The time has
come to realize that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist
one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior
of things; mind as well as matter.
(Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon
of Man, p. 35-36)
The
third in a series of posts presenting
The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Human Intelligence
Foucault
also saw the emergence of a new positivist episteme in the 16-18th
centuries. (See Michel Foucault, The Order
of Things.) The French Revolution spawned the social
sciences in that it introduced the concept of public sovereignty, replacing “subjects”
with “citizens”. That is, Man as a subject
within his own philosophical and political knowledge, no longer moving between
a two-tiered vertical medieval political theology linking heaven and earth, but horizontally chugging,
like a locomotive, along a modern, linear and secular track into the future.
(See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies.)
By
the 19th century man further objectified, almost mummified, himself as a scientific object securely entombed within his
own empirical rationalism. With
this change man contorted himself into an idol, a Blakean “emanation.” Like Alice he went through the looking glass of
his own thought, and to the extent that he worships himself he is an idolater,
like Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection. But this crabbed distortion is but a drunk’s illusion
of himself from which he must be dis-illusioned if he is to awaken back to sober
reality. This first ugly distortion spawned in reaction
an equally grotesque distortion, namely, the imperial self, the great idol of the
modern temper of cultural libertinism that believes that he comes out of himself,
that he has broken through or seeks to break through all limitations to breathe
the clear, crisp air breathed before only by the gods. His anarchy of personal experience and
extreme moral relativism is, perhaps, the horrific conclusion of the once proud
Protestant revolt, with its rise of the individual interpretation of the Word of God, against the oppressive communal moral authority of the Catholic Church. Now, in a supremely ironic
twist, in a world supposedly without
taboos the only taboo left is God Himself. For, to this almighty self any higher power reminds him of limitations,
authority, and that something greater than numero uno exists.
In
historiography, Meyer Abrams in Natural
Supernaturalism, following scholarly studies such as Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the 18th-century Philosophers, saw the gradual and complete substitution
up through the nineteenth-century of natural contexts for supernatural ones to
describe human progress: that is, denying religion even as one uses the
premises of religion as a precondition for one’s own reasoning: a process of eating the fruit
but denying the seed it came from. Abrams wrote: “It is a historical commonplace
that the course of western thought since the renaissance has been one of
progressive secularization, but it is easy to mistake the way in which that
process took place. Secular thinkers
have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian
culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance
of classical and pagan thought. The
process—outside of the exact sciences at any rate—has not been the deletion and
replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation
of religious ideas, as constitutive elements in a world view founded on secular
premises. Much of what distinguishes
writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever
their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes,
and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature
and creation, but to reformulate them within a prevailing two-term system of
subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its
transactions with nature.” (Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism:13) During these centuries, among the
learned class religion lost entirely its transcendent foundation to become a
purely phenomenal thing, a field for sociological and psychological—more often
than not psychopathological—inquiry, simply one among a number of cultural
products.
After
the dissociations and narrowing of intellectual vision in all fields just
noted, the philosophies and sciences of the 19th and 20th
centuries in the west were avowedly reductionist, mechanical, and objectivist:
in short, materialist. Whatever advantages
accrued from this laser-like focus on the material, and there are many, these knowledges
present a deformed understanding of both the universe and human nature. They proceed by dividing
the inner from the outer and then denying the validity of the inner on strictly empirical grounds, thereby reducing spirituality and consciousness to some effluvia of
material or neuronal processes. One result
of this is that modern man has lost to a great extent the capacity to have
faith in anything that cannot be proven by the methods of the natural sciences. But science stops at the point where talk
goes to entities not made by natural processes and this reveals the limitations
of its virtues. For, if we are under the
domination of what material science can tell us with any degree of certainty, we
live as though the spiritual part of reality doesn’t exist and consequently we
lose vision: that is, we blind ourselves to what thought can perceive of
invisible reality. In that fallen state,
we see man not as a holy and infinite being but as a wholly finite being, not soaring through
eternity but crawling through temporality. This loss has had
dire consequences for people’s life and health.
That is, as The Book of Proverbs says: “Where there is no vision, the people
perish.” (The Holy Bible, Book of Proverbs 29:18)
The
centuries from the sixteenth through the nineteenth may rightly be termed the
rise and spread of scientific rationalism, a stage of thought without religion,
built upon a material causality, an epistemology of the senses, an reductionist
empiricism called objectivity and a digital language of number, a concretizing,
quantifying, and fixing of the warm living cosmos into a cold dead universe. The
material science that came out of these four hundred years is the last stage of
a multi-millenial intellectual unfoldment generated by a series of increasingly
powerful divine pulsations. Science is today, as religion was yesterday, a
universal mode of thought and is, therefore, ripe for transformation.
As
Muhammad threw down the pagan idols in the Mosque at Mecca, so Baha’u’llah is
throwing down the idols in the inner Temple of Intellect. The human spirit cannot breathe imprisoned
within matter. Materialism is not
comprehensive enough an interpretation of Reality for the living human
intelligence. Thus the scientific
materialist episteme has, since early in the twentieth century, the pinnacle
moment of its dominance, been giving way to a new one.
The
scientific initiative that positioned humanity within a purely physical
universe and objective science was undermined from within and without. Inwardly, just as this order of narrowly rational,
materialist thought had consolidated itself triumphal over the mind, Freud
discovered the irrational, anarchic, instinctual basis of thought of the
unconscious individual. Jung then dug
deeper and discovered it for the race.
The ego personality was seen by Freudians to be sitting atop a boiling
cauldron of impulse, repressed feelings and id desires. Yet these irrational powers, which ordinary
rationality misses, dismisses, neglects, and argues away, could be understood
rationally by Jungians as archetypes, mythic structures, unconscious layers of
human experience, the population of forms in the morphic field. This perspective provided the
impetus for a new, more inclusive rational psychological order, bringing
psychology at least to the very brink of the spiritual. But, except for a few courageous
practitioners, with no felt need to leap over the abyss of unbelief into that
land so long as they wanted to call psychology a science like other sciences, psychologists
dug in their heels and, braying like frightened mules, retreated, to call
spirit nothing but human projection, a vestige of childhood wish-fulfillment
dreams.
Parallel to these developments in psychology
has been the shattering of the homogenous Newtonian universe by theories
beginning with Relativity through Quantum physics and now String Theory. Both physics and psychology found states of
pure potentiality waiting to be formed into actuality by an observer. Physics began exploring the foundations of
matter, which seemed to consist, materially, in the anarchic collision of a whole
galaxy of sub-atomic particles. But driving
even deeper, often with the help of insights from psychology, empirical investigation
of the deepest layer of the physical universe arrives at the same kind of intelligent
foundation as exists in human psychology, and their fusion into complementary
discoveries means their essence is the same and they are actually twin
manifestations of it on the same plane. Science
acknowledges that something intelligent is, indeed, out there! And if the spiritual is everywhere at once,
then what is “out there” might be essentially the same thing as what is “in
here”.
A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle
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