Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 23 — Romanticism (Summary & Notes)

“Music and art are going to be understood as giving us access through the imagination to what’s real.”

(In case you missed it: Summary & Notes for Ep. 22: https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-22-descartes-vs-hobbes-summary-notes-eb9f3d4d8d45)

Ep. 23 — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Romanticism [56:34] https://youtu.be/Noc1OH0CUBc

• As we’ve seen, to escape the meaning crisis religion is not a viable way out. But we need to explore why a secular solution for people also doesn’t seem viable. Lots of paradoxical tension and contradiction, which is the hallmark of the Cartesian legacy.
• Vervaeke makes this argument by showing the responses to the meaning crisis that come after Descartes. i.e. pseudoreligious ideologies, and how they’ve led us to become traumatized since these ideologies have led to terrible warfare and genocidal bloodshed.
• Emmanuel Kant: he’s trying to deal with this fracturing of realness left by Descartes — the inner subjective mind and the outer mathematical. He asks: how is it that math is so good at describing reality? (We originally had the Neoplatonic answer…)
• He comes up with a radical proposal, a “Copernican revolution”: these patterns of intelligibility that we find in the world aren’t actually there. Not in the sense we think they are. He uses an Ockham-type move: these ways of measuring the world itself, they’re a way of organizing experience in a way that makes sense to the mind.
• His idea was that there are structures in the mind that act as “filter- frames” (like glasses) that impose a structure of intelligibility on experience. This is the opposite of the Platonic model, a complete reversal. Your mind is “making sense.”
• For Kant this means we can never know the world as it is, the “thing-in-itself.” The mind is only ever really touching itself.
• The implicit idea here, that raw material is being filtered in and structure being imposed on it. This is the most prevalent model in most cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Bottom-up processing starts with perception and moves toward cognition, and top-down processing starts with cognition and moves down into perception. This two-way process conforms to the Kantian model of reality.
• Notice what’s happening: As the raw material moves closer to cognition it becomes more and more rational, mathematically intelligible, but also farther and farther away from being in contact with the world.
• For Plato, as you move deeper and deeper into rationality you get closer and closer to reality, but for Kant it’s the opposite.
• This is how we get Carl Jung. He tells his readers repeatedly he’s a neo-Kantian. Kant’s epistemology + Gnostic mythology = Jung. He essentially lays out the idea that as you move closer to your non-logical, irrational, dream-like impressions and leave behind the rational/logical side you’re actually getting in closer contact with the world. [see Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman]
• This is the main idea of Romanticism. “Romanticism is the idea that we can recapture contact with reality by moving away from the rational layers of cognition and into the irrational layers.”
• This gets associated with love because in the Platonic tradition the quintessential form of participatory, perspectival knowing is love. And the Romantics are getting back to that, they’re starting to see that and embrace it as the fundamentally irrational force.
• This leads to the idea that imagination is the mediator between the intelligibility of reality and the sensual experience of reality. “Imagination is where the mind initially imposes the order on raw data of experience.” So that the raw data of experience can be made available to reason. “Music and art are going to be understood as giving us access through the imagination to what’s real.”
• The world is a blank canvas on which the imagination presses out (“ex-presses”) itself. This is why “expression” is an important idea to the Romantics. Jung and Freud take this idea and use the term “projecting” instead. This is all in contrast to the Empiricists, who see the mind as a blank slate onto which the world imposes itself (or as Locke says, “im-presses”), which becomes part of the “scientific” model. (Vervaeke says confidently that both are wrong. Too much evidence against both.)
• People get swept up in Romanticism, in the arts and in religion… it becomes a pan-European movement. Romanticism lays out a framework for you to regain contact with reality by moving into the world of the imagination, all with the machinery of religion. It is the first of all the other pseudo-religious ideologies that follow.
• We still understand and use the grammar of Romanticism in today’s culture. To talk about love, how it operates (romantic comedies, etc.)… lots of bs. The price you pay for Romanticism is that you’re right where Descartes and Luther left you: you’re still trapped inside your mind. And the only way to get in touch with reality is to think and behave irrationally?
