rationalism has for years now been shading into what has variously been called postrationalism and metamodernity. it has become increasingly comfortable, indeed enthusiastic, about drawing from occultism, myth and mysticism.



(i promise, right here and now, that the basilisk doesn’t come up at all)



so is it all just a laugh? all just metaphors, fun and games, a small detour on the wild side, but very firmly and securely contained in the rationalist framework? but what of the fact that more than a few rationalists ended up committed catholics, not despite, but because of their commitment to rationalism? why so many adjacents, or adjacent-adjacents, that are full on into mysticism, into chaos magick, what have you?



i think there’s something deeper at work. i think, essentially, it’s an increasing awareness, not only of the fact, but the ramifications thereof, that the subjective-objective abyss cannot be bridged.

yawn whatever, puff and pass it forward already, right?

okay, bear with me. big yud was of course never unaware of this fact, but he more or less handwaved this as a problem to be corrected for as we go. that’s what the simple truth was about (though let’s recall that its conclusions ultimately rested on pragmatic grounds). and he built all he built more or less on this assumption.

don’t get me wrong, he accomplished a lot along the way. i’m very much on the record that the sequences are A Good Thing. i occasionally go back to old favorites and find that they hold up just fine.

but the inherent weakness of the founding assumption, unavoidable as it may be, will necessarily come back to (somewhat literally, in this case) haunt it.

let’s take a little detour before we go any further.

metaethics is not feasibly (though it might in principle be) reducible to a strict logical formulation. i think EA was a good idea, and that it has accomplished good things, with its ethos of taking ethical commitments seriously. we can more or less all agree that saving people from malaria is a good thing, and those kinds of initiatives seem to have been pretty effective at getting more people on board.

however, it turns out some basic theoretical problems with utilitarianism are causing significant tension and stasis in the movement, because you can’t in principle decide how many suffering chickens are equivalent to one suffering child. this is a hopelessly abstruse theoretical problem, until it isn’t.

utilitarianism also eventually clashes against virtue ethics on the wireheading question, or, in its more relevant and prosaic form, the point at which removing difficulty and discomfort from someone’s life is causing more harm than good, and at which point it’s best to let that person develop their strength as a moral agent. this is hard enough to tell at the individual level, nevermind making population-wide generalizations. not to mention deontology, which has the least metaethical justification but is more or less indispensable in practice.

the point of this aside being that the fault-line in ethics turns out to be the same as in epistemology. try as you might, you can’t surmount that barrier. and eventually, the conceptual problem becomes an actual problem.

here is the question: is the human experience best understood as existing in a mind-like or a physics-like context?



the answer of rationalism has been more or less to treat the mind-like part of the equation as noise–noise that you can sometimes play with, but otherwise that is to be corrected for. your real work, including in the ethical sense, is to develop your understanding of objective reality, first and foremost.

this has proven… lacking. in practice, this imperative tends to compete with intuitive capabilities. it tends to stunt the capacity for associative and transcendent thinking, and it tends to blind you to the emotional and unconscious currents that you thus, for want of understanding, cannot stop from dragging you where they will.

this is not something that i can prove to you. it’s just something you find out as your life continues not to go as you wish it would, as anxiety and depression mount, as you feel increasingly unmoored, and rationalism either cannot account for it or is powerless to help.

this is where you need help from the subjective domain–the mythical, the psychoanalytic. but of course we don’t want to give up the rational–it’s too powerful, too important.

is this non-overlapping magisteria rearing its head again? we should be so lucky.



a logical compromise might be to “run it on an emulator,” as it were–you keep the rationalist operating system and run a mythical engine within it. this is more or less what reading fiction is, or at least what we imagine it is.

the problem is that, for the mythic to do its work properly, it needs to exceed the bounds of that emulator. it needs to overgrow its bounds like a weed without being constantly pruned by the rational.

this is key. you if you could set its bounds ahead of time, you would be able to comfortably fit it within the confines of rationalism. but if you do that, it doesn’t work.

(remember, rationalism was built on pragmatism to begin with)

this leads to a very common recurring theme in my thinking, which is more or less parallel to david chapman’s, with different emphases: good living, and well-functioning systems, require not the resolution of contradictions, not finding a point of rest on a happy medium, but a sustained and irresolvable tension between them.

sometimes that tension will send you flying wildly in an unexpected direction. sometimes that’s the right thing to do.