Postmetaphysical Teleological Ethics?

[Balder]

In one of my classes, we’ve been reviewing a number of different moral theorists, and I thought about introducing the work of one of them here: Alasdair MacIntyre.  I decided to post something about him based on our recent discussion of Sam Harris’ work, particularly in The Moral Landscape.  In that text, Harris argues that science can contribute meaningfully to the shaping of our moral values, especially if we define morality as that domain of thought and practice concerned with understanding and promoting human well-being or thriving.  As I will discuss below, I think MacIntyre’s work could likely serve as a philosophical complement to Harris' proposal.

MacIntyre is a British moral and political philosopher (and, more recently, theologian).  He converted to Catholicism back in the 1980s when he was wrestling with Thomist thought (initially attempting to discredit it), and consequently has been working to outline and clarify possible Aristotelian and Thomist contributions to modern moral philosophy.  He has worked largely “at the margins” of academia, as he puts it, and has held a number of positions at multiple universities, including serving as Professor of Darkness and Despair at the University of Notre Dame.  (What a cool title!)

MacIntyre perceives a deep disorder and incoherence in much post-Enlightenment moral discourse, which has descended, as he puts it, into an empty or contentless sort of emotivism.  From this perspective, moral judgments lack objective basis and merely point to how a given subject feels about an issue or situation.  In Wilberian terms, he is objecting to a condition of "flatland" which prevails in much modern and postmodern academic moral theorizing. 

To address this state of affairs, MacIntyre draws on resources found in the works of certain premodern moral theorists, particularly Aristotle and Aquinas.  Interestingly, however, he does so in a way which doesn't simply abandon modern or postmodern advances; rather, he uses elements of premodern virtue ethics to critically assess, transform, and carry forward, post/modern moral theorizing.  He actually resists the suggestion that his theory is in the lineage of virtue ethics, at least in any direct way, particularly because he defines virtues as necessarily grounded in specific historical and social practices (rather than conceiving of them, say, as interior (metaphysical) states of the soul).  But even though he rejects the label, his work is deeply informed and inspired by Aristotelian and Thomist conceptions of virtue and teleological ethics.

It is the rejection of Aristotle's teleology, in fact, which MacIntyre suggests has led to the present crisis in Western moral thinking.  When Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers dropped the teleological notion that human life moves towards any specifiable 'good' or 'end,' and the related idea that human living must be given to cultivating and realizing such an end, moral theorizing was unmoored from its context and gradually drifted towards subjectivism, emotivism, and the present state of philosophical incoherence.  And this drift towards subjectivism was reinforced, in his view, by the ascription of moral agency to the individual -- the myth of the autonomous, self-determining moral agent -- again the story, largely, of the disembodied rational Ego that Rifkin and Lakoff have each challenged in their own ways.

But in arguing for the reincorporation of a teleological structure or framework in moral theorizing, MacIntyre is not arguing for a return to premodern metaphysics.  In his book, After Virtue, he tried to formulate a non-metaphysical approach to virtue which focused on social practices, strongly rejecting Aristotle's "metaphysical biology," but as he states in Dependent Rational Animals, he later realized that he was wrong to try to describe ethical practice or the nature of virtue without any reference to biology.  I will return to these thoughts in a moment.  For now, I want to comment briefly on the philosophical, historicist background of his overall approach (and his recontextualization of virtue ethics).  After surveying the moral teachings of many different cultures and traditions, he found that many accounts of human virtue were incompatible or at least inconsistent, with differing "lists" of those traits a culture finds most virtuous.  “What historical enquiry discloses," he writes, "is the situatedness of all enquiry, the extent to which what are taken to be the standards of truth and of rational justification in the contexts of practice vary from one time to another.’”

MacIntyre concludes from the inconsistent accounts of virtue across traditions that these differences can be understood as stemming or emerging from the pursuit of different, historically and socially situated practices.  Christian, or Greek, or Buddhist virtues must be understood as virtues that are enacted from within various coherent forms of social activity.  The virtues allow us to realize certain concrete 'ends' or 'goods' (or conditions of excellence or flourishing) that are internal to that activity.  But, as MacIntyre argues, there is an additional 'telos' that transcends and includes any particular set of practices in the realization of a 'global' good, the good of an individual's whole life -- namely, the virtue of integrity. 

But while MacIntyre accepts that moral systems always originate in, and are embedded in, unique historical streams, and while he would accept the 'relativist' conclusion that conceptions of virtue are (to some degree, if not entirely) particular to cultures (and, we might add, developmental or historical stages) and that virtues help in the realization of 'states of excellence' as uniquely and variously conceived within those various practice traditions, he does not embrace a flatland sort of relativism that would leave us without any ability to evaluate the merits of different moral systems.  In particular, he attempts to eschew impotent relativism in two ways:  First, rejecting the idea that we can ever fruitfully abstract systems from their historical contexts and simply compare abstractions, he argues that it is nevertheless possible for a particular tradition to successfully challenge another tradition, even to push it into crisis, via something like a Nietzchean genealogical analysis.  For if you can learn to think in the terms established by another tradition, you can then speak both from within and to that tradition, helping to identify and clarify intractable problems within it, to provide a coherent historical account of how it found itself in that predicament, and then, possibly, to point the way out of the predicament through recourse to the understandings of an alternative or rival system.  In MacIntyre's view, this is what he is attempting to do: demonstrating how an Aristotelian, teleological ethics can coherently diagnose and remedy the failures and incoherencies of modern moral discourse, through an intensive historical, sociological, and linguistic analysis of the various Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment traditions.

For instance, MacIntyre argues that the projects of Kant and Mill, to identify an impersonal, universal standard of morality, are understandable in light of the particular cultural loss that marked this historical period -- the "loss of shared practices necessary for the discovery of goods in common."  But, he argues, their projects could not succeed precisely because to sustain standards of morality requires just such practices, such modes of enactment -- without which, you only have ungrounded abstractions.

In a more recent work, Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre critiques the "myth of self-sufficiency" that informs both the Enlightenment notion of the disembodied, rational Ego and Aristotle's notion of the "great-souled man" (who would be too proud to receive help or acknowledge need).  In After Virtue, as I mentioned previously, MacIntyre defined virtues primarily in relation to social practices, but in DRA he now attempts to expand that understanding to include our biological nature as well (and this constitutes his second means of eschewing relativism).  In particular, he argues that an understanding of virtue -- and, more broadly, of human flourishing -- must take account of the findings of modern evolutionary theory, biology, anthropology, and psychology, which appear to vindicate the Greek notion that humans are social animals.  MacIntyre carefully avoids making any ahistorical, a priori claims about human nature per se; rather more modestly, he argues that scientific facts are as relevant to our notions of human flourishing as they are to our understanding of 'flourishing' in any other domain (say, the flourishing of crops, or other animals such as dolphins or elephants), without going so far as to assert that science alone can deterministically define such flourishing.  Flourishing must be understood in relation to our desires, projects, and interests as well.  But in this account, flourishing for a human being means flourishing as a social animal -- an animal inclined to cooperation and empathy as much as it is to pleasure and self-preservation. 

For MacIntyre, humans as social animals, like other advanced social animals, live lives especially marked by dependence, vulnerability, and disability.  We owe both our survival and our flourishing to others.  He believes these facts have been too little acknowledged in moral literature, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, but that they can play an important role in crafting a coherent, compelling narrative about the role of virtue in human life as dependent, rational animals.  MacIntyre asks:  "What would it be for thus vulnerable and dependent rational animals to flourish and what qualities of character would we need, if we were able to receive from others what we need them to give to us and to give others what we need to receive from them."   For MacIntyre, those qualities that allow us to flourish in such conditions -- to both grow towards relative degrees of independence or agency, and to function -- to give and receive support -- within conditions of dependency, vulnerability, and occasionally disability -- are the virtues -- virtues such as courage, justice, patience, and temperance; of gratitude, generosity, and forbearance.   As MacIntyre argues, in order to grow towards the ideal of being independent reasoners, we need to be able to detach from the compelling flow of present desires; we need skills (or skills become traits) to act with moderation and balance, to create sufficient mental and emotional space to entertain the vision of alternative futures or outcomes, and so on.  In other words, we need both the virtues of acknowledged dependence and of independent reasoners, and for MacIntyre, these virtues are those of the same sort of being: a dependent rational animal.  For, as he argues, the attainment of independence or agency is not in constrast to some undesirable state of dependency (as either Aristotle’s great-souled-man or Nietzsche’s Ubermensch might have it) but always already in the context of dependence, or interdependence -- a flourishing made possible by the very indispensable gifts of such interdependent social systems. 

As MacIntyre writes:

"To participate in this network of relationships of giving and receiving as the virtues require, I have to understand that what I am called upon to give may be quite disproportionate to what I have received and that those to whom I am called upon to give may well be those from whom I shall receive nothing. And I also have to understand that the care I give to others has to be in an important way unconditional, since the measure of what is required of me is determined in key part, even if not only, by their needs."