• So we go into our romantic relationships with unreachable expectations of how the person is going to possess everything that we’ve lost in our history. This is why people to turn to these relationships to provide all the answers and meaning in their life while also being the source of so much pain and trauma in their life.
• Blake, for example, tries to use poetry to put into words these expectations and this meaning that’s being sought. Using imagery to point to a transformative, mystical experience. But without a systematic set of psychotechnologies and systems to go along with it, all you have is words. The Romantics didn’t give us anything else. They don’t give us practices, institutions. They give us promises, images, and words. It’s a pseudo-religious ideology. “It’s spiritual junk food. It’s tasty, but it’s not nutritious.”
• It quickly gets translated to nastier forms. It plays a big role in the rise of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Beethoven was writing music initially because he was a fan of Napoleon. Why did people like Napoleon? “By force of will (and that’s what an im-pression is) he is imposing a structure onto the world. He is restructuring the world. He is painting his picture onto the world.”
• Napoleon is eventually defeated, science moves on, and there is a response to the failure of Romanticism. It failed because it couldn’t be the replacement for Christianity, but doesn’t go away. We now live with “Decadent Romanticism” (rom-coms being an example of this)
• There are still further attempts to understand Romanticism. It quickly passes into Schopenhauer, the godfather of Nihilism. Note that now we’re back with Germans. Germany is where this history is unfolding. Schopenhauer internalizes this model of the world, picking up on Kant. Makes a distinction between arbitrary will (the will to live, the raw will that structures you). He says it’s relentless but it’s pointless (since it’s not rational). He says the will is like a huge man and the ego is sitting on his shoulders. That the rational mind is in service of the irrational will. (Note how close this is to Jung…)
• Schopenhauer says that sex is the cruel joke that the species plays on the individual. That sex is evidence of that primal will to live, and promises so much… and yet none of it accrues to you. Now we’re at Dawkins’ idea, that we’re all just replicating machines, etc.
• So for Schopenhauer it all amounts to a nihilism, a pessimism. You’re left with a meaningless existence. Nihilism becomes an existential response to Romanticism.
• Schopenhauer has a great follower: Nietzsche. Father of Post-Modernism. He’s also a disciple of Wagner, who represents Romanticism in music breaking down — music becoming untethered from its traditions. A problem with Wagner, though, is that he’s a vicious anti-semite.
• Luther actually anti-semitically states that “we are at fault in not slaying them [the Jews].” His treatise also argues for burning their books, synagogues, and homes, and drafting them into forced labor or exiling them. What is happening in Germany around this time?
• Luther says this because Jews, in his mind, are followers of the law and are people trying to earn their salvation, rejecting Jesus. So in rejecting Jesus, Luther says they reject the idea of salvation in terms of the law. So he says they’re evil.
• Nietzsche keeps most of Schopenhauer’s framework but rejects the Kantian and Neoplatonic stuff. (He says “I hate Socrates, he’s so close to me I’m always fighting him.”) He has a deep conflict with the Axial Revolution. He proposes this idea of a “will to power” instead. A more creative act.
• For Nietzsche, everything is pressing itself out, and that this is a feature not just of our minds but of reality itself. To create and master oneself in the world. He sees a way of getting back something that was lost: self-transcendence. Meaning. (Note: his father was a Lutheran pastor, so he understands Christianity in a very Lutheran way, a way of suppressing the capacity for self-transcendence. This is why he’s trying to move away from and reject Christianity. He’s deeply influences by the Stoics and other Axial Age thinkers and he’s trying to bring it back but he’s blocked by this Lutheran interpretation.)
• This is a dangerous way of thinking though. Reason has now been reduced to merely being a little logical, framing thing. He has created self-transcendence without the machinery of dealing with self-deception. That’s what rationality really is: psychotechnology that affords self-transcendence by training you to overcome self-deception. This is the great tragedy of Nietzsche.

Next up: Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 24 — Hegel (Summary & Notes): https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-24-hegel-summary-notes-895ed0a3cadd

List of Books in the Video:

• Gary Lachman — Lost Knowledge of the Imagination