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.
Hey Michael! The essay was meant to be somewhat polemical & get people thinking about the political consequences of their so-called spiritual/ religious views & online consumption of media. I’m glad to hear you are wrestling with it. And thanks for reading! Its a long one.
As for Iain, he’s an absolutely brilliant and eminently affable man. I am grateful to count him as a friend. But as you probably know from my half a dozen replies to some of his more political posts here on Substack, we have rather fundamental disagreements about where the real problems lie.
Still, I think it’s pretty clear that Lukács analysis of “irrationalism,” while powerful as polemic, is pretty weak so far as serious intellectual histories go. I think you can do better than to lean on his work as if it were somehow an adequate account of so-called Romantic liberalism. (BTW I take it you still haven’t spent much time with my social threefolding article, wherein I lay out a position I’m not sure can meaningfully be called liberal anymore, even if it incorporates some important liberal values).
Lukács the Stalinist is in such a rush to reduce metaphysical positions to class positions that he runs roughshod over the deep incompatibilities in the supposed “lineage” he constructs. Further, his ideological fixation apparently blinded him to the mass death brought by his own favored brand of Marxist dialectical rationality, rightly or wrongly applied. Communism is not the only reasonable alternative to fascism.
“CIIS’s Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, founded by Richard Tarnas in 1994, has been the academic home of process-relational metaphysics in North America for three decades”
A generous statement! But surely the more accurate statement would be to say that PCC was *one* such academic home. The Center for Process Studies, founded by John Cobb, Jr and David Ray Griffin, is far more worthy of being proclaimed *the* academic home of process thought, and for closer to the last 50 years.
I had a tough time gaging the granularity of the network structure when writing, & left a lot out. There is definitely a lot more work that can be done there.
![Integral [+] Facticity](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yhcJ!,w_120,h_120,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8458843-3278-4fcc-accc-17ad21352205_1280x1280.png)
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.
By all means! Feel free to DM me & arrange something. Glad to hear some of it resonated.
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.
Hey Michael! The essay was meant to be somewhat polemical & get people thinking about the political consequences of their so-called spiritual/ religious views & online consumption of media. I’m glad to hear you are wrestling with it. And thanks for reading! Its a long one.
As for Iain, he’s an absolutely brilliant and eminently affable man. I am grateful to count him as a friend. But as you probably know from my half a dozen replies to some of his more political posts here on Substack, we have rather fundamental disagreements about where the real problems lie.
Still, I think it’s pretty clear that Lukács analysis of “irrationalism,” while powerful as polemic, is pretty weak so far as serious intellectual histories go. I think you can do better than to lean on his work as if it were somehow an adequate account of so-called Romantic liberalism. (BTW I take it you still haven’t spent much time with my social threefolding article, wherein I lay out a position I’m not sure can meaningfully be called liberal anymore, even if it incorporates some important liberal values).
Lukács the Stalinist is in such a rush to reduce metaphysical positions to class positions that he runs roughshod over the deep incompatibilities in the supposed “lineage” he constructs. Further, his ideological fixation apparently blinded him to the mass death brought by his own favored brand of Marxist dialectical rationality, rightly or wrongly applied. Communism is not the only reasonable alternative to fascism.
I totally agree with you! But if we are going to make headway against the critical theory folks, we have to deal with Lukacs & Habermas.
“CIIS’s Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, founded by Richard Tarnas in 1994, has been the academic home of process-relational metaphysics in North America for three decades”
A generous statement! But surely the more accurate statement would be to say that PCC was *one* such academic home. The Center for Process Studies, founded by John Cobb, Jr and David Ray Griffin, is far more worthy of being proclaimed *the* academic home of process thought, and for closer to the last 50 years.
I had a tough time gaging the granularity of the network structure when writing, & left a lot out. There is definitely a lot more work that can be done there.