes the ACT framework from the Hegel-Lacan tradition — this decision is not miraculous, not abyssal, not ex nihilo. It is enacted. It is cultivated through specific processes (defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, present moment contact, values clarification, committed action). It is repeatable. And it is empirically studied across thousands of clinical trials and process-based intervention studies.

The existence of this parallel suggests that the Nature-Spirit problem is not merely a historical curiosity in Hegel scholarship. It is a live question with practical stakes: How do organisms trapped in self-perpetuating deadlocks break free? And the answer being developed in contextual behavioral science — an answer grounded in empirical research rather than speculative metaphysics — points toward resources that the philosophical debate has not yet considered.

IV. From the Parallax Gap to Integral Epistemological Pluralism

Here is the deeper problem. Žižek, Johnston, and Shaul are all working within the Hegel-Lacan corridor — a brilliant but structurally limited intellectual tradition that operates primarily in what Ken Wilber’s integral theory identifies as the Upper-Left quadrant: the interior of the individual subject. Subjectivity, the gap, absolute negativity, the death-drive, the undecidable decision — these are all descriptions of first-person interior experience, even when they claim ontological or cosmological reach.

Wilber’s AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) framework maps four irreducible dimensions of any phenomenon: interior-individual (Upper Left: subjective experience), exterior-individual (Upper Right: observable behavior and biology), interior-collective (Lower Left: shared meaning, culture, intersubjectivity), and exterior-collective (Lower Right: systems, institutions, social structures). Each quadrant has its own irreducible methodologies — phenomenology, empiricism, hermeneutics, systems theory — that cannot be collapsed into one another.

Žižek’s Parallax View is, I want to suggest, an attempt to get at precisely this insight. The “parallax gap” — “a confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible” — describes exactly the irreducibility of perspectives across quadrants. Quantum physics and subjective experience cannot be synthesized into a single view. Neuroscience and psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to one another. Political economy and phenomenology operate with incommensurable logics. Žižek sees all of this clearly.

What he cannot do, given his Lacanian commitments, is hold these perspectives together in a coherent architecture. For Lacan, the big Other does not exist — there is no meta-position from which the whole can be surveyed. Any claim to such a position is imaginary, a fantasy of wholeness. So the parallax gap remains a gap — an irreducible ontological fissure that the subject must endlessly traverse without resolution. The irreducibility of perspectives is treated as a final conclusion, the last word on the structure of reality. There is nowhere to go from here except to repeat the traversal, each time with greater theoretical sophistication. This is the bad infinite at the meta-theoretical level.

Integral Epistemological Pluralism offers a fundamentally different response to the same recognition of irreducibility. IEP agrees with Žižek that no neutral common ground is possible — that the methodologies proper to each quadrant cannot be synthesized into a single meta-methodology, and that any claim to have achieved such a synthesis is indeed a fantasy. But IEP draws a different conclusion. The absence of neutral common ground does not entail that the irreducible perspectives cannot be navigated. A living human being participates in all four quadrants simultaneously. You are always already a subject with interior experience (UL), an organism with measurable biology (UR), a participant in shared cultural meaning (LL), and embedded in institutional and systemic structures (LR). The question is not whether these can be theoretically unified — they cannot — but whether the organism can develop the practical capacity to move across them without collapsing any into the others.

This is what distinguishes IEP from both the parallax gap and from a naive integral synthesis. Žižek says: the perspectives are irreducible, and no meta-position is possible, so the gap is ontologically final. A naive reading of Wilber might say: the quadrants provide the meta-position that integrates everything. IEP says neither. It says: the perspectives are genuinely irreducible (Žižek is right about that), AND they can be held together in praxis by an organism that has developed the flexibility to operate across multiple epistemological domains without requiring a theoretical resolution of their differences. The meta-position is not a view from nowhere — it is the developed capacity to move between views, to hold multiple ways of knowing simultaneously, and to recognize when one is being collapsed into another.

Wilber’s eight methodological zones (inside and outside perspectives on each quadrant) provide the architecture for this pluralism. Each zone has its own validity conditions — its own criteria for what counts as a good claim within that domain. First-person phenomenology has different validity conditions than third-person neuroscience, which has different validity conditions than second-person hermeneutics, which has different validity conditions than systems-theoretic analysis. IEP insists that all of these are genuine ways of knowing, that none reduces to any other, and that the integral practitioner navigates across them through developed capacity — not through theoretical fiat.

When this architecture is read through Habermas’s fallibilism — when every claim within every zone is understood as provisional, revisable, and redeemable only through intersubjective discourse — you get a framework that is genuinely post-metaphysical in a way that neither Žižek’s speculative materialism nor a dogmatic integralism achieves. The quadrants are not a map of the Absolute. They are a provisional, fallible, revisable framework for navigating epistemological plurality. And the Hexaflex, as I will argue in Section VI, is the functional praxis that makes this navigation possible at the level of daily life.

V. Freedom and Fullness: The Missing Distinction

There is a still deeper issue that the entire Žižek-Johnston-Shaul conversation cannot address, because their shared Hegelian framework lacks the conceptual resources to formulate it.

All three thinkers operate with a developmental logic of increasing complexity. Spirit becomes progressively more differentiated, more inclusive, more self-aware. In Wilber’s terms, this is the trajectory of fullness — the movement he calls “Growing Up” or process of adult development. Things get fuller: more perspectives, more complexity, more integration. Hegel’s Encyclopedia system is the paradigmatic expression of this trajectory: from the abstract poverty of pure Being to the concrete richness of Absolute Spirit.

But Wilber’s framework also includes a fundamentally different trajectory: freedom — the movement he calls “Waking Up.” Freedom is not greater complexity or more inclusive perspective-taking. It is the recognition that awareness itself was never bound. The nondual witness — self-as-context in ACT’s vocabulary — is not a higher level of development achieved through greater sophistication. It is the discovery that the space within which all development occurs is itself already free, already complete, already what the traditions variously call Big Mind, Rigpa, the Absolute.

Žižek gets close to this with absolute negativity. The void, the gap, the “less than nothing” — these point toward a dimension that precedes and exceeds all determinate content. But Žižek can only think this negatively: freedom from determination, the barred subject, constitutive incompleteness. Wilber’s nondual includes the negative moment but goes further: freedom as the nature of awareness itself, which is simultaneously empty (freedom) and luminous (fullness). The two are not opposed; they are the same reality apprehended from different angles. Žižek has arrived at a genuine realization — but he has mistaken one moment in a longer journey for the destination.

This is where the complementarity of Wilber and Habermas becomes decisive, and where their combined contribution to the Nature-Spirit problem needs to be made explicit — because they are not doing the same thing, and neither alone is sufficient.

Habermas brings facticity, post-metaphysical epistemology, and a genuine developmental account. To be precise: Habermas is not without a theory of development. His work on communicative competence, his appropriation of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, and his account of the rationalization of lifeworlds all constitute a serious developmental framework — one that tracks how subjects grow in their capacity to make, challenge, and redeem validity claims across domains. This is Growing Up in Wilber’s terminology, and Habermas does it with epistemological rigor that Wilber sometimes lacks. His insistence that all validity claims — truth, rightness, authenticity — are fallible, revisable, and redeemable only through intersubjective discourse is what makes his framework genuinely post-metaphysical. There is no standpoint outside communicative action from which the whole can be surveyed and guaranteed. No cosmic idea underwrites the process. Every claim must be redeemable; every framework is provisional; facticity is the irreducible horizon within which all discourse operates.

Where Habermas falls short is not in development as such but in two specific trajectories. First, Cleaning Up: Habermas engages with psychoanalysis — his early work in Knowledge and Human Interests draws on Freud’s model of self-reflection as emancipation — but he never develops this into the kind of sustained depth-psychological account that Lacan provides or that Wilber’s Cleaning Up trajectory demands. The shadow, the unconscious structuring of discourse by repressed material, the ways in which communicative competence can be systematically distorted by unintegrated psychological content — Habermas acknowledges these in principle but does not give them the sustained attention they require. Žižek, whatever his other limitations, takes the unconscious far more seriously as a structuring force in both individual and collective life. This is Lacan’s genuine contribution, and it operates precisely in the territory that Habermas’s procedural rationality cannot adequately map.

Second, and more critically: Waking Up. Habermas has no account whatsoever of contemplative experience as a distinct domain of human development. His procedural rationality operates entirely within the horizon of discursive reason — the making and redeeming of claims through intersubjective communication. The direct experiential recognition, available through contemplative praxis, that awareness itself is not bound by any particular content — that the subject who makes validity claims is itself grounded in a prior openness that discourse presupposes but cannot thematize — falls entirely outside his framework. Habermas tracks how claims are made and redeemed in discourse; he does not track the transformation of the subject who is making the claims. His framework is rigorous but flat on this axis.

Žižek shares this limitation, though he approaches it from a different and more provocative angle. His absolute negativity points toward emptiness — the constitutive incompleteness of substance, the void at the heart of subjectivity. This is a genuine philosophical achievement, and it converges with the contemplative traditions’ recognition that awareness is fundamentally empty of fixed content. But Žižek can only think emptiness as lack — as the barred subject, the gap, the traumatic kernel that can never be integrated. He cannot think emptiness as simultaneously luminous, as the open ground from which all experience arises.

What makes this limitation especially striking is that Žižek himself repeatedly engages with a tradition that carries exactly this nondual recognition: Christianity. His readings of Paul, his appropriation of Chesterton’s paradoxes, his “Christian atheism” in which God dies on the cross and the Holy Spirit emerges as the community of believers — all of this flirts with the contemplative depths of the Christian tradition without ever arriving there. Žižek reads the crucifixion as the moment when the big Other itself is revealed as non-existent — God dies, and what remains is the gap, absolute negativity, the community constituted around a shared lack. This is a brilliant philosophical reading. It is also, from the perspective of the Christian contemplative tradition, profoundly incomplete. The mystics — Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing — did not stop at the void. They passed through it into what Eckhart called the “desert of the Godhead” (Wüste der Gottheit): an emptiness that is simultaneously the ground of all being, the luminous darkness from which all form arises. Žižek reaches for the kenotic moment — God’s self-emptying — but cannot think what the tradition itself discovered on the other side of that emptying: not nothing, but a fullness indistinguishable from freedom.

The same pattern holds across traditions. Žižek engages Buddhism only to critique it as a fantasy of wholeness — and he is right that certain popular presentations of Buddhism do function this way. But the Zen tradition’s rigorous engagement with emptiness — particularly in the kōan tradition and in Tōzan’s Five Ranks — is anything but a fantasy of wholeness. It is a disciplined, enacted confrontation with the void that arrives, through sustained practice, at the recognition that emptiness and form are not opposed. Žižek’s critique of Buddhism applies to the Buddhism he has read; it does not apply to the Buddhism that is practiced. Neither Žižek nor Habermas has access to the nondual realization that freedom and fullness, emptiness and luminosity, are not opposed — a recognition that is not a theoretical proposition but an enacted discovery available only through sustained contemplative praxis, within any tradition that carries the Waking Up function.

Wilber brings the developmental architecture and, crucially, Waking Up. His AQAL framework (articulated most fully in Integral Spirituality, 2006) maps not only the four quadrants (which provide the meta-theoretical architecture the Hegel-Lacan corridor lacks) but also the multiple trajectories of human development: Growing Up (increasing cognitive, moral, and perspectival complexity — the trajectory Habermas maps with genuine rigor), Cleaning Up (integrating shadow material — the domain where Lacan and psychoanalysis make their genuine contribution, and where Habermas’s engagement remains underdeveloped), Showing Up (embodied engagement with the world — the domain where Varela’s enactivism and Johnston’s 4E cognitive science are most relevant), and Waking Up (the recognition of nondual awareness, the freedom dimension that neither Žižek nor Habermas can access).

Waking Up is the decisive addition. Without it, all you have is fullness — increasing complexity, more perspectives, more integration, more development. That is genuinely important; Growing Up is real and it matters. But fullness without freedom is the bad infinite at the theoretical level: ever-more-sophisticated accounts of the gap, ever-more-nuanced diagnoses of the deadlock, ever-more-complex systems of thought — without transformation. The Hegel-Lacan tradition has been producing increasingly elaborate theoretical machinery for decades, and none of it has resolved the problems it diagnoses. This is not because the thinkers are insufficiently brilliant. It is because they are operating with only one trajectory — fullness — and mistaking it for the whole.

Waking Up is not another level of fullness. It is a fundamentally different kind of recognition: that the awareness within which all development occurs — all the growing up, cleaning up, showing up — was never itself developed, never itself bound, never itself in need of liberation. Self-as-context in ACT’s vocabulary points toward this directly: you are not your thoughts, not your feelings, not your stories, not your drives. You are the context within which all of these arise and pass away. This is not a metaphysical claim about a cosmic Absolute. It is a phenomenological finding — reproducible across traditions, testable through sustained contemplative praxis, and transferable to anyone willing to engage the practice. It does not require allegiance to any particular metaphysical system. It requires only that the practitioner show up and observe. This is what makes it genuinely post-metaphysical: it generates knowledge through enacted experience, not through dogmatic commitment to a speculative architecture. And it is precisely what Žižek’s absolute negativity reaches toward but cannot grasp — because Žižek’s Lacanian commitments allow him to think the void only as lack, never as the luminous openness that contemplative praxis, across every tradition that carries the Waking Up function, consistently discovers on the other side of that lack.

The Five Ranks: What the Nondual Actually Looks Like

But what does this trajectory actually look like from the inside? If freedom and fullness are genuinely distinct and yet ultimately nondual, how does the practitioner move from recognizing their difference to realizing their identity — without collapsing one into the other?

The contemplative traditions have mapped this with extraordinary precision. The most rigorous cartography is Tōzan Ryōkai’s Five Ranks (Go-i), the ninth-century Sōtō Zen teaching that traces the practitioner’s evolving relationship between the Absolute (emptiness, freedom, the Real) and the Relative (form, fullness, the Apparent). Wilber draws on Tōzan explicitly in Integral Spirituality, and Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind process — a contemporary adaptation of this teaching — makes the Five Ranks experientially accessible without requiring decades of formal Zen training. What follows is not a historical survey but a philosophical explication of why the Five Ranks matter for the Nature-Spirit problem — and why neither Žižek nor Habermas can access what they describe.

Rank One: The Apparent within the Real (Shō chū hen). The practitioner glimpses that all phenomena — thoughts, drives, deadlocks, the entire domain of fullness — arise within a prior openness that is not itself a phenomenon. Form is seen from the side of emptiness. The world does not disappear, but it is recognized as appearing within a boundless awareness that cannot be reduced to any of its contents. In ACT terms, this is the initial recognition of self-as-context: the discovery that you are not your thoughts. In the Nature-Spirit context, this is the moment the organism first steps back from the sex-death deadlock and recognizes that it is not identical with its drives. Žižek’s absolute negativity points toward this rank — the recognition that subjectivity is not reducible to substance. But Žižek treats this recognition as the whole story.

Rank Two: The Real within the Apparent (Hen chū shō). The practitioner discovers that the Absolute is not elsewhere — not above, behind, or beyond the phenomenal world. Freedom is found within fullness. Emptiness is discovered within form. The ordinary world — this body, this breath, this conversation, this deadlock — is itself the site of the Absolute. Nothing needs to be transcended. In ACT terms, this is present moment contact deepened to the point where attention to what is actually happening becomes itself a contemplative act. What was “mere” experience becomes luminous without ceasing to be ordinary. Habermas’s lifeworld — the pre-theoretical horizon of shared meaning within which all discourse operates — is, from this rank, already the Absolute operating in the register of the everyday. But Habermas cannot see this, because his framework has no contemplative dimension through which the lifeworld could be recognized as sacred.

Rank Three: Coming from within the Real (Shō chū rai). Freedom stands alone. Pure emptiness, pure witness, the Absolute without content. This is the most dangerous rank, because it is genuinely profound and genuinely incomplete. The practitioner may experience boundless awareness, the dissolution of the separate self, the void that precedes all phenomena. In ACT terms, this is self-as-context apprehended as pure context — awareness without any particular content to be aware of. This is precisely where Žižek lives philosophically: absolute negativity, the barred subject, “less than nothing,” the constitutive incompleteness of substance. It is a real realization, not an error. But it is Rank Three of Five. To mistake it for the final word — as Žižek does — is to remain trapped in freedom without fullness, emptiness without luminosity, the Absolute without the Relative. The bad infinite reappears at the contemplative level: the endless traversal of the void without return to the world.

Rank Four: Arrival at Mutual Integration (Hen chū shi). Freedom and fullness begin to interpenetrate. The practitioner no longer oscillates between emptiness and form, between the witness and the world. The Absolute is recognized as the Relative — not “in” it, not “behind” it, but as its very nature. And the Relative is recognized as the Absolute — not a fallen version of it, not a veil to be pierced, but the Absolute appearing as form. In ACT terms, this is where defusion and acceptance cease to be techniques applied to experience and become the texture of experience itself. The Hexaflex processes are no longer strategies for managing suffering; they are the organism’s natural way of being when psychological flexibility has stabilized into a trait rather than a state. Neither Žižek nor Habermas can reach this rank: Žižek because his Lacanian commitments prevent him from recognizing luminosity within the void, Habermas because his procedural rationality has no phenomenological access to the interpenetration of freedom and form.

