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The ambition to emancipate ourselves as autonomous subjects by objectifying the world has in a sense come full circle, returned to haunt us, by turning the human self into an object as well—an ephemeral side effect of a random universe, an isolated atom in mass society, a statistic, a commodity, passive prey to the demands of the market, prisoner of the self-constructed modern “iron cage.” Thus Weber’s famous prophecy:
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
Defined in the end by its disenchanted context, the human self too is inevitably disenchanted. Ultimately it becomes, like everything else, a mere object of material forces and efficient causes: a sociobiological pawn, a selfish gene, a meme machine, a biotechnological artifact, an unwitting tool of its own tools. For the cosmology of a civilization both reflects and influences all human activity, motivation, and self-understanding that take place within its parameters. It is the container for everything else.
This, therefore, has become the looming question of our time: What is the ultimate impact of cosmological disenchantment on a civilization? What does it do to the human self, year after year, century after century, to experience existence as a conscious purposeful being in an unconscious purposeless universe? What is the price of a collective belief in absolute cosmic indifference? What are the consequences of this unprecedented cosmological context for the human experiment, indeed, for the entire planet?
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who seems to have recognized most intensely the full implications of the modern development, and experienced in his own being the inescapable plight of the modern sensibility: the Romantic soul at once liberated, displaced, and entrapped within the vast cosmic void of the scientific universe. Using hyper-Copernican imagery to depict the dizzying annihilation of the metaphysical world and death of God wrought by the modern mind, and reflecting that peculiarly tragic combination of self-determining will and inexorable fate, Nietzsche captured the pathos of the late modern existential and spiritual crisis:
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?
If we again look at the diagram illustrating the difference between the primal and the modern experience of the world, taking into account the full effect of the post-Copernican, post-Nietzschean situation, we see the extremity of the late-modern human’s differentiation and alienation in the cosmos (Figure 4). The source of all meaning and purpose in the universe has become at once infinitesimally small and utterly peripheral. The lonely island of human meaning is now so incongruent, so accidental, so ephemeral, so fundamentally estranged from its vast surrounding matrix, as to have become, in many senses, insupportable.
Yet it is perhaps the very starkness and self-contradictory absurdity of this situation that suggests the possibility of another perspective. The modern mind has long prided itself on its repeated success in overcoming anthropomorphic distortions in its understanding of reality. It has constantly sought to purify its world view from any naïve anthropocentrism and self-fulfilling projections. Each revolution in modern thought from Copernicus onward, each great insight associated with a canonical name in the grand procession—from Bacon and Descartes, Hume and Kant to Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kuhn, and the entire postmodern turn—has brought forth in its own manner another essential revelation of an unconscious bias that had until then blinded the human mind in its attempts to understand the world. The gist and consequence of this long, incomparably intricate modern and postmodern epistemological development has been to compel us with ever-increasing acuity to recognize how our most fundamental assumptions and principles, so long taken for granted as to fully escape our notice, imperceptibly bring into being the very world we consider unarguably objective. As the post-Kuhnian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend recognized:
A change of universal principles brings about a change of the entire world. Speaking in this manner we no longer assume an objective world that remains unaffected by our epistemic activities, except when moving within the confines of a particular point of view. We concede that our epistemic activities may have a decisive influence even upon the most solid piece of cosmological furniture—they may make gods disappear and replace them by heaps of atoms in empty space.
Let us, then, take our strategy of critical self-reflection one crucial and perhaps inevitable step further. Let us apply it to the fundamental governing assumption and starting point of the modern world view—a pervasive assumption that subtly continues to influence the postmodern turn as well—that any meaning and purpose the human mind perceives in the universe does not exist intrinsically in the universe but is constructed and projected onto it by the human mind. Might not this be the final, most global anthropocentric delusion of all? For is it not an extraordinary act of human hubris—literally, a hubris of cosmic proportions—to assume that the exclusive source of all meaning and purpose in the universe is ultimately centered in the human mind, which is therefore absolutely unique and special and in this sense superior to the entire cosmos? To presume that the universe utterly lacks what we human beings, the offspring and expression of that universe, conspicuously possess? To assume that the part somehow radically differs from and transcends the whole? To base our entire world view on the a priori principle that whenever human beings perceive any patterns of psychological or spiritual significance in the nonhuman world, any signs of interiority and mind, any suggestion of purposefully coherent order and intelligible meaning, these must be understood as no more than human constructions and projections, as ultimately rooted in the human mind and never in the world?
Perhaps this complete voiding of the cosmos, this absolute privileging of the human, is the ultimate act of anthropocentric projection, the most subtle yet prodigious form of human self-aggrandizement. Perhaps the modern mind has been projecting soullessness and mindlessness on a cosmic scale, systematically filtering and eliciting all data according to its self-elevating assumptions at the very moment we believed we were “cleansing” our minds of “distortions.” Have we been living in a self-produced bubble of cosmic isolation? Perhaps the very attempt to de-anthropomorphize reality in such an absolute and simplistic manner is itself a supremely anthropocentric act.
I believe that this criticism of the hidden anthropocentrism permeating the modern world view cannot be successfully countered. Only the blinders of our paradigm, as is always the case, have prevented us from recognizing the profound implausibility of its most basic underlying assumption. For as we gaze out now at the immense starry heavens surrounding our precious planet, and as we contemplate the long and richly diverse history of human thinking about the world, must we not consider that in our strangely unique modern commitment to restrict all meaning and purposive intelligence to ourselves, and refusing these to the great cosmos within which we have emerged, we might in fact be drastically underestimating and misperceiving that cosmos—and thus misperceiving, at once overestimating and underestimating, ourselves as well? Perhaps the greater Copernican revolution is in a sense still incomplete, still unfolding. Perhaps a long-hidden form of anthropocentric bias, increasingly destructive in its consequences, can now at last be recognized, thus opening up the possibility of a richer, more complex, more authentic relationship between the human being an
d the cosmos.
Questions and issues like these compel us to direct our attention with new eyes both outward and inward. Not only inward, as we habitually do in our search for meaning, but also outward, as we seldom do because our cosmos has long been regarded as empty of spiritual significance and unable to respond to that search. Yet our gaze outward must be different from before. It must be transformed by a new awareness of the interior: The questions and issues we have confronted here require us to explore yet more deeply the nature of the self that seeks to comprehend the world. They press us to discern yet more clearly how our subjectivity, that tiny peripheral island of meaning in the cosmic vastness, subtly participates in configuring and constellating the entire universe we perceive and know. They compel us to examine that mysterious place where subject and object so intricately and consequentially intersect: the crucial meeting point of cosmology, epistemology, and psychology.
II
In Search of a Deeper Order
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
—William Shakespeare
Hamlet (First Folio)
Two Suitors: A Parable
Imagine, for a moment, that you are the universe. But for the purposes of this thought experiment, let us imagine that you are not the disenchanted mechanistic universe of conventional modern cosmology, but rather a deep-souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence. And imagine that you are being approached by two different epistemologies—two suitors, as it were, who seek to know you. To whom would you open your deepest secrets? To which approach would you be most likely to reveal your authentic nature? Would you open most deeply to the suitor—the epistemology, the way of knowing—who approached you as though you were essentially lacking in intelligence or purpose, as though you had no interior dimension to speak of, no spiritual capacity or value; who thus saw you as fundamentally inferior to himself (let us give the two suitors, not entirely arbitrarily, the traditional masculine gender); who related to you as though your existence were valuable primarily to the extent that he could develop and exploit your resources to satisfy his various needs; and whose motivation for knowing you was ultimately driven by a desire for increased intellectual mastery, predictive certainty, and efficient control over you for his own self-enhancement?
Or would you, the cosmos, open yourself most deeply to that suitor who viewed you as being at least as intelligent and noble, as worthy a being, as permeated with mind and soul, as imbued with moral aspiration and purpose, as endowed with spiritual depths and mystery, as he? This suitor seeks to know you not that he might better exploit you but rather to unite with you and thereby bring forth something new, a creative synthesis emerging from both of your depths. He desires to liberate that which has been hidden by the separation between knower and known. His ultimate goal of knowledge is not increased mastery, prediction, and control but rather a more richly responsive and empowered participation in a co-creative unfolding of new realities. He seeks an intellectual fulfillment that is intimately linked with imaginative vision, moral transformation, empathic understanding, aesthetic delight. His act of knowledge is essentially an act of love and intelligence combined, of wonder as well as discernment, of opening to a process of mutual discovery. To whom would you be more likely to reveal your deepest truths?
This is not to say that you, the universe, would reveal nothing to the first suitor, under the duress of his objectifying, disenchanting approach. That suitor would undoubtedly elicit, filter, and constellate a certain “reality” that he would naturally regard as authentic knowledge of the actual universe: objective knowledge, “the facts,” as compared with the subjective delusions of everyone else’s approach. But we might allow ourselves to doubt just how profound a truth, how genuinely reflective of the universe’s deeper reality, this approach might be capable of providing. Such knowledge might prove to be deeply misleading. And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.
I believe that the disenchantment of the modern universe is the direct result of a simplistic epistemology and moral posture spectacularly inadequate to the depths, complexity, and grandeur of the cosmos. To assume a priori that the entire universe is ultimately a soulless void within which our multidimensional consciousness is an anomalous accident, and that purpose, meaning, conscious intelligence, moral aspiration, and spiritual depth are solely attributes of the human being, reflects a long-invisible inflation on the part of the modern self. And heroic hubris is still indissolubly linked, as it was in ancient Greek tragedy, to heroic fall.
The postmodern mind has come to recognize, with a critical acuity that has been at once disturbing and liberating, the multiplicity of ways in which our often hidden presuppositions and the structures of our subjectivity shape and elicit the reality we seek to understand. If we have learned anything from the many disciplines that have contributed to postmodern thought, it is that what we believe to be our objective knowledge of the world is radically affected and even constituted by a complex multitude of subjective factors, most of which are altogether unconscious. Even this is not quite accurate, for we must now recognize subject and object, inner and outer, to be so deeply mutually constituted as to render problematic the very structure of a “subject” knowing an “object.” Such a recognition—hard-won and, for most of us, still being slowly integrated—can initially produce a sense of intellectual disorientation, irresolution, or even despair. Each of these responses has its time and place. But ultimately this recognition can call forth in us a fortifying sense of joyful co-responsibility for the world we elicit and enact through the creative power of the interpretive strategies and world views we choose to engage, to explore, and to evolve with.
What is the cure for hubristic vision? It is, perhaps, to listen— to listen more subtly, more perceptively, more deeply. Our future may well depend upon the precise extent of our willingness to expand our ways of knowing. We need a larger, truer empiricism and rationalism. The long-established epistemological strategies of the modern mind have been both relentlessly limiting and unconsciously “constructing” a world it then concludes is objective. The objectifying ascetic rationalism and empiricism that emerged during the Enlightenment served as liberating disciplines for the nascent modern reason, but they still dominate mainstream science and modern thought today in a rigidly undeveloped form. In their simplistic myopia and one-sidedness, they seriously constrain our full range of perception and understanding.
The disenchanting strategy can be said to have served well the purposes of its time—to differentiate the self, to empower the human subject, to liberate human experience of the world from unquestioned pregiven structures of meaning and purpose inherited from tradition and enforced by external authority. It provided a powerful new basis for criticism and defiance of established belief systems that often inhibited human autonomy. It also at least partly succeeded in disciplining the human tendency to project onto the world subjective needs and wishes. But this differentiation and empowerment of the human being has been striven for so single-mindedly as to now be hypertrophic, pathologically exaggerated. In its austere universal reductionism, the objectifying stance of the modern mind has become a kind of tyrant. The knowledge it renders is literally narrow-minded. Such knowledge is at once extremely potent and deeply deficient. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but a massive amount of knowledge based on a limited and self-isolating set of assumptions may be very dangerous indeed.
The remarkable modern capacity for differentiation and discernment that has been so painstakingly forged must be preserved, but our challenge now is to develop and subsume that discipline in a more encompassing, more magnanimous intellectual and spiritual engagement with the mystery of the universe
. Such an engagement can happen only if we open ourselves to a range of epistemologies that together provide a more multidimensionally perceptive scope of knowledge. To encounter the depths and rich complexity of the cosmos, we require ways of knowing that fully integrate the imagination, the aesthetic sensibility, moral and spiritual intuition, revelatory experience, symbolic perception, somatic and sensuous modes of understanding, empathic knowing. Above all, we must awaken to and overcome the great hidden anthropocentric projection that has virtually defined the modern mind: the pervasive projection of soullessness onto the cosmos by the modern self’s own will to power.
Objectifying the world has given immense pragmatic power and dynamism to the modern self but at the expense of its capacity to register and respond to the world’s potential depths of meaning and purpose. Contrary to the coolly detached self-image of modern reason, subjective needs and wishes have unconsciously pervaded the disenchanted vision and reinforced its assumptions. A world of purposeless objects and random processes has served as a highly effective basis and justification for human self-aggrandizement and exploitation of a world seen as undeserving of moral concern. The disenchanted cosmos is the shadow of the modern mind in all its brilliance, power, and inflation.