In MacIntyre’s view, in other words, if individuals understand and appreciate their mutual indebtedness -- if they grasp the extent to which independence is fostered by interdependence, and their character has been formed in a community of shared practices and common goods – they will have the opportunity to inculcate those virtuous character traits in light of which the provision of help to those in need is perceived as a natural (e.g., unconditional) duty.  Some would likely object to MacIntyre’s contention here, questioning for instance why someone should make the (possibly self-sacrificial) effort to help a stranger in need without first perceiving the good in it for themselves, but MacIntyre’s response to this would be that a person who so demands such justification of the moral impulse has already forgotten or denied the field of mutual indebtedness which has allowed him to emerge and flourish as an independent reasoner in the first place.

This brings us back to a key element of MacIntyre’s project, which is to challenge the myth of the self-sufficient, disembodied rational ego.  One way he attempts this is to situate human beings in a continuum of socialibility with other higher social animals – to tell a new narrative of human origins and world-relationship than the one that has dominated Western discourse for the past few centuries.  In this effort, he is league with other thinkers we’ve discussed in this forum, such as Jeremy Rifkin and Brian Swimme.  MacIntyre believes our capacity as rational moral agents to self-reflect, to distinguish goods from wants, rests on, and in fact requires as its base, certain practical, pre-linguistic, embodied forms of cognition – to hold (pre-linguistic) beliefs about the world, to act for reasons, to empathically connect with and respond to others – that we share in common with other higher mammals.  Language allows us recursively to reflect on, and to situate  in broader time horizons, these embodied, practical forms of cognition; to fuller appreciate the horizons of possibility for human thriving, and to contextually apprehend which forms of behavior and modes of relating best afford such thriving.  This is the basis, he argues, of the virtues.  MacIntyre’s discussion of the sociability of higher mammals, and the general argument he develops, is not really the strongest section of his book, in my opinion.  Lakoff, Varela, and Rifkin have each, in their own ways, argued for embodied cognition in more compelling ways than MacIntyre achieves, but I believe the main thrust of his argument is still valuable for a postmetaphysical project:  that cognition is “animal” and “embodied”; that our spiritual virtues grow out of, and are necessarily rooted in, our identity as vulnerable, dependent animals and orient, teleologically, towards human flourishing (as both Aristotle and Aquinas argued); and that the myth of the self-sufficienct, disembodied rational Ego has been rooted in our flight from animal nature, and has not been without significant moral, social, and environmental impact.

MacIntyre at one point was a Marxist, and has been a powerful critic of the capitalist system, but with the Thomist turn in his thought, he argues that we need to look now for the emergence of a new “St. Benedict” – a Benedict suitable for our age, who can help us re-envision and create nurturant local communities capable of promoting thriving on a human scale.  I’m curious here whether Rifkin’s proposals in The Empathic Civilization might serve these ends, but I haven’t investigated that yet; I put his book aside, and now will return to it with MacIntyre in mind.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Bruce, thanks for sharing this post. You are right that it seems to fit well with many of the premises of my book, Allsville Emerging (http://sbpra.com/DarrellMoneyhon). Virtues work (are functional for individuals and for species who learned to use interdependence) and they are more social in nature than we previously thought. Traditionally, virtues are looked at as individual traits, but I agree with MacIntire's implication that they are cultural-like tools for group adaptation. Virtues are largely transpersonal things. See my own statements (from the Intro section of Allsville Emerging) to this effect: 

In this sense, the proposed model community of Allsville is the place where a “culture

of consciousness” is developed in order to grow virtue.

   When I say virtue, I don’t mean only the traditional version

of an individual virtue. Virtue occurs to various degrees

within a culture. The fascinating thing about culture is that

there is an interaction between it and mind. Individual minds

shape culture, and culture shapes individual minds. Likewise,

individual virtues shape virtuous patterns that occur

culturally/transpersonally. And transpersonal virtues shape

individual character. Who’s to say whether the virtuous qualities

are mine or yours? Perhaps it is, in some ways, more

accurate to say that these virtues are ours?

   Traditionally, virtue has been viewed as an individual trait.

But this book moves our consciousness, and the emerging

culture of consciousness, toward a social paradigm of interdependence.

In terms of interdependence (independent of

mere independence!), virtue is no longer seen as being limited

to individual character. Virtue is also the domain of the

collective body.

   (end excerpt) 

   

 Thanks Bruce for noticing the match between some of MacIntyre's thought and mine. 

   Darrell

 

[Balder]

Hi, Darrell, that's well said.  Yes, I like your emphasis on interdependence, which is indeed resonant with aspects of MacIntyre's work.

If you're interested, here is a film and here is a blog by a member here which you may find relevant to your project.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Thanks for the referral. Yes, Andrew and I seem to be channeling the same energy and/or vision. I introduced myself to him, tried to explain the calling behind my book, and hopefully he and I will start a conversation. 