Rank Five: Unity Attained (Ken chū tō). Freedom IS fullness. Fullness IS freedom. Not a synthesis that resolves the tension between them — not a higher-order integration that subsumes both into a third term — but the lived realization that there was never a gap. The ordinary becomes extraordinary without ceasing to be ordinary. Chopping wood, carrying water. Caring for one’s father. Writing an essay. Making the bed. The Absolute is not somewhere else. It is this — precisely this, exactly as it is. In Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind vocabulary, this is the integrated free-functioning human being who moves through the world without fixation on either emptiness or form. In ACT terms, this is psychological flexibility fully enacted: the organism navigating its facticity with values-directed committed action, not from a position of transcendence but from within the lived reality of its own situation.

The critical philosophical point — and this is what makes the Five Ranks indispensable for the Nature-Spirit debate — is that you cannot skip to Rank Five. The differentiation of freedom and fullness (Ranks One through Three) must be genuinely accomplished before their integration (Ranks Four and Five) is authentic rather than premature. A “unity” that has not passed through the differentiation is mere confusion — the pre-differentiated state that Wilber calls “pre/trans fallacy,” where prerational fusion with experience is mistaken for transrational nondual realization. Žižek, for all his limitations, has genuinely accomplished Rank Three. His absolute negativity is not a confusion; it is a real philosophical achievement. But it is incomplete. And its incompleteness explains why his framework can diagnose the deadlock but cannot resolve it — why the parallax gap remains a gap rather than opening into the mutual integration of Rank Four and the enacted unity of Rank Five.

The Five Ranks also illuminate why IEP is necessary. Each rank represents a different epistemological relationship between freedom and fullness, between the Absolute and the Relative. The practitioner does not comprehend the ranks theoretically and then apply them. The practitioner moves through them enactively — each rank is a lived realization, not a propositional truth. And different contemplative traditions map the same territory with different cartographies: Tōzan’s Five Ranks in Zen, the Four Yogas in Dzogchen, the stages of Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle in Christian mysticism, the maqāmāt in Sufi practice. IEP holds all of these as genuine but irreducible ways of knowing the same nondual reality — honoring each tradition’s validity conditions while refusing to absolutize any single cartography. Even the Five Ranks themselves are held fallibilistically within the IACT framework: a powerful map, not the territory.

Together, Habermas and Wilber provide what neither provides alone — and what the Five Ranks make concrete. Habermas provides the post-metaphysical epistemological discipline: fallibilism, procedural rationality, the refusal of any ultimate ground. He also provides a genuine developmental account of Growing Up — the trajectory of communicative competence and moral reasoning — that is more epistemologically rigorous than anything in either Žižek or Wilber. But Habermas lacks the depth-psychological seriousness of Cleaning Up and has no access whatsoever to the Waking Up trajectory that the Five Ranks describe. Wilber provides the developmental and experiential architecture: the quadrants, the multiple trajectories of growth, and above all the freedom dimension of Waking Up — including the nondual realization that freedom and fullness, once properly differentiated, reveal themselves as inseparable. But Wilber without Habermas risks the very metaphysical inflation that Shaul’s article exemplifies — the temptation to treat the integral map as itself the Absolute rather than as a provisional, revisable, fallible framework operating within facticity. Habermas without Wilber is rigorous but flat. Wilber without Habermas is deep but potentially dogmatic. Together, they provide the architecture for a genuinely post-metaphysical engagement with the nondual.

IACT holds them together — and Integral Epistemological Pluralism names the epistemological structure of this holding. Integral Facticity — the grounding concept of my framework — names the ontological horizon within which IEP operates: the Absolute is not a cosmic agent driving the system from behind (the premodern regression). Nor is it a mere procedural fiction (the Habermasian deflation). It IS the irreducible conditions within which all experience, development, and praxis occur — and it includes the practitioner’s awareness of those conditions. Facticity, in Habermas’s sense, as the horizon that cannot be transcended. Integral, in Wilber’s sense, as the recognition that this horizon encompasses all quadrants, all levels, all trajectories — including the freedom that was never lost. The Five Ranks show us what it looks like when this freedom is not merely theorized but enacted: differentiated from fullness, integrated with fullness, and finally recognized as never having been separate from fullness at all. IEP is the epistemological stance adequate to this horizon: multiple irreducible ways of knowing, held together not by theoretical synthesis but by the enacted flexibility of an organism navigating its own facticity — always already in the present moment of freedom that is none other than the fullness of this very life.

VI. The Functional Layer: Committed Action Across All Quadrants

This brings us to the decisive point. Shaul describes the animal’s undecidable decision as the transition from Nature to Spirit. Žižek calls it the “abyssal act.” Johnston grounds it in emergent neurobiological structures. But none of them can tell you what to do. The undecidable decision has no methodology. The abyssal act has no praxis. Strong emergentism has no intervention.

The ACT Hexaflex — the six interrelated processes of psychological flexibility — provides exactly this functional layer:

Defusion is the capacity to observe thoughts without being determined by them. In the Nature-Spirit context, it is the organism’s ability to notice the deadlock between drives without collapsing into either pole. Defusion does not resolve the parallax; it holds it.

Acceptance is willingness to have experience as it is, without avoidance or struggle. It is the organism’s capacity to remain present to the contradiction between sex and death rather than fleeing into the bad infinite of repetitive escape strategies.

Self-as-Context is the witness perspective — the awareness that observes all content without being any particular content. This is where ACT touches Waking Up directly: self-as-context is the enacted discovery of the freedom dimension that Žižek’s framework cannot reach.

Present Moment Contact is embodied attention to what is actually happening, as distinct from conceptual elaboration about what is happening. It is Varela’s enactivism in functional form: the organism coupled with its environment, bringing forth a world through attention.

Values are chosen directions of living that give meaning to action. They are what Shaul calls Spirit’s “drive toward novelty” — but grounded in the particular person’s actual life rather than in the Absolute Idea’s cosmic self-enjoyment.

Committed Action is the process that sustains and operationalizes all the others — and it does so across every quadrant of human existence, not only in the domain of outward behavior. In the Upper Left (interior-individual), committed action is the discipline of returning to contemplative practice, maintaining sustained attention to one’s own psychological processes, choosing again and again to observe rather than fuse. In the Upper Right (exterior-individual), it is the organism caring for its own biology — tending to the body as empirical probe, engaging with the material conditions of embodied life. In the Lower Left (interior-collective), it is the sustained investment in intersubjective meaning-making — maintaining relationships, engaging in communicative action, refusing to let shared understanding erode by default. In the Lower Right (exterior-collective), it is building and maintaining the systems, protocols, and institutions that support collective flourishing — Prosocial territory, Ostrom’s Core Design Principles enacted over time.

Without committed action operating across all four quadrants, the other five Hexaflex processes remain episodic — fleeting states rather than stable capacities. Defusion without committed action is a one-off insight that dissolves by morning. Acceptance without committed action collapses back into avoidance at the next provocation. Self-as-context without committed action is a glimpse of freedom that never becomes a way of life. Committed action is not the sixth process alongside the other five. It is the temporal dimension of psychological flexibility itself — the ongoing-ness of praxis within facticity, the process that transforms moments of flexibility into a sustained way of being.

When these six processes operate across Wilber’s four quadrants — individual interior and exterior, collective interior and exterior — you get IACT: Integral Awareness and Commitment Training. The Hexaflex is the functional layer. The quadrants are the meta-theoretical architecture. Prosocial (Atkins, Wilson, and Hayes 2019) extends psychological flexibility to group-level processes through Ostrom’s Core Design Principles for managing shared commons. And the whole is grounded in what I call Enactive Fallibilism: Peirce’s pragmatic fallibilism (every framework is provisional and revisable) combined with Varela’s enactivism (the body is the empirical probe; when systems cause suffering, systems are falsified).

VII. From States to Traits: The Temporality of Praxis

There is a dimension of the Nature-Spirit transition that the entire philosophical debate has failed to address: its temporality. Žižek wants a single dramatic break — the abyssal act, ex nihilo. Shaul wants the undecidable decision at a precise pivot point. Johnston wants the emergent property appearing at a threshold of neural complexity. All three conceive the transition as an event — something that happens once, even if it must be retroactively reconstructed.

But the lived reality of the transition from deadlock to freedom is not an event. It is a practice. It unfolds in time, one moment at a time, one step at a time, one day at a time. And the philosophical significance of this temporality has been hiding in plain sight — not in the Hegel-Lacan corridor, but in the great contemplative and religious traditions that have been cultivating precisely this practice for millennia.

The developmental mechanism works as follows. A moment of defusion, a flash of self-as-context, a single act of acceptance — these begin as states: transient, episodic, unreliable. The person glimpses freedom but cannot sustain it. The bad infinite reasserts itself. The deadlock returns. This is where most accounts of the transition stop — at the level of the breakthrough moment, the peak experience, the philosophical insight that cannot be maintained.

Committed action is what transforms states into traits. The practitioner returns to the practice — again and again, across all four quadrants, within the irreducible conditions of facticity. Each return is itself an undecidable decision in miniature: it cannot be derived from the prior pattern, it is not guaranteed by any system, and it requires the organism’s genuine participation. Over time — and this “over time” is precisely what the philosophical debate cannot think — repeated states crystallize into structural capacities. What was effortful becomes available. What was a glimpse becomes a stable perspective. What was a state becomes a trait. What was a moment of flexibility becomes a way of being.

And these stabilized traits, in turn, build new facticity. They change what the organism is, which changes what is possible for it. The person who has cultivated defusion as a stable capacity lives in a different world than the person still fused with every thought. The community that has developed collective psychological flexibility through Prosocial practices operates within different structural conditions than the community still trapped in zero-sum competition. Facticity is not only the given conditions one inherits. It is also the conditions one builds through sustained committed action. Development within facticity transforms facticity itself.

This is not a discovery unique to IACT or to ACT. It is a structure recognized across the great contemplative traditions — though what matters here is not the premodern metaphysical frameworks in which these traditions originally embedded their practices, but the Waking Up function that those frameworks carried. The point is not to recover a “perennial philosophy” that treats all traditions as saying the same thing beneath surface differences — that is precisely the kind of pre-critical synthesis that Habermas’s facticity and fallibilism rightly refuses. The point is a post-metaphysical retrieval: extracting the contemplative developmental practices from their premodern metaphysical containers, reading them through IEP as irreducible but genuinely plural ways of enacting the state-to-trait transformation, and helping the traditions themselves Grow Up without losing what they have always known about Waking Up. The Bodhisattva vow in Mahāyāna Buddhism is not a contract signed once; it is a commitment renewed in every moment of awareness — the practitioner choosing, again and again, to return for the sake of all sentient beings. The Christian daily office structures the entire day around the rhythm of renewed commitment — “Give us this day our daily bread.” The Jewish practice of teshuvah is not a single act of repentance but an ongoing turning toward, a reorientation that must be enacted in the present or not at all. Islamic dhikr — remembrance — names the continuous practice of re-orienting awareness toward the Real. Even the Ignatian Examen, within the tradition that most directly shaped Jesuit spirituality, is practiced daily: a nightly review of where Spirit moved, designed to cultivate sustained attentiveness across the whole of one’s life.

What all of these traditions share — and what the Hegel-Lacan corridor structurally cannot access — is the recognition that the decision to become fully human is not made once. It is not an abyssal act performed at the dawn of Spirit and then philosophically comprehended after the fact. It is a living orientation, sustained through committed action in every moment, always already in the present moment of freedom. The repetition is not the bad infinite. It is the deepening of freedom through sustained engagement with facticity. Each morning the practitioner wakes and chooses again — not because the previous day’s choice was insufficient, but because freedom is not a possession to be secured. It is a practice to be lived.

This is what Žižek’s framework structurally cannot see. He can describe the break — the single dramatic rupture with the prior order. But the Bodhisattva does not break once. The Bodhisattva returns. And the return IS the practice. The accumulation of these returns — one moment at a time, one day at a time — is how states become traits, how fleeting flexibility becomes structural capacity, how the organism builds the very facticity within which further development becomes possible.

IACT does not claim to have invented this. The contemplative traditions have been practicing it for millennia — though often within premodern metaphysical frameworks that modernity has rightly challenged. What IACT provides is the post-metaphysical architecture (Wilber’s AQAL quadrants and developmental trajectories, read through Habermas’s facticity and fallibilism) and the functional praxis (the ACT Hexaflex, extended through Prosocial to group-level processes) that retrieve the Waking Up function of these traditions without regressing to their premodern ontologies. Integral Epistemological Pluralism holds the contemplative practices of multiple traditions as genuinely irreducible ways of enacting the freedom trajectory — honoring each tradition’s validity conditions while refusing to absolutize any single tradition’s metaphysical claims. And Enactive Fallibilism ensures that even this holding remains provisional, revisable, and accountable to the lived experience of the organism that practices it.

VIII. Enactive Fallibilism vs. Speculative System-Building

This last point deserves emphasis, because it marks the sharpest difference between IACT and the tradition Shaul represents.

Hegel’s Encyclopedia is a closed system — the “circle of circles” in which Logic, Nature, and Spirit form a self-completing totality. Shaul’s reading preserves this closure: the Absolute Idea moves from Logic through Nature to Spirit and back again, enjoying itself through the circular self-movement of alienation and return. This is magnificent philosophical architecture. It is also unfalsifiable. No lived experience could ever challenge the system, because the system already includes all possible experiences as moments in its own self-development. Suffering becomes a “necessary” moment. Deadlock becomes “productive.” The bad infinite is retroactively redeemed by the true infinite that was always already at work.

Enactive Fallibilism refuses this move. Drawing on Peirce, it insists that every framework — including Hegel’s, including Wilber’s, including IACT itself — is provisional and subject to revision through encounter with recalcitrant experience. Drawing on Varela, it insists that the organism’s embodied engagement with its environment is the primary site of knowledge, not the speculative system that claims to comprehend it from above. When a system — philosophical, institutional, clinical, political — produces suffering in the organism, the system is tested and found wanting. This is not a grievance; it is a falsification event that demands revision through committed action.

The practical difference is enormous — and it concerns what kind of knowledge each framework produces. For Shaul, the animal’s encounter with the sex-death deadlock is philosophically comprehended within a speculative system — it is a “necessary” moment in Spirit’s self-creation, intelligible only to those who have already accepted the metaphysical architecture of the Encyclopedia. This knowledge is not reproducible outside that architecture. It is not testable by any practitioner who does not share Shaul’s Hegelian commitments. It is not transferable to the person actually trapped in a deadlock — in addiction, institutional dehumanization, relational rupture, or the bad infinite of bureaucratic systems — because it offers comprehension without praxis. It tells you what the deadlock means within the system. It cannot help you navigate it.

For IACT, a person’s encounter with deadlock is an empirical datum — not an illustration of a prior metaphysical truth, but a test of whatever framework is being applied. The question is not “how does this deadlock fit within the system?” but “does this framework help the organism move?” If the framework cannot help the person navigate the deadlock, the framework is falsified. Not the person. The framework. And this falsification generates genuinely post-metaphysical knowledge: reproducible (other practitioners can test the same processes), transferable (the Hexaflex operates across cultures, contexts, and populations), and revisable (Enactive Fallibilism demands that IACT itself be abandoned or revised when it fails). This is what distinguishes post-metaphysical praxis from premodern dogma: the willingness to let lived experience falsify the system, rather than letting the system explain away lived experience.

IX. Conclusion: What Is to Be Enacted

Shaul concludes his article with the political implications of the Nature-Spirit debate: Pippin’s gradualism, Johnston’s emergent structural interventions, Žižek’s revolutionary abyssal act. Each maps onto a different reading of the transition. Each has something to recommend it and something it cannot deliver.

IACT proposes a different kind of conclusion. The transition from Nature to Spirit — from deadlock to committed action, from the bad infinite to values-directed living — is not a single dramatic leap, not a gradual evolutionary process, and not an emergent property of sufficiently complex neural networks. It is a praxis: repeated, embodied, fallible, revisable, and always situated within the irreducible conditions of facticity. It is available to anyone, not because it descends from the Absolute Idea’s cosmic self-enjoyment, but because the capacity for psychological flexibility is a basic feature of human organisms navigating their environments.

Integral Epistemological Pluralism names the meta-theoretical structure of this praxis. The parallax gap — Žižek’s recognition that irreducible perspectives admit no neutral common ground — is not the end of the story. It is the beginning. IEP takes the irreducibility seriously, refuses the fantasy of theoretical synthesis, and asks instead: what kind of organism, with what kind of developed capacities, can navigate across genuinely plural ways of knowing without collapsing them? The Hexaflex is the answer at the functional level. The quadrants are the answer at the architectural level. Enactive Fallibilism is the answer at the epistemological level. And IACT is the name for the whole: the enacted, embodied, fallible navigation of epistemological plurality within facticity.

The Hexaflex does not resolve the parallax gap. It holds it. Defusion holds multiple perspectives without collapsing them. Acceptance holds suffering without fleeing. Self-as-context discovers the freedom that was never lost. Present moment contact grounds the organism in the only place any of this can happen. Values provide direction without cosmic guarantees. And committed action — sustained across all four quadrants, transforming states into traits, building new facticity through practice — makes the decision real. Not once. Not at the dawn of Spirit. But every morning, in every moment of renewed orientation, one step at a time, always already in the present moment of freedom.

