De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being

by Paul Tyson

We live in a strangely fragmented lifeworld. On the one hand, abstract constructions of our own imagination--such as money, "mere" facts, and mathematical models--are treated by us as important objective facts. On the other hand, our understanding of the concrete realities of meaning and value in which our daily lives are actually embedded--love, significance, purpose, wonder--are treated as arbitrary and optional subjective beliefs. This is because, to us, only quantitative and instrumentally useful things are considered to be accessible to the domain of knowledge. Our lifeworld is designed to dis-integrate knowledge from belief, facts from meanings, immanence from transcendence, quality from quantity, and "mere" reality from the mystery of being. This book explores two why should we, and how can we, reintegrate being, knowing, and believing?

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Nonfiction, History, Politics

128 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 21, 2017

Reviews

[Joseph Bianchi]

An incredibly important book. A slim yet dense treatise on Christian platonism but more accurately described as a jeremiad against the foundational philosophical bankruptcy of modernity.

Could use some editing for sentence-level clarity. Not an introductory or popular philosophy book. However -- could change your life.

[Andrew Talbert]

Excellent work! Modern Christian Platonism quite literally crammed into 115 pages. It’s only missing the integration of aesthetics and truth.

[Joel Karanikas]

Tyson has written a very accessible introduction to Radical Orthodoxy. For those who are too daunted to crack open John Milbank (a wholly forgivable anxiety), this will serve as a useful précis of the essence of RO.

And for those used to the standard terms of Christian apologetics, there will be something unusually fresh about Tyson’s approach to the fragmentation of modernity, as he is not really arguing that “religion” as such is needed to “de-fragment” modernity, but rather a rich metaphysics inspired by classical notions about Being. So thankfully this is far less of a cheap defence of Christian orthodoxy as we too often encounter among the discontents of modernity, and more of a thoughtful reflection on the philosophical genealogy of modernity, with all the “flattening of ontology” and ruthless, ill-grounded separation of the objective and subjective that came about with it.

That said, Tyson’s discussion of Duns Scotus and the maligned “univocity of being” is plagued by the same academic pitfalls that Milbank and RO have courted. So I cannot endorse this without recommending readers look up the other side of the argument; see especially Daniel Horan’s “Postmodernity and Univocity: A Critical Account of Radical Orthodoxy and John Duns Scotus.”

[Nick Anctil]

Understanding Christian Platonism connects key concepts about ontology, especially the Theory of the Forms. It's clear to see the Platonic influence pass down from Augustine, to Anselm, to Aquinas, and to CS Lewis. Not only does this philosophy provide guardrails against the two extremes, dualism and materialism, but it also enhances the reality of heaven itself.

[Mark Gring]

To come later

[Richard]

Dense, foundational, very good.

[Sebos]

It's not a bad book, but it's difficult to read and could use some better editor and clearer sentence structure, sometimes things were harder to graph than they should've been.

[Jeremy]

Genius.