   Allsville is an attempt to salvage things before they totally collapse. I feel that we at least have to try to make things work. I am not okay with waiting around for society or the world to collapse. I believe strongly that we have it in us to make a good collective life. 

    Darrell

Balder said:

Hi, Darrell, that's well said.  Yes, I like your emphasis on interdependence, which is indeed resonant with aspects of MacIntyre's work.

If you're interested, here is a film and here is a blog by a member here which you may find relevant to your project.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Bruce, I would like you to check out my latest post at IL :

A Flare for Living, Be Not Afraid

   You have seen earlier rounds of the "flare" model, but I have added some refinements along the way. Also, I attempt to speak in favor of some good old metaphysical speculation, and try to conceptualize how it might fit in with the Integral line of thought, even though IPM tends to shun metaphysical speculations. 

     I wanted to see how accurate my reason is in regards to Integral line of thought. I don't want to wait to become an expert before I philosophize about Integral things, but I don't want to offer wrong conceptions of IL either. Best I can do is post, and then seek quality review by persons such as yourself. 

   That is, of course, if you can find the time. 

    Darrell

[Balder]

Hi, Darrell,

 

I'm sorry to be so long in responding.  For the past week and a half, I was working quite intently on finishing a writing project, which I finally completed this past weekend, so my participation on this forum in general has been minimal.

 

I am in full agreement with your prefatory remarks about the usefulness of metaphysical speculation -- even, or perhaps even especially, within a postmetaphysical orientation.  We've discussed this point quite a bit around here over the past few years, as you might expect, given the focus of the group.  Postmetaphysics, as I understand it, does not translate as "anti-metaphysics," and is not opposed to metaphysical speculation.  Such speculation is not idle, in my view; it can be generative and even transformative.  In more recent discussions, we've explored this in the context(s) of Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and various quantum and fractal ontologies.

 

I recall your flare model, and I appreciate -- as I may have said before -- how it has grown out of your own energetic and visionary experience.  I can feelingly relate to aspects of it from my own experience.  I can see your "unfolding" flare metaphor as consonant with a model such as Bohm's (implicate and explicate orders).  There are some aspects of your unpacking of the metaphor, however, that seem to follow the Perennial model of the physical world, the world of form and complexity and "ego" and so on, as being "far" from the Reality of the Source.  Is that intended?  That doesn't line up so well with my own (nondual, somewhat immanentist) metaphysical druthers.

 

Best wishes,

 

B.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Hi Bruce, Re the ego-far-from source implications: Actually, My own take on my beliefs about ego is that I see it much more spirit-friendly than the old spirit vs flesh line of thought does. Or at least "self." And ego is just one of self's tools. 

   The main reason I developed the model was to explain the continuity of surface aspects of self and the deeper energetic core of our being. I introduce the model in the book I am still working on: Christians Thinking Like Energy. And it was supposed to show how thinking like energy could allow us to see self not cut off or at odds with spirit, but as connected to it via the manner that energy unfolds into more static and material aspects. 

   If I made it look like there is a natural disconnect between self and spirit or between ego (as self's helpful tool, appendage) then I probably misarticualted my actual leanings. I have long felt that I lined up more with Hindu or Veda/vedic (sp?) concept of Self, instead of Christianity's (my chosen vehicle for spiritual growth and maintanence) tendency to see self and flesh as sinful (the old original sin thing, or sin theology - which really turns me off). In Christians Thinking Like Energy, I plan to trace some of this unproductive sin theology to the habit of thinking like matter. When we have specific location thought/thinking characteristics which come with "thinking like matter," then meaningful paradoxes and overlap or translocation just doesn't make sense. Thinking like matter leans to either/or thought. Thinking like energy (in my book -both in the figurative and literal sense of the word "book") allows for what Ken Wilber and others have called " 'and' thinking."

   The modern concept (and/or discovery) of energy provides us a unique opportunity to see things differently - perhaps even to do a little quad crossing or overlap? (which UR quad "energy" does seem to do with UL quad subjective realities, in my "book," anyway). 

   In my most recent Integral Life post about the flare model (the one you apparently read), I speculated that the whole Integral Map might be positioned closer to "thinking like matter," even though it also lends itself to much more dynamic and "and" thought than previous models or methodologies. The Integral map has provided us with a very valuable linkage or interface tool that helps bridge the old familar way of TLM (thinkig like matter) with TLE (thinking like energy). 

