Thought soup poisoned with metaphysics

Re-seeing to get the Ancient Greeks out of our cultural cognitive grammar

Fyodor Bronnikov, Pythagoreans' Hymn to the Rising Sun, 1869.

The ways we think about important issues of meaning, such as life-purpose and sacredness, are limited by mistaken metaphysical ideas.

In fact, our everyday ways of thinking and talking and acting in mundane matters are also distorted the same way!

This is true for everyone, including those who know absolutely nothing about philosophy, because these ideas form fundamental structures of our whole way of being.

I’ve called this “thought soup,” which the Meaningness Glossary explains as:

the incoherent mass of disconnected fragments of dead ideologies that survive in popular culture as ways of talking, and therefore of thinking and feeling and acting: clichés, bromides, plot points and story arcs. Its metaphors and intuitions powerfully influence the ways we relate to meaningness, in ways we’re never fully conscious of.

In “Meaning: lost, or muddled by metaphysics?”, my video with Andrew Conner, I got excited and incoherent when discussing a key point, so we had to cut much of that part. This post explains what I meant to say there.

John Vervaeke uses the terms “cognitive grammar” and “cultural grammar.” As I say in the video, this is a great metaphor, because our communication is fundamentally structured by grammatical rules that we’re mostly unaware of. By analogy, we don’t know that we don’t know the ways our culture structures and limits our thinking, feeling, and activity.

There are no essential or accidental properties.

“What’s big and red and eats rocks?”

It turns out that literal, linguistic grammar encodes some of the cultural, cognitive grammar. The example I explained with Andrew was adjective ordering in English. (This was mainly in the bit we had to delete from the video. The remainder runs from about 12:00 to 15:00.)

“Big red rock eater” sounds right; “red big rock eater” is jarring. According to the official rules (that nearly no native speaker knows) it’s outright ungrammatical. Nevertheless, “red big rock eater” could be grammatical in context. However, it means something different.

A “big red rock eater” means a red rock eater that happens to be big, whereas a “red big rock eater” is big rock eater that happens to be red. In the latter case, the implication is that there are two kinds of rock eaters, little ones and big ones, which are “natural kinds”: categories based on how things really are, not just our understanding of them. Being big is essential to belonging to the category of big rock eaters. They start out big, and can’t turn into small rock eaters. On the other hand, a big rock eater might be any color, or change color over time. Redness is not an essential property of a red big rock eater; it’s an “accidental property.”

If you look at the rules for English adjective ordering, the ones closest to the noun are more-essential properties, such as their intrinsic category and the material they are made from. Color is a bit further away. The ones furthest are accidental, such as size, because that often changes as things grow. Anything that changes is a mere accident; essential properties are immutable. (According to mainstream metaphysics.)

The ways we relate to everything are infested with the wrong idea that there are essential and accidental properties. For example, Meaningness discusses “confused stances” according to which everyone has essential, intrinsic purposes, which define who they really are and what they really should do. We don’t actually have those, and the implicit belief that we must causes an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering.

The main advance in philosophy over the past hundred years has been the gradual realization, and then reluctant admission, that there are no essences. In the dimension of purpose, this was the thrust of existentialism: that purposes are merely accidental, and therefore can be chosen arbitrarily. This is also wrong, and also causes great suffering.

More broadly, it became apparent that the foundational metaphysics we inherited from centuries past, which shapes our everyday patterns of activity, was wrong.

This is what the “meaning crisis” mainly consists of, I think!

Everyone now feels how metaphysics has conclusively failed, even if they have no explicit knowledge of it. This is postmodernity: we can no longer believe any of the Big Stories About Life, The Universe, And Everything, because they rest on metaphysical ideas that we now instinctively discount.

We feel a constant lack of fit between our unthought cultural assumptions and how things are. We can’t escape the uneasiness this brings, since we haven’t yet reworked our cultural cognitive grammar to accommodate a better understanding of meaning, and of other fundamental metaphysical terms like “category” and “property.”

This is also much of what the culture war consists of!

