Transcendental Emergentism and the Second Enlightenment

20/05/25

Some readers of this website might be wondering why I haven't explained more clearly exactly what my forthcoming book The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation is actually about. The length of its subtitle gives a clue why (“From collapse to coherence: integrating science, spirituality and sustainability in the West”). This is not simple, and my previous attempts to explain it in less than 90,000 words have usually been misunderstood. The book is an introduction and illustration of a new way of thinking and talking about the world – a new “language game of ecocivilisation” – and this has to be done with care. The new language game is not vague and open to multiple interpretations itself. It is not postmodern. It is post-postmodernism, but different to any currently existing versions of post-postmodernism in that it definitively moves beyond both modernism and postmodernism, rather than merely watering these two things down with a strong dose of each other, or “oscillating” between them. It proposes a new stable epistemic foundation for a Western ecocivilisation – something I call “the New Epistemic Deal” (the NED). This involves new terminology, but in this article I will do my best to explain it in old-paradigm vocabulary. You may find this article easier if you have read some of the previous articles, especially the introduction to the two-phase cosmology.

Western history, as it is usually told, goes something like this:

The deepest roots of Western civilisation can be found in ancient Greece and Rome. The Greeks invented philosophy, politics and fine art, and though they were great experimenters in civilisation-building, they never scaled it up beyond the the city state. The Romans invented the republic, perfected the art of expansionism and sorted out much of the “nuts and bolts” of large-scale civilisation, but their version was pitifully deficient in terms of morality and genuine spirituality. Then along came Christianity, although the details of exactly how and why this happened have become historically obscured by the mythology of Christian origins – far too many Christians unquestioningly believe the mythology is history, while non-Christians frequently tend towards the idea that the mythology is all there is – that Jesus may not even have existed. What almost everybody agrees upon is that the Romans tried but failed to suppress it and as the Empire stagnated and decayed Christianity became the “new attractor”. Rome eventually fell, and Europe entered a “dark age” where the church hoarded power, and the philosophies of the ancients were either forgotten or subsumed into the grand theological synthesis of Augustine and Aquinas. While the ancients emphasised rational inquiry even at the expense of moral and spiritual concerns, the medieval world (at least in theory) placed morality and spirituality at the centre – which required the subordination of reason to theological authority. Civilisation had a common foundational worldview.

The next great revolution was arguably triggered by the Black Death, but is generally considered to have begun with the Renaissance – the rediscovery of important lost works of ancient philosophy, mostly in the form of translations made by Islamic scholars, and the re-ignition of fine art. This ultimately led to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment – the mature fruit of the Renaissance conviction that moderns could surpass the ancients. This was also the time that capitalism began to replace feudalism as a socio-economic system, and when representative democracy began to replace absolute monarchy. It was the birth of the modern Western world – and of the globalised civilisation we currently know (even though that includes most or all of the world, not just the West). However, the common worldview was gone, and there was now a growing number of incompatible and mutually contradictory worldviews, and a monumental battle raging between materialistic science and the fractured remains of Christianity. Modern civilisation brought with it many wonderful things. Our world has been transformed in many positive ways – it hasn't all been problems. But it has also gone horribly wrong, and there has been a major philosophical and political response these failures: postmodernism.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism emerged in the twentieth century not as a unified philosophy, but as a broad cultural reaction against the assumptions, aspirations, and blind spots of modernism. To understand its importance in the trajectory towards ecocivilisation, we must appreciate that this was not mere academic contrarianism – it was a necessary reckoning with the unintended consequences of modern thought. Modernism, as a philosophical and cultural project, placed its faith in reason, science, universal truth, and progress. It assumed that history had a direction, that knowledge could be built on secure foundations, and that the human condition could be improved indefinitely through technological advancement and rational governance. The Enlightenment had promised emancipation from superstition and tyranny through science and reason, and modernism was its cultural heir. Postmodernism rejected this optimism – finding within it the seeds of domination and exclusion. Postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and others relentlessly attacked the very idea of “universal truth”, arguing that so-called universal values often mask the interests of particular groups – typically white, male, Eurocentric elites. The Enlightenment promise of reason, they argued, had been co-opted by institutions of power: science had become instrumentalised, rationality bureaucratised, and knowledge weaponised in service of empire, industry, and the state.