    I also plan to show western mind's evolution path as outlined on a simple four-cell matrix where one axis is dynamic/static (thought) and the other axis is informal/formal (thought). I believe that the western mind started with the cell that is informal x static thinking. This was "thinking like matter." Then along came science and we moved to formal x static thinking. This was thinking about matter. 

   Then science discovered energy and wierd energy-like properties of subatomic things. This was "thinking about energy." But if you run the observations through a mental filter (Kant comes to mind here) that is still thinking like matter, then you don't get the full implications of the "study" or research. Finally, we will soon be stepping into the Tree of Life phase in which (at long last) western mind can not only observed and study energy at a distance, but it can begin to think like the thing being studied. It can think like energy. 

    Other cultures may have thought like energy long ago. They may have more or less started in that cell. But we western mind folk took a long path to be able to think like energy. I guess it allowed us to do a lot of "stuff" in between, and to highly differentiate the overall field of the known. 

    Darrell

Balder said:

Hi, Darrell,

 

I'm sorry to be so long in responding.  For the past week and a half, I was working quite intently on finishing a writing project, which I finally completed this past weekend, so my participation on this forum in general has been minimal.

 

I am in full agreement with your prefatory remarks about the usefulness of metaphysical speculation -- even, or perhaps even especially, within a postmetaphysical orientation.  We've discussed this point quite a bit around here over the past few years, as you might expect, given the focus of the group.  Postmetaphysics, as I understand it, does not translate as "anti-metaphysics," and is not opposed to metaphysical speculation.  Such speculation is not idle, in my view; it can be generative and even transformative.  In more recent discussions, we've explored this in the context(s) of Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and various quantum and fractal ontologies.

 

I recall your flare model, and I appreciate -- as I may have said before -- how it has grown out of your own energetic and visionary experience.  I can feelingly relate to aspects of it from my own experience.  I can see your "unfolding" flare metaphor as consonant with a model such as Bohm's (implicate and explicate orders).  There are some aspects of your unpacking of the metaphor, however, that seem to follow the Perennial model of the physical world, the world of form and complexity and "ego" and so on, as being "far" from the Reality of the Source.  Is that intended?  That doesn't line up so well with my own (nondual, somewhat immanentist) metaphysical druthers.

 

Best wishes,

 

B.

[Edward theurj Berge]

"I’m curious here whether Rifkin’s proposals in The Empathic Civilization might serve these ends, but I haven’t investigated that yet; I put his book aside, and now will return to it with MacIntyre in mind."

So now that you've read Rifkin what do you think about your question?

[Balder]

I had forgotten asking this question; thank you for highlighting it.  I think Rifkin and McIntyre are looking in different directions for solutions, but that their aims are complementary (and overlap in the shared emphasis on empathy and appreciative inter/independence).  McIntyre holds back in actually giving voice to a "charter" for a new community, saying he is waiting on the arrival of a "new Benedict" to do so; whereas Rifkin seems to be more actively stepping into a (thought)-leadership role here.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Bruce, I'm glad you cued me to contemplate non-duality. That has been on my mind lately. Seamless flow in which surface manifestations appear dualistic but are nonetheless part of a deeper non-dual reality. In a recent dream I was in a mall with some kids. My wife and I paid for a kid's animated movie, but it ended up being presented on a tiny TV afixed to the back of an old car from the fifties, Caddilac I think. It was not easy to see. Even worse, at one point glare from sunlight made the screen all but impossible to see. In the dream I recall talking about what a waste of money it was.