For example, I’ve used this lens to explain the culture war trans battle. Are transwomen essentially women, who only superficially appeared to be men before transition, due to an unfortunate accident of birth? Or are they essentially men who have been surgically mutilated to alter some accidental characteristics while leaving their male essence unchanged? Or is sex entirely accidental, and everyone is just whatever sex they happen to “present as” on a particular occasion? If you know the details of any particular case, an actual person, it’s clear that all those metaphysical positions are untrue and unhelpful.

More generally, categorizing properties as either essential or accidental is only useful in some contexts for some purposes. This artificial distinction was invented by Aristotle in an attempt to fix Plato’s wrong theory of sameness and difference. In practice, Aristotle’s version is only occasionally useful in understanding specific differences and similarities. It is mostly conceptually incoherent, and is never capital-T True.

Metaphysics is only ever credible when you deliberately un-see the actual world, and imaginatively inhabit the domain of metaphysical abstractions instead. Doing so is silly and harmful. However, metaphysical assumptions are so deeply embedded in our way of being, even in English grammar, that it’s difficult to avoid unconsciously applying them. They includes essentialism, among many others.

The world was never disenchanted.

There’s a common idea that we lost meaning because of rationality.

According to this story, the world was “enchanted,” pervasively charged with meaning, before rationality was invented. This primordial meaningfulness was sacred and tremendously important, and the meaning crisis is the result of its loss.

That never happened.

Theorists have assigned this loss of meaning to innovations in rationality at different points in history. The earliest candidate was Ancient Greek philosophy. As I said in the video, I don’t know Vervaeke’s work well at all. However, my superficial impression is that he thinks we lost meaning back then, and we somehow need to reclaim it. If so, I disagree.

Two things did happen:

• Rationality revealed that many explanations of meaningful events were incorrect. Gods do not cause plagues to punish us for our sins. This is an important advance in understanding, and for effective action. Prayer does not help. Antibiotics do help. Hooray for rationality!

• Rationalism had no explanation for how meaning works. Eventually, it insisted that anything it couldn’t imagine an explanation for doesn’t exist. Therefore, nothing is meaningful. This inference became part of our pervasive cultural cognitive grammar: nihilism. Even though it’s obviously false, everyone’s way of being is harmfully distorted by it. Boo to rationalism!

Meaning is obvious everywhere. In the video, I use the example of a salt shaker. It is there to shake salt. This is not mysterious! We never lost such meanings!

We see meaning everywhere, all the time. I wrote about this “Reasonable perception,” for example. We now have quite good understandings for how meaning works, and how we do see it.

“No!” some would reply, irritated:

You are playing on the ambiguity of the word “meaning.” Mundane trivia like salt shakers are not the kind of meanings we are talking about here. The point is big stuff like immanent sacredness, and your true purpose, and the meaning of life. That’s what we lost, throwing away the sacred along with discrediting belief in miracles, omens, and thunder gods.

We didn’t lose anything. What we got from rationalism was a ton of harmful new metaphysical ideas, which we’ve had to live by for a couple thousand years. One egregious example is:

Nothing in the actual world is sacred. Only the other, better, metaphysical world is sacred! We have to get from here to there!

But we see sacredness all the time. We’ve just learned to parrot the rationalist lie that we don’t, and to deny the meaning we see in order to maintain our faith in rationalism.

I’d explain this more, but Sonja Blignaut has already done an outstanding job in “The world was never disenchanted. We were.”

“Disenchantment” became a posture. A way serious people were expected to speak. A performance of maturity that bore little relationship to actual experience.

The world was never stripped of its enchantment. We just learned to avert our gaze.

Disenchantment, then, is not a discovery about reality; it is a training of perception.

Re-enchantment is a discipline of attention. A practice of looking again and acting on what we see, rather than hiding behind abstraction. Of noticing again what we’ve learned to dismiss. Of feeling what we’ve learned to numb. Of staying present to mystery without rushing to resolve it.

We can choose to see differently.

We can remember that perception is participation, and that how we look shapes what we find.

We can recover our capacity to perceive and orient around beauty and aliveness.

We can cultivate humility, stay present to mystery and cultivate our sense of wonder and awe.

The world was never disenchanted. Only our ways of seeing were.

THAT, like the intricate beauty of the salt shaker, is the essence of Vajrayana.