The great contemplative traditions have practiced this for millennia — within premodern frameworks that modernity rightly outgrew. Contextual behavioral science is now empirically validating the functional mechanisms that these traditions enacted. IACT provides the post-metaphysical architecture that retrieves what the traditions knew about Waking Up while helping them — and us — Grow Up. The decision to become human is not made once. It is made over and over again and every moment.

Suggested Reading

Atkins, P. W. B., Wilson, D. S., & Hayes, S. C. (2019). Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups. Context Press.

Comay, R. & Ruda, F. (2018). The Dash — The Other Side of Absolute Knowing. MIT Press.

Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. T. McCarthy. Beacon Press.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Johnston, A. (2008). Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press.

Johnston, A. (2018). A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism. Columbia University Press.

Peirce, C. S. (1992). The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1. Ed. N. Houser & C. Kloesel. Indiana University Press.

Pippin, R. B. (2008). Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge University Press.

Pippin, R. B. (2015). Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel. In Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy. University of Chicago Press.

Sellars, W. (1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Harvard University Press.

Shaul, D. (2026). From Nature to Spirit in Hegel’s Encyclopedia: Sex, Death, and Quantum Physics. Crisis & Critique, 12(1), 295–322.

Tōzan Ryōkai (Dongshan Liangjie). Five Ranks (Go-i). 9th century. See Powell, W. F. (1986). The Record of Tung-shan. University of Hawai’i Press; and Merzel, D. G. (Genpo Roshi) (2007). Big Mind, Big Heart: Finding Your Way. Big Mind Publishing.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.

Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. Shambhala.

Wilber, K. (2006). Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Shambhala.

Wilber, K. (2017). The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions. Shambhala.

Žižek, S. (2006). The Parallax View. MIT Press.

Žižek, S. (2012). Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso.

Žižek, S. (2014). Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. Verso.

Abstract

Language colonizes us before we can speak. It names us before we can name ourselves. The suffering this generates — through diagnostic labels that harden into identities, political ideologies that determine what can be seen, and moral certainties that make revision increasingly difficult — is not incidental to language but bound up with the same symbolic capacities that make self-consciousness and shared meaning possible.

Jacques Lacan and Steven Hayes, working from opposite sides of the same mountain, both identified something important about this problem. The Lacanian tradition gives us a powerful account of how subjects become captured by language, ideology, and the authority of the Master Signifier. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers something different but complementary: a set of practices for changing our relationship to that capture. The bridge between them, I want to argue, extends well beyond the therapy room.

Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology helps explain why rational discourse so often breaks down across political and moral divides, while Jürgen Habermas provides an account of the communicative and institutional conditions toward which democratic life might nevertheless aspire. What is less developed between them is the question of how people actually become capable of inhabiting those conditions. Deliberation requires more than procedures and good arguments; it requires the ability to tolerate disagreement, loosen identification with one’s own narratives, take another perspective seriously, and remain open to revision when one’s moral intuitions or political identity are at stake. The ACT Hexaflex — defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, present-moment awareness, values, and committed action — provides part of that missing psychological account.

At stake, then, is not the fantasy of abolishing Master Signifiers, but learning to inhabit structures of meaning without allowing them to become so rigid that contradictory experience, new evidence, or another person’s perspective can no longer alter how we understand the world. Michael Brooks offers one concrete way of thinking about what this might look like politically. His politics combined strong commitments with humor, curiosity, internationalism, and an unusual willingness to move across moral and cultural worlds without giving up judgment. His engagement with Lula and Brazilian politics belonged to a wider attempt to imagine a Left that could be genuinely international without becoming abstract, and politically committed without allowing commitment to harden into rigidity. The larger question of this essay is whether qualities like these can become more than the virtues of unusual individuals — whether they can be cultivated through the institutions, communities, and political practices we build.

Tags: ACT, Integral Theory, Moral Psychology, Political Philosophy, Habermas, Haidt, Wilber, Hayes, Lacan, Žižek, IACT, Enactive Fallibilism, Prosocial, Michael Brooks, Heidegger, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Civilizational Dialogue

“The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers.” — Jacques Lacan

“The mind makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” — Steven C. Hayes

“Each successive stage transcends and includes its predecessor.” — Ken Wilber

I. The Language Problem

In my previous essay, “The Language Parasite and the Symbolic Order,” I traced how two radically different intellectual traditions — Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Steven Hayes’s Relational Frame Theory — converge around a common problem, and I proposed that their convergence opens a path toward what I called a post-metaphysical virtue ethics.

For readers encountering the argument for the first time, the core claim is this: Lacan describes a Symbolic Order — the structure of language, law, and social convention — through which the subject becomes socially intelligible at all. We become speaking and desiring beings only by entering systems of meaning that precede us and will outlast us. Hayes’s Relational Frame Theory, developed within a very different scientific tradition, reaches a related conclusion from the side of behavioral psychology: once human beings acquire the capacity for arbitrarily applicable relational responding, language begins to transform the functions of events far beyond what direct experience alone would produce.

The word “failure,” for example, does not merely describe an event. It can transform our relationship to past events, future possibilities, bodily sensations, and ourselves. A diagnosis can organize care, provide explanation, and open access to support, but it can also harden into an identity through which subsequent experience is interpreted. A political label can orient someone within a tradition while gradually determining which facts are trustworthy, which sources are considered credible, and which disagreements register as legitimate. Language makes reflective human life possible, but the same capacity also allows verbal categories to begin organizing experience in ways that become increasingly difficult to revise.

Lacan and Hayes do not therefore offer identical theories. Their vocabularies, methods, institutional histories, and philosophical commitments differ too much for that. But they illuminate a common problem from different directions: human beings become entangled in systems of symbolic relation that they participate in without fully mastering. My previous essay proposed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a practical bridge between these traditions — one capable of moving from diagnosis toward praxis. Here I want to follow that argument further, from the way language organizes individual behavior toward the way those same processes become entangled with collective life. Language does not only shape what we think about ourselves; it helps organize how we respond when our interpretations are challenged, how we inhabit political identities, recognize authority, and participate in institutions.

The question, then, is no longer merely how individuals can loosen the grip of language, but how practices and institutions might cultivate forms of commitment, authority, and collective identity that remain responsive to experience rather than closing down what experience is allowed to mean.

II. Two Responses to the Parasite

For the Lacanian-Marxist tradition — and here I am thinking especially of Slavoj Žižek, whose work has profoundly shaped this discourse — the Symbolic Order is inseparable from questions of power, ideology, and domination. In Lacanian terms, the Master Signifier quilts a field of meaning: it becomes an organizing term around which otherwise unstable identities and social relations acquire coherence. A category can therefore do more than describe the subject; it can locate them within an institutional and symbolic order through which subsequent experience is interpreted.

The Lacanian response emphasizes the failure of every symbolic system to completely capture the subject or the Real. Traversal, contradiction, lack, and antagonism interrupt the fantasy that any Master Signifier can finally close the field of meaning. The point is not that we occasionally become trapped by the wrong words and might eventually discover some unmediated reality beneath them. There is no subject prior to symbolic mediation waiting to be recovered intact. We become subjects through structures of language that precede us, and attempts to escape those structures inevitably take place through language again. The trap is therefore structural.

For Hayes and contextual behavioral science, the problem appears differently. Relational Frame Theory is less concerned with the impossibility of symbolic closure than with what language does to behavior. Once events become related verbally, those relations can transform their psychological functions without the person needing to encounter the events directly. “Failure,” “addict,” “socialist,” “reactionary,” or “dangerous” can begin altering attention, emotion, avoidance, affiliation, and action because of the networks of relations in which those words participate. Language does not merely represent a world already there; it changes what situations mean to us and, in doing so, changes what becomes easier or harder to do.

Cognitive fusion names one way this process can become rigid. A thought, category, or narrative begins exercising such strong control over behavior that alternative responses become increasingly difficult to contact. The thought “I am a failure” becomes more than a passing verbal event. A diagnostic label becomes more than one description among others. A political identity can become the frame through which events, people, evidence, and disagreement are interpreted before they are encountered on their own terms.

Defusion does not free us from language, nor does it reveal some authentic self prior to the Symbolic Order. It changes the function language has within a particular situation. A thought can remain present without operating as a command; an identity can remain meaningful without determining every subsequent interpretation; an unpleasant emotion can be experienced without avoidance becoming the organizing principle of behavior. If there is no simple position outside language, what can change is the degree to which particular verbal relations govern what we are able to notice, tolerate, and do. ACT is concerned precisely with expanding that range of possible action.

Lacan offers a structural account of why symbolic capture cannot simply be abolished. Hayes gives us a functional account of how verbal relations acquire behavioral force in particular contexts, while ACT develops practices aimed at changing our relationship to that force. One emphasizes the constitutive role and limits of the Symbolic; the other asks how behavior can become more flexible even when symbolic mediation remains unavoidable.

A related tension appears within intellectual cultures shaped by Žižek. Thinkers such as Daniel Tutt and Cadell Last have built serious and intellectually generative communities around psychoanalysis, Marxism, and contemporary philosophy. My concern is not that they simply reproduce Žižek or submit to his authority. It is more structural than that. A tradition organized around diagnosing Master Signifiers can itself become organized around a relatively stable conceptual vocabulary, canon, and set of authorities through which critique is authorized.

Žižek can thereby begin to function, ironically, as a Master Signifier within parts of the intellectual culture that formed around his work. This is not because his readers are incapable of criticism, but because a theory organized around the impossibility of escaping the Symbolic Order can itself become caught within a relatively stable language of critique. The theoretical machinery is exceptionally good at showing why every positive project remains incomplete. That strength can become a trap when incompleteness becomes the reason construction never begins.

ACT faces almost the inverse danger. If psychological flexibility is treated primarily as an individual clinical achievement, the social and institutional conditions that continually reinforce particular verbal relations disappear from view. A person may learn to hold a diagnostic label more lightly while still needing that label to access treatment, insurance, housing, or employment accommodation. Someone may become less fused with a political identity while participating in institutions whose incentives reward polarization, punish deviation, or continually reproduce the same categories.

The verbal relations governing behavior are therefore never simply private events occurring inside individual minds. They are learned and reinforced through families, schools, workplaces, media, political communities, religious traditions, diagnostic systems, economic arrangements, and institutions. Language acquires behavioral force within social worlds.

The argument cannot consist simply of scaling individual therapy up into politics. A public sphere requires people who can encounter challenges to their interpretations without experiencing every challenge as an attack on the self, but it also requires institutions that make genuine disagreement and revision possible rather than rewarding strategic performance, ideological conformity, or permanent outrage. Psychological flexibility and institutional structure meet here because both shape which responses remain available when people encounter one another across real differences.

What is needed, then, is not a choice between structural critique and psychological practice. Lacan helps explain why there is no clean exit from the symbolic structures through which subjects and political identities are formed. Hayes helps explain how verbal relations acquire functional control over behavior and how that control can change. The political question is what follows when we take both seriously: how to cultivate greater flexibility in the people who inhabit institutions while also building institutions in which disagreement can genuinely alter what people think and do.

III. The Hierarchy Problem

Ken Wilber introduces a distinction that helps clarify the difficulty: the difference between hierarchies that support development and hierarchies organized around domination.

Wilber uses the language of holarchy to describe the nested organization of complex systems. Cells include molecules; organisms include cells; more complex capacities emerge while retaining and reorganizing earlier ones. The concept becomes more controversial when extended from biological organization to psychological and cultural development, but the underlying distinction remains useful: not every structure that organizes differences in complexity, competence, or responsibility is therefore a structure of domination.

A teacher may know something a student does not. A physician may possess forms of expertise a patient does not. A contemplative tradition may preserve practices that require years of disciplined training. None of this automatically makes the relationship liberating. Expertise can become coercive, tradition can become dogma, and mentorship can become domination. But neither does the existence of asymmetry make domination inevitable.

This distinction matters because emancipatory traditions can become suspicious not simply of domination but of hierarchy as such. The suspicion is historically understandable. Hierarchies of race, class, gender, empire, religion, and expertise have repeatedly been used to naturalize domination. Yet if every developmental structure is interpreted through the same lens, the distinction between authority and authoritarianism, between expertise and rule, and between scaffold and cage becomes increasingly difficult to make.

A scaffold constrains in order to make greater capacity possible; a cage preserves dependence upon the structure itself. The same external form — rules, hierarchy, discipline, authority — can therefore function very differently depending upon whether it is oriented toward developing the agency of those inside it or protecting itself from their eventual independence and criticism.

Wilber’s Pre/Trans Fallacy is useful here. The rejection of a conventional structure does not tell us whether we have moved beyond it or simply fallen beneath it. The person who no longer requires external moral rules because they have developed a more complex ethical capacity is not in the same position as the person who rejects all moral constraint, even if both appear “non-conventional” from the standpoint of the convention they have rejected.

The developmental distinction nevertheless requires its own safeguard. A model that helps us distinguish capacities within persons or institutions does not thereby authorize us to arrange entire civilizations along a single historical trajectory. Development becomes politically dangerous when differences in psychological organization, moral complexity, or institutional form are generalized into a philosophy of history through which other traditions are understood mainly in relation to one particular civilizational experience. Developmental knowledge may disclose something real, but it must remain open to encounters with histories and traditions that can challenge the categories through which development itself has been understood. Otherwise, a hierarchy intended to describe growth can become one more means of absorbing historical difference.

Political, therapeutic, and religious communities alike face the same problem. If we cannot distinguish structures that enable greater agency from structures that enforce conformity, we are left oscillating between two bad options: structure as domination, or the fantasy of structurelessness. The harder task is to ask what kind of authority we are dealing with, how it is legitimized, what it makes possible, and whether experience can change it.

IV. Moral Foundations and Political Life

Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory attempts to map recurring domains of moral intuition. The framework commonly distinguishes Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. Haidt’s political argument is not simply that one side possesses morality and the other does not, but that political cultures tend to weight and interpret these domains differently. Liberal and left-leaning moral cultures tend to place comparatively greater emphasis on Care and Fairness, while conservative moral cultures tend to draw more heavily from Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity as well.

Haidt’s framework helps illuminate something politically important: moral disagreement does not always occur within a shared moral vocabulary. Consider Authority/Subversion. Parts of the Left have good historical reasons to distrust authority. Authority has justified empire, patriarchy, clerical abuse, class domination, racial hierarchy, colonialism, and authoritarian government. Yet this historical suspicion can become generalized into difficulty distinguishing authority that supports development from authority that demands submission. The teacher and the warden are both authorities, but that does not make them the same kind of authority.

Conservative cultures can make the opposite error by treating inherited authority as morally presumptive simply because it is inherited. The result is a mirror image of the same confusion. One side can struggle to recognize legitimate authority because authority has so often concealed domination, while the other can struggle to recognize domination when it arrives clothed in the language of legitimate authority.

Something similar happens with Loyalty and Sanctity. Loyalty can be weaponized by nationalism, sectarianism, fascism, and tribal politics, but no durable collective project exists without some form of shared commitment and mutual obligation. Sanctity can become purity politics, religious repression, or moral disgust projected onto outsiders, but the intuition that some things possess a significance irreducible to instrumental utility does not disappear simply because secular politics stops calling them sacred. Human dignity, ecological preservation, solidarity, justice, and truth can all become objects of something very close to sanctification.

The question is therefore not whether Authority, Loyalty, or Sanctity should be accepted or rejected in the abstract, but whether we can distinguish their liberating from their dominating forms. This becomes particularly important for the Left because political communities do more than distribute resources or critique institutions. They also form people: they establish what deserves loyalty, what kinds of authority are legitimate, what conduct is admirable, and what people should be willing to sacrifice for.

V. The Elephant, the Rider, and the Public Sphere

Haidt’s “elephant and rider” metaphor is especially important here. Moral intuitions are often fast, embodied, and pre-reflective, while conscious reasoning frequently arrives later, constructing explanations for responses already underway. In the vocabulary developed in these essays, the rider can become one expression of the Language Parasite: the elephant moves, and the rider narrates.

This does not mean reasons are irrelevant or that human beings are incapable of reflection. It means that reflection begins inside a living organism whose affective, social, and moral responses have already been shaped before explicit argument begins. The reasons we give for our beliefs may therefore function partly as genuine inquiry and partly as post-hoc justification. The verbal networks described earlier do not float above these embodied responses; they organize and reinterpret them, giving the rider increasingly elaborate ways to explain why what already feels true must be true.

This places real pressure on the Habermasian project. Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action places enormous weight on the capacity of participants to exchange reasons, raise validity claims, question one another, and reach forms of understanding that are not reducible to coercion or strategic manipulation. His reconstruction of the public sphere and deliberative democracy depends upon the possibility that communication can become something more than competing exercises of power.

But what psychological capacities does this require?

Habermas gives us an extraordinarily rich account of the pragmatic structure of communication and the normative expectations implicit in discourse. His central concern, however, is not the clinical or developmental question of how people acquire the ability to remain within those conditions when disagreement activates identity, loyalty, fear, shame, or moral disgust. Haidt makes that problem difficult to ignore. If moral judgment is often intuitive before it becomes explicitly reasoned, then formally open procedures cannot by themselves guarantee communicative rationality. People may enter deliberation already attached to interpretations that determine which reasons appear plausible, which speakers appear trustworthy, and which conclusions can be entertained at all.

