#76. Modernity's Gains

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/

 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This post is part of the series I began with #73 on two important books dealing with the integration of science and religion: Ken Wilber's The Marriage of Sense and Soul and Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution. They go together as theory and practice.

In post #74 I focused on Wilber's description of the main stages of Western society's cultural development: Modern, Pre-modern, Post-modern. The key idea here is that the perspective known as the Great Chain of Being, common to all the world's Pre-modern religions, was lost with the coming of Modernity.

In the most recent post (#75) I focused on the three Post-modern cultural movements: Romanticism, Idealism and Deconstructionism. Each of them attempted-- and failed-- to deal with the loss of the religious perspectives of the Pre-modern Great Chain of Being.

Words like "loss" and "failure" make it sound as if Modernity is something totally negative, but it's not. As I mentioned in post #74, Wilber is especially good at presenting a balanced view of the gains as well as the losses resulting from Modernity. This post, "Modernity's Gains," is about his understanding of the positive side of the picture.

---

Wilber says that the very essence of Modernity is a cultural process-- first named by the 19th- and early 20th-century scholar of sociology and economics, Max Weber-- called the "differentiation of the cultural spheres." Max Weber himself described it as "one of the most significant developments in all human history."

It was a totally new idea to me. I have been interested in science and religion all my life, but here I am, 72 years old, just hearing about "one of the most significant developments in all human history." Amazing!

It may be a new idea for you, too. Both terms of the process-- "differentiation" and "cultural spheres"-- require some explanation. And Wilber's presentation tends to be a bit confusing because he needs several sets of terms to describe the three "cultural spheres" that got differentiated. But it's well-worth our efforts to follow his thoughts. An understanding of the gains of Modernity makes clear, as nothing else I've seen previously, what's needed for the integration of science and religion.

===

Differentiation. "Differentiation" is a familiar idea. It just means growth and development. It's a basic characteristic of every living thing and a daily experience for all of us.

We know, for example, that each human being starts as a group of cells made from union of the father's sperm and the mother's egg, and that as a zygote it has no parts. But over days and months the cells differentiate: arms and legs, bones and nerves, genitals and internal organs begin to appear.

The process of differentiation continues after the infant is born. Babies smile and cry as they learn to indicate their needs. Soon children walk and talk as they begin to be aware of the world around them and use words to communicate to others.

When children are growing up their minds and hearts are formed originally by their parents and extended family. But little by little they become separate persons: they differentiate themselves from their more or less previously unconscious mental and cultural backgrounds.

In adolescence there's further differentiation, as they venture out on their own beyond their extended families to join the wider communities of society available to them.

Even those various social groups in a society differentiate from one another. Whole segments of culture begin to see things differently from other segments. The various cultural perspectives arise naturally from the different ethnic, geographic and environmental circumstances in which the various communities live. Even the great global cultures of Asia, India and Europe originally differentiated from one another in this way.

And within each of those large cultural centers various smaller segments of society continue to differentiate. Artisans, for example, have quite different concerns than bankers, and both have different concerns from those of politicians and religious leaders.

This differentiation of fields of interest and concern-- of conscious activities in human society-- is what's meant by "the differentiation of the cultural spheres."

After many centuries of its history, sometime after the year 1000 CE-- and definitely by the 1600s-- in Western society three major areas of human consciousness began to differentiate--- just the way arms, legs and internal organs differentiate in an embryo.

These differentiations mark Western culture's shift to Modernity.

===

The Cultural Spheres. The three areas of culture which were differentiated can be named in many different ways. Wilber most generally refers to them as "art, morality and science."

This doesn't mean, of course that art and morality or science didn't exist in earlier times. It only means that, as conscious human activities, these three realms of human concern became separate from, and independent of, one another-- just as adolescents gradually separate from, and become independent of, their parents and extended families.

It's this differentiation-- the independence of the three cultural spheres of art, morality and science-- that is the very essence of Modernity. It's what Max Weber was referring to when he said it was "one of the most significant developments in all human history."

The separation from one another of the cultural spheres of art, science and morality has been so successful that it's difficult for us today to understand just how un-differentiated they were prior to the coming of Modernity. They were fused, Wilber says, like the parts of a potential oak tree while they are still in an unsprouted acorn.

He also points out an added problem for our understanding: that most of the history we learn is surface history. There's still little awareness in Western culture's educational perspectives that we also need to understand the inner story of our culture. We lack a sense of the importance of anything having to do with interiority-- precisely because that's what was lost with the collapse of the Great Chain of Being.

But the take-over by rationalism and scientific materialism came after the collapse of the Great Chain. So it's important to see that the conflict between science and religion didn't precede but resulted from the differentiation of the spheres of art, morality and science.

It's difficult to describe the differentiation of the cultural spheres simply because we so take them for granted today. The shift from the Pre-modern to Modern has been very successful!

So we need to take a close look at these areas of culture which were differentiated if we are to recognize the positive gains resulting from the shift from Pre-modern to Modernity.

Wilber calls the loss of the Great Chain "the disaster of Modernity." He uses the term dignities to describe Modernity's gains.

---

I've said Wilber uses various sets of names in describing the three areas of culture that were differentiated. All are helpful, but too many tends to be confusing. At lunch recently, a friend and I tried to list the various sets of names Wilber uses. We easily came up with a dozen.

