John Vervaeke – The Centrality of Goodness

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John Vervaeke – The Centrality of Goodness

In The Centrality of Goodness, a nine-hour course, Dr. John Vervaeke presents goodness within the ancient triad of transcendentals—truth, beauty, and goodness—as pathways to Being itself, highlighting ontonormativity, or the inherent goodness of reality. We examine how modern dichotomies like mind/body and fact/value obscure this goodness, contributing to nihilism and the meaning crisis. Through key concepts like relevance realization, metanoetic passage, voluntary necessity, and anagoge, we discover practical ways to transcend these philosophical limitations and recover our capacity to perceive and participate in the goodness of the real, offering hope beyond nihilism.

Lectures

1. Goodness and Being

In our introductory lecture, Dr. Vervaeke presents the centrality of goodness within the ancient triad of transcendentals—truth, beauty, and goodness—as pathways to Being itself, drawing on the work of D.C. Schindler. We examine the limits of modern “propositional tyranny” and contrast it with noesis: a deeper, non-propositional knowing rooted in insight, orientation, and lived experience. Through examples of mystical experience, we explore encounters with the “really real,” revealing a fundamental human hunger for reality, meaning, and connection. Finally, we introduce ontonormativity—the non-moral goodness of being—which fulfills this hunger and restores a more profound, embodied mode of knowing.

2. Connecting to the Real

In lecture two, we expand on ontonormativity—the goodness of the “really real” that fulfills our deepest desire for meaning—through scientific, artistic, and religious perspectives. We examine noetic (non-propositional) and gnosis (participatory) knowing, how Genesis frames light as intelligibility, and how these modes connect us to reality. Dr. Vervaeke addresses the Euthyphro paradox and analyzes how modernity’s rejection of ancient dualism created new dichotomies leading to the rise of mind/body and fact/value splits that flatten beauty and meaning. The lecture concludes by pointing toward a post-nihilistic Neoplatonism as a path beyond this fragmentation.

3. Stranded Goodness

In lecture three, we investigate how modernity and postmodernity obscure ontonormativity—the idea that reality itself is inherently good—by trapping us in dichotomies like mind/body, subject/object, and fact/value. Through thinkers such as Kant and Descartes, we examine how these frameworks strand goodness in the subjective realm, generating contradictions and deepening the drift toward nihilism. Dr. Vervaeke proposes a metanoetic passage—a careful transframing beyond these limits—to help us recover our capacity to perceive and participate in the goodness of the real.

4. Recovering Goodness

In lecture four, Dr. Vervaeke advances the “metanoetic passage” beyond modern dichotomies by deconstructing the fact/value split through Hilary Putnam’s critique. Together, we see how “facts” depend on relevance realization—an ongoing, participatory process that underlies cognition, science, and rationality itself—revealing knowing as transjective, grounded in fittedness between mind and world rather than a “view from nowhere.” Challenging foundationalism and certainty, the lecture reframes faith as evolving, participatory trust, opening a path beyond nihilism and nostalgia toward the recovery of ontonormativity and the centrality of goodness.

5. Dismantling Dichotomies

In lecture five, we examine modernity’s final defense of foundationalism—the claim that logically certain facts ground knowledge and ease existential anxiety. Through critiques by Plantinga and Hume, Dr. Vervaeke shows how this project fails, leading to skepticism about causation, science, and knowledge. The lecture concludes by dismantling key dichotomies—fact/value, meaning/measurement, analytic/synthetic, subjective/objective—drawing on Wittgenstein, Quine, and others to reveal that concepts resist definition and that goodness cannot be separated from reality.

6. Relevance in Meaning

In lecture six, we explore the collapse of modernist dichotomies to reveal connections between truth, goodness, and beauty. We see how, through processes of indwelling and internalization, we come into contact with reality by both shaping and being shaped by it, then delve into relevance realization as the foundation of intelligence. Through predictive processing and opponent processing models, we show how cognition emerges between mind and world. The discussion links relevance realization to meaning in life, maturity, and wisdom, addressing the meaning crisis by emphasizing practices that cultivate skills and character beyond beliefs.

7. Voluntary Necessity

In lecture seven, we study the relationship between relevance realization and truth as a dynamic interplay—relevance shapes what we consider true, while truth refines what we find relevant. This process enables an “optimal grip” on reality through embodied, enactive cognition, allowing us to navigate increasing complexity. The lecture culminates in the idea of voluntary necessity—seen in love, beauty, reason, and flow—as a driver of self-transcendence, drawing on Iris Murdoch’s account of attention as the basis for moral insight and realizing the good.

8. Communal Being

In our eighth and final lecture, we consider anagoge as a process of reciprocal opening and sensibility transcendence that deepens our love of the world through its inexhaustible intelligibility and ontonormative goodness. Drawing on William Desmond, Iris Murdoch, and D.C. Schindler, we show how phenomenological, cognitive, and ontological arguments converge on the primacy of relations and the fundamentally communal nature of being. Dr. Vervaeke concludes our course by integrating these insights into a vision of beauty, truth, and goodness as responses to nihilism, offering a hopeful path forward in the meaning crisis through renewed openness to the sacred.