Old Christopher Alexander fan and cog.sci sceptic, and I can't really summarize him, but I thought he was an antithesis for post-modern subjectivity, and a modern philosophical advocate for the value of <i>techne</i> over <i>episteme</i>. I thought he was approaching an implied question of whether a critical theory or ideology of Order and Nature could produce beauty reliably. It was based on some axioms that reduced to beauty = truth = the real, and where the uncanny dissonance (ugliness) intrinsic to shallow representations might be refined out of the things we make, if we could only make them with a deeper understanding of each other. Hence his divergence into these secular but still essentially spiritual cog.sci ideas.<p>The basic flow from that is, we understand each other more, produce things based on this understanding that is, in effect, a love, and then the things we make from that are the tools and artifacts in a human story that evolves with that intent, and organic growth from that forms a substrate for our experience made of this Real and Beauty he's talking about, instead of just a bunch of noisy representations of other sentiments that pile up as garbage. In a comment, that's what I read in him anyway.
Looking for tools to make sense of reality (which includes human experience obviously) in the last few weeks has led me to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_realism_(philosophy_of_the_social_sciences)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_realism_(philosophy_o...</a>.<p>I didn't study anything of the sort and am just a layperson but it's interesting that CR attempts to tackle such issues head on.
The problem with dualism is that you have endless rewrite rules. Monism is difficult to communicate, but a threefold perspective such as the classical pathos, logos and ethos lets you easily define an interface with your fellow entities.