Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 7: Aristotle’s World View and Erich Fromm
According to Aristotle, to be rational meant being aware of and overcoming self-deception, simultaneously getting more in contact with reality and improving character. Aristotle was concerned with when and how we could be confident that the pattern in our mind matches the pattern that exists in reality.
One aspect of this involves gathering reliable knowledge, which means ensuring that our senses and the environment are clear and trustworthy, and that we are able to obtain intersubjective agreement.
Another aspect involves our ability to act skillfully. For example we might ask: who knows a chair better, someone who can describe one, or someone who can make one? For the latter, we might say that he has captured the essence of the chair in his mind, such that he can cause it to be. Thus we increase our knowledge by bringing our minds into conformity with the thing. This is known as contact epistemology or participatory knowing.
We can break down a worldview into two aspects: our understanding of the world as an arena, and how we gain knowledge of that world as an agent. An existential mode is defined as a particular co-identification of agent and arena, which defines a meta-meaning relationship; a mismatch between the two can and often does lead to feelings of absurdity. The process of worldview attunement occurs when the agent and arena mutually support each other, leading to a coherent worldview.
One of the problems with today’s purely scientific worldview is that it categorizes the external world without a corresponding insight into how the agent fits into that. In that sense, it can provide no existential guidance. In contrast, when we do have a worldview in which the project of understanding the world fits with the project of fitting meaningfully into the world, we achieve nomological order. One way to sum up our Axial Age heritage is that a meaningful life is a life that is situated within a nomological order.
Let us now consider India’s response to the Axial revolution, and the development of mindfulness and Buddhism from Siddhartha Gautama. His story introduces us to the distinction between two existential modes: the Having mode and the Being mode. The Having mode primarily relates to our needs of consumption and satiation, where we manipulate things in the world and relate to them categorically. In contrast, the Being mode relates to our needs of becoming, expressing, and entering relationships of mutual transformation. To try to satisfy one’s needs through the wrong mode leads to modal confusion, a type of absurdity. What is it that Siddhartha discovered upon leaving the Palace, and the Having mode it represented?