The issue therefore goes beyond whether the correct procedures have been established. A public sphere also depends upon what people can actually do when their existing interpretations encounter resistance: whether disagreement produces inquiry or immediate defense, whether another perspective can modify an existing frame, and whether the discomfort of uncertainty can be tolerated long enough for communication to remain possible.

This is where ACT becomes politically interesting.

VI. The Six Capacities: ACT’s Hexaflex

Steven Hayes developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy over several decades within contextual behavioral science — a tradition rooted in functional contextualism, behavioral psychology, and a pragmatic approach to human action. Where Lacan offers a theory of the subject’s capture by language, Hayes and his colleagues offer something different: a systematic set of processes for cultivating a more flexible relationship to verbal and experiential life.

The core of ACT is often represented through the Hexaflex — six interrelated processes associated with psychological flexibility: defusion, acceptance, self-as-context, present-moment awareness, values, and committed action. These are usually discussed clinically. I want to treat them more broadly as cultivable human capacities, and as part of the psychological infrastructure that communicative and democratic practices already presume.

Defusion is the capacity to notice verbal processes without being completely governed by them. When the thought “I am a failure” appears, defusion does not require replacing it with “I am a success.” It changes the function of the thought by changing our relationship to it. “I am a failure” becomes something occurring within experience rather than an unquestionable description of reality. Politically, this matters whenever an identity, ideology, diagnosis, or moral narrative begins to narrow what can be noticed or done.

Acceptance is the willingness to remain in contact with difficult internal experience without making avoidance the organizing principle of action. It is neither resignation nor passive submission. Applied to moral disagreement, acceptance includes the capacity to remain present to discomfort, contradiction, uncertainty, and moral intuitions we find disturbing without immediately needing either to obey or suppress them.

Self-as-Context refers to the capacity to experience thoughts, roles, identities, and narratives as contents of awareness rather than as the entirety of the self. “I am a socialist,” “I am a conservative,” “I am an addict,” “I am mentally ill” — each may describe something important. Problems arise when the description becomes the location from which every other experience must be interpreted. This also creates room for perspective-taking because one’s own position can be experienced as a position rather than as the only possible standpoint.

Present-Moment Awareness is the capacity to contact what is happening here and now rather than responding entirely through inherited verbal narratives about what is happening. Political ideology becomes especially rigid when every event arrives already interpreted by a template. Present-moment contact does not mean abandoning history or structural analysis. It means requiring the theory to remain answerable to what is actually occurring.

Values are chosen directions of action rather than goals that can finally be completed. Justice, solidarity, courage, care, curiosity, and fidelity organize behavior without becoming external commandments.

Committed Action is where those directions become patterns of behavior, institutions, relationships, disciplines, and practices. Commitment therefore includes persistence, but it also includes revision when action fails to serve the value that supposedly justified it.

Taken together, these capacities describe something closer to a practical psychology of fallibilism than a collection of isolated clinical techniques. Fallibilism becomes more than the abstract admission that one could be wrong. It requires capacities that allow behavior to change when the thing being challenged is bound up with identity, belonging, or a deeply held moral commitment.

Seen this way, ACT begins to look less like an isolated psychotherapeutic intervention and more like one possible contribution to a contemporary virtue ethics.

VII. Psychological Flexibility and Communicative Action

With the Hexaflex in view, the bridge between Haidt and Habermas becomes clearer.

Haidt helps explain why deliberation is psychologically difficult before a single argument has been exchanged. Moral intuitions, social identities, and affective responses already shape what appears obvious or objectionable. Habermas, by contrast, gives us a normative account of communication in which claims remain open to challenge and participants orient themselves toward reasons rather than simply toward strategic victory. The distance between those two descriptions is precisely where psychological flexibility matters.

Psychological flexibility is not simply an attitude of open-mindedness. It concerns whether a person retains enough behavioral range to respond differently when language, emotion, and identity begin pulling action in a familiar direction. Defusion and self-as-context can create some distance between the person and the verbal identities through which disagreement is interpreted. This does not make political commitments weak. It makes it possible for a commitment to be questioned without every challenge becoming a threat to the integrity of the self.

Acceptance and present-moment awareness matter for a different reason: discourse becomes difficult precisely where contradiction produces discomfort, and a person unable to remain present to that discomfort will predictably narrow the available response — dismissing the speaker, retreating into a familiar narrative, escalating the conflict, or simply leaving the encounter. Values and committed action prevent flexibility from collapsing into endless openness. Communication remains oriented toward goods that matter and is carried outward into practices and institutions where the consequences of what has been argued can actually be tested.

ACT does not supply a missing psychological module that can simply be inserted into Habermas, and Haidt, Hayes, and Habermas do not form a single theoretical system. Their projects illuminate different parts of a common problem. Haidt draws attention to the intuitive and embodied conditions under which moral reasoning takes place. Habermas gives us a normative account of what reason-giving and reciprocal justification require. Hayes gives us a functional account of why verbal and emotional processes can narrow behavior, together with practices for altering that relationship.

Wilber adds a further question: how do capacities such as perspective-taking, tolerance for ambiguity, moral reflection, and the ability to hold multiple frames actually develop over time? Whatever problems attend particular stage models, this developmental question cannot simply be avoided. A democratic culture that requires increasingly complex forms of perspective-taking while doing little to cultivate them is asking institutions to depend upon capacities they have not learned how to support.

Communicative rationality, in other words, has developmental and psychological conditions. Procedures matter enormously, but procedures alone do not produce people capable of inhabiting them. At the same time, individual flexibility cannot compensate indefinitely for institutions whose incentives reward precisely the rigidity, strategic performance, and polarization that communicative action asks participants to overcome. The psychological and institutional problems meet in the public sphere.

The question becomes what kinds of communities might help cultivate these capacities, and what kinds of institutions allow them to matter once they have been cultivated.

VIII. Michael Brooks and the Public Sphere

Michael Brooks remains one of the most compelling examples for me of what this might look like in political practice. As I argued in “Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Brooks attempted to build what he called a “worker’s counterpublic” through The Michael Brooks Show, his book Against the Web, and his role on The Majority Report. What made his work distinctive was not simply the content of his democratic socialism, but the form of political subjectivity and public culture he tried to cultivate around it.

Brooks held strong ideological commitments — democratic socialism, anti-imperialism, international solidarity, materialist analysis — without appearing entirely captured by the identity attached to them. Humor was central to this. He could advocate passionately for a position while satirizing the rigidity and absurdity of people nominally on his own side, creating distance without political indifference.

His internationalism required something similar. Brazilian politics, Indian politics, American politics, Marxism, religion, nationalism, class, and empire could not simply be collapsed into a single ideological template. His sustained engagement with Lula and Brazilian politics is especially important here because international solidarity, for Brooks, was not simply the projection of American political categories outward. It required attention to histories, institutions, religious traditions, political inheritances, and struggles that could not be absorbed into a single grammar of emancipation. A genuinely cosmopolitan Left would have to enter such encounters with commitments of its own while remaining open to forms of political life and historical experience capable of revising the terms through which solidarity itself was understood.

Perspective-taking does not require pretending that every perspective is equally valid. Psychological flexibility does not require the abandonment of ideology, commitment, or conflict. What it makes possible is enough distance between the person and an interpretive framework for experience, evidence, and encounter to require revision of the framework itself.

Beneath that flexibility was a relatively stable orientation toward solidarity, human dignity, internationalism, and emancipation. Most importantly, he built. The Michael Brooks Show, his interviews, educational work, political relationships, and attempts to construct an internationalist counterpublic were not simply commentary on what a better Left should look like. They were efforts to instantiate one.

Brooks’s politics combined strong commitments with a willingness to revise, seriousness with humor, internationalism with particularity, and critique with construction. The result was not some perfectly integrated political subject, but something more plausible: a public practice in which strong commitments did not have to predetermine every encounter.

A counterpublic, on this account, does more than circulate better information. It creates contexts in which some habits of speech, interpretation, disagreement, solidarity, and authority are reinforced rather than others. It therefore participates in the formation of the people who inhabit it. The unresolved question is whether capacities that appear in figures like Brooks can become more teachable and institutional rather than remaining dependent upon unusual individual personalities.

IX. Integral Facticity & Enactive Fallibilism

The argument so far has depended on two ideas I have been developing elsewhere: Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism.

Integral Facticity begins with the Heideggerian recognition that inquiry always takes place from within conditions we did not choose — bodies, languages, histories, institutions, relationships, economic circumstances, and inherited traditions. Facticity names this situatedness. There is no neutral position outside these conditions from which the world can be viewed in its entirety, and no integral map capable of finally escaping the historical and embodied location from which it was drawn.

Wilber’s integral framework adds a second claim: those conditions are not exhausted by any single mode of explanation. Subjective experience, observable behavior, cultural meaning, and social structure can all disclose something real without becoming interchangeable. Habermas, meanwhile, gives us a way of thinking about validity claims, communication, normativity, and institutional legitimacy. The value of bringing these together is not that AQAL somehow completes Habermas or that communicative theory resolves the problem of facticity. It is that each introduces forms of differentiation and correction that the others can leave obscure.

The distinction has been operative throughout this essay. A behavioral account of cognitive fusion can help explain how a political identity acquires control over what someone notices and does, but it does not by itself explain the institutions that reward and reproduce that identity. Structural analysis can show how those institutions distribute power and constrain action without telling us how particular people respond to them. Haidt’s account of moral intuition cannot substitute for Habermas’s account of justification, any more than communicative procedures can substitute for the psychological capacities required to participate in them.

Integral Facticity is my attempt to remain answerable to these different levels without pretending they can be cleanly separated in lived experience. We encounter language through bodies, political institutions through cultural meanings, moral intuitions through histories, and developmental possibilities through social structures that distribute resources, authority, recognition, and opportunity unevenly. Any framework adequate to political praxis has to move among these levels without allowing one to swallow the others.

Fred Dallmayr adds another dimension that has become increasingly important to how I understand this project. Epistemological differentiation can prevent scientific, contemplative, psychological, cultural, and institutional claims from being reduced to one another, but it does not by itself tell us what happens when historically distinct traditions enter into dialogue. Dallmayr’s integral pluralism refuses both the assimilation of difference into a supposedly universal historical trajectory and the opposite picture of civilizations as sealed worlds incapable of transforming one another. Dialogue becomes more than the exchange of already finished positions. At its strongest, the encounter can alter the horizons through which the participants understand themselves and one another.

This matters for Integral Facticity because situatedness is not only a limit to be acknowledged; it is also something that can be transformed through encounter. We begin from histories and traditions we did not choose, but those horizons are neither absolute nor inert. Another person, another tradition, or another historical experience can disclose limits in our own categories that would remain invisible from inside them. A genuinely fallibilist integral framework must therefore remain open not only to anomalous evidence but to forms of dialogue capable of changing the terms through which evidence, development, freedom, or even universality are understood.

Enactive Fallibilism provides the epistemological counterpart. Peircean fallibilism reminds us that knowledge remains revisable, while enactivism reminds us that knowledge develops through embodied engagement with a world that pushes back. Together they suggest a practical epistemology in which we enact frameworks, discover what those frameworks allow us to see, and also encounter what they obscure.

Here the recurring language of correction becomes philosophically explicit. A liberating structure is not simply one that feels open, egalitarian, or flexible. It is a structure capable of being corrected by the realities and people it claims to serve. It may contain rules, authority, hierarchy, traditions, and strong commitments. What matters is whether those structures remain answerable to their consequences.

A dominating structure increasingly protects itself from such correction. Contradictory experience is reinterpreted until the framework remains intact, criticism becomes betrayal, doubt becomes pathology, and failure becomes further evidence of the theory. At that point the framework no longer uses experience to test itself; it uses itself to explain away experience.

This danger does not belong exclusively to the Right, the Left, psychoanalysis, behavioral science, integral theory, or any other intellectual tradition. Enactive Fallibilism has to turn upon the frameworks through which we practice it. Integral theory is not exempt because it contains the language of integration, and anything calling itself an Integral Left cannot presume that its synthesis has somehow escaped the problem of symbolic capture.

If the framework cannot be corrected, it has already failed its own test.

X. IACT & Integral Political Praxis

Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT) is my attempt to bring these threads together as a form of praxis. The question is no longer simply how an individual becomes more psychologically flexible, but how capacities such as defusion, perspective-taking, tolerance for uncertainty, value-guided action, and openness to correction might be cultivated within the communities and institutions through which political life actually takes place.

IACT therefore cannot be reduced to a recovery program, a political ideology, a spiritual system, or a collection of clinical techniques applied to isolated individuals. ACT provides much of its psychological grammar, but the project extends outward through Prosocial into group cooperation and institutional design, through Habermas into communicative legitimacy and the public sphere, through Haidt into the embodied and moral conditions of political disagreement, and through Wilber into the developmental question of how increasingly complex capacities can be supported over time. Lacan remains important precisely because none of this amounts to escaping symbolic mediation, while Enactive Fallibilism insists that no framework — including IACT itself — gets to place itself beyond correction.

Brooks’s public practice raises the question IACT is intended to pursue more deliberately: whether capacities such as ideological commitment without complete fusion, internationalism without abstraction, humor without cynicism, and disagreement without annihilation can be cultivated rather than left to individual temperament or political circumstance.

Integral political praxis therefore has to work in both directions at once. It has to concern itself with the development of persons able to participate in collective life without being completely governed by the identities and narratives they bring into it, while also attending to the structures that shape, reinforce, and constrain those capacities. Individual flexibility cannot substitute for institutional transformation, but institutional transformation cannot simply assume the existence of subjects able to inhabit more complex and democratic forms of collective life.

Prosocial becomes especially important here. Drawing upon the work of Elinor Ostrom and contextual behavioral science, Prosocial shifts attention from isolated psychological processes toward the conditions under which groups cooperate, share power, establish norms, resolve conflict, and respond to changing circumstances. It provides one practical route for asking how the behavioral flexibility cultivated by ACT might become entangled with the design of groups and institutions rather than remaining an achievement of isolated individuals.

Habermas expands the same problem into the public sphere. Political institutions need procedures through which claims can be challenged and authority justified, but those procedures remain fragile when participants cannot tolerate the uncertainty, disagreement, and revision that meaningful communication produces. Haidt reminds us that those participants do not arrive as disembodied reasoners, while Wilber asks how the capacities required for increasingly complex forms of perspective-taking and moral judgment are themselves developed. IACT sits at the intersection of these questions rather than pretending to resolve them.

The practical question is what allows a person to remain committed without becoming fused, to accept authority without surrendering judgment, to inhabit a political tradition without allowing it to determine the meaning of every new encounter, and to act decisively while remaining capable of correction. At the collective level, the corresponding question is what kinds of institutions expand rather than continually narrow the range of responses available to the people who inhabit them.

To act within facticity is not to escape the Language Parasite, because we cannot, nor to overthrow the Symbolic Order and emerge into some unmediated freedom beyond language. It is to recognize that symbolic structures will continue shaping perception and behavior while refusing the conclusion that their effects are therefore fixed. We can change our relationship to the language that organizes experience, but we can also change the institutions, relationships, and practices through which particular ways of speaking and acting acquire their force.

This gives a somewhat different meaning to the familiar integral injunction to Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up. None of these can finally mean escaping the historical, linguistic, embodied, and institutional conditions within which development takes place. The task is to cultivate greater psychological flexibility while building communities that form people without possessing them; forms of authority that remain answerable to those they serve; loyalties strong enough to sustain collective action without requiring enemies to give them meaning; and institutions able to learn when the frameworks through which they understand the world no longer fit what the world is telling them.

The Master Signifier will not disappear. Human beings will continue organizing experience through names, identities, traditions, institutions, and ideals because without them collective action would scarcely be possible. The question is whether those symbolic structures remain open enough for experience to correct them, or whether reality eventually has to be distorted in order to protect the name.

That is the distinction I want to preserve: between a framework that merely interprets the world through its own categories and one that remains capable of changing both itself and the conditions in which we live.

Suggested Reading

David Sloan Wilson, Paul Atkins, and Steven C. Hayes, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (2019)

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1958)

Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (1996)

Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010)

Daniel Tutt, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family (2022)

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991)

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962)

Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976)

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vols. 1 and 2 (1981)

Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1992)

Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (1995)

Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (1996)

Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (2000)

Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World (2006)

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

Michael Brooks, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right (2020)

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991)

Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999)

Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (2006)

Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012)

Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (2019)

Steven C. Hayes, Kirk Strosahl, and Kelly Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed., 2012)

Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (2004)

Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013)

Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016)

Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019)

Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics (2020)

Todd McGowan, The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan (2025)

I. Between Lacan & RFT/ACT

In June 2025, Daniel Tutt’s Emancipations Study Collective hosted Benjamin Schoendorff for a presentation on Relational Frame Theory. Schoendorff — a clinical psychologist, ACT trainer, and founder of Montreal’s Contextual Psychology Institute — had been pressing Tutt to take RFT seriously as a contribution to Marxist psychology. Tutt, a philosopher working through Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, was receptive but unconvinced.