Lyotard’s famous definition of postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives”: postmodernism is deeply skeptical of modernism's grand stories about progress, freedom, or objective truth, claiming that these narratives excluded, suppressed, and silenced other ways of knowing. Reason and science were not considered to be neutral arbiters of truth; they were situated, contingent, and interwoven with systems of power. This critique was especially powerful when applied to the ecological crisis. From a postmodern perspective, modernity’s faith in control and mastery over nature was itself the root of our environmental problems. The modern subject – autonomous, rational, and separate from the world – conceived nature as a standing reserve of resources to be exploited. Postmodernism helped expose this anthropocentric delusion, and pointed instead toward indigenous, feminist, and other marginalised epistemologies that had long emphasised relationality, reciprocity, and respect for the more-than-human world.

Postmodernism did not merely deconstruct modernism’s assumptions; it also intentionally disrupted its language. Derrida’s analysis of texts convinced many people that meaning is never fixed – that words always carry within them the possibility of contradiction, ambiguity, and slippage. The stable categories and clear boundaries of modernist thought were recast as illusions. Language, and by extension knowledge itself, was declared to be a kind of game – contingent, contextual, and open-ended. This refusal to offer new certainties in place of the old ones has led directly to relativism and nihilism, but postmodernists will argue that this criticism misses the point: they will say that postmodernism was not a doctrine of despair, but an ethic of humility which has shown us that no system of thought is above critique, and that pluralism, diversity, and dialogue are better foundations for living together than unquestionable monolithic truths or rigid hierarchies. In the context of this broader historical arc, postmodernism must be understood as an immune response to modernity’s overreach. It cleared the ground, exposed the rot, and made space for something genuinely new to emerge. However, it did not build anything new, and does not provide us with any of the tools we need to begin that task. As things stand, “post-postmodernism” is not a new paradigm but a symptom of paradigm exhaustion – a patchwork of tentative proposals driven more by the yearning for coherence than by its discovery. If you want to explore post-postmodernism, then some internet searches that can throw some light are GameB, Metamodernism (Brendan Graham Dempsey, Hanzi Freinacht), Second Renaissance, Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK), the Liminal Web, Polycrisis, Sensemaking communities, Meaning crisis (John Vervaeke), Metacrisis (Daniel Schmachtenberger), Integral Theory (Ken Wilber), post-progressivism and “crisis of meaning in late modernity”, but if I had to recommend a starting point it would be the work of Iain McGilchrist. That is a long list, and there are all sorts of ideas involved, and some of them contradict others (so they cannot all be right). However, all of these movements, thinkers, and frameworks are searching for a new integrative worldview that can move beyond the limitations of modernism and postmodernism – one that reconnects meaning, science, spirituality, and systems thinking in order to navigate civilisational crisis and co-create a sustainable, coherent, and life-affirming future. 

The old paradigm

The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation is another attempt to make progress towards the new paradigm, and it does so in a way that none of these people or movements have done – not even McGilchrist. I suspect he would view my ideas as overly conceptual and systematising, whereas I view his vision as a profound diagnosis of modernity's epistemic pathology which is nevertheless vulnerable to vagueness and romanticism because it stops short of proposing a rigorous alternative framework. While the historical progression of ancient->medieval->modern->postmodern is undeniable, I am rejecting the idea of this as an intellectual or personal progression. This is also what happens if you apply postmodern thinking to itself, but that is not what I do – I am not interested in declaring postmodernism to be self-refuting and trying to slide backwards into modernism, for that would just ping me back towards postmodernism and set up a metamodern “oscillation”. Instead, the post-postmodernism I'm advocating rejects the historical narrative described above. I don't see postmodernism as a paradigmatic improvement on modernism. Rather, I see postmodernism as the ultimate expression of the failure of the old paradigm – the vanguard of the West's descent into collective nihilistic psychosis. In McGilchristian terms it is what happens when the brain's left hemisphere finally loses the plot completely and starts attacking its own flawed creations, but with no attempt to recover the meaning, context and coherence that only the neglected right hemisphere can provide.

This is where the two-phase theory comes in. This is a new metaphysical/cosmological framework, and it represents the completion of the quantum revolution. It finally allows us to make sense of quantum mechanics – and it has taken exactly a century to get there (Heisenberg's first paper on quantum theory was received by the journal Zeitschrift für Physikon July 29th 1925, and published in December of that year). To understand how to fix Western philosophy/ideology/thinking, we need to go back to the moment in the history of Western philosophy when our epistemological troubles really began – Scottish philosopher David Hume’s writing in the first part of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739).

