Episode 25: The Clash

Last time we took a look at what's happening in Germany in the period after Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. We took a look at the rise of pseudo-religious ideologies and of the various other cultural undercurrents and threads and processes of transformation that were gathered together in Germany and then exacerbated and ignited (if you'll allow me a volatile metaphor) by Germany's terrific defeat in the terror that was World War One, and the impact this had on Germany and how all of this, all of these features that we saw at work in Germany and in the meaning crisis get spun in Hitler's autodidactic myopia into a gnostic nightmare, a titanic pseudo-religious ideology.

The two great pseudo-religious ideologies of Nazism and Marxism (at least the Stalinist version in the Soviet Union) come to titanic blows in the Eastern Front at the Battle of Kursk. Then I pointed out that this, and then the political ideological battles of the Cold War and thereafter have left us deeply traumatized. We place no faith in pseudo-religious ideologies, utopian visions to solve the meaning crisis; at least, many of us don't. We do not see ourselves as capable of the nostalgic return to religion, somehow pretending that all of this history, all the science can be ignored in a kind of fundamentalism (and please not that I'm not equating all religion with fundamentalism!). Instead we find ourselves in the middle in between these and we're trapped; we can't go back, and we can't do a secular alternative to religion, and yet we need something that will systematically create psychotechnologies that transform consciousness, cognition, character, and culture in a way that religions have if we're going to address the meaning crisis, and in fact the meta-crisis that we're confronting right now in the world today.

So we're caught in this situation and we pursue either various radicalisms (and I critiqued the idea that the meaning crisis should be understood, or we should attempt to solve it by the means of the clash of political ideologies; that is to fundamentally misframe it, because if you remember Kierkegaard and Marx and Schopenhauer all in their different ways and in ways that we can criticize are nevertheless pointing to the fact that the participatory, perspectival knowing that is so crucial to responding to losses of meaning and regenerating meaning has been ignored by Hegel). So we can't do this politically; it doesn't mean the politics is irrelevant but it means that framing and formulating the problem at the political level is to radically misframe it and misformulate it.

Then I proposed to you that instead we turn to an alternative way of trying to reformulate the problem: that we try to get a scientific understanding, as best as we can, of the meaning machinery, this machinery that we perspectivally participate within. I'll often say 'meaning-making' but as I'll argue we don't make meaning the way the Romantics said, neither do we just receive meaning from the world the way the empiricists and the Enlightenment argued; we're going to see that it's neither one of those. That's another dichotomy that we have to transcend.

Nevertheless, let's look at this machinery, the machinery of meaning realization. What are the cognitive processes at work within it? I propose that we do that from a scientific worldview precisely because, at least from a scientific point of view, precisely because we need that to complement the historical analysis and because the scientific worldview is part of the problem of the meaning crisis itself. So I propose that we take a look at the science of cognition and that means that we take a look at cognitive science.

(The last third of this episode is warming up the transition from history to science, and so I extended a bit from the recap to the introduction of episode 26, in a way that mirrors episode 25's structure.)