The next day (in reality) the sermon was about some Bible-time minister named Zacharia (or some such "Z" name) who was made speachless (dumb) as part of an initiation for his wife to be able to bear a child (no longer be "barren") at the ripe old age of 90! The minister unpacked the story as being a metaphor of not letting regular ego thought with its "kowns" to get in the way of deeper spirituality from whence new order, creative living (like a newborn child) can flow. I immediately associated Zacharia's oration or pontification with what I've been calling "second nature" in a book I'm currently working on: Your Third Nature. Third nature is more like a teleologically-pulled source of optimal integration and growth. Also adept at accessing and applying the depths of being and reality to the surface realm we call "reality" and where we "think like matter." I state in the book that it is perfectly okay to say that this hypothetical third nature is simply our "spirit," but that this "S" word has perhaps taken on too much baggage from being associated with specific religious dogma, etc, and that it may be helpful to use a more secular or neutral term for this wholeness or integrative capacity that we seem to have. First nature is what comes natural, the way a kid picks up a bat or golf club and swings it. Second is the specific things and skills we work hard to learn until it becomes "like second nature to us." Third nature is not only highly integrative of all things but it is specifically adept at integrating our first nature with our second nature, or the natural with the learned. Perhaps paralelling Keven Kelly's "born" with the "made," and "swarm systems" with "clockwork systems," all of which seem to reflect the specialties of our two brain hemispheres. The left brain keeps ducks in a row and makes orderly clockwork-like, linear causality, systems or views of reality. More like my "thinking like matter." The right brain however thinks in all sorts of interactions and emergent patterns. More like the unfolding flow of energy that I conceptualize reality to be like. Also of course consitent with quantum realm characteristic of entanglment. The day before the dream I had contemplated nature while visiting my boyhood home in Kentucky. I stood still and became perceptive/receptive in a small wooded hollow. After awhile I was given a child/epiphany or word structure of "everything is more everything else than it is itself." This was, of course, a view of the interconnected, entangled, or even "non dual" nature of reality. I still maintain that the right brain has to be allowed back into our brain orchestra and must be integrated with our left brain structures in order to have such insights. The oh so familiar shift from identifying things to simply being perceptive. Similar to Zacharia's shutting up for a change. Literally "for a change" (in the old order). I have also been intellectually processing Kelly's notion of the interaction of order and disorder (and realized that we need to differentiate "coherent disorder" from "incoherent disorder. The word "coherent" was borrowed from Bohm.). Zacharia's non-talk allowed coherent disorder to help open up the closed system of the word-bound "known." We see this happen in the Job story as well, when Ellihu finally gets Job and the others to shut up and simply percieve or witness or contemplate. Mystery or coherent disorder brings fresh new blood into the body of existing knowledge. But we must suspend the left brain dominance or what I've recently have been calling second nature. Actually Pascal Solenquintez (my co-author in the not-yet-published book, About Wholeness) gave me that first nature and second nature notion. I simply saw our innate capacity for wholeness or integration as being a "third nature." Not sure if Pascal would agree with that formulation, but it provided me a book idea that I hope to write on a seventh grade reading level. Really just a variation on the theme of wholeness or optimal psychology (Maslow's "Self-actualization") or integrative capacity. In a non-dual   
line of thought there is no reason why wholeness would not flow from the mind of God's creatures. Because we are all really just God-responders in which ultimate reality is working through us and even as us. 

   Back to the dream: the small screen was the limited way we tend to see reality. We are in fact wasting a lot of our time and energy on such a small view of reality. One way we make such a small TV is by clinging to theism. God gets separated from us as though an object/being or matter-based being. This is because of our language structure which is rooted in thinking like matter and heavily baised toward the left brain way of seing and enacting. We need to shut up and let a new mode, bigger screen, entertain and inform us. We need to inhibit second nature long enough to let third nature inform and empower us. Not to do away with learning and knowledge, but to let in a deeper and swarmier dance partner, so that the message is re-orderd in creative new ways -- like old folks giving birth to a child. 

    I think one of the main ways that spirit or third nature works is by being able to go deeper, into packed and even pre-packed realms of reality. It sees the packed before it becomes unpacked. My dream prepared me for the sermon. And the dreamy insight from the nature contemplation the day before the dream prepared me for the dream. We can see the future before it unpacks. At least enough to be prepared to watch for certain new jewels or barbs which will soon come our way. And then we can  participate in the unpacking in such a way that more of the packed and pre-packed shines through (instead of on, as glare) our realities and reality views. 

     Darrell
Darrell R. Moneyhon said:

Hi Bruce, Re the ego-far-from source implications: Actually, My own take on my beliefs about ego is that I see it much more spirit-friendly than the old spirit vs flesh line of thought does. Or at least "self." And ego is just one of self's tools. 

   The main reason I developed the model was to explain the continuity of surface aspects of self and the deeper energetic core of our being. I introduce the model in the book I am still working on: Christians Thinking Like Energy. And it was supposed to show how thinking like energy could allow us to see self not cut off or at odds with spirit, but as connected to it via the manner that energy unfolds into more static and material aspects. 

   If I made it look like there is a natural disconnect between self and spirit or between ego (as self's helpful tool, appendage) then I probably misarticualted my actual leanings. I have long felt that I lined up more with Hindu or Veda/vedic (sp?) concept of Self, instead of Christianity's (my chosen vehicle for spiritual growth and maintanence) tendency to see self and flesh as sinful (the old original sin thing, or sin theology - which really turns me off). In Christians Thinking Like Energy, I plan to trace some of this unproductive sin theology to the habit of thinking like matter. When we have specific location thought/thinking characteristics which come with "thinking like matter," then meaningful paradoxes and overlap or translocation just doesn't make sense. Thinking like matter leans to either/or thought. Thinking like energy (in my book -both in the figurative and literal sense of the word "book") allows for what Ken Wilber and others have called " 'and' thinking."