What interested me about the conversation was not simply that they disagreed. They repeatedly seemed to approach the same phenomenon from different directions and then lose one another precisely where the overlap became most interesting.

Schoendorff approached language through contextual behavioral science. Relational Frame Theory attempts to explain how human beings learn to relate events symbolically and how those learned relations transform what things do to us. Words, memories, identities, imagined futures, social categories, and evaluations acquire behavioral functions that no longer depend upon direct experience alone. A person can become frightened by something that has never happened, organize a life around avoiding a judgment no one has actually made, or respond to a word as though it were the thing the word names.

Tutt kept pushing from another direction. What happens to the symptom in this account? What about jouissance — the strange attachment people can develop to forms of suffering they consciously claim to want to escape? What about alienation that cannot simply be understood as bad learning or maladaptation? Most importantly, if psychotherapy aims at greater flexibility and adaptation, what prevents it from becoming another technology for producing subjects better able to tolerate conditions they ought instead to resist?

That question brought the conversation closest to the point that has stayed with me.

Freud, Lacan, and later Žižek can help us see the symbolic trap we are already in. Psychoanalysis gives us a language for recognizing how symptoms, fantasies, identifications, repetitions, and ideological formations organize our lives without our fully understanding how they do so. Lacan radicalizes the point by insisting that there is no fully formed subject standing outside language who can simply step away from the Symbolic Order once its operations have been exposed.

But seeing the trap is not the same thing as changing what we do inside it.

A person can acquire an extraordinarily sophisticated interpretation of the fantasy organizing their life and continue reproducing much the same pattern of behavior. They can understand why they desire what they desire, why a particular symptom persists, or how an ideological identification structures what appears possible while remaining no more able to respond differently when the relevant situation actually occurs. Psychoanalytic insight can certainly change people, but behavioral transformation is not specified with anything like the clarity or systematic attention it receives within ACT.

Schoendorff’s emphasis on self-determination therefore seemed important to me, even where Tutt’s criticism remained valid. ACT asks whether a person can take their history with them without allowing that history to determine every subsequent action. It does not require a clinician to specify the correct life in advance. Yet that very refusal leaves another problem unresolved: if greater psychological flexibility makes different action possible, what gives that action direction?

I came to the exchange already moving between these traditions, reading the ACT and contextual behavioral science literature alongside Lacan through Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal. What increasingly interested me was neither a victory of behavioral science over psychoanalysis nor a synthesis in which their differences disappeared. Psychoanalysis had diagnosed something real about symbolic capture: the ways language, fantasy, and identification can organize us without our fully knowing it. Contextual behavioral science, however, seemed to offer a much more developed account of how the behavioral effects of that capture might actually be altered.

But that creates a new problem. If psychological flexibility gives us more room to act, what should we do with that room? Becoming less governed by a verbal system does not by itself tell us what kinds of action are worth pursuing, what kinds of people we should become, or what kinds of institutions we should build. The problem of symbolic capture therefore leads directly into a problem of orientation.

II. Seeing the Symbolic Trap

Relational Frame Theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis are, in important respects, approaching the same human phenomenon: we become organized by symbolic relations that operate prior to conscious reflection and can come to govern perception, identity, emotion, memory, and action.

Lacan’s account is structural. Human subjectivity is constituted through language rather than merely expressed through it. The subject enters a Symbolic Order of names, laws, kinship structures, prohibitions, social meanings, and signifiers that existed before any particular individual appeared. There is no fully formed self standing outside this order and subsequently learning to use language as an instrument. The speaking subject emerges through symbolic mediation and remains divided by it.

This is one reason psychoanalysis can be so illuminating. It directs attention toward repetitions and identifications that ordinary introspection misses. Freud’s unconscious already challenged the ego’s confidence that it knows why it does what it does. Lacan relocates that problem within language itself. Žižek then extends it into ideology, showing how political and cultural formations can organize desire precisely where subjects imagine themselves to be acting freely.

There is an old joke about a man who goes into psychoanalysis because he wets the bed. Years later, a friend asks whether the analysis worked. “I still wet the bed,” he replies, “but now I know why.”

The joke is unfair to psychoanalysis, but it captures the problem I am trying to name. Insight and behavioral change are not the same thing. A person can understand a symptom, give an increasingly sophisticated account of the fantasy or repetition underlying it, and remain caught in much the same pattern. Knowing why one does something does not necessarily make another response available when the conditions that produce the behavior return.

That limitation becomes especially visible in the Lacanian and Žižekian traditions because their great strength is interpretation. They can make forms of capture visible that would otherwise remain difficult to see: how desire becomes organized around lack, how identification attaches us to particular images of ourselves, how ideology operates through enjoyment rather than simply through false belief. But the very sophistication of the interpretive machinery can become part of the difficulty. One interpretation leads to another; contradiction generates another dialectical turn; the discovery that we are caught within language produces still more language about the character of our capture.

At its best, this can deepen self-understanding and expose ideological structures that a narrower psychology might overlook. At its worst, the person becomes increasingly fluent in explaining why change is difficult without becoming substantially better able to change.

RFT reaches much of the same territory from a radically different intellectual lineage. It does not begin with the divided subject or the Symbolic Order but with learned relational behavior. Human beings acquire the capacity to respond to relations among events — same as, different from, better than, before, after, mine, yours, here, there — in ways that become increasingly independent of the physical properties of the events themselves. Once these relational networks develop, the functions of one event can be transformed through its relation to another.

The word worthless can alter behavior even though worthlessness is not a physical property one could discover in the body. A memory of humiliation can change what a future social encounter means. A political category can alter whom we trust before another person has spoken. A diagnostic label can reorganize how previous experiences are remembered and how future possibilities are imagined.

There is a genuine convergence here. Both traditions reject the picture of an autonomous rational individual transparently deciding what things mean and then acting accordingly. Both recognize that human beings become entangled in networks of symbolic relation that acquire force outside conscious intention.

The difference becomes much more significant when we ask what happens next.

Psychoanalysis asks us to understand the structure of the trap more deeply. RFT asks what the trap is doing to behavior. ACT then asks whether that behavioral relationship can be changed.

That movement from interpretation toward function and action is where the distinction becomes practical.

III. From Interpretation to Behavioral Change

For contextual behavioral science, a verbal relation matters not only because of what it signifies but because of how it changes behavior.

The thought “I am a failure” can alter what someone attends to, which memories become salient, whether they enter a relationship, whether they apply for a job, how they interpret another person’s expression, and what they do when anxiety appears. The significance of the thought lies partly in the network of relations surrounding it and in the functions those relations acquire within a particular history and context.

Cognitive fusion describes a situation in which such verbal processes exert increasingly rigid control over behavior. The thought is no longer merely something that occurs. It becomes an organizing frame through which subsequent experience is filtered.

ACT does not try to defeat the thought by arriving at a superior interpretation of its hidden meaning. Nor does it require replacing “I am a failure” with the more reassuring “I am a success.” Defusion aims instead to change the relationship between the verbal event and subsequent action. The thought may remain painful. The history that produced it does not disappear. What changes is whether its appearance determines what happens next.

This is the point at which I find ACT considerably more useful than the psychoanalytic traditions that helped identify the problem in the first place. Freud, Lacan, and Žižek can help us recognize how we have become caught within symbolic structures. ACT asks what can be done when those structures show up again tomorrow morning.

Can the thought be present without dictating the next action? Can shame be experienced without avoidance becoming the organizing principle of the day? Can a political identity remain meaningful without determining in advance which evidence will be accepted? Can a diagnostic category organize care without becoming the total explanation of the person? Can fear remain present while someone nevertheless moves toward something they value?

These are behavioral questions, and they shift the criterion of success.

The issue is no longer simply whether I understand the symbolic structure governing a pattern. The question becomes whether I can respond differently when that structure becomes active. The old thought may still appear. The anxiety may still arrive. The symbolic identification may remain important. But if my range of possible action has expanded, something consequential has changed.

The distinction should not be exaggerated into a claim that interpretation is useless or that psychoanalysis never changes anyone. Insight can alter behavior, relationships, and self-understanding, and the therapeutic relationship itself may produce forms of change that cannot be reduced to interpretation. The narrower point is that behavioral transformation is not left implicit within ACT. It is the explicit object of the work.

Psychological flexibility names that shift. It involves remaining in contact with what is happening, allowing difficult internal experience to be present, loosening the control of rigid verbal processes, taking perspective on the stories through which the self has been organized, clarifying valued directions, and behaving in ways that increasingly reflect those values.

This also distinguishes ACT from approaches that measure therapeutic success primarily through whether the unwanted thought, feeling, or symptom disappears. Psychological flexibility does not require the symbolic trap to vanish. It asks whether the person’s behavior must continue being organized by it in the same way.

There is, however, a political limit to this approach. ACT cannot solve a structural problem merely by producing more flexible individuals.

A worker can learn to relate differently to anxiety while remaining in a workplace organized around impossible demands. Someone can defuse from a stigmatizing diagnosis while still requiring the diagnosis to access treatment, insurance, or institutional support. A person can become less fused with political identity while participating in media and organizational environments whose incentives reward precisely the polarization they are learning to resist.

Language is never merely a private event occurring inside the skull. The relational networks through which people understand themselves are learned and reinforced through families, schools, clinics, workplaces, religious communities, political movements, media systems, and economic institutions.

Psychological flexibility can expand the range of responses available to a person, but political praxis also requires changing the contexts in which particular forms of behavior are repeatedly reinforced.

Tutt’s concern about adaptation therefore remains important. The aim cannot simply be to produce people better able to tolerate intolerable circumstances. Sometimes flexibility means adapting oneself to reality. Sometimes it means refusing the demands of an institution. Sometimes it means organizing with others to change the conditions under which the problem continually reappears.

That still leaves the question Schoendorff’s account cannot settle on its own: flexibility in the service of what?

IV. The Problem of Orientation

Schoendorff’s refusal to dictate the content of self-determination follows from an important ethical commitment. A therapist should be extremely cautious about deciding what another person’s life ought to mean.

Lacanian resistance to positive prescription has a related logic. Psychoanalysis becomes something quite different if the analyst already possesses the correct image of the healthy subject and treats analysis as the process of bringing the patient into conformity with it.

Both traditions therefore have good reasons to distrust a ready-made account of the Good.

But once their insights are extended beyond the clinical encounter, the normative question becomes difficult to avoid. Greater behavioral flexibility creates possibilities, but possibilities are not yet orientations. A person can become extremely flexible in the service of exploitation, domination, narcissism, or cruelty. The ability to tolerate discomfort can support civil disobedience, but it can also support a corporate executive working seventy-hour weeks. Perspective-taking can deepen solidarity, but it can also make manipulation more effective.

This is another reason diagnosis alone is insufficient. Knowing that our desires and identities are symbolically mediated does not tell us what kinds of desires should be cultivated or what forms of collective life are worth constructing. The endless revelation that every identity is incomplete, every symbolic system fails, and every political project contains contradiction can eventually become its own form of paralysis. Critique becomes exceptionally good at preventing naïveté while providing increasingly little assistance with construction.

ACT moves further because values are built into its account of psychological flexibility. Behavior becomes flexible not simply for the sake of flexibility but so that action can become more responsive to what matters.

Yet “chosen values” cannot carry the entire normative burden either. Values are never chosen in a vacuum. They are inherited, contested, revised, learned through relationships, embedded in traditions, and shaped by social conditions. Even our language for what matters reaches us through worlds we did not create.

The question therefore cannot simply be: What do I value?

It also becomes: What kinds of practices form the kinds of people we are becoming? What forms of life allow our values to be challenged and deepened rather than merely affirmed? How do commitments become durable enough to organize action without becoming another symbolic structure that settles every question in advance?

This is where I have increasingly returned to the language of virtue.

Not because virtue provides an escape from the post-metaphysical problem, but because it shifts the question away from possessing the correct interpretation and toward cultivating capacities for action.

Courage is not primarily a theory of courage. It becomes visible in what someone does when fear is present. Awareness is not a doctrine about consciousness. Love is not simply assent to the proposition that other people matter.

Virtue concerns what we become able to do.

V. Awareness, Courage, and Love

Gareth Holman’s work in contextual behavioral science gives this problem a surprisingly simple vocabulary: Awareness, Courage, and Love.

At first glance, ACL can look like another clinical mnemonic. It becomes more interesting when understood as a description of capacities cultivated through practice.

Awareness concerns the ability to notice what is occurring without immediately becoming identical to the interpretation placed upon it. It includes attention, defusion, perspective-taking, and the possibility of recognizing that a thought or feeling is present without requiring it to determine what happens next.

Courage concerns action in the presence of fear, uncertainty, discomfort, or the pull of familiar avoidance. Psychological flexibility would mean very little if it merely produced increasingly sophisticated awareness of the forces governing us while leaving us unable to behave differently when those forces appear.

Love introduces the relational dimension. A flexible person is not simply an increasingly autonomous individual capable of choosing private values more efficiently. Human beings become persons through relationships and remain dependent upon forms of recognition, care, cooperation, responsibility, and mutual vulnerability. Love, in this context, names an orientation beyond the isolated self without requiring us to settle in advance every philosophical or theological question contained in the word.

I am increasingly comfortable calling these virtues, although not in the sense that contextual behavioral science has somehow scientifically discovered the final virtues of human life. Awareness, Courage, and Love have histories extending far beyond psychotherapy, and religious and philosophical traditions have interpreted each of them in radically different ways.

The narrower claim is more useful. They can be understood as virtue-like dispositions whose significance becomes visible through practice. Awareness creates room for another response. Courage makes acting differently possible when the old response still exerts force. Love places that action within a world of other people rather than treating psychological flexibility as the private achievement of an autonomous individual.

They also develop recursively. Awareness can make courageous action more possible. Courage allows us to remain present where awareness might otherwise become another form of withdrawal. Love gives both an interpersonal orientation, while relationships of trust and solidarity make awareness and courage easier to sustain.

This returns us to something neither psychoanalysis nor individual psychotherapy can resolve by itself. People do not cultivate these capacities alone. They develop through practices, relationships, communities, and institutions.

VI. Prosocial

Prosocial, developed by Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, Steven Hayes, and collaborators, extends contextual behavioral science toward collective life by bringing ACT into conversation with Elinor Ostrom’s research on commons governance.

Ostrom challenged a powerful assumption: that shared resources inevitably require either centralized state control or privatization to avoid collapse. Across different contexts, communities developed durable systems of cooperation through practices involving shared purpose, fair distribution of costs and benefits, participatory decision-making, monitoring, graduated responses to violations, conflict resolution, local authority, and coordination across levels.

Prosocial adapts these insights into a framework for examining how group norms and patterns of interaction support or undermine cooperation.

The point is not to turn Ostrom’s Core Design Principles into a new moral law. Empirical regularities cannot by themselves tell us everything we ought to value, and the evolutionary history of cooperation does not derive an ethics from biology.

What this literature does show is that capacities often treated as individual achievements depend profoundly upon social conditions.

Trust is easier to sustain in groups where exploitation is not continually rewarded. Courage takes different forms when dissent leads to expulsion than when disagreement can be expressed without destroying membership. Perspective-taking matters differently when decision-making structures allow another perspective to influence an actual outcome. Commitment is easier to distinguish from obedience when authority can be questioned and rules can be revised.

This brings the behavioral argument outward. ACT asks how a person’s repertoire can become less rigid. Prosocial asks how groups can be organized so that flexibility, cooperation, disagreement, and revision remain possible in the first place.

Institutions do not mechanically manufacture virtuous people, but neither do virtuous people simply appear prior to institutions and then decide what to build. People are formed through participation in social worlds, and those people in turn reproduce, contest, or transform the structures they inhabit.

Rather than imagining virtue as a private accomplishment or an eternal definition imposed from above, we can therefore begin asking what kinds of practices make people more capable of awareness, courageous action, mutual concern, perspective-taking, cooperation, and revision — and what kinds repeatedly reward conformity, domination, isolation, avoidance, or rigid identification.

That is already a movement from therapy toward politics.

VII. Integral Facticity & Enactive Fallibilism

Two ideas I have been developing — Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism — help me make sense of the relationship between symbolic mediation, behavioral change, development, and social structure.

By Integral Facticity I mean that human beings always begin within conditions they did not choose: bodies, languages, histories, relationships, institutions, economic circumstances, inherited traditions, and social positions. There is no view from nowhere from which these conditions can be suspended while we determine the correct form of life.

At the same time, no single mode of explanation exhausts them.

This matters particularly for the distinction I have been drawing between psychoanalysis and contextual behavioral science. Lacan can disclose something important about symbolic constitution without thereby giving us an adequate account of behavioral change. RFT can explain how verbal relations transform psychological functions without thereby explaining the political institutions through which those relations are socially reinforced. Structural critique can expose economic and institutional constraints without telling us what a particular person can do differently when those constraints become psychologically embodied.

These are not competing descriptions from which one winner must be selected. They disclose different aspects of a situation that remains psychological, behavioral, cultural, embodied, and institutional at once.

Wilber’s integral framework remains useful to me for precisely this reason. Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up name different dimensions of development that cannot simply be reduced to one scale. Contemplative awareness is not the same thing as moral development; psychological integration is not political transformation; sophisticated interpretation does not guarantee behavioral flexibility; behavioral flexibility does not guarantee ethical maturity.