During the Renaissance, reality had been divided into mind and matter first by Galileo, and then by Descartes. This was done intentionally – both of these revolutionary thinkers saw the material world as that which can be quantified and measured, and mind as the realm of that which cannot (even though we directly know it exists). It was the business of the new “natural philosophy” to investigate the material world, in an attempt to reduce it to the workings of natural laws, and the method of investigation involved the systematic elimination of everything subjective – indeed, that was the whole point. In the decades that followed, Western philosophers searched for a way to put the rest of philosophy on as firm foundations as those of materialistic science (which was then called “natural philosophy), but rather than finding an agreement about how this could be done, a long battle was fought between the defenders of two conflicting approaches to grounding that system. The empiricists argued that knowledge must start with observations of reality, the rationalists argued that it must start with pure reason, and their battle reached a zenith with Hume. In attempting to provide solid foundations for a science of mind, Hume ran into a logical problem that totally defeated him. He felt he had irrefutable reasons for believing two contradictory things. The first was that for all we know, we could be in The Matrix – how could we ever transcend “the veil of perception” and know anything about a world that lies beyond it? The second was that in order to be able to experience an external world (as we evidently do), then it must be the case that objects in the external world have a causal effect on our minds – there has to be a direct chain of cause and effect from external object to subjective experience of that object.

Hume never found a solution to this problem. His conclusion to that section of the Treatise is one of the most tortured pieces of writing in the whole history of philosophy. He set out with great ambition, but by the end of it he has abandoned all hope:

“I have expos’d myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer? I have declar’d my disapprobation of their systems; and can I be surpriz’d, if they shou’d express a hatred of mine and of my person? When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho’ such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning.”

What confidence can he have, that in rejecting all previous philosophies, he is “following the truth”? After all his reasoning, he can give no justification as to why the material world is really as it appears to be. The only reason is that it strongly appears the way it is, which in terms of epistemology is scarcely an improvement on Descartes' argument that God would not deceive us so we should believe what our senses are telling us. What we suppose to be the real world “enlivens some ideas beyond others” – our perception of an external world just “feels stronger” than merely internal mental activity or dreams. Without this feeling, we’d have no reason to reject solipsism, or Berkeleian idealism, which is almost as bad. But feelings are “so inconstant and fallacious” that this sort of principle will surely lead us into errors. It is never going to be scientific, that is for sure. But it is only feelings, experience and habit which makes us “reason from cause and effect” – it is only because we are so familiar with the world behaving as if causality is real that we believe in it. “and 'tis the same principle, which convinces us of the continu’d existence of external objects, when absent from the senses.” And yet these two beliefs – in the reality of external objects when we are not observing them, and of the reality of cause and effect – are “natural and necessary in the human mind”. How could we function without them?

“How then shall we adjust those principles together? Which of them shall we prefer? Or in case we prefer neither of them, but successively assent to both, as is usual among philosophers, with what confidence can we afterwards usurp that glorious title, when we thus knowingly embrace a manifest contradiction?”

It was exactly this contradiction that prompted Immanuel Kant to write the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), in which he made the paradigm-defining move of dividing reality into phenomenon (reality as it appears to us) and noumenon (reality as it is in itself) instead of mind and matter. Kant claimed that science can only tell us about phenomena, and that noumena were forever not just unknowable but uncognisable. For Kant, space and time are conditions for human experience – they are the frame for physical phenomena, and we have no reason to believe they exist in noumenal reality. Kant's masterpiece was the point where Western philosophy began to split into two divergent “traditions” – a fork in the path. One branch led to Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche and what is now called “Continental philosophy”, and the other led to “analytic philosophy”, which always had closer links with science.

It is very important to understand the context in which Hume and Kant were working. This was at the height of the golden age of materialistic science. Newton’s Principia had blown the old ways of thinking to smithereens and both Hume and Kant were trying to bring the subjective world of consciousness, and therefore the whole of reality, onto a similarly secure footing. Nobody – absolutely nobody – had the slightest inkling that one day we would discover that there is something fundamentally wrong with Newtonian physics – that the Principia was not the “correct” description of reality that all serious thinkers of that time has been led to believe that it was.