   The modern concept (and/or discovery) of energy provides us a unique opportunity to see things differently - perhaps even to do a little quad crossing or overlap? (which UR quad "energy" does seem to do with UL quad subjective realities, in my "book," anyway). 

   In my most recent Integral Life post about the flare model (the one you apparently read), I speculated that the whole Integral Map might be positioned closer to "thinking like matter," even though it also lends itself to much more dynamic and "and" thought than previous models or methodologies. The Integral map has provided us with a very valuable linkage or interface tool that helps bridge the old familar way of TLM (thinkig like matter) with TLE (thinking like energy). 

    I also plan to show western mind's evolution path as outlined on a simple four-cell matrix where one axis is dynamic/static (thought) and the other axis is informal/formal (thought). I believe that the western mind started with the cell that is informal x static thinking. This was "thinking like matter." Then along came science and we moved to formal x static thinking. This was thinking about matter. 

   Then science discovered energy and wierd energy-like properties of subatomic things. This was "thinking about energy." But if you run the observations through a mental filter (Kant comes to mind here) that is still thinking like matter, then you don't get the full implications of the "study" or research. Finally, we will soon be stepping into the Tree of Life phase in which (at long last) western mind can not only observed and study energy at a distance, but it can begin to think like the thing being studied. It can think like energy. 

    Other cultures may have thought like energy long ago. They may have more or less started in that cell. But we western mind folk took a long path to be able to think like energy. I guess it allowed us to do a lot of "stuff" in between, and to highly differentiate the overall field of the known. 

    Darrell

Balder said:

Hi, Darrell,

 

I'm sorry to be so long in responding.  For the past week and a half, I was working quite intently on finishing a writing project, which I finally completed this past weekend, so my participation on this forum in general has been minimal.

 

I am in full agreement with your prefatory remarks about the usefulness of metaphysical speculation -- even, or perhaps even especially, within a postmetaphysical orientation.  We've discussed this point quite a bit around here over the past few years, as you might expect, given the focus of the group.  Postmetaphysics, as I understand it, does not translate as "anti-metaphysics," and is not opposed to metaphysical speculation.  Such speculation is not idle, in my view; it can be generative and even transformative.  In more recent discussions, we've explored this in the context(s) of Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and various quantum and fractal ontologies.

 

I recall your flare model, and I appreciate -- as I may have said before -- how it has grown out of your own energetic and visionary experience.  I can feelingly relate to aspects of it from my own experience.  I can see your "unfolding" flare metaphor as consonant with a model such as Bohm's (implicate and explicate orders).  There are some aspects of your unpacking of the metaphor, however, that seem to follow the Perennial model of the physical world, the world of form and complexity and "ego" and so on, as being "far" from the Reality of the Source.  Is that intended?  That doesn't line up so well with my own (nondual, somewhat immanentist) metaphysical druthers.

 

Best wishes,

 

B.

[Layman Pascal]

The Professor of Darkness & Despair appears to be "one of us". His move from Anti-Thomist Marxian to Pseudo-Thomist, scientific interlocutor of Aristotle & Nietzsche is good circumstantial evidence of a Green > Teal shift. This amplifies the utility of his critique of the limiting assumptions of Orange ethical philosophy and economics.

Of course there are the usual dangers. One always fears that the invocation of Nietzsche will be based on a partial and conventional academic misreading -- which predictably mishandles his very careful, very counter-intuitive evaluations of charged wording. The other fear, of course, is that of the typical academic exaggeration of the historical significance of specific terminology and doctrinal articulations. A lawyer's pettiness about the "word of the law" too often combines with the vanity of philosophers to make them quite gullible... all too willing to believe that intellectual arguments and "discourse" fads are somehow the drivers of human culture -- rather than just side-effects, symptoms & red-herrings. Such natural but trivial beliefs appear to menace us when we hear that "the loss of teleology as the source of incoherence in post-Enlightenment moral theorizing".

I do not know his work intimately enough to decide how often MacIntyre evades such traps.

Let me lay out the Nietzchean moral proposal. Perhaps someone else can say how closely or distantly it resembles MacIntyre.

