I couldn’t agree more.

As much as modern interpretations of spirituality get flack, I actually see them as a move in the right direction.

When people on Instagram post things about “listening to the universe” or whatever, I see it as a secular attempt to employ traditional religious modes and methods of interacting with the world and life in general.

In a world that is as decentralized as the one that we live in, it’s impossible to know when, if ever, such a belief system could codify into a unified set of principles that we could follow as a collective.

I’m doubtful if such an ideological unification would even be a good thing in the first place.

But I do see a lot of evidence that there is a trend towards a sort of modern, decentralized, more secular spirituality which at least attempts to reconcile our emotional wants and needs with modern developments in science and philosophy.

Thank you for this article. I think it is a little sad that today there is an extreme polarism in most people's mind that says "science true" / "religious myth wrong".

Well may I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain?

I don’t rightly know what metaphor is but I do know that I don’ find myth necessary or helpful. Religion, to me, is myth or at least part of myth. And I have no use for religion because religions are collections of fairy tales.

To clarify here - A simile is a subcategory of a metaphor, it's just stated differently. So all similes are metaphors but not all metaphors are similes. It's arguable there are only two tropes - metaphor and symbol, with metonymy and synecdoche essentially being kinds of metaphors. But Traffic flowed like a river is a verbal way of referencing an underlying metaphor 'traffic is a river', just like 'we got off to a bumpy start' references an underlying metaphor 'a relationship is a journey', or 'they really swallowed that' the metaphor 'ideas are food'. In other words metaphors can be referenced indirectly.

Can we start moderating what sources can be posted to a “philosophy“ sub Reddit? Seriously people, this is just some random person’s blog where they write their personal feelings and opinions.…

Gee… thanks?

> if your audience doesn't have a common frame of reference for your words, there's a not-insignificant chance that the metaphor will either fail to convey meaning or, more likely, will convey a meaning wholly at odds with the author's original intent.

If I rephrase this as "your audience needs background knowledge to understand", then this is actually identical to knowledge. Especially when it comes to specialised knowledge, such knowledge can only truly be gained if the required background knowledge is present.

The informative statement "traffic consists of automobiles" will not be understood by anyone without the background knowledge of what an automobile is. Entire scientific journals exist which would be completely incomprehensible to anyone except experts in that scientific field.

In other words, I don't think you've found a flaw in the use of metaphor, so much as you've found a fundamental challenge to effectively communicating understanding in any way at all.

Not wrong. Clear thinking is the basis of a healthy mind. Reminds me of Markus Aurelius.

I observe my son, still pretty young learned concepts and ideas from the if then statement. He's not yet learned of myths and metaphors but, the if then allowed him to learn meaning.

And I would tell him stories with morals, made up, so he can understand the cause and effect of things. He would then make it simple to an if then statement.

It's probably not wrong to say, we need the if then logic for meaning and language and clarity.

>In the context of conveying meaning I would argue myth and metaphor are always useful tools.

Whenever someone uses words like "never" or "always," I like to ask myself, " . . . are we sure?"

For instance, do we consider math equations to be a means of conveying meaning? If the meaning I want to communicate is highly technical, like an equation, should I resort to a myth or a metaphor? Let's say my intent is to convey the location of something to someone. "Where's your house?" is the question I want to answer; should I tell the querent my address or a story about how I came to live there?

Yes, myth and metaphor are useful tools for communicating information; but the utility of a given tool is dependent on the user's intent.

You can use a hammer to pound a screw into a block of wood . . . but you're better off using a screwdriver.

(and that is an example of when using a metaphor (or simile) is particularly useful.)

As an alternative, here's a much more effective version of this article, more suited to our current rhetorical climate:

1. Understand that you're not trying to change anyone's mind. People who don't already agree with you are the enemy. They're lost. The only possible goal is to "energize your base", and convert "people who already agree with you" to "people who will get out and vote, donate, or buy your merchandise"
2. The best defense is a good offense. Again, you need to focus on people who already agree with you, so your core audience is pre-disposed to believe anything about your shared enemies. Especially if it's entertaining and allows them to feel superior and justified in their current beliefs.
3. Be vague about yourself and your beliefs, and specific about the adversary. Your supporters might be de-energized if they find out they don't agree with you on every little thing. Much safer to focus on the enemy and the clear-cut ways they can be made to look disagreeable.
4. Nobody will pay attention to more than one sentence - and they'll only read one sentence if it's entertaining. Get in, cause an emotional reaction in your supporters, get out.
5. Always consider your brand before speaking, and only say things that support your brand identity. Do not speak or engage debate on any subject that is not part of your brand.

How does someone write an article like this without mentioning Spengler?

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In the context of conveying meaning I would argue myth and metaphor are always useful tools. There aren’t better tools. There are bad metaphors, though. To your point about traffic, like you said, as a concept it is new. If metaphors restrict themselves to ancient concepts, though (fire, love, pain), they are able to fulfil their purpose for a broader audience.

Fukuyama's end of history seems pretty laughable. The idea that things would happen and that these things might change our lives our life, but that these wouldn't matter because . . . liberal democracy? I'm not sayin that our age isn't one of ennui and seeming uneventfulness, but rather this is our distorted perception.

Well I think we shouldn't disregarded the fact that inducing oneself in know-how knowledge by some advanced tech would also put into question rather that itself is knowledge. Epistemic theories such as justified true belief try to refine the definition of knowledge by giving it certain necessary criteria. However, as we all come to learn, every epistemic theory has its own flaws but so does the presupposition of knowledge given in argument as such. There is this one guest professor coming to our uni to talk about a new criteria for justified true belief for knowledge, and thats autonomy. The crux of his thesis tries to put into perspective how autonomy serves a specific purpose as a criteria for gaining knowledge, therefore he is opposing the idea that if we were able to transfer empirical knowledge into our brains it wouldn't actually count as knowledge due to the lack of autonomy. Its still unsure as of how he himself comes to define autonomy into his theory but once he visits I'll let you know.

Myth is of fundamental importance in the history of philosophy. Ancient philosophers were able to exploit their arguments through myth. The most important example is the mythology linked to Orphism, which laid the foundations for the philosophy of Socrates, but especially for Platonic philosophy, introducing the concept of "daimon" in ancient and modern philosophy.
Despite all the importance that myth has had in the history of philosophy, in the present system, the soul has been removed from the dominant philosophical thought.
I therefore consider it of fundamental importance to bring the concept of soul back into the dominant philosophical speculation. Because through myth it is still possible to perfectly understand also the modern reality of our days.

"But the sort of “meaning void” we’ve fallen in to is much more a result of changing social and environmental factors, ideological and philosophical conflict between different sources of authority, and a general deepening of our knowledge (thus resulting in myth and metaphor needing to more accurately depict reality), than it is about our disconnection from some primal Truth that can only be ascertained through spiritual means."

So much yes. "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." My friends and I frequently draw on that verse as an apt analogy of the current state of knowledge. I used to think it was possible to form some kind of "cosmological analogy" for our new technological paradigm, but sometimes the only way out of something is to go through it. Unfortunately I don't see the conflict resolving into a new paradigm anytime soon.

”What the Crows experienced was the collapse of their lifeworld. The traditional Crow way of life was structured around two cardinal virtues: being a warrior and being a hunter. Waging battles against rival nations and engaging in seasonal buffalo hunts were the supreme purposes of Crow existence and gave meaning to every other activity, down to the smallest gestures of everyday life. Everything was oriented toward them. “Nothing happened,” then, meant that once the telos of Crow life had disappeared, any subsequent happenings had already lost their purpose and become meaningless. In such a situation, Lear observes, “the concepts with which [one] would otherwise have understood [oneself] … have gone out of existence.” An invisible cultural scaffolding supporting a form of life and a way of being in the world has collapsed. Suddenly, the world no longer offers a solid backdrop to our existence and to our aspirations. It is as if there had been in Plenty Coups’s life “a moment when history came to an end.”

——

I feel like this partially explains why people in democracies have become so drawn to “voting for chaos” and fantasizing about the apocalypse. They cannot contextualize a history, and sense a lack of telos, in the current state of the world. Waiting in the antechamber of history feels unbearable.

Beliefs aren't really filters, if by filters you mean something that obstructs. True reality, or the full picture as you say, is already blocked to us for obvious reasons, such as the eye example I gave you earlier. For us to see true reality, or be free from all filters or beliefs as you said, we would have to be Laplace's demon and such a being doesn't exist.

The point you seem to be making is that people stick to outdated, unuseful, unreliable or inaccurate beliefs and this causes them to have a worse understanding of the full picture. But this is not a fault of belief or having them, beliefs are compulsory and useful, its a fault of poor reasoning causing rejection of new information. People who stick to inefficient beliefs when new ones are being shown to be better, are behaving irrationally because their reasoning is poor and preventing them from adopting better beliefs.

We don't solve this by getting rid of beliefs and we can't anyway. Not ever, because we don't have perfect information about all things, all of the time and therefore every action we take is always founded on some belief or another.

“Metaphors we Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson is a nice read, especially for anyone interested in cultural anthropology. Here is a pdf just in case.

Darmok and Jalad at Tinagra

While most of what you say is true, beliefs are ALL filters and therefore prevent us from seeing the full picture. That we are unable to see the full picture and are sometimes forced to therefore rely on beliefs is in no way equal to a need to buy into beliefs if we have an option to forego them and see reality instead.

Should we have relegated satellite science to those who continue to believe the earth is flat? Of what value is believing in that myth?

Relating to the concept of myth/metaphor: Icarus flew too close to the sun, so his wings melted from the heat and he fell to his death. It’s a fun story, and its point is to understand your limitations… but were we to believe in that myth as it is told, we would run counter to the science that it is colder as we get higher into the sky. One need only go up a thousand feet to know this.

But if you want to say that “belief in myth/metaphor“ is a metaphor for utilizing those tales as possible reference points, then perhaps you’re correct. Which would make them meta-metaphors lol

I can suggest a 50 part lecture series on youtube called “awakening from the meaning crisis” by a brilliant man named John vervaeke. He completely breaks down the meaning crisis, but it is a mental tax to go through the whole thing but incredibly worth it! If anyone wants a more in-depth video series on the meaning crisis definitely check out johns work!

I wish the article had sources for the different studies.