Metamodern Spirituality | Traditional Faith and Metamodernism (w/ Jared Morningstar)

Process thinker Jared Morningstar joins me to discuss the relationship of metamodernism to traditional forms of religion. How can engaging the traditional frame be done without losing hard-won gains in complexity and perspective-taking? Here Jared advocates for an open, flexible, and epistemically humble form of experimentation and participation in different religious modalities. We consider the role of 'causal opacity' in religious functionality and whether reflection is inherently harmful to generating emergent potential in religious contexts. We also explore the ways traditional faiths may be genuinely engaging with hyper-complex phenomena and how tradition-specific language can be helpful in extending faith into metamodernity. Finally, we discuss the role of plurality and singularity, the general and the particular, in what it means to engage religion from a metamodern perspective.

0:00 Introduction
1:34 Reaction vs. Reconstruction: Which Direction Is Calling?
10:50 Unseen Causes: Participatory Experimentation and Epistemic Humility
17:43 Breaking the Frame: Causation, Disenchantment, and Etic vs. Emic Perspectives
24:25 Moving In and Out of Tradition: Looking Back or Going Back?
35:24 Superstition or Super-Complexity? Parsing Tradition's Relationship with Hyperobjects
50:03 Beyond Perennialism: Religious Pluralism and Traditional Particularity
1:03:09 Living the Openness
1:10:59 Orienting Value in the Uncertainty
1:18:46 Integrating the General and the Particular: Heading Out and Coming Home
1:23:33 Conclusion

[jerrypeters]

This talk increased my appetite for metamodern dialogue with people of various traditionalist languages/perspectives. Speaking of "going east", i hope to find other traditionalist languages/perspectives on metamodernism from the Shinto, Tao, Hindu, etc. as well.

Thanks to the both of you for creating a catalytic conversation.

[FootnotesPlato]

48:00 “If, in physics, one seeks to explain the nature of light, nobody expects that as a result there will be no light. But in the case of psychology everybody believes that what it explains is explained away.”
-Carl Jung (‘Answer to Job, ’ para. 749n2).

[domesdaylines]

I believe I know the missing ingredient for this new religion-- restoration of the neglect for instinct, nature, and the unconscious in man, with a synthesis to his modern consciousness. Only time will tell if/when this new oldness will come to pass.

[rigelthurston]

Great conversation! Brendan, I appreciate your persistence in leaning into the problem of returning to a traditional practice after having awakened to a more modern/pragmatist mindset. And Jared, your response was so good! It’s actually helping me sort through some of my own struggles in this area within the Christian tradition—-remembering that the modern etic analysis is likely incomplete.

Thank you for breaking down the difference between etic and emic—-super useful for amateur philosophers like myself. ❤

[dianagoddard]

Isn’t there something that links with John’s 4 ps. Where the participatory knowing ie ritual is based on procedural and then gets intrinsically mixed with
The propositional knowing which tends to
Be fixed. So he is talking about perspectival knowing as a bridge but YES is there a bridge too far

[they]

29:42 Brendan, would this be what you meant by attending church for aesthetic reasons?

[elenabalyberdina]

Brendan, your question regarding jumping from emic to etic and then back to emic seems hinting, but not fully realizing that there is no going back. I ll quote Zizek here: "It is necessary to begin by choosing Evil; or, more precisely, every true Beginning as a radical break with the past is by definition Evil, from which the Good can emerge only afterwards, in the space opened up by that Evil.
Zizek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 107). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

[dianagoddard]

Merton s zen and the birds of appetite is a great dialogue with Buddhism wrestling with how to deal with Christology and emptiness

[elenabalyberdina]

Something more radical is needed. Namely, grasping the idea that being barred from the Ultimate is the Ultimate itself and foundation for the new metatheory. Otherwise, it is going to be just one or another interpretation, leading to violence and brawl over the "True" one. And no matter how you guys are trying to be humble and intellectual about it, you can't crossbreed mytho-poetic and objective approaches. Stop covering over anxiety and trauma of existence. That would be a new ground for compassion and love..., and more generous world, politically and socially

[E_Pedagogy]

Great conversation! Jared seems like someone who is both a deep thinker and willing to do the work. I was surprised by how resonant the part about being "Slayed in the Spirit" and excess cohesion was to our own conversation yesterday. I think distributed cognition, collective intelligence, and relevance realization are key features in the eventual understanding that is to be had. Not my original argumentation obviously.

[elenabalyberdina]

Brendon, you didn't say why is it so hard to live it or live from meta position of groundless ground. Just try it...All you need is Care - not to say "death do us apart every time you marry, Reason, not to say you do know, when you don't and Courage - not to conform to dogmatism and unverified claims

[GreenManorite]

I think you necessarily need two things: a narrative within the tradition of integration and valuing truth seeking. Fundamentally, unless the metamodern framework is not seen as native to the tradition, it's not going to integrate into the broader frame. You're going for: "Well isnt this what Jesus said all along?" In that sense you don't need the frame toggle.

Through the traditional lens, that's always how things sort of work, you adjust and point to a reason that it's already part of the rich tradition. This is not problematic from a modernist frame because institutions should be adopting organically to new environments. A metamodern/philosophical lens sees the shifting narrative of the traditional as emerging recognition of God/deeper reality.

Basically you need metamodern view to be read into the existing accept/tradition/narrative.

[fosterryanlac]

Brendan, I haven't noticed any Buddhist traditionalists in these conversations. There is a lot of it out there but it never seems to get touched upon, only Buddhist modernism ever seems addressed- aka Mindfulness. I personally was raised Catholic but found my way to a traditional Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as have many others. Also, many traditional zen practitioners are out there.

[brendan]

This convo introduced the etic vs emic thing to me so thanks for that

I’m wondering about there being an “emic” aspect of our life that we can never “etic-ly” stand back from.

Since you talk about Buddhism, maybe you could say: each person is emically always already the Buddha. For that reason, an etic perceptual view of Buddhahood will always already be somewhat false. On the other hand, meditation could be seen as the on-going “etic” contemplation of one’s most “emic” condition. That’s why meditation cannot exactly expect a result…I.e there’s an emic core that cannot be converted into the etic I.e. the conceptual. There may nevertheless be a valuable dance that involves tickling the emic with the etic (and the reverse). The emic as I’m using it here would be “suchness” with the etic then being conceptualization out of suchness.

[elenabalyberdina]

Brendan, why don't include atheists, especially atheist psychoanalysts into the conversation, or you don't think they have anything important to add to the topic of meaningful living in metamodern movement...

[KalebPeters]

Jared was such a great guest, thanks for having him on Brendan!

Got a new YouTube channel to go and binge now...