Episode 7: Aristotle's World View and Erich Fromm

So last time we took a look at the second half of Aristotle and his further developments of the Axial Age's understanding of meaning and wisdom. We took a look more at the world side of things and we took a look at his worldview, with two components: his conformity theory, which is an important alternative understanding of knowledge--it's a contact epistemology, an intimate knowing and being with something--and how plausible that contact epistemology actually is, and then we also looked at a plausible (turned out to be false, but a plausible) model of the world that is very consonant and consistent with that conformity theory: this is a geocentric world that is moved by natural motion. It's a cosmos.

Then we use that to discuss how the theory of the world and the theory of how we know the world and be within the world are intimately connected and mutually supporting, and you get worldview attunement, and how that creates existential modes in which we are co-identifying the agent and the arena and creating the meta-meaning, the relationship that makes all individual acts and events and situations and places meaningful for us, and how important that consonance is between our existential mode and our intellectual understanding. Aristotle is so prominent because of his capacity to create a worldview that lasts for a millennium, and because it's so well-attuned a worldview.

We then paused from our discussion of the Axial Age in Greece and we moved to the Axial Age in India for the explicit purpose of trying to discuss the impact of the Mindfulness Revolution. Part of the thesis of the series is the mindfulness revolution is in response to the meaning crisis in the West and growing confluence between Buddhism and cognitive science is an attempt to address and provide solutions to the meaning crisis in the West. We started by looking at the figure who epitomizes the Axial Revolution within ancient India and that's Siddhartha Gautama. We began by looking at his myth--his mythological biography if you want to put it that way--and I remind you again how I am using the world 'myth'.

We began by taking a look at his early life within the palace. We stepped aside and examined the palace as a mythological representation of a particular existential mode. We talked about two different existential modes, following the work of Fromm; it's also convergent of work from Buber, and other important thinkers (Stephen Batchelor is going to make use of this distinction, etc.).

Fromm talks about two modes:

1. The having mode that's organized around meeting our 'having needs' in which we perceive the world categorically. We want to manipulate it and solve our problems and control it. 
2. The being mode which is organized around our 'being needs'. These are needs that are met by becoming something: mature, virtuous, love.

We then talked about the possibility of modal confusion: being locked in the having mode in trying to meet your being needs within the having mode. So trying to meet your need for maturity by having a car, or meeting your need for being in love by having lots of sex. We talked about the fact that you can become enmeshed in modal confusion and how that becomes a vicious cycle because as your being needs are frustrated you pursue evermore the misframed projects that the modal confusion is giving you. You try more to have things as opposed to more and more become what you need to become.

Then I suggested to you that being in the palace is a mythological representation of this kind of modal confusion in which we are stuck in the having mode and of course this also had one important cultural point--I did say at the beginning we would talk about about that--we would develop a way of talking about the connection between the meaning crisis and other crises we are facing, so issues about a market economy and a commodification of everything and everyone by inducing modal confusion it is possible to sell you more. As your identity becomes more and more a political and economic thing and commodity that should be categorically understood and manipulated, the more and more I can sell you things and sell you ideas and manipulate you accordingly. So this has important ramifications for us now. That's why it's a myth; because it has important ramifications for us right now.