"Jurgen Habermas speaks directly to the same challenge at a societal level. On the one hand the separation of the value spheres has its advantages because science, aesthetics and ethics have their own languages and evaluation processes. For instance, it’s no bad thing that scientific inquiry can be free from religion, and we don’t want to judge poetry based on quantitative measurements, as was once beautifully demonstrated in a scene from Dead Poets Society. But the problems caused by the severing of the value fields are considerable and they manifest mostly through the overreach of instrumental rationality, which is another angle on the left-hemisphere taking over, highligthed by Iain McGilchrist. Habermas puts it with dark beauty as “the system colonising the lifeworld.” This is also why “systems change” is not enough - it doesn’t contend with our individual and collective interiority; with beauty or goodness; with soul and society.

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Habermas argues that the differentiation of truth, beauty and goodness is one of the major things that characterises the modern age as distinct from the pre-modern age when they were more intertwined (Wilber refers to the separation of the spheres as ‘the disaster of modernity’). 

On this account, science ceases to be the flame of inquiry and wonder and becomes amoral, prodedural, technocratic and dehumanising. Morality loses its moorings in an objective world and collapses into anything goes relativism. Art ceases to speak to Goodness and Truth, for instance through social critique, and becomes commercialised status-seeking. Habermas believes that as a corrective, we need to work towards a public sphere characterised by communicative rationality. That’s a complex notion, I don’t want to butcher it here, and in its first expression it was pre-internet, but one way to think of it is that it’s an attempt to establish public processes in which truth, morality and aesthetics may remain distinct, but are also allowed to co-arise and be discerningly integrated".

JR

Stein signals the scale of the ambition:

There is no longer any prospect for premodern forms of metaphysics after Kant, Darwin and planetary-scale computation. Yet the modern and postmodern absence of metaphysics has created its own problems by leaving a vacuum where answers to the most important questions used to be found. The metamodern return to metaphysics seeks to fill this vacuum of meaning by providing a new context for human self-understanding – a new Universe Story that includes a new story of self and community.

The case for the return to metaphysics is also indicated by Bonnitta Roy, who has argued that metaphysics matters because we need ‘a new mind’ and metaphysics is required to help us foster new architectures of thought, an idea further developed in her chapter for Dispatches where she writes:

The new architecture would cut out the epistemic complexity and more perfectly cohere with the rich elegant complexity of the real. By adopting a process understanding of reality, metaphysics could become a suitable guide for a Metamodern praxis, one which integrated perception and participation with the free play of imagination and memory. [51]

A feature of the new metaphysics is that it will have to integrate the immanent and the transcendent. Many of the more promising initiatives for societal renewal have distinctly premodern or indigenous features relating to returning to the land, the soil, the seasons. 

JR