In addition to "art, morals and science," for example, Wilber uses the familiar terms from Greek culture, "Beauty, Goodness and Truth." Sometimes he says "aesthetics" for art, "empiricalism" for science and "religion" for morality.

He also names them as the areas of the "personal, communal and non-personal" and the domains of the "subjective, the inter-subjective and the objective." For shorthand he refers to them as the realms of "I, WE and IT." And sometimes he just says "the Big Three."

I'm going to try to describe each of these spheres (areas, realms, domains) of culture which were differentiated. If these ideas are new to you, as they were until recently to me, please hang in there. They make good sense and help greatly in our understanding the conflict between religion and science and what can be done to bring about their integration.

In talking about these three differentiated cultural spheres, Wilber is especially helpful in telling us which kind of language we need to describe them.

Science. The objective area of science, the sphere of Truth and the realm of IT, uses what Wilber calls "mono-logical" language. By that he means that this cultural sphere is concerned with things, and we can describe them without getting any feedback from them. To give an easy example from chemistry, we don't need the opinion of the element potassium to describe it as "shiny, easily cut with a knife, and explosive with water." We can describe the world of things objectively, using "mono-logical" language.

Morality. In contrast, we need "dia-logical" language to talk about the communal WE realm of Morals and Good. We obviously need feedback from others if we are to know what they consider to be of value and significance. Because we have to talk with people to know what's important to them, the inter-subjective moral realm of WE requires "dia-logical" language.

Art. The subjective realm of I, Art and Beauty, uses "trans-logical" language. By that Wilber means that the realm of personal subjectivity is mostly beyond words. We really can't say much about our inner experience in rational terms. Logical language isn't adequate to express our relationships with one another or to express the experience of communion with all that exists, and it is even more inadequate if we try to express in words our relationship with that "ultimate mystery out of which all things emerge." We turn to Beauty and Art, aesthetics and creativity, to express these most intimate aspects of our interiority.

---

The great shift in Western culture from Pre-modern to Modern is that these three realms-- each understood in the broadest sense-- become free to pursue their own concerns and interests, free to use their own methods, and free to proceed at their own pace. With the coming of Modernity, art, morality and science became independent spheres of human activity.

Wilber gives some good examples of this independence. Artists can now paint landscapes or a still life, for example; they don't have to limit themselves to depictions of the lives of the saints or stories from the bible, as they did when the cultural areas were fused "like an acorn."

Scientists, similarly, can use an instrument like a telescope to observe the motion of the moons around a planet; they didn't have to accept the word of church authority that said such motion isn't possible.

And both individuals and communities can determine what's right for them, without external authorities defining for them what constitutes proper ethical behavior.

In addition to his descriptions and examples of the three differentiated spheres, Wilber's comparisons of the cultural spheres-- each with the two others-- is especially helpful:

WE & IT. The differentiation of the communal realm of WE from the objective realm of IT results in the fact that the tyranny of the group-- either religious or political-- could no longer determine what is objectively true. WE and IT are separate realms of knowledge.

I & IT. In the same way, differentiation of the subjective realm of I from the objective realm of IT means that no individual can claim to establish objective truth. When art and science are differentiated, truth isn't determined by the wishes or whims of any individual.

WE & I. Similarly, the differentiation of the communal realm of WE from the subjective realm of I resulted in the fact that groups could no longer dominate the lives of individuals. Persons have rights that cannot be violated-- by church, state, family or communities. When morality and art are differentiated, individuals are no longer controlled by the group WE.

When we look at Wilber's descriptions of the three cultural spheres and his comparisons between them, it's clear that the "gains of Modernity" can be described in one word: freedom.

===

Historically, Modernity is most often said to have started around the time of the Italian Renaissance (14th century) and to have blossomed at the time of the Enlightenment (18th century). An important author I've referred to a number of times in these posts, Bruno Barnhart, sees it starting a century or two earlier (around the time of Francis of Assisi and Dante) and I've even heard it traced back to the desert hermits of the early centuries of Christianity.

However far back we can trace its roots, the very essence of Modernity is human autonomy. If the disaster of Modernity is the collapse of the Great Chain, human freedom is its dignity.

In a section on Modernity in his book, The Future of Wisdom, Bruno Barnhart says that as individuals differentiated themselves from religious and cultural traditions and institutions, they began to realize themselves with a new autonomy which also included a new intellectual autonomy. 

The individual person "began to think for himself or herself, and to arrive at independent conclusions."

This opened up space "for critical thought and free discussion," leading to scientific inquiry, creative innovation, and a sense of progressive dynamism-- "all expressions of a single massive historical process," the "emergence of the individual person from the collective matrix of religion, society and culture."

Wilber mentions other aspects of human freedom-- that our personal identity "is not determined by our role in a social hierarchy," for example. And among the "dignities" of Modernity he lists "political and civil rights such as the outlawing of slavery, women's rights, child labor laws, and freedom of speech, religion, assembly, fair trial, and equality under the law."

This independence from social class, economic status and religious background is one of the great treasures of American society.

The main idea in all this is quite clear. As Wilber puts it: "the values and rights brought about by Modernity such as equality, freedom and justice existed nowhere in the pre-modern world on a large scale." (Wilber's italics.) "Slavery existed in every pre-modern society," he notes, "and none of the world's pre-modern religions offered these rights and dignities on any large scale."

In the face of this failure of the Pre-modern religious perspective, human freedom stands out. We can easily see why the early sociologist Max 
Weