I am new to this community, but I am not new to its subject matter. Since I finished my philosophy degree in 2008 (aged 36) I have been trying to find a way to both define the new paradigm (and the old paradigm) and figure out a way that it can actually become reality – how to bring enough people together to actually enact this paradigm shift. For me this involves two main factors. The first is the inevitability of collapse and the need to turn a process of collapse of civilisation into a process of transformation into something truly sustainable, and the second is to resolve the science-spirituality conflict in the West.
As things stand 2R is not a coherent movement. It consists of a bunch of different movements, people and ideas. It is clear enough to bring together as a nascent paradigm shift – something is trying to be born. But there’s already too many people trying to take the movement off in different directions. It currently doesn’t have enough structure to become a paradigm shift worthy of the name “Second Rennaissance”.
I am seeing something I believe to be a fundamental mistake, and it is particularly clear in the work of Hanzi Freinacht. That is the idea that 2R must be thought of as a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism, and that it is absolutely essential to incorporate postmodern thinking in the new paradigm. The idea is of a progression: ancient → modern → postmodern → metamodern. We need to “hold on to the core insights and values of postmodernism”, as an integral part of the new paradigm. That is not how the first Renaissance happened. Galileo and Descartes didn’t ask themselves how to synthesise Aristotle and Aquinas because it was so important to hold on the best of their ideas. No. They started again – in terms of epistemology, it was a new beginning.
I think we need to view Western history in terms of epistemic paradigms. The “first age” was ancient and its epistemic starting point was Plato and Aristotle. That age ended with the rise of Christianity and the decline of the western Roman empire, at which point an epistemic regime dominated by Aristotlean cosmology was replaced the Catholic Christian synthesis. This “second age” was epistemologically a continuation of Aristotle, but combined with Augustinian and Thomist theology.
The Rennaissance was the beginning of the “third age”. What was the epistemic regime of this third age? We need to split it into sections. The first section runs from Galileo/Descartes to Hume and Kant. This was characterised by an epic epistemological battle between Rationalists and Empiricists – a big argument about where we should start. Pure reason? Or empirical observation? This argument was brought to an end at the pivotal moment for modernity, which was Hume’s attempts to find a secure starting point for a science of the mind (“moral subjects”) and the subsequent publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And the relevance of the CPR was, again, its new starting point – the key component of which is the splitting of reality into phenomenal and noumenal (reifying the Cartesian split) . Epistemologically Kant starts by defining concepts referring to the world as it is experienced by us and the world as it is itself, and he declares that science can only tell us about the former, and that about the latter we can know nothing at all. It was all about epistemology, and it was the beginning of a great fracturing of Western thought.
This “third age” I call “the Age of Disjunction”, because it is characterised by an ever-increasing array of mutually-incompatible epistemic systems. These include scientific materialism, various strains of idealism, growth-based economics, Marxism and most recently postmodern antirealism and cynicism. Postmodernism defines itself in opposition to all those other things, which it dismisses as “totalising metanarratives”. It is a sort of “anti-epistemology”, because its only starting point is to declare that there are no privileged starting points – it takes Kant’s division to its absolute extreme: there is no such thing as objective truth, everything is a perspective, all if which are valid unless we declare that they are immoral. Or something like that. So rather than seeing postmodernism as the “next stage up” from modernism, I see it as the final epistemological bankruptcy of the Age of Disjunction – the point where we are as far away from a coherent epistemological starting point as it is possible to be. The whole Age of Disjunction has been a descent ever further into left hemisphere domination, and postmodernism is the ultimate conclusion – it is what happens when the left hemisphere starts eating itself. If this is correct, then trying to incorporate this into the new paradigm is a serious error. It simply won’t work.
My point is this. I think in order for the Second Renaissance to actually happen, what is needed is a new starting point. Instead of asking how we can synthesise modernism and postmodernism, we need to ask ourselves where we are now, and where we can agree to start in terms of epistemology. How can we build a movement with sufficient agreement about what is true or real that we can start asking the right questions about what the rest of the new paradigm needs to look like? We need to start with the question “What do we know?” instead of “What is important?”
This starting point cannot possibly include postmodernism, or anything derived from it. That is because postmodernism itself is anti-epistemological – it allows everything in by default and then starts by asking questions about morality. Who has power? Who is oppressed? What concepts do we need to change in order to change the narrative and redistribute power? The problem with this is not just, as Hanzi says, that people don’t like it because they have different value systems. The problem is that it doesn’t care enough about the truth – it doesn’t value truth. It tries to put morality before truth.
So my question is this:
Is anybody in the 2R ecosystem offering a new epistemological starting point? The question is not just which starting point is valid, but which starting point can build a large enough consensus to make 2R a reality. Is there a starting point that is both epistemologically defensible and capable of sustaining the Second Renaissance?
This is the question I have spent the last 16 years trying to answer. I believe I have that answer. But right now I’d like to explore other people’s answers.
Where do you think 2R needs to start? What is going to be the epistemological regime of the fourth age?