Development also never occurs outside facticity. We grow from somewhere, through languages and institutions we inherited, in bodies with possibilities and limits, under historical conditions we did not select. Development can transform those conditions without ever beginning outside them.

Enactive Fallibilism describes the methodological attitude that follows.

Peircean fallibilism begins from the recognition that our claims remain revisable. Enactivism adds that knowing develops through embodied engagement rather than from the detached standpoint of a disembodied observer. We discover something about our frameworks by living through them.

This is another place where I depart from the interpretive recursion that can characterize psychoanalytic theory. A framework cannot protect itself indefinitely by generating another interpretation of whatever contradicts it. At some point consequences matter. Evidence matters. Other people’s accounts matter. What happens when the framework is enacted matters.

The body matters too, but not because bodily experience provides an infallible verdict. Suffering matters. Exhaustion matters. Fear, breakdown, pleasure, attachment, conflict, cooperation, and physiological consequences all provide evidence that theories of human flourishing cannot simply explain away.

But bodily experience still requires interpretation. Pain can accompany growth as well as injury. Comfort can sustain domination. Immediate relief does not prove that a practice is good, any more than suffering automatically falsifies every structure in which it appears.

Enactive Fallibilism therefore requires a more demanding movement between framework and practice. We enact interpretations, discover what they make possible, encounter what they obscure or damage, and revise them in light of consequences, new evidence, other perspectives, and conditions they did not initially know how to accommodate.

No tradition receives immunity from that process: psychoanalysis, contextual behavioral science, Marxism, integral theory, religious tradition, subjective experience, or a framework I am constructing myself.

This gives a different answer to Schoendorff’s concern that we cannot stand outside language and determine which verbal system is finally correct. We do not need such a position. We need ways of living and inquiring through which our interpretations can be changed.

It also gives a different answer to Tutt’s concern about adaptation. The relevant question is not simply whether a person becomes more functional within an existing environment. The environment must also remain available for criticism and transformation. Sometimes behavior has to change. Sometimes institutions have to change. Often each changes through engagement with the other.

Psychological flexibility becomes politically significant when it helps make that reciprocal transformation possible.

VIII. IACT & Post-Metaphysical Virtue Ethics

Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) is my attempt to organize these ideas into a working form of praxis.

It begins from a distinction that became clearer to me through the Schoendorff-Tutt exchange. Insight into symbolic capture matters. Freud, Lacan, and Žižek can show us dimensions of that capture that a purely behavioral account may overlook. But the old psychoanalytic joke remains instructive: knowing why we wet the bed is not the same thing as no longer wetting it.

ACT starts from the other side. Defusion, acceptance, present-moment awareness, self-as-context, values, and committed action are practices aimed at increasing the range of behavior available when the old symbolic relations become active. They move from understanding the pattern toward changing our participation in it.

That does not make ACT a sufficient political philosophy. Individual flexibility cannot substitute for institutions, traditions, communities, or forms of collective action. Prosocial extends the framework into groups, where behavioral possibilities depend partly upon how cooperation, authority, conflict, and participation are organized. Wilber keeps developmental differences and multiple dimensions of experience in view. Integral Facticity prevents development from becoming a fantasy of escaping history, embodiment, or social constraint. Enactive Fallibilism requires the architecture itself to remain revisable through what happens when it is practiced.

Awareness, Courage, and Love give this work a provisional language of virtue. They do not constitute a final conception of the good life. They name capacities that become increasingly important once psychological freedom is understood not simply as knowing why we are captured but as becoming able to respond differently.

Seen from here, Schoendorff and Tutt each preserve something the other risks losing.

Schoendorff is right to resist telling another person which verbal system they ought to inhabit. Psychological freedom purchased through submission to the therapist’s worldview would scarcely count as freedom. ACT is also right to insist that flexibility ultimately has to appear in what people are actually able to do.

Tutt is right that adaptation cannot become the unquestioned goal. A psychology that teaches people only to accommodate themselves to existing institutions can become an efficient technology of domination. Psychoanalysis preserves an essential suspicion toward the demand to become the properly functioning subject of a dysfunctional order.

But suspicion and interpretation cannot be the end of the work. Non-adaptation remains politically empty unless there is something we are attempting to build, protect, transform, or become.

The space between those positions is where I locate post-metaphysical virtue ethics.

“Post-metaphysical” does not mean that metaphysical or religious questions have been disproven, nor that traditions must abandon them before entering modern life. It means something narrower: practices of psychological and political formation need not wait for universal agreement about ultimate reality before they become subject to reflection, evidence, dialogue, and revision.

Likewise, virtue need not mean recovering an uncontested Aristotelian essence of the human being. It can begin with capacities cultivated through practice: the ability to notice without immediately fusing with an interpretation, to remain in contact with difficult experience, to act despite fear, to take another perspective seriously, to orient behavior toward goods that matter, and to revise our practices when their consequences betray the values through which they were justified.

None of these capacities guarantees virtue. Awareness can become manipulation. Courage can become fanaticism. Love can become possession. Psychological flexibility can serve destructive ends. Groups can cooperate around terrible purposes.

Fallibilism therefore cannot be added at the end as a methodological footnote. The virtues themselves, the institutions cultivating them, and IACT as a framework all have to remain answerable to their consequences.

IACT is not the theory that finally escapes the symbolic trap. There is no such theory. It is an attempt to move from recognizing that trap toward practices through which its behavioral consequences can become less rigid, while connecting that individual transformation to the relationships and institutions in which behavior acquires its meaning and force.

Freud, Lacan, and Žižek can help us see why we are not masters in our own symbolic house. RFT helps explain how that house continues organizing what we feel and do. ACT asks whether, without pretending that we can simply leave it behind, we can nevertheless learn to move differently within it — and eventually begin altering the structures themselves.

Post-metaphysical virtue ethics begins there: not with one more interpretation of why we remain trapped, but with the cultivation of forms of practice through which people and institutions can actually change.

The task is not merely to interpret the symbolic structures through which we understand the world, but to develop forms of praxis capable of changing both themselves and the conditions in which we live.

Suggested Reading

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI, 1973; English trans. 1977)

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Steven C. Hayes, Dermot Barnes-Holmes, and Bryan Roche (eds.), Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition (2001)

Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed., 2012)

Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (2019)

Gareth Holman, Jonathan W. Kanter, Mavis Tsai, and Robert Kohlenberg, Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Relationships (2017) — particularly useful for the Awareness, Courage, and Love model.

Jonathan W. Kanter, Gareth Holman, and Kelly G. Wilson, “Where Is the Love? Contextual Behavioral Science and Behavior Analysis” (2014)

Daniel W. M. Maitland, Jonathan W. Kanter, Katherine E. Manbeck, and Adam M. Kuczynski, “Relationship Science Informed Clinically Relevant Behaviors in Functional Analytic Psychotherapy: The Awareness, Courage, and Love Model” (2017)

Paul W. B. Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven C. Hayes, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (2019)

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990)

Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991)

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vols. 1–2 (1981)

Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (2000)

My conversation with Cadell Last in September 2023 was a pivotal moment, one that definitively cemented his standing, in my mind, as one of Canada’s most compelling emerging intellectuals. Our extensive discussion, provocatively titled "Towards New Philosophical Horizons," was specifically conducted to illuminate his extraordinary aptitude for speculative thought and his almost innate ability to venture into and explore novel philosophical frontiers. Cadell, alongside the equally impressive , stands out prominently among a burgeoning new generation of Canadian thinkers whose intellectual output consistently impresses me, not only with its sheer volume but also with its remarkable quality and depth.

What has consistently intrigued me about Cadell’s intellectual contributions is his remarkable ability to draw together disparate intellectual camps into an expansive orbit—a talent that, in its own distinct way, strikingly mirrors the unifying magnetism Michael Brooks wielded. As I've explored in my previous post, "Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere," Brooks's own ability to unify these camps and forge a new kind of intellectual commons was a remarkable feat; I now see Cadell accomplishing many of the same things through his online community, the Philosophy Portal. He possesses an almost alchemical gift for synthesizing divergent traditions, bringing together followers of the American integral movement, the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, and Canadian Idealism through a unique Hegelian lens. This distinctive ability to synthesize ideas and foster community has been creating a vital new space for the advancement of philosophical discourse.

For a time, demanding family and work commitments prevented me from following his recent work or participating in his online seminars as closely as I'd wanted. The timely arrival of his book, Real Speculations, was a fortunate development. It was an interesting and captivating read, offering a cohesive and comprehensive overview of his latest intellectual developments. This challenging and engaging text didn't just help me get up to speed; it also served as an entertaining and enlightening entry point into his developing body of work and original analytical framework.

In this essay, I aim to trace the unorthodox intellectual lineage that led me from the late Michael Brooks to the work of Cadell Last, and in doing so, provide a preliminary commentary on Cadell's new book, Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. I will argue that Cadell's work represents a crucial and ongoing development within contemporary left-wing discourse and philosophical thought since the tragic passing of Michael Brooks. His contributions offer a vital way to understand current philosophical and cultural shifts, continuing the critical discourse that Brooks so profoundly shaped. Ultimately, this essay serves as a bridge, connecting the intellectual ecosystem of Brooks to the profound ideas in Cadell’s new book, which I highly recommend reading in combination with these other illuminating works:

• Flowers for Marx - featuring authors such as , Conrad Hamilton, Matt McManus, Ernesto Vargas, and

• Michael Brooks's Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right

• Matt McManus's A How To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism: A Tribute to Michael Brooks

• Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson by Ben Burgis, Conrad Bongard Hamilton, Matthew McManus, and Marion Trejo

From Brooks to Cadell Last: An Unorthodox Intellectual Lineage

The path from Michael Brooks to Cadell Last was no straight line, but a series of unforeseen intellectual connections. This wasn't a direct introduction, a recommendation from a colleague, or a chance encounter in an academic setting. Instead, my discovery of Cadell emerged organically, almost as an intellectual offshoot, from my initial and more focused foray into the works of Michael Brooks.

My primary objective at the time was to delve into the intricate intellectual connections between Brooks's widely recognized political activism and his less publicized, though equally compelling, engagement with the Integral movement. My initial fascination was ignited by a pivotal conversation Brooks conducted with Jeremy Johnson in August 2019. Broadcast on his acclaimed program, The Michael Brooks Show, this discussion was the primary catalyst, profoundly stimulating my interest in his sophisticated and often understated approach to integral political praxis. This fascination coincided with my sustained fascination at the time with various online intellectual communities, particularly Rebel Wisdom (which has since been rebranded as Kainos). My attention had been particularly drawn to their interview with Ken Wilber in March 2019, an episode that delved into Wilber's reflections on the Intellectual Dark Web and the pervasive cultural phenomenon surrounding Jordan Peterson.

As Michael Brooks diligently began the promotion of his seminal work, Against the Web, I also found myself increasingly drawn to The Stoa, an adjacent community deeply intertwined with Rebel Wisdom due to the close friendships and working relations of figures like , , and . It was during Brooks's appearance at The Stoa in May 2020 that I started noticing the distinctive intellectual contributions of Cadell. At that nascent stage, his work, which was predominantly centered on his talks on Hegel and his book, Sex, Masculinity, God, did not deeply resonate with my prevailing intellectual predispositions. My focus at the time was much more acutely directed towards the compelling works of Matt McManus and Brooks himself, particularly their incisive analyses concerning the emergent new right and the intricate nuances of postmodern conservatism, or what some people are now calling the new woke right. Their collective contributions aligned seamlessly with my own developing theoretical frameworks and provided a robust lens through which to understand contemporary political shifts. This concentrated intellectual focus subsequently led me to follow McManus's work with heightened attention, especially after the publication of his book, Myth and Mayhem, which was notably distinguished by a compelling and captivating introduction penned by the renowned and influential philosopher, Slavoj Žižek.

It is a curious and often overlooked aspect of Brooks's legacy that his profound and genuine interest in integral theory, particularly the complex and expansive works of Ken Wilber, was largely overshadowed and often neglected in favor of his more widely recognized and celebrated focus on Marxist theory, socialism, and cosmopolitan thought. To ensure that this significant, yet often neglected, aspect of his intellectual life remained apparent and received due recognition, I embarked upon the creation of my own podcast series. This series officially debuted in March 2022, with an insightful and engaging interview with Matt McManus. The fundamental purpose of the podcast was to feature guests who could authentically speak to Brooks's multifaceted life and enduring legacy, with a particular emphasis on those individuals who possessed a clear awareness of his foundational background in integral theory. Through this endeavor, I quickly discovered that among the select few individuals who were genuinely aware of his deeper and more nuanced involvement with the integral movement were and . I was fortunate enough to conduct insightful interviews with both of them, further enriching my understanding of Brooks's life and earlier years before his rise to fame and shedding light on this less-explored dimension of his thought.

My research pivoted in June 2023 when I interviewed Matt Flisfeder. I had initially become aware of his work as a regular listener of the PlasticPill podcast, where I learned he had brokered the renowned Peterson-Žižek debate. This key revelation was the primary motivation for me to pursue an interview with him. I was also drawn to his compelling book, Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, as a work that offered a fresh and incisive perspective on contemporary digital culture and the future of humanism. His intellectual gifts, especially his ability to synthesize structuralist theory with social media analysis, captivated me and formed the basis for our conversation, "Towards a New Structuralism & Humanism."

My path next led to Daniel Tutt, a Žižek and Alain Badiou scholar whose interview with Flisfeder on "In Defense of Žižek?" caught my attention. Coming from an academic background in religious studies, I was curious to hear him talk about his work on Islam, a topic he had not discussed in previous interviews. His unique perspectives on religion and his evident concern for family well-being created a meaningful point of connection for our discussion. Building on my conversation with Matt Flisfeder, we explored not only these themes but also his critique of post-Marxism and the historical influence of pragmatism on American leftist thought. He argued that the abandonment of a materialist and class-based analysis in favor of a purely cultural based-approach has been harmful, leaving the Left ill-equipped to counter the rise of irrationalist thinkers. Our wide-ranging conversation became a space for exploring how the Left must re-engage with political economy to effectively combat the cultural politics of the New Right, an ongoing theme that has profoundly shaped my perspective on the current intellectual landscape.

To gain a deeper understanding of the intellectual ecosystem that gave rise to many of the thinkers who shaped this particular path, I interviewed Douglas Lain, the former publisher of Zero Books—a publishing house deeply intertwined with the intellectual lineage and enduring legacy of Michael Brooks. Lain's insights from our conversation on "Michael Brooks, the Next Left & The Future of Left Media" provided invaluable context for this inquiry.

A new avenue of inquiry opened up in August 2023 after I discovered that Cadell had also interviewed . This prompted me to revisit Cadell's work. I found his book, Systems and Subjects: Foundations of Philosophy and Science, to be much more expansive than I had initially assumed. My subsequent podcast conversation with Cadell was a truly revelatory experience. He generously shared details of his rigorous academic trajectory, recounting how he pursued an MSc in evolutionary anthropology before relocating to Brussels to complete his PhD in philosophy. There, he was fortunate enough to be mentored by a leading systems theorist and cybernetics expert, an influence that profoundly shaped his philosophical outlook. This extensive and remarkably interdisciplinary academic journey, spanning disparate fields, helped him develop his unique and profoundly interdisciplinary approach to knowledge.

Cadell's intellectual contributions are distinguished by a profound and compelling theoretical rigor. His work echoes the meta-thinking of Michael Brooks—a mode of inquiry that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries to synthesize disparate fields of knowledge. This is powerfully demonstrated in his seminal book, Systems and Subjects. Rather than simply mirroring Ken Wilber's Four-Quadrant model, Cadell's framework is equally robust and granular, offering a sophisticated and comprehensive critique of materialist or objective-only approaches to science, and systems theory approaches. These approaches, Cadell argues, fundamentally neglect the crucial dimension of subjective experience.

These insights resonate deeply with my existing comprehension of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, which is premised on the foundation of three distinct validity claims. Habermas's project is a profound attempt to move beyond the limitations of earlier critical theories by synthesizing their core insights into a new framework for emancipatory thought. He extends Hegel's dialectical unfolding of spirit, but instead of focusing on a totalizing historical process, Habermas grounds his theory in the intersubjective communication of individuals. From Marx, he inherits the critique of ideology and the understanding that social systems can distort human relations, but he broadens the focus from purely economic domination to the colonization of the "lifeworld" by instrumental reason. The influence of Freudian psychoanalysis is also evident in Habermas's idea of a "discourse ethics" that aims to uncover and correct systematic distortions in communication, much like a therapist helps a patient overcome repressed or distorted truths. Finally, drawing on the work of developmental psychology from figures like Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, Habermas establishes a universal, non-relativistic foundation for his validity claims, arguing that the capacity for rational moral and social judgment is a trans-historical human capacity that develops in stages. Cadell's work, in its effort to integrate these same dimensions—objective, social, and subjective—offers a powerful and robust model for intersubjective understanding that moves beyond mere deconstruction, much like Habermas's framework. This conceptual alignment affirmed for me that Cadell was not just a fellow traveler but a thinker with the theoretical rigor of others I admire.

This enhanced understanding, forged through engagement with Cadell's foundational work, ignited a keen anticipation to delve into his newest book, Real Speculations.