A genealogical and etymological investigation of moral terms reveals that, despite their broad variation among cultures and epochs, there are also two grand trends -- obvious mixed in most situations -- which are observable independently of geography, period and emergent complexity. These trends might be called "victorious" and "frustrated". The former indicates health and strength in the sense that it indicates that our evolved functions are flourishing in their usage. The latter indicates a certain thwarting, resentment and subterfuge resulting from social and environmental conditions of frustration. In very primitive layers of culture these can be roughly equated with conquerors and enslaved populations but that distinguish dissolves rapidly. Different cultures handle this tension differently. In some cases it mutates into new functions, in other conditions it becomes narrow pools of strength, and in still others there is a pathological reversal of functioning. A "nihilism" in which value-sensations and virtues become associated with non-action, illusion and dis-spiritedness. Despite the fact that Aristotelian flourishing (the general state described by the telological goal of the Will-to-Power), Nietzsche finds a strong streak of dysfunctional idealism being articulated in the Golden Age of Greece. He refers to a particular European plague of nihilism "platonism" and then "christianity". W. Reich will later call it "the emotional plague".

Inter-cultural evaluations of virtues are possible. How well, in context, does a particular set of generative actions, associated with an implied evaluation, allow a type of being to maximize its health -- where health is seen as an interpretative, evolutionary coherence of various will-to-power drives which make up an organism or society? It is possible, therefore, according to N., to establish a more objective or fundamental table of values which can be used to affirm or critique all contingent variations of virtues within communities.

The use of the philosopher therefore become the attempt to create, legislate, connive or command a situation in which human civilization experiences more and greater intensities of "being" or "well-being" or "flourishing". This goal is only sometimes related to their survival but is also rooted in the structural capacities of their organism... whose full extent, dimensionality and powers cannot be definitely established by their organ of conscious thought.

Producing more intense flourishing requires several obvious necessities:

1. A rigorous capacity to evaluate moral systems among each other and establish the relative degree of health or dysfunction implied in each evaluation/practice.

2. The production of situations and institutions which stabilize the self-esteem and success-experiences of the majority and "artistically" weave them into a condition of surplus cultural harmony which adequately combines their functionality, individuality, uniformity and voluntarily service.

3. The production of individuals who can pursue new and more intense forms of bio-cultural victory experience (flourishing) -- even where this might conflict with the well-being of the masses. From these individuals, if they are protected, encouraged and trained properly, we expect to find both novel evolutionary pathways AND the crucial crop of visionary adepts who are able to experimentally take upon themselves the enormous responsibility of trying to cultivate and shape the human species in the direction suggested by a comprehensive overview of competing moral value systems.

All of these are rooted in practices ("breeding") which generate virtue-experience... rather than in virtue-philosophy (which typically allows our more frustrated and dysfunctional instincts to interfere with general empowerment and well-being).

[Layman Pascal]

What we might call the Nietzsche/Crowley/Reich position is that healthy functioning is a dynamic teleology which brings the diversity of beings together in an embodied, creative harmony -- quite distinct from the static version of a teleological end-state. We could call this is a second-tier or at least a post-dogmatic teleological ethics. And, although it is sometimes overlooked, virtually all proponents of such models include a very bio-energetic, very cooperative, very difference-embracing ethical framework. Implicit in healthy functioning, therefore, is some variable which we voluntarily help the cosmos to maximize... general utility, the true will, love. Not every function is equally healthy or comprehensive. Therefore a Wilberesque gesture of inclusiveness is needed alongside some metric by which various attempts at embodying a dynamic teleology can be compared against each other. Like the Greeks, I do not place it beyond possibility that a computational mathematics can describe the aesthetic proportions which comprehend the general set of configurations which optimal enactions are collectively trying to approximate no matter what structure and perspective they begin from. But that remains to be seen...

> In MacIntyre's view, this is what he is attempting to do: demonstrating how an Aristotelian, teleological ethics can coherently diagnose and remedy the failures and incoherencies of modern moral discourse, through an intensive historical, sociological, and linguistic analysis of the various Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment traditions.

Very attractive. However, I will need to hear more about the "remedy". I remain highly skeptical whether analyses and demonstrations, of the conventional ethical and philosophical variety, are potent enough to generate new cultural patterns. There is a high likelihood that this things are merely symptoms, flag posts, etc.What is the significance of modest, considerate arguments? Does MacIntrye (do any theorists) do much more than stand next to history and observe that it is occurring? Where is the most probably level which connects theory to emergence? Surely it is not simply the description of what is necessary... but just as surely we cannot do without a competent diagnosis if we seek a cure...

How then, does MacIntyre, propose to bring forth new practices for the discovery of common good?

[Balder]

After my reading of Bhaskar these past couple months, I've learned he also advocates a very Nietzsche/Crowley/Reichian spirited teleological ethics for the realization of "a eudaimonistic society."  As for MacIntyre, I am afraid he is pretty much an academic -- commenting, for the most part, on the sidelines of the unfolding of history.  He says he is waiting for "the next Benedict" -- someone who will take practical action to create small new intentional/experimental/post-monastic communities or enclaves -- but he is not that man.