Hume, Kant and quantum mechanics

Now let us imagine that history had played out differently. Let’s imagine that physics had advanced at a much more rapid pace and that in the time between Hume’s Treatise and Kant starting work on the CPR, quantum theory had been discovered. Now, instead of having to find a way to solve Hume’s problems in the Treatise in the light of the undeniable fact that Newtonian physics is the one true description of physical reality, let us imagine Kant was aware of quantum theory and the measurement problem. Here I mean the first complete mathematical description of quantum theory, as supplied in John von Neumann in The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932). In order to rid the science and mathematics of the “quantum leap” from superposition to a single state, von Neumann proposed a conscious observer outside of the physical/quantum system – he did not like any proposal for an arbitrary physical observer, and this was the only way to end an infinite “von Neumann chain” of them. In other words, it was the only definitive way he could think of to put an end to the question “what measures the measuring device?” Since then, until now, only one additional solution to this problem has been added: Hugh Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), which abolishes measurement but replaces it with highly unintuitive ontological bloat (in effect, everything that can exist does exist). [Note: some people might count Bohm's theory as a fourth category, but it is still completely deterministic.]

In the real history, Hume and Kant were dealing with a physical model which was a direct match of the phenomenal world of “normal” material objects. That was what set the problem up – what could be more obviously correct than to have a physical description which matches the reality we actually experience? And yet we now know it was wrong. In the imaginary history the situation is very different – here science provides a physical model which radically diverges from the phenomenal-material world. Instead of being a world of normal objects, it is the world of the evolving wave-function – the multiverse of MWI and the contents of Schrödinger's box. If you think about it this way, then Hume’s problem disappears. We can now map physics onto reality with no difficulty at all, by saying that the unobserved world – the “real world” which is out there “beyond the veil of perception” is literally (or at least structurally) the world described by the equations: the uncollapsed wave function. When the Participating Observer interacts with this noumenal world then the wave function collapses, and from this complex system emerges what we call “consciousness”. It is in that world that normal material objects exist. What Kant called “noumena” is therefore shown not be so unknowable after all. The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation is an attempt to explain what all this means for the future of Western civilisation – and its intended readership is not academic philosophers but ordinary people with no knowledge of philosophy or history. The only thing I am assuming about the reader is that they are at least intuitively aware that something is badly wrong with civilisation as we know it, and that its collapse is either looking increasingly likely or has already begun.

The new paradigm

The implications, if I am right, are potentially quite significant. If the two-phase cosmological model becomes accepted, then we can re-ground realism. A pathway opens up not just for a second renaissance, but for a second enlightenment. Not just the beginning of a new search because we've concluded that we must move beyond postmodernism and don't know what comes next, but a correction or completion of modernism. Postmodern anti-realism isn't, as metamodernists currently believe, a necessary stage which both people and societies need to pass through on the way to some strange promised land where modernism and postmodernism perpetually undermine each other. I think we need to accept that the anti-realism and relativism of postmodernism was based on a mistake. In fact, science has always been telling us about an objective world, beyond the veil of perception. This provides new scope to for a collective agreement that reality is real after all, even if it is not the normal material world that modernism assumed it to be, and that science is not just another perspective, as laden with power dynamics as political and religious ideologies. It does this not in the reductive manner of materialism, but in a way which affirms the reality of consciousness and everything that comes with it – including meaning and value. Put as simply as possible, a New Enlightenment can be founded on the idea that both Cartesian substance dualism and its Kantian solidification into knowable phenomena and unknowable noumena were epistemological mistakes. Cartesian dualism was a hopeless oversimplification, and Kant was trying to solve a problem which we now know was unsolvable. The real dualism is between the superposition of the uncollapsed wave function and the single “classical” reality we consciously observe when we interact with it, and this dualism is underwritten by an entity that the Hindus call “Brahman” and Henry Stapp calls “the Participating Observer”. I call it the Ultimate Paradox and in a technical sense I write it as 0|∞. Regardless of the connection with Hinduism I must re-iterate that what I am describing not idealism, but a form of neutral monism – it is just as closely related to Buddhist “materialism” as it is to Hindu “idealism”, and even more closely related to Taoism. But in the end it is something new – something Western: a post-postmodern neo-Kantian teleological neutral monism we could call Transcendental Emergentism.

