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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)
Hi Erik, this was a timely read. Some of it is wildly off the mark, but I agree with a great deal of it in spirit. I won’t say more here, but I would be glad to talk about it at some point. Jonathan.
As a prospective student of CIIS, I took this critique of McGilchrist (who transformed and informs my worldview) and the larger “romantic-liberal formation” of philosophy to heart.
While you've persuaded me on several points, it’s harder for me to embrace your larger critique of McGilchrist and other neoromantic philosophers asserting a totalizing and closed narrative of universal value and meaning, subsuming world religion and spirituality for its purposes. I see them offering the early stages of a new paradigmatic worldview, capable of holding great pluralities that anchor perspective-taking from multiple vantages--though I do see how it currently falls short. Your critique regarding public adjudicating of claims still stands for me though, since paradigms inevitably reach questions that procedural debate cannot settle. I am still wrestling with how to operate at this level without falling into relativism, but also see worldviews as inevitable psychological architecture that should be engaged with in some fashion, for all the risks of totalization that they come with.
At the same time, I don’t see McGilchrist’s embrace by the Right as an inherent problem. Any truly holistic paradigm would be amenable to all sorts of political commitments, as it would describe them all. I do see how McGilchrist’s presentation of the hemispheric polarity is too general to prevent its ideological capture, but I also see its idealism and universalizing commitments as anathema to the broader left’s rejection of philosophy outside of contingent material analysis, an overcorrection to historical catastrophes that prevents any inroads into this sphere of political theory and action. This too is a hard problem to solve, and one I appreciate your essay making more conscious in my thinking.