A First Look at Real Speculations

Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis is a major new work from Cadell, offering a dense but rewarding reading experience. Spanning 36 chapters that synthesize his work from the Philosophy Portal, the book is structured around the legacies of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Lacan and is bookended by a profound introduction that dialectically mediates New Atheism and a conclusion that explores the potential of Christian Atheism. In this commentary, I will focus on three sections that had the biggest impact on me: "Introduction: Dialecticising New Atheism," "Chapter 2: Phenomenology of Spirit Is Not a Theory of Everything," and "Chapter 36: The Revenge of Philosophy." My explicit aim is not to provide an exhaustive analysis but a preliminary one designed to propel online discussions and expand the philosophical discourse around Cadell's work.

Dialecticising New Atheism

The Introduction: Dialecticising New Atheism traces the historical trajectory of New Atheism, beginning with Richard Dawkins's rationalistic critique of religion and moving through Sam Harris's turn to "spirituality without religion." It presents Jordan Peterson as a crucial figure in this lineage, who re-engages with religion's psychological and mythological dimensions. The Introduction positions Cadell's own project as a necessary next step to transcend these figures and develop a dialectical materialism capable of integrating both religious and atheistic thought.

Cadell's insightful analysis, particularly his dialectical approach to New Atheism and his engagement with figures like Jordan Peterson, represents a significant and welcome contribution. While I may not concur with every detail or conclusion, his work is deeply generative—a much-needed step in the right direction. His nuanced perspective, which skillfully reintroduces religion in a serious way into public discourse from a left-wing perspective, is crucial for fostering an emancipatory project that grapples with these fundamental human desires for meaning and community. This strategic positioning of the Left vis-à-vis religion is what makes this section particularly impactful for me, mirroring the intellectual project of Michael Brooks in his book Against the Web. Brooks, too, recognized that a purely dismissive approach to religion left a vacuum that was easily exploited by the political right and its brand of postmodern conservatism. By engaging with religion on its own terms, but from a dialectical, left-wing perspective, Cadell’s work provides a new, more effective way for the Left to understand and counter the cultural shifts being driven by figures like Peterson. It moves beyond a simplistic culture war to a deeper, more sophisticated engagement with the underlying drives and myths that shape our society.

Phenomenology of Spirit Is Not a Theory of Everything

In Chapter 2: Phenomenology of Spirit Is Not a Theory of Everything, this section challenges the contemporary impulse to create a "Theory of Everything" (TOE). It argues that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is not a unified theory of being, but rather a guide for the knower's own process of "coming-to-be." It critiques both reductionist scientific and emergentist philosophical TOEs for skipping this crucial step, arguing that the knower must first understand their own consciousness and its historical becoming before they can meaningfully address questions of absolute being. The desire for a grand unified theory often comes from a naive, pre-Hegelian standpoint that assumes a stable, external reality waiting to be discovered. From Hegel's perspective, this desire itself is a symptom of a deeper philosophical problem: the separation of the knower from the known. In failing to account for the subjective dimension—the "in-and-for-itself" of consciousness—these theories risk being nothing more than elaborate, unreflective systems of thought.

While it is tempting to view all attempts at a TOE as philosophically naive, the conversation is more complex. Indeed, a central point of my own reflection on Cadell's work is that he and integral theorist Ken Wilber seem to have more in common than Cadell's critique initially suggests. While Cadell critiques Wilber's work as a TOE, Wilber, much like Habermas, is also actively engaged in pushing back against a purely technological and materialist theory of reality. Wilber's project, framed by his famous Four-Quadrant model, is a comprehensive approach to "spirit science" that aims to integrate multiple, seemingly disparate dimensions of existence. These quadrants—the Interior Individual (e.g., subjectivity), the Exterior Individual (e.g., biology), the Interior Collective (e.g., culture), and the Exterior Collective (e.g., social systems)—are not meant to provide a deterministic, final answer to "everything." Instead, they are a framework for mediating different modes of knowledge, including those of art, morals, science, philosophy, and theology/religion. In a similar vein, the work of Jürgen Habermas, with his three universal validity claims (truth, normative rightness, and sincerity) also seeks to provide a model for intersubjective understanding that moves beyond a purely objective, and reductionist scientific worldview.

This shared commitment to finding a comprehensive framework that includes subjective experience and social norms demonstrates a deep underlying resonance between these thinkers. The true challenge, then, is not simply to dismiss these projects, but to inquire into the very nature of the knower who would attempt such a synthesis. It suggests that a true "spirit science" would be more concerned with the conditions of possibility for a productive dialogue between these traditions—Žižekian, Wilberian, Habermasian. Rather than seeking to establish a monolithic, unifying theory that subsumes all perspectives, such a science would instead focus on the epistemological and methodological frameworks necessary for these distinct yet often overlapping intellectual currents to engage in meaningful conversation. This approach would recognize the inherent strengths and limitations of each tradition—Žižek's critical psychoanalytic lens, Wilber's integral meta-theory, and Habermas's theory of communicative action—and explore how they might complement or challenge each other in the pursuit of a deeper understanding of consciousness, culture, and social transformation. The goal would be to foster a space where diverse forms of knowledge and inquiry can interact constructively, leading to new insights that are not reducible to any single paradigm, but emerge from the dynamic interplay between them. This would entail examining the underlying assumptions, conceptual vocabularies, and practical implications of each tradition, identifying points of convergence and divergence, and ultimately seeking to articulate a shared horizon of understanding that allows for ongoing cross-pollination and mutual learning. This is an area that I believe will be a fruitful subject for future posts and essays.

The Revenge of Philosophy

In “Chapter 36: The Revenge of Philosophy”, Cadell's work reflects on the philosophical void of the postmodern era, which has been filled by the ontological commitments of scientific materialism and the technological singularity. This section argues that philosophy is now having its "revenge" by providing the necessary conceptual tools to navigate these new frontiers. It highlights the work of thinkers like Hegel to demonstrate that technology and science don't replace philosophical questions about death and immortality; instead, they make them more urgent and central to our existence. For decades, the "great questions" of philosophy—the nature of the self, the possibility of immortality, and the origin of the universe—were largely considered relics of a bygone era. They were seen as problems to be solved by science or, in the case of continental philosophy, deconstructed as culturally relative narratives. Cadell argues that this has created a dangerous vacuum. As technologies like bio-genetics and artificial intelligence begin to offer concrete, if terrifying, answers to these questions, the "revenge of philosophy" becomes necessary. The role of philosophy is to provide the conceptual rigor to understand the implications of these changes, preventing us from blindly rushing into a techno-utopia or regressing into a simplistic pre-modern myths.

Cadell’s critique, which asserts that postmodern thought’s deconstructive tendencies ultimately abandon the universal pursuit of truth, is a point I've explored extensively in my work. For example, in a podcast conversation with Daniel Tutt, we discussed how this critique illuminates a crisis of epistemic reliability and the phenomenon of postmodern fragmentation. I also took up this intellectual thread in several interviews with Matt McManus, where we explored the intellectual lineage of postmodern conservatism and the emergent new right in his books. These discussions confirmed a core consensus: a purely postmodern worldview, by its very nature, tends to deny the existence of a shared objective reality. This denial, we discussed, renders such a worldview highly vulnerable to exploitation by "irrationalist" thinkers, starkly exemplified by figures like Jordan Peterson.

Peterson, for instance, often presents capitalism not as a contingent socio-economic construct but as an immutable natural order. This move effectively insulates it from rigorous rational critique and, in doing so, impedes any collective project aimed at achieving genuine social progress. The implications of this intellectual maneuver are far-reaching, undermining the very possibility of a shared understanding necessary for social change.

Within this critical context, Cadell's work, particularly his unique synthesis of Hegelian thought and Lacanian psychoanalysis, offers a powerful way forward. By drawing on Slavoj Žižek's project, Cadell provides a robust framework for understanding the ideological drives and fundamental fantasies that shape our current moment. This approach helps to expose how thinkers like Peterson use myth and narrative to obscure underlying political and economic realities. However, I believe Žižek's work, while essential, is insufficient on its own. To fully address the crisis of fragmentation, his analysis must be supplemented and expanded in dialectical tension with other thinkers.

For example, the work of Ken Wilber, with his integral approach to "spirit science," and Jürgen Habermas, with his focus on communicative action and universal validity claims, offer crucial frameworks for re-establishing an epistemologically reliable foundation. These thinkers, much like Cadell, are concerned with moving beyond a purely materialist or deconstructionist worldview. By bringing the critical psychoanalytic lens of Žižek into conversation with the meta-theoretical frameworks of Wilber and Habermas, we can build a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of political and social reality. This foundational project is crucial to prevent society from blindly hurtling towards uncritical techno-utopias or, conversely, regressing into simplistic and potentially dangerous pre-modern mythic thinking. The contemporary task of philosophy, therefore, is not to withdraw from the complexities of the world but to re-engage with them in a profound way, offering a rigorous framework that combines intellectual courage, analytical precision, and a steadfast commitment to the pursuit of truth.

A Rosy Cross for Our Time

Cadell Last's Real Speculations is a profoundly generative philosophical event—or perhaps a "Rosy Cross for our time," as he puts it—offering a vital framework for navigating the treacherous currents of the contemporary intellectual and cultural landscape. My journey to his work, illuminated by Michael Brooks's intellectual brilliance, has been circuitous yet highly revealing and generative. I contend that Last's contributions are not merely additive but represent a crucial and ongoing development within left-wing thought, pushing its boundaries and offering new avenues for critical engagement. The book's intricate synthesis of Hegelian rigor, Nietzschean insight, and Lacanian depth provides a coherent and powerful lens for understanding the complexities of the modern world..

This intellectual project is essential for confronting the crisis of epistemic reliability that I have consistently identified in my own work and in conversations with Daniel Tutt and Matt McManus. Postmodern fragmentation has created a dangerous vacuum, which has been filled by "irrationalist" narratives from figures like Jordan Peterson. Cadell's audacious synthesis of Hegelian and Lacanian thought provides an indispensable toolkit for deconstructing these myths and understanding the drives that give them power.

While Cadell's foundational engagement with Slavoj Žižek is central, I am convinced that the most fruitful path forward lies in placing his insights in dialectical tension with other traditions. By bringing Žižek's critical psychoanalytic lens into a rigorous and constructive conversation with the expansive meta-theoretical frameworks of Ken Wilber and Jürgen Habermas, we can construct a more comprehensive and epistemologically reliable foundation for political and social reality. This robust new synthesis would resist the seductive irrationalism of the Right and the debilitating relativism of the Left, offering a path toward genuine understanding and transformative action.

In this review, I have deliberately refrained from providing a detailed commentary on Cadell's culminating chapter on "Christian Atheism." This omission is not due to a lack of interest or appreciation, but rather because I have not yet had the profound opportunity to fully engage with Žižek's most recent and developing work on this complex and provocative subject. Nevertheless, I found Cadell’s initial thoughts on the topic within Real Speculations to be incredibly compelling and intellectually stimulating. I view a deeper dive into this area as a necessary next step, one that will undoubtedly unlock a more complete and nuanced appreciation of the true scope of his entire philosophical project. The implications of "Christian Atheism," particularly in a world that is increasingly secular yet spiritually yearning, are vast and warrant dedicated exploration.

Overall, I find myself captivated by Cadell's work in a way that profoundly reminds me of my deep admiration for Michael Brooks. Both thinkers possess an extraordinary ability to synthesize disparate intellectual traditions and, in doing so, forge a new kind of intellectual community. Cadell's work, in particular, has proven to be an invaluable intellectual resource, a compass guiding me through complex theoretical terrains. Reading Real Speculations has been a tremendously generative experience for me personally, prompting me to further explore, reflect upon, and write about these profound ideas. I am genuinely eager to witness the continued evolution of his thinking and the unfolding of his intellectual journey in the years to come, anticipating with great interest the next iterations of his groundbreaking work.

Introduction

The enduring intellectual project of the late Michael Brooks offers a powerful, and often overlooked, roadmap for a Left grappling with postmodern fragmentation. My aim in this essay is to reconstruct his unique vision and argue for its contemporary relevance. This work is born out of my critical reflection on the book Flowers for Marx, which, despite its noble ambitions, lamentably omits an engagement with Brooks’s legacy. That oversight compelled me to revisit a conversation I had with Daniel Tutt from July 2023, a dialogue that now serves as the foundation for this essay.

For those unfamiliar with that discussion, we covered significant ground, beginning with Daniel's unconventional intellectual journey from a conservative, working-class background to a Marxist orientation. Our dialogue delved into his work on "post-oedipal politics" as a framework for understanding the new right and postmodern conservatism, and the complex and unfulfilled historical dialogue between critical theory and American pragmatism. The conversation's central theme—the need for a new structuralism or humanism on the Left—is a conceptual framework that I had previously discussed with Cadell Last and Matt Flisfeder as a means to counteract the undermining forces of today's political discourse.

Drawing on these foundational discussions, this essay will integrate Daniel Tutt's insights with a detailed exploration of Brooks’s intellectual trajectory. This synthesis will lead to an epistemologically grounded understanding of politics—a framework I've termed integral facticity—that offers a substantive alternative that moves beyond the regressive postmodern right and postmodern neo-marxist left. My ultimate goal is to foster a concrete understanding of an integral-praxis—a framework that empowers a Left to embrace pro-social ideas of religion and family, and in doing so, forge a new form of integral humanism.

A Genealogy of Michael Brooks Radical Synthesis

To understand Brooks's unique intellectual project, we must first trace its unexpected lineage. Brooks was not directly influenced by American pragmatism, but rather encountered its core tenets through the work of Ken Wilber. This is a crucial detail because, as Zachary Stein argues in "Integral Theory, Pragmatism, and the Future of Philosophy," Wilber's thought itself can be characterized as a continuation of American Pragmatism. This philosophical movement, pioneered by figures like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, arose in the late nineteenth century in response to the profound transformations of a new industrial and technological era. The Pragmatists sought to develop a systematic and cosmopolitan philosophy that could integrate science, religion, and a framework for social emancipation—a project that resonates deeply with Wilber's work.

This intellectual lineage provides the backdrop for a central tension within leftist thought, one that Daniel Tutt explores in his article, "The Rise and Fall of Homegrown American Marxism." In this piece, Tutt, drawing on the work of Brian Lloyd, argues that the influence of figures like William James, John Dewey, and Thorstein Veblen in the Second International era effectively "domesticated" U.S. Marxism. This "generic pragmatism" led American Marxists to embrace a revisionist, economistic theory of class that neglected the importance of class conflict and revolutionary struggle. It reduced Marxism to a progressive liberalism, ultimately making its proponents unable to support or incapable of militant action. This domestication created a form of socialism that was, in essence, unradical, and unable to move beyond a limited, progressive-liberal framework. Brooks's indirect and personal path to these ideas, however, allowed him to bypass this domestication. Coming to pragmatism through a developmental framework and a class-based analysis, Brooks avoided the intellectual compromises of this generic and unradical form of pragmatism, instead forging a synthesis that was both radical and psychologically astute.

Brooks’s journey also echoes a historical conflict between critical theory and American pragmatism, one that Tutt details in his article "The Missed Encounter Between Critical Theory and American Pragmatism." Tutt's article details how this encounter, or lack thereof, was largely defined by Max Horkheimer’s 1947 critique in Eclipse of Reason. Horkheimer argued that American pragmatism was "adjusted to exploitation and the status quo" because it reduced reason to a purely instrumental function—a tool for adaptation to existing conditions rather than a means for critical thought and social rupture. This flawed approach, Horkheimer claimed, neglected the dialectical thinking necessary for real social change and the analysis of social domination. This historical conflict serves as a powerful reminder of the intellectual pitfalls Brooks’s work navigated. By forging a synthesis that incorporated both developmental frameworks and a materialist commitment to the working class, Brooks positioned himself to create a form of leftism that resisted the apathetic tendencies of American pragmatism and critical theory.

Integral Facticity & Epistemic Reliability

My conversation with Daniel Tutt has illuminated a crucial epistemological problem facing the Left today, rooted in what Georg Lukács termed a specific form of "irrationalism." This worldview abandons the Hegelian commitment to understanding history and social totality, instead embracing an "aristocratic epistemology" where truth and justice are not universal, but are reserved for an elite. This worldview is preserved not through natural order, but by the unnatural structures of capitalism, which reify human relations and turn social interactions into impersonal, quantifiable things.

The rise of Jordan Peterson perfectly exemplifies this irrationalism. He presents capitalism not as a changeable, historical system but as a reflection of immutable human nature, rooted in a mythic or biological "order." In doing so, he sidesteps the concrete injustices created by capitalism, such as economic inequality, the exploitation of labor, and the commodification of human life. By denying the intellectual legitimacy of socialist and Marxist thought, Peterson's approach discourages any rational critique of capitalism and its social consequences, instead treating its flaws as a natural, unchangeable part of the human condition.

This is where my own project, centered on integral facticity, becomes a direct response. Where irrationalism denies the possibility of a shared, rational understanding of political and social reality, integral facticity aims to provide a framework for a robust and epistemologically reliable understanding of politics and human nature. This is a deliberate turn towards an epistemology that can map and articulate social antagonisms, not ignore or mystify them. The task of the Left, as Tutt and I discussed, is an epistemological one: to redirect the site of antagonism and reveal the systemic dependencies and relations of injustice that are obscured by irrationalist thought.

This epistemological project is why I find myself gravitating towards the work of Ken Wilber and Jürgen Habermas and away from the Lacanian framework championed by Slavoj Žižek. While Žižek is an unparalleled master diagnostician of ideological pathology, his combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis with neo-Marxism is insufficient to address the problems of subjectivity and extreme relativism inherent in postmodernism. In fact, Žižek, much like Peterson, often embodies the very problems he exposes, albeit from a different ideological position. His work is brilliant at revealing the inconsistencies and fantasies that underpin our social world, but it offers no clear prescription for reconstruction. Critically, his framework lacks the conceptual tools to differentiate between growth hierarchies that are natural and necessary for individual and collective development, and the destructive dominator hierarchies that oppress and exploit. Moreover, his focus on deconstruction and Lacanian analysis provides no comprehensive form of individual or collective praxis beyond philosophical critique. His epistemology excels at critiquing what is, but it offers no systematic framework for building what could be.

In contrast, the work of Habermas and Wilber’s developmental psychology, particularly in his collaboration with Guy Du Plessis, offers a prescriptive and practical epistemology for individual and collective growth beyond our postmodern crisis. Their work on ideological addiction/fixation and aversion/allergy provides a sophisticated set of tools for not only critiquing cultural phenomena but also for actively guiding psychological and societal development. This is a crucial distinction. While Žižek gives us the philosophical tools to understand why a figure like Jordan Peterson is a symptom of our epistemological crisis, the work of Habermas, Wilber, and Du Plessis provides a path for moving beyond that crisis—a path from diagnosis to the creation of a new, more robust epistemology that can ground an empirically-based, and genuinely emancipatory understanding of politics.

Michael Brooks Digital Counterpublic

Brooks's relationship with the integral movement was complex, mirroring the very tensions he sought to resolve on the Left. While he drew from its developmental and religious insights, he was also a fierce critic of its insular, apolitical tendencies. This tension is central to the project of an integral-praxis because it highlights a crucial pitfall: a Left that retreats into philosophical navel-gazing, detached from the concrete struggles of the working class. As I argued in my article, "The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves," communities like Integral Life often represent a form of "bourgeois spirituality" that fosters superficial connections at the expense of genuine political commitment.

This critique, however, is not a rejection of the integral framework itself, but a call to ground it in a concrete political project. The solution, as suggested by Daniel Tutt in his foreword to Flowers for Marx, lies in the creation of a "worker's counterpublic"—a public sphere rooted in the proletariat that stands in an antagonistic relationship with the dominant bourgeois public sphere. Brooks's intellectual legacy is a brilliant example of this in action. He not only used his platform to critique the flaws of a fragmented Left, but he actively built a new kind of public sphere. His digital counterpublic, forged through new media, became a living experiment in fostering the informed, collective deliberation that Habermas champions.

Brooks’s work answers the key question: "To resist or to create?" His unique synthesis of a developmental, integral worldview with a materialist commitment to the working class provides the conceptual tools for such a project. This perspective is powerful precisely because it is so nuanced: his critiques of the integral movement’s flaws provide a blueprint for what a worker's counterpublic should resist, while his materialist commitments provide the imperative to act and construct a new public sphere and superstructure. Ultimately, this fusion of psychological depth and materialist imperatives offers a powerful intellectual model for a Left that seeks to both critique power and build a new culture of solidarity.

Communication & the Evolution of Society

The intellectual legacy of Michael Brooks is not a matter of historical preservation but of practical application for the future. Brooks’s unexpected intellectual journey—from integral theory to Marxism—demonstrates that a genuine Left cannot be a static ideology but must be a living synthesis, drawing upon the best available tools to build rather than merely critique.

This synthetic approach finds its philosophical anchor in the work of Jürgen Habermas. In his book, Communication and the Evolution of Society, Habermas saw his critical theory as a "research program" aimed at reconstructing historical materialism. This reconstruction moves beyond a purely economistic or deconstructive approach by asserting that social evolution is a "bidimensional learning process (cognitive/technical and moral/practical)". This crucial insight allows us to recognize that progress is not merely a matter of developing productive forces, but also of developing "normative structures", which, in fact, act as the "pacemaker of social evolution". Habermas's work on the development of "normative structures" through a "hierarchical sequence of increasingly complex and encompassing forms of rationality" and Wilber’s theory of a developmental holarchy, where each higher stage is more inclusive and compassionate, provide a powerful intellectual basis for this distinction.

This approach allows for a Left that can critique destructive "dominator hierarchies" without resorting to a flatland anti-hierarchical stance that, as Wilber argues, inadvertently undermines the very processes of growth and integration needed for true social progress. Moving beyond a Lacanian framework that relies on an outdated psychological model and a Hegelian dialectic lacking a robust theory of communication, Habermas offers a constructive prescription grounded in communicative action and a concerted effort to forge a collective political will. This stands as a powerful counterweight to Žižek's brilliant but often insufficient model, which, while a master at diagnosing ideological pathology, provides no systematic framework for building what could be. The synthesis of Brooks’s practice with the reconstructive epistemology of Ken Wilber and Guy Du Plessis offers a comprehensive model for a Left that can build, not just deconstruct, by providing the psychological tools to navigate and overcome the ideological “addictions and allergies” of our postmodern condition.

Michael Brooks embodied a brilliant response to this modern dilemma. As a broadcaster, podcaster, and writer, he masterfully utilized the tools of new media—YouTube, podcasts, and social media—to forge a new kind of public sphere. His "worker’s counterpublic" was a living experiment in fostering the informed, collective deliberation that Habermas champions. It was a space for intellectual rigor and international solidarity, presented with a disarming humor that made complex topics accessible and cultivated a new “normative self-understanding” among a dispersed, active citizenry.

This synthesis of Brooks’s practice, Habermas’s theory, and Wilber’s psychology offers a powerful counterweight to Slavoj Žižek’s brilliant but often insufficient Lacanian framework. It moves beyond the limitations of an outdated psychological model to carry critical thought forward in a truly constructive and emancipatory project—one that is both rigorous and hopeful, and a novel development with the express purpose of building a better future.

Introduction

It is with profound lament that the book Flowers for Marx, despite its admirable ambition to address the left's uncertainty and future direction, notably omits engagement with the rich contributions and enduring legacy of Michael Brooks. As someone whose own intellectual and political journey has been deeply shaped by Brooks's work, and who shares a similar background in seeking a more comprehensive and strategic approach to leftist politics, this oversight in the collection feels particularly significant and forms the critical vantage point for this essay. My goal in writing this essay is to bring to the forefront the crucial insights Brooks offered, which could have profoundly enriched the very debates Flowers for Marx seeks to engage.

Flowers for Marx is a seminal work that synthesizes key themes and arguments from various discussions surrounding the contemporary state of Marxism, featuring authors and contributors such as , Conrad Hamilton, , Ernesto Vargas, and . The book and its related discussions delve into the perceived "death of the millennial left," the failures and potential futures of socialist thought, and critical internal debates within the movement. Central to these discussions are tensions between "humanistic" and "scientific" or "anti-humanist" Marxism, the crucial role of anti-imperialism, and the often-neglected global North-South dynamics. While Flowers for Marx delves into critical contemporary leftist dilemmas, such as the dichotomy between democratic socialism and a more radical anti-capitalist uprising, and differing interpretations of Marx—as either a "founder of a new science" or a "humanist"—Michael Brooks's unique perspective, which integrated "cosmopolitan socialism" and integral theory, could have offered an even more nuanced and multi-layered analysis. This distinct approach held the promise of significantly enriching these debates, potentially broadening their scope and strategic impact.

Cosmopolitan Socialism and Global Perspectives

Brooks advocated for a "cosmopolitan socialism" that integrated local, national, and international perspectives, encompassing East, West, North, and South. This aligns perfectly with Flowers for Marx's exploration of critical fault lines like anti-imperialism and the global North-South divide. Ernesto Vargas, a contributor to Flowers for Marx, highlights the importance of global cooperation and learning from the Global South, noting that "multilateral development is already happening" in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, often outside the Anglosphere's purview. Brooks's "integral and Marxist humanist" perspective would have significantly bolstered these arguments by providing a theoretical foundation that transcends Western-centric analysis, which often overlooks successful development in non-Western contexts. This framework, grounded in a comprehensive understanding of human flourishing and societal structures, would have enabled a more nuanced examination of global development patterns. Brooks's integral vision, which recognized the importance of diverse worldviews, including Eastern traditions, is particularly vital as the United States navigates economic and cultural decline. This understanding paves the way for a more cosmopolitan outlook and approach to systemic change. By acknowledging and analyzing the successes and unique developmental paths of nations outside the traditional Western paradigm, Brooks's insights could have fostered a more inclusive and effective approach to international relations and thought. Engaging more deeply with alternative models of progress is essential for fostering greater international understanding and identifying truly transformative solutions to urgent global challenges. This approach allows us to move beyond the constraints of a singular, often prescriptive, Western perspective, and even Marxist worldview.

Brooks's Integral Vision & Framework

Michael Brooks’s profound intellectual ideas were anchored in integral theory, a sophisticated and multifaceted framework meticulously designed to synthesize and harmonize an expansive array of knowledge systems and diverse perspectives. His highly ambitious theories and ideas were built upon a comprehensive and inclusive approach, forming an overarching theoretical architecture. This framework was specifically designed to bridge and seamlessly integrate diverse perspectives across the entire spectrum of human inquiry, from rigorous scientific investigation and deeply rooted religious traditions to the intricate processes of human development and the complex dynamics of collective systems. At the core of Brooks’s intellectual endeavor was a resolute quest to transcend the inherent limitations imposed by conventional disciplinary silos. He ardently aimed to forge a unified lexicon and a coherent conceptual framework that could be universally applied. This concerted effort was strategically intended to enable a more effective engagement with complex challenges that defy singular disciplinary solutions and to cultivate a deeper, more nuanced understanding of reality's inherent interconnectedness. Brooks was a staunch advocate for the integration of various viewpoints, viewing this synthesis as crucial for attaining a comprehensive, cohesive, and balanced understanding of the world. He believed that true understanding and deep insight could only emerge from such a process. His core belief was that this systemic approach would empower the left to effectively link diverse traditions and bridge theoretical positions that frequently appeared to be at odds, fostering a more unified and potent force for change. This innovative methodology directly countered the prevailing tendency towards "atomizing and fighting" that Brooks acutely observed within contemporary leftist discourse. He critiqued the fragmentation and internal conflicts that he felt weakened progressive efforts, arguing that a more integrated perspective was crucial for overcoming these destructive tendencies.

Fostering Constructive Debate and Bridging Divides

Flowers for Marx championed "open adversarial debate but without antagonism," a goal perfectly aligned with Michael Brooks's broader vision for intellectual engagement. Brooks aimed to create an environment where rigorous critique and diverse viewpoints could be explored freely, without devolving into personal attacks or unproductive divisiveness. This emphasis on collegiality and constructive intellectual exchange has been lauded by Matt McManus, who recognized its ability to foster new insights, advance collective understanding, and move beyond the perpetual divisions often seen in political and intellectual discourse. Brooks's integral vision sought not only to synthesize knowledge but also to transform how progressive movements engaged with ideas and each other, paving the way for a more cohesive pursuit of shared goals. His emphasis on complex thinking, psychological flexibility, and empathy offered a practical model for navigating profound ideological disagreements, such as those between democratic socialism and more radical "Stalinist/Maoist" perspectives, which are central to the book. The integral model's four validity claims, mapping subjective/objective and individual/social components of reality, served as a "training wheel" for Brooks. This framework cultivated his ability to think with profound understanding and mental flexibility, allowing him to move between worldviews and various factions on the progressive-left. This skill is essential for understanding the motivations of opponents, which is vital for effective engagement and coalition-building, and directly aligns with the book's aim to foster robust debate while avoiding unproductive divisiveness.

The Left's Engagement with Religion and Spirituality

Brooks also consistently championed the left's engagement with "religion and spirituality," a realm he argued was frequently exploited by the right. He contended that the left needed to cultivate its own profound understanding and integration of these concepts, emphasizing empathy, compassion, and heightened awareness as essential tools to combat the alienating effects of capitalist fragmentation. This deeply humanistic and existential facet, a hallmark of Brooks's insightful political analysis, presented a potent counter-narrative to the prevailing secularism and atheism prevalent within many Marxist circles today. His perspective suggested that by reclaiming and reinterpreting these religious dimensions, the left could forge a more comprehensive and resonant vision for social change, one that spoke not only to material conditions but also to the human spirit's longing for meaning and connection. While Flowers for Marx acknowledges the undeniable necessity of normative commitments and a robust moral framework for the realization of socialism, Matt McManus in the Flowers for Marx discussions argues for the necessity of "normative commitments" and moral arguments in Marxism, asserting that Marx himself never abandoned ethical concerns. Brooks's profound emphasis on religion and virtue ethics as a foundational wellspring for political action could have propelled this discussion even further. This is particularly true given his palpable regret over the "religious left" being a missed opportunity in urgent need of reintegration and re-exploration. His approach was uniquely and firmly rooted in a rigorous material analysis of societal structures, yet it was equally informed by a deep appreciation for existential meaning. This dual grounding was vividly evident in his concept of "Machiavellian spirituality," which reconciled practical political strategy with a broader spiritual sensibility, and his genuine receptiveness to diverse religious traditions, including the often-overlooked yet historically significant current of Christian socialism and engaged Buddhism. Brooks's work thus offered a powerful invitation for the left to broaden its intellectual and philosophical horizons, recognizing that the struggle for a more just society must also encompass the existential and religious dimensions of human experience.

Brooks's Legacy: Bridging Theory and Praxis

Brooks's contributions extended beyond theoretical discourse, permeating the practical applications of leftist principles. He possessed a rare ability to translate complex philosophical concepts into actionable strategies, bridging the chasm between academic ivory towers and the streets where political change is forged. This accessibility was a hallmark of his approach, ensuring that his ideas resonated with a broad spectrum of individuals, from seasoned scholars to grassroots organizers. His writings and public engagements consistently championed a nuanced understanding of power dynamics, recognizing the interplay of economic, social, and cultural forces in shaping societal structures. This comprehensive lens allowed him to dissect contemporary issues with unparalleled clarity, offering insights that remain remarkably pertinent in the face of evolving global challenges.

Moreover, Brooks cultivated a unique intellectual environment that fostered critical self-reflection within the left. He challenged dogmatism and encouraged a constant re-evaluation of established paradigms, pushing for a more flexible and responsive approach to political action. This commitment to intellectual rigor, coupled with his deep empathy for the struggles of marginalized communities, positioned him as a guiding light for those striving for social justice. His work served as a crucial reminder that true revolutionary change emanates not just from ideological purity but also from a profound understanding of human experience and a genuine commitment to alleviating suffering. The resonance of his ideas continues to inspire contemporary movements, providing a potent antidote to apathy and a compelling call to action.

Conclusion

Flowers for Marx, a seminal work with its powerful imagery of a rose defiantly bursting through concrete, serves as a poignant and enduring symbol for the very essence of resilience and resistance—qualities not only admired but actively championed by Michael Brooks. His regrettable omission from this collection, therefore, represents a significant and glaring oversight, given the profound alignment of his philosophical contributions with the book's central message. Brooks was not content with merely identifying the profound political deadlocks and impasses that plagued contemporary society; he actively and relentlessly sought to transcend them through the development and application of his groundbreaking understanding of "integral-praxis." This innovative framework was meticulously designed to bridge deeply entrenched theoretical divides, fostering a much-needed sense of unity and cohesion within the often-fragmented landscape of leftist thought. The embrace of such an "integral-praxis" holds the transformative potential to invigorate and revitalize a renewed, genuinely inclusive, and deeply empathetic leftist movement, one that is truly capable of grappling with the intricate complexities of the modern world. Furthermore, it could offer indispensable critical perspectives for rigorously evaluating current approaches and, more importantly, for envisioning and constructing a more equitable and just future for all.

Brooks's enduring legacy is unequivocally defined by his extraordinarily expansive curiosity and intellectual zeal that profoundly enriched the left, endowing it with a unique and much-needed sense of facticity and grace. His sudden and untimely loss left an undeniable void, from which the left has never quite recovered from the shock of his loss. This profound intellectual and emotional impact underscores why Brooks's intricate thinking and far-reaching legacy are not merely supplementary footnotes in the annals of leftist thought. Instead, they are absolutely essential for comprehensively understanding, critically analyzing, and effectively navigating the multifaceted and often daunting challenges confronting the left today. His extensive body of work provides far more than just a historical guide; it offers a dynamic, adaptable framework for contemporary political struggle, equipping activists and thinkers with the tools necessary for not only deconstructing existing injustices but also for actively forging a more just and sustainable future. The discussions surrounding Flowers for Marx emphasize the need for Marxist theory to be accessible and directly connected to political practice, moving beyond academic esotericism, a goal Brooks's work undoubtedly served. The core lament, then, is that by not including Brooks's integral vision, Flowers for Marx missed a crucial opportunity to present an even more robust and systematic path forward for the contemporary left, one that could have more effectively addressed its internal divisions and external challenges.