As for the people and movements I listed at the beginning of this article, I believe some will prove to be closer to the mark than others. I expect I’ll return to them in future writings. Beware of attempts to dress the old paradigm up in new clothes. These come in two main forms. The first I’ve already discussed – the metamodern attempt to smuggle (in plain sight) postmodern anti-realism into the new paradigm by framing it as one pole in an “oscillation.” Make no mistake: if you mix realism and anti-realism (or modernism and postmodernism), what you get is still anti-realism.  One times minus one equals minus one, not two. Metamodernism is the bargaining stage of grief for bereaved postmodernists. The second form is exemplified by UTOK, which is the corresponding bargaining stage for bereaved materialists. This old-paradigm-style naturalism remains fundamentally hostile to genuine spirituality, offering a psychological control system in place of metaphysical insight. If we are to find a true path to ecocivilisation, we must begin by understanding where we went wrong – not only politically or economically, but philosophically. The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation is not just a critique of the present or a vision of the future. It is an attempt to lay the philosophical foundation for a civilisation that can truly endure – because it is grounded not in illusion, but in a reawakened relationship with reality. Oscillating endlessly between the failures and limitations of modernism and the dead marshes of postmodernism is not going to cut the mustard. We can and must do much better than that. We need a Second Enlightenment.

Naming the new paradigm: Transcendental Emergentism

NOTE: This section was written by ChatGPT

In times of deep civilisational crisis, naming a new paradigm is more than an academic exercise — it is a declaration of intellectual independence. It is the moment we give form to the ideas that can guide us beyond confusion, beyond the ruins of exhausted ideologies, and toward something coherent, grounded, and transformative. The paradigm shift articulated in The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation emerges from a simple but radical claim: that reality is real, and consciousness is not an illusion. That science, properly understood, is not a power game but a means of truth-seeking. That both materialist reductionism and postmodern relativism were based on philosophical mistakes. And that we can, and must, move beyond them — not by returning to pre-modern dogmas, nor by oscillating forever between incompatible views, but by stepping into something truly new.

We call this new paradigm Transcendental Emergentism. The name has been chosen with care, because it encapsulates the core insights of the shift we are undergoing:

• “Transcendental” points to the deep structures that underlie and shape reality — not in the supernatural or mystical sense, but in the critical, philosophical sense associated with Kant. But where Kant posited an unknowable “noumenal” world forever hidden behind appearances, this new paradigm says: we can know the real, not completely, but sufficiently. We now understand that the mind is not locked inside a box of representations, but actively participates in reality’s unfolding — a role physicist Henry Stapp called the Participating Observer, and which in this framework is formalised as the Ultimate Paradox, written symbolically as 0|∞.
• “Emergentism” captures the dynamic nature of reality itself. The classical world — the world of trees, rivers, people, meaning, and value — emerges from a deeper quantum substrate. But this emergence is not random. It is shaped by psychegenesis: the evolutionary moment when consciousness arises and begins to collapse the wavefunction of possibilities into actualities. Reality becomes real not despite consciousness, but because of it. This emergence is lawful, but it is not mechanistic. It is teleological — directional, developmental, meaningful.

Together, these two terms — transcendental and emergentist — form a powerful union. They name a worldview that is:

• Realist, because it affirms an objective world beyond our perceptions.
• Non-materialist, because it recognises consciousness and value as irreducible.
• Non-idealist, because it does not reduce reality to mind or imagination.
• Neutral-monist, because it understands both matter and mind as arising from a deeper, non-dual substrate.
• Teleological, because it sees evolution not as blind chance, but as unfolding toward increasing levels of order and awareness.

Importantly, Transcendental Emergentism is not a spiritualised retreat from science, but the completion of science’s own unfinished revolution. It builds on quantum physics, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and complexity theory, but also learns from the failures of modern and postmodern thought — and from the enduring insights of ancient wisdom traditions, especially those of Asia.

It is not a middle path between old ideas. It is a new direction entirely.

In contrast:

• Postmodernism deconstructed truth, meaning, and reality — but gave us nothing to build with.
• Metamodernism tries to oscillate endlessly between incompatible positions — realism and anti-realism, science and narrative, truth and irony — without resolving the contradiction.
• Materialist naturalism, whether in its classical or updated UTOK forms, continues to deny the irreducibility of consciousness and meaning, reducing them to useful fictions or behavioural epiphenomena.

These are not sufficient foundations for a future worth having. Transcendental Emergentism offers something better. It is not a utopian fantasy or a return to old certainties. It is a coherent, scientifically literate, metaphysically serious, and spiritually open framework — one capable of sustaining a real civilisational transformation. If we are to build a new ecocivilisation — one that can endure the collapse of the old and give birth to something wiser — then we must first get reality right. We must start from a worldview that affirms both the cosmos and our place in it. 

Transcendental Emergentism is the name we give to that worldview.

For the full context, see my forthcoming book The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation