Western Philosophy Has Run It's Course

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, Marcus here. So, I don't really talk about philosophy all that much on this channel anymore. Definitely a lot less than I used to. And the reason for that is because I I find that the western philosophical project is concluded. Um, and what do I mean by this? I mean that western philosophy can be understood a bit like a like a brand name where it's really the footnote to Plato, meaning everything that's basically been built off of the Platonic dialogue. So beginning with Socrates, expanding into the Platonic works, um then Aristotle and so forth, um leading up to pretty much the 20 the 20th century. And by finished, I mean it's it's finished in the sense that all the achievements have been unlocked like you maxed out the game at 100% and there's nothing left to do. And that's kind of a a bold claim for me to make, but I mean, I've read pretty much every significant thinker, most of the primary text spanning the last 2 and a half thousand years, and a lot of things have emerged um that convince me that we've run the course of what could be discussed within the framework, the Platonic framework. Now, Western philosophy has a a certain foundation to it. And if I were to actually pinpoint just one thing that grounds all of western philosophy, that would be the strict use of reason. So Aristotle's three uh three laws of reason being non-contradiction, excluded, middle, and identity. They they basically form the foundation of all discourse that well that that spans the whole Platonic project. And anyone that isn't engaging in uh leveraging reason can't really be considered somebody who participated as part of the western philosophical project.

[00:01:49]Now a lot of questions were raised in the earlier works that were actually addressed and I I would say quite convincingly by the late Renaissance philosophers. So for example I would say that ontology was solved by Kant that ethics was pretty much solved by Nichza and that um uh language was solved by Vickenstein um so there's not much left to talk about in a sense but in the same way I can't make the claim that we possess knowledge now because let's talk about Kant for example so in his critique on pure reason he makes these distinctions between the numinal world and the phenomenal world And the phenomenal world is ultimately what we what we experience as the mediated uh as the mediated reality through our senses and then through our minds. So what Kant argued is that the the numinal world is the world in of itself meaning the world unmediated through a consciousness unmediated through anything else. It's just how it is how it exists. and his argumentation landed on the um on a conclusion stating that access to the numinal world is impossible namely that we can only actually access a human world of a sorts. So we know that our senses are limited in of themselves. So our eyes take in a spectrum of light but at the same time our science has gotten to the point where we understand that there there are wavelengths of light that our eyes don't register like ultraviolet and um uh infrared. So like bees see infrared. We don't but we are aware of infrared based on tooling we've developed through modern science. Except our experience of infrared is not the bee's experience of infrared. Our experience of the of infrared, how we see infrared is by looking at like a gauge on a tool that has numbers on it.

[00:03:42]And that can't be that can't be said to be comparable at all to the lived experience of witnessing that spectrum of light. Much in the same way that dogs their sense of smell is quite evolved compared to the human being. And how a dog experiences reality compared to a human being is also radically different.

[00:04:03]And we can't communicate with the dog.

[00:04:04]So we can't get access to it. But the dog experiences the numinal world differently than us even though we share the same numinal world. So phenomenon is ultimately the the only thing we have.

[00:04:17]And that kind of ties in quite well with um Plato's claim that well Socrates's claim that upon hearing from the oracle of Deli through an intermediate that he was the wisest man in Athens, he he was stumped by this. He he didn't know why the gods would make such a claim because he himself knew that he didn't know anything. But how could he be then the wisest if he knows he doesn't know? and his conclusion was ultimately that he was aware that he doesn't know whereas others believe that they do know. Now, what's interesting about the Platonic dialogues is that some of the dialogues are set up in a way where they're not really intended to teach you anything um that's directly spoken of in the dialogue itself, but to give you like a meta lesson. So there's one dialogue I don't remember its name exactly but the subject matter is about analyzing uh not trying to extract knowledge based on language based on words. So can you actually derive what an elephant is from the word elephant? And back in those days in the ancient Greek days that was an activity that actually did take place that people tried to use the history of a word the word itself to infer the real world phenomenon that the world corresponds to. Um and what what Socrates was doing in that dialogue was he was demonstrating to the audience that he is a master of that activity that he is able to with the best of them to derive meaning from these words but he also demonstrated in that dialogue that it's a feudal activity that does not uh lead to knowledge. So what what is the lesson here? The lesson here is that Socrates didn't dismiss that activity just at face value. He mastered it first and then he showed it to be lacking. So in this manner, it's very possible that a lot of the apparatic dialogues because it's hard to distinguish where Plato begins, where Socrates ends, but a lot of the apparatic dialogues were kind of structured to give like this meta lesson of itself is that reason is great and we should use it, but it's lacking. That it ultimately is lacking because we can't seem to come to a definition that sticks. And all the apparatic dialogues work the same way. Is that no matter what definition, what what common understanding of a concept like justice or or virtue or piety or you know love, no matter which concept you attempt to then break down through a logical process, you always end up in some sort of contradiction and you you end up having doubt at the end. So you you end up finding out you don't really know what any of these things are. And perhaps the meta lesson that Socrates was trying to teach also through the statement that he knew he didn't know anything was that he was aware that there's a hard limit to reason that simply reason is not really the most appropriate tool to get at knowledge.

