This essay is part of the second phase of The Magical Flower of Winter, a project that now turns its focus from outlining a metamodern view of reality as a whole, towards the metacrisis. The thread that links these two phases is how the former can be considered an attempt at providing a world view that may better help us deal with the latter. The first phase can best be accessed through its introduction:
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My partner and I are expecting the birth of our first child. Our child’s name will be what my partner dreamt his name to be if it is a boy, and it will be what I dreamt her name to be if it is a girl. Speaking for myself, I in part want dreams to be the source of the name to show to ourselves and our child that dreams hold power in the world. What do I mean by this? Dreams holding power? What I want to try to show is that these words, like all words, grasp at something (which is no thing) that cannot be contained by them without loss. It is this remainder that is left out by our words that is what we are really after, and it is this that constitutes the power of dreams and so much else in the world, a power I think our culture and age has largely neglected. I want our child to grow up in a world where this power is once again recognized, but not through some fairytale culture of a past age, but a new one, fit for our time and our challenges.
Before giving up on this as some form of pseudo-magical nonsense I invite you to reflect on whether the irrational doesn’t already play a part in your life. Not as that which goes against reason, but as that which reasoning or rationalization fails to envelop. I invite you to reflect on whether the source of your actions often can’t be traced to reasoning at all, whether reasoning as rationalization isn’t for the most part some post hoc, after-the-fact process altogether at odds with what was in play in the moment. What we have forgotten in our drive to reduce and control every aspect of reality is the very source of our drive, and from our theories to our actions we have blinded ourselves to reality as it is prior to being broken down and made to fit our inner and outer dialogues about reality. The map is not the territory.
This matters, not only for our theories about the world, but also for our acting in the world, for we in part base the latter on the former. One component of the deep shit we find ourselves in is precisely our unquestioned yearning for explanation, rationalization and control. What will free us from our predicament is not more control, more planned action, but yielding control to the other, the whole, allowing virtue to act through us, once we have forged it in the deep of our being. The age-old adage goes that to know anything, you must first know yourself. I believe that perhaps the most vital part of knowing ourselves is to realize that we can’t fully know ourselves, and we never will, and this realization may offer up a bridge back to the whole, tempered by the limited and contextual knowledge we have gained about it. This is a very particular kind of yielding control and letting go, a kind that we cannot approach by rationalism alone.
One may now counter that, even though much of our actions aren’t rationally premeditated, our brain and body are the ultimate source of our actions, and our brain and body operate on rational, reducible, scientific principles. Following this line of argumentation, that our brain and body as a system is too complex to predict the actions of does not speak against its rational underpinnings, but simply to the vast complexity of what it is to be a human being. I think the depths of our confusion shines no clearer than in this example. In our quest to know ourselves and our world, we have walked a path that reduces away the terms that initiated our quest, all the while being blind to the confusing process this reduction proceeded by. For in going ever further in the depths of reduction and knowledge, the epistemic, we not only cut off all context outside the domain of our study, and by so doing delegate the true target of our quest to complexity, but we also blind ourselves to the rightful place of this process of reduction and its fruits. What is revealed by this process is not the reality we in our quest sought to know, but a sketch of it we in our zealousness have confused for the target of our quest. If philosophy has taught us anything in the past century, it should be that when switching domains, our concepts no longer mean or work the same. Reality cannot be understood except in the context of our experience, an experience that our sketches are only pieces of and in. We are largely ignorant to the way our concepts work, yet our concepts take part in shaping the world of tomorrow, regardless of us understanding how. With the powers modernity has granted us, we are now forced to better understand how this process works if we are to responsibly temper those powers.
In a similar vein as having confused the relationship between reality, mind and rationality, we have consigned dreams to the space of imagination, to the realm of the unreal. We have discovered in our neurocognitive models reasons to think that dreams are just what our generative brain makes up when freed from input from the external world, free-form hallucination that may act towards creating memories and help clean up our neuronal networks. But this tells us nothing about the meaning dreams may have for how we experience the world and how we think about our experiences. This is not some statement made in service of magical thinking or for distrusting rationality and sense-making in public discourse. This is about what dreams, and so much else in reality, reveals about the limits to rational explanation when it comes to our understanding this reality of ours. For understanding itself is not finitely definable, but a contextual lived process, an experience, something more than what we are able to wrap in our webs of explanation. An explanation of how the brain works can never be a proxy for the meaning of our experience.
The consequences of such a view on our outlook on reality, life and society can be far-reaching, and ground-shifting. To take the holistic stance, the stance I have attempted to outline, is not only to acknowledge that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but more importantly that the experiential whole that is reality precedes the parts we abstract thereof. The ‘more’ must be understood to belong to the domain of the irreducible, the irrational, the unsayable, the ontic. To say that the ‘more’ we encounter in reality which cannot be ascribed to the parts is emergent is nothing further than naming the unsayable by a concept that tries to force capture of the holistic using a reductionist language, like forcing a square peg through a circular hole. The whole, however, is forever on the horizon, out of reach of the webs we throw after it.
As humans we have a need for dreams, a need for stories, a need for mythology. Life is larger than the waking world, larger than the rational. By externalizing every aspect of experience to the conceptual, rational, linguistic and representational, we lose sight of what we forge in our hearts, the values we set down in our lives by habit and all that isn’t voiced out loud. The role of storytelling through culture, whether religious or not, has to a large extent been about showing the values and virtues of the culture through role models and narrative structure, by holding up examples we can aspire towards. Showing and saying are not the same. Our time needs new stories that aid us in forging these values, stories that can stick even when we also know they are just stories and what their purpose are. On the surface, truth plays little part in the efficacy of enculturation, but if we look further, we may find the deeper truths that our stories and values aim to represent. Stories hold great power in the world, but not in the surface level ways of explicit causal efficacy we normally trace them by. In a global society without value-grounded processes of enculturation, were we are in thrall to the representations of media, science and entertainment ungrounded in the worth for human life, there should be little surprise that we have gone astray.
I want our child to grow up in a world where stories of virtue and value are integral parts of a culture that acknowledges its own limits. A culture that is built around values, values that enable balanced living, cooperation and everybody's quest for a good life. I want our child to grow up with stories that can be looked up to, stories that highlight the virtuous life of wisdom, bravery and restraint, of doing good for the world, virtues that can be strived for. I believe everyone to some extent want this, but I fear we are trapped in politics and a techno-capitalist society that is the nemesis of a value culture. What manner of escape is there? Only to try to inspire our children by our own actions, to show them the path of virtue and value, so that the shape of our society of tomorrow do not propagate the sins of the past.
If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up the men
to gather wood,
divide the work and
give orders.
Instead,
teach them to yearn
for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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