[00:07:21]Now maybe it wasn't as evolved as a uh as a concept back then because reason was something that was coming into um into fad I suppose amongst the intellectual intelligencia of the time.

[00:07:36]So he had to master it to teach this meta lesson. And that's what I believe is the case because of the of the works that came much later like thousands of years later specifically in Kant and Kant had a much more uh solid framework of over 2,000 years of discourse on the subject to be able to put into words this limitation and his concept of the the numinal world versus the phenomenal world um really gained traction. Now there were the the pirick school of skeptics also doubted that knowledge was possible. I mean I I did a video on skepticism years ago which showcased the various um factions and how you know how they were skeptical whether knowledge was possible whether uh a human being was possible of possessing knowledge and so forth and the skeptics were the boogeyman of philosophy ultimately because if knowledge is not possible philosophy is not possible it's all just a waste of time which is much kind of what vickingstein concluded that uh vickingstein's thesis um mostly focused the it's two separate works that he produced in quite distant periods of time against each other and they don't really cohhere with each other. But they were both about the subject of language and uh uh he he concluded that pretty much philosophy is a is a language game.

[00:08:54]It's almost like a fancier way of saying that it's it's kind of sophistry like we we we play these games but we're not really talking about the numinal world in that sort of sense. Um with Nichzche too I believe that uh ethics was basically solved. I mean the will to power I think is a defective concept because I don't believe it's true but I believe it's true in a a different way in a not objective way but in a human way in a very human way um that if indeed it is only possible for humanity to possess something akin to human knowledge as opposed to objective knowledge because of our limited access to the numinal world then we're we're going to have something akin to a cybernetic relationship with reality. ity with the numinal world. So the numinal world appears to be indifferent for the most part of how it presents itself to the human condition as in people can see patterns in reality that only exist as patterns because of concepts they came up with say much later down the line. So Haidiger talks a lot about this uh the unconcealment um um basically the the world presenting itself to you only after you've acquired a certain disposition in your mind to be able to see that. So for example gold gold is only has really value because humanity you know um considers it to be valuable. I mean sure it has manufacturing uses but in of itself the exaggerated value of gold is really a human constructed endeavor. Now, if you own a piece of land and you don't possess the concept of gold or money, then these yellow stones laying around don't really mean anything to you. And from your perspective, you're a poor man who, you know, is downtrodden and you have no ability to gain great wealth because say that ground littered with these weird looking yellow stones can't be farmed and farming and food is the only currency you understand. So from that perspective, the world has not it has not unveiled itself that you're actually a rich man because you own a piece of land that is basically a gold mine. Right? So the cybernetic nature of of of the concepts we wield versus the numinal world is that if we accept something to be true like for example reason that reason is built into reality which was very much Aristotle's position then the world will actually show us that that that concept is true in a way there there will be patterns that conform to reason and we will almost in a um confirmation bias this sort of way, find these patterns to verify that reason works and reason does work in many cases. Um, but it is possible to believe in lies um and have them be pragmatically useful. Uh, I'm not going to go into I have an example of this that I could go into. It's it's quite protracted, but it'll be a distraction.

[00:11:55]But in my own experience and in my reading, I I see it this way now as more of this cybernetic relationship between our minds and objective reality. And if this is the case, then western philosophy didn't really fail, but it it like finished a certain train of thought. It took like 2 and a half thousand years to finish this train of thought. And the train of thought was that you know we got to knowledge is possible through reason alone fundamentally which was the Platonic project because he was uh Socrates was definitely a realist in that sense.

[00:12:32]Plato was definitely a realist in that sense um where empirical evidence didn't really matter at all like it made no difference what your experience was that everything was derived ultimately from first principles through the application of correct reasoning. Um, and I don't think that that that works. I think at this point in time, we've had enough talk in the long debate to get to the conclusion that reason alone is insufficient. Um, I think it's very useful and it has led to the development of a great many things which define basically western culture, but we're at the tail end of this where it's hard to maintain this certainty anymore. And because it's hard to maintain this certainty, you have offshoots obviously within the philosophical space that took place in the west but can't be said to be western philosophy like postmodernism. Postmodernism is kind of nonsense but it's like an attempt to get away from the foundations of Plato and from the foundations of pure reason in in of itself.

[00:13:39]And for a long time, you know, I didn't really have any alternatives that I considered viable to um continue my own philosophical development because I I was in this place where I kind of saw the writing on the wall with western philosophy. But I didn't really have any any any guidance on how I could move past this hurdle where where it appeared that that reason alone is insufficient.

[00:14:06]Um but I eventually stumbled upon the works of Jean Gapser. He's a very little known philosopher. I spoke about Gapser's work a little bit u several videos back. Um the uh everpresent origin is the specific work I referred to. And in GPS I found that uh he he proposed a new framework. It's still kind of in the Platonic uh Platonic tradition, but it it was so it's so original to me because it dealt with consciousness and it dealt with telling the human story around the development of consciousness and how man's interface with reality had changed over the eons of the existence of the human condition.

[00:14:46]And the four stages of consciousness that he enumerated place us um at the last stage. Well, the fourth stage, um, which isn't the last stage, but it's the last stage we've reached as a species, which is exactly grounded in this perspective, you know, where, um, the laws of Aristotle still apply. Reason is the fundamental way of interfacing with reality through thought. Um, and we've also cultivated an inner world that opens up the opportunity for ownership of ideas and thoughts. Meaning, I can have an opinion. you know my truth is a negative consequence of this sort of inner world aspect. But Ger was predicting um a further shift in consciousness and that further shift was what he referred to as the u integrated form of consciousness. Now what all this means is that every phase of consciousness when I look back on philosophy historically and even prescratic philosophy you know the the Greek myths uh Homer and whatnot they all seem to be projects based around a certain stage of consciousness meaning that the western philosophical project was the philosophical project of this fourth stage of consciousness that we've been living through since basically the the you know the 600 BC period leading up to now and that cycle is now kind of concluding and this state of consciousness is finding lacking which is throwing a great deal of doubt over this philosophical project and so we've kind of gotten stagnant and the way out of this is going to be a general human shift in consciousness into this integrated form and this integrated form is not an evolution it's more of a a humbling experience where you want to recover things from the past of the previous stages, the magical stage of consciousness, the mythic stage of consciousness. Because each of these stages um they're they're layered. They exist within the human psyche, but they're repressed fundamentally. They're they're now considered like quackery um because of the predominance of reason as the exclusive arbiter of reality and uh our ability to you know engage in discourse in and around it. So GPSer's work offered me a kind of a a new framework where I could ground myself into continue my own philosophical development. But because of this, I've kind of I found myself that I'm both at the leading edge of philosophical discourse, but also at the same time lacking mentors within the subject because it's the leading edge, meaning now I'm responsible for philosophizing because that's where we are. We're at the the end of the long debate now. Now I'm uh a speaker in the debate. I'm no longer a student. I'm no longer a listener. Now I have to talk.

[00:17:38]Now I have to think um in order to cultivate the the progressions of philosophy which is um obviously a time-consuming activity. It's subject to a great deal of doubt. Um because you're most people are including me were just spoiled on the idea of having all these great thinkers that my development was really just learning from Khan, from Nietze, from uh Plato, from Thomas Aquinus and whoever else came before. So now it's like that safety net is gone.

[00:18:07]Now I'm kind of left on my own and I have to search out for not known philosophers that are contemporary that are developing thought in this new space in this new integrated form of consciousness mindset and there's no rules here. It's all new. It's it's it's like the wild wild west of philosophy fundamentally. So you start looking into esoteric schools of thought thinking well maybe I got to look into things like Reiki like crystals like um uh Steiner's work of anthroposophy of the theosophical schools the esoteric thought itself maybe there's clues there and through my dive into these areas I discovered Gpser though GPSer I wouldn't say is an esoteric philosopher he was an academic his books are his well he wrote a few books but the the or the archaic form of consciousness is um is definitely a standard academic text.

[00:19:03]It's very dense. It it reads kind of like like your standard academic text like reading young or somebody like that. And having that framework now having discovered it through exploration of these esoteric dimensions of thought which are generally considered quackery or weird or you know culty um uh I started encountering other phenomenon that are not related to GPS per se but are also from the contemporary stint that further expand and solidify a framework that is replacing slowly the western philosophical project in my mind. So Ger would be the scaffolding.

[00:19:40]Um Marshall McCullen's work the uh Gutenberg Galaxy is a great exposition on the fourth stage of consciousness.

[00:19:50]And it's not so much that McCullen is expanding on Gapser because they wrote in similar time frames and uh McCullen's work came out um in a time frame that would suggest that he had not read Gapser basically. So it depend it evolved independently and you can see that there's no references as m in mccllin's work to gapser but through his own independent research mccllin really did solidify a great hypothesis on how the emergence of this um uh perspectival form of consciousness's fourth stage actually transpired leading up from the development of the Gutenberg press. It's a fascinating work, incredibly dense as well, rich with examples and evidence uh empirical evidence, historical evidence supporting his hypothesis and it fits so neatly into GPS's thesis as well of GPS scaffolding and then later on I discovered the works of um David Talbot.

[00:20:48]David Talbet's book, The Saturn Myth, and that whole space um explained to me the formation of mythic consciousness, right? The one that preceded um the the the mental form, the the perspectival form that we exist in now.

[00:21:06]And mythic consciousness would have been what Socrates and Plato were transitioning out of into this this more perspectivalbased mental form of consciousness that Gert describes. So Socrates was really living in a time similar of great intellectual change much like we're living now in in a form of great intellectual change and Socrates had to think for himself is the whole Socratic project why it was so influential is because it was in a sense quite original for its time. So um uh David Tablet's work it's fascinating in of itself because again it's not linked at all to either GPS or McCullen and also it was produced in and around the same time um as these other thinkers but Talabot's work is kind of crazy if you actually read what he's saying and I'll give you a synopsis of what Talbot's work is about. David Talbot's work suggests that about uh 3000 BC or 3 to 5,000 BC something somewhere around there the night sky did not look like anything that what we see now. So there's this assumption within astronomy and the general public carries this assumption with it is that our solar system always looked the way it did within at least the lifespan of known human life. meaning that the sun was always where it was, the moon was where it was. All the planets were where they were. They were orbiting basically for millions of years on their current track. So what we see in the night sky today is basically what people saw in the night sky, you know, like 50,000 years ago. Well, Talbot's work suggests that that's not at all the case. In fact, that there was a stable conjunction of three planets and these planets were far closer to the Earth than their position now. So the orbital positions of these planets was nothing like what it is now. You couldn't see the sun. There was light, but you couldn't see the sun. You couldn't see the moon. What you could see was where the north star right now is. You could see Saturn. And Saturn was like 50 to 100 times bigger in perspective than what the size of the moon is to our eyes when we look up at the night sky today.

[00:23:18]And Saturn was ever present in that position, that fixed position. within it was Venus spewing out these weird magnetic light things forming these these star-like shapes and uh the further conjunction was Mars. So you had Mars closest, then you had a Venus, then you had uh Saturn as the biggest celestial body. And for the most part, the rest of the sky was almost blurred out like it was a there were no stars in this sense. Like they they existed, but they were not visible. Meaning there was this kind of fog in a way. Uh so when people looked up at the night sky, it was uh it was chaotic. It was kind of like looking at the ocean where you see waves but you don't see structure. You don't see any order. And the mythic stories that come down to us through the Egyptians that come down through all the independent civilizations ultimately tell the same story of the creation of heaven and earth. Meaning that the uh the sky in a way cleared up. Stars started to be visible. These planets started to be visible. And then Saturn worship became a thing because it was like this enormous everpresent feature of the night sky, the first set of order that would appear in the night sky. Now, like I said, this stuff sounds crazy, but if you read his book or or you he has a channel on YouTube, uh it's something like Musings of an Alien Sky. It's like 42 videos. Something Alien Sky, David Talbot. Look it up. Watch like two or three of his videos. They're fairly short. They're like 5 to 10 minutes long. There's like 43 of them. I watched them all. And uh uh listening to that thesis, it fits so well with Gapser's work. It fits so well in accounting how the mythic form of consciousness emerged that I'm having a hard time not accepting that perhaps the narrative in general of human history and how philosophy ought to be approached needs to take on this more esoteric nature to it. um namely that Gpser generally figured out something that's very viable as a hypothesis around human consciousness. McCullen really gave a good understanding of the current state that we're in this fourth stage this mental stage this perspectival stage of consciousness. Talbot gave a really good account really convincing account of how this mythic stage would have uh come to emerge and how human thought emerged as a consequence of it. And all these thinkers wrote independently. So they're not like bouncing off each other. And it to me it it requires a complete shift in how I think about philosophical thought, the human condition and about what can be you know considered a viable path towards knowledge. you know what we need to be skeptical about and it's also new to me compared to the philosophical pro the western philosophical project which has this pedigree this 2 and a half thousand years of works you can reference whereas this new area of thought has very little material to draw from and I'm not as familiar with it so I don't speak about it because my own development philosophically is shifting towards this new direction now leaving behind the legacy of western philosophy not because it was wrong. But because it was incomplete, it got us as far as it could get us because of the way man interfaces with reality. But our interface with reality, it needs to change. It needs to move on so that a new philosophy needs to emerge consequent to it that'll help us solve the problems that this current mode of existing with relationship to reality um to solve the problems that that has created. So, this is really why I don't really talk about philosophy much on this channel anymore because I I don't feel that there's a lot of sense for me to continue to talk about Plato or Nietze or Kant or any of these people cuz I've already done the work internally for myself and it's all out there. You should be reading the primary text, not listening as somebody like me talking about it. you should really go to the primary text because you'll get so much more from them than any video on YouTube, any commentary or exogetical um set of content as opposed to the primary works. Whereas my own thoughts are now spent on furthering my own, you know, love of wisdom. I I do consider myself a philosopher in the strict sense of the word, a philosopher of wisdom. And because I'm now kind of in the deep end of the pool where there's no more real handholding, where I have to engage in thought myself and you know, original ideas, interesting ideas take a long time to cultivate. I don't have that much to say that's authentic and genuine based on my own development in the philosophical project as I'm now moving in than I did when I was really kind of bought into western philosophy as a whole which again is not saying that eastern philosophy is right even though I've started reading more and more from that space as well just to see what the contrast is and it's not to say western philosophy was wrong it's just it carried us as far as it could and um and we need to move on and there's been a lot of false starts I think that um uh postmodernism is a failed project already. I think it was more of a weapon of psychological warfare than anything else. But but uh it's just the world we live in. We're going to get a lot of quackery and within philosophy proper within academia. And also the spaces I'm reading from and drawing from now, the esoteric spaces are also full of a lot of quackery uh and you know like grifting. So sorting through all that grift, sorting through all that sophistry that exists in those spaces which are even less developed than um uh in some ways less developed than the the proper uh western project as it was, you know, put through academia over 2 and a half thousand years. It it's challenging. It's challenging to know what's true, what isn't true. And I'm kind of back to square one in many many senses. Um, other writers that I think are very much worth examining are Rupert Sheldrake and his uh, morphic resonance theory. I think it's a really cool way of innovating on platonic forms. So, it has a kind of a visceral correctness to it. Um, I I I don't I don't know how it fits into all these other facets yet completely, but it's an area that I'm exploring and I'm going to continue to philosophize and explore in this direction for my own personal development. I'll keep you guys updated as best I can. But uh at this point in time I don't feel as confident to speak to these subjects as I did with the other stuff because well I had a lot of years of time to you know study those subjects and discourse uh engage in discourse with um more developed philosophers than I on um on the tradition and that just doesn't exist anymore. So I don't talk about it as much but if you want to go on this journey yourself then Rupert Sheldrake um read GPS first as a scaffolding read um um Marshall McCullen's Gutenberg Galaxy as uh exposition on the fourth stage of consciousness read David Talbett's book the Saturn myth and watch his videos for the mythic stage and exposition how that may have come about and look into Rupert Sheldrick's work as well um and I mean come on this journey with me, I guess, because I'm not that much more far ahead than anybody else at this point because these these thinkers are all 20th century thinkers. They're people that are still alive. Well, not all of them, but um Sheldrake is still alive. Um David Talbot is still alive.

[00:30:50]So, you can actually go track them down and talk to them directly, which is something that was impossible for me to do with any of the long dead thinkers. I can't go to talk to Nichze, but I could technically track down Rupert Sheldrake and have a conversation with him, which maybe one day I'll do. I mean, we'll see if he's willing, but uh but yeah, so that's that's kind of what it is. And this channel is just going to be more of what I'm doing now, I guess. So, yeah.

[00:31:15]So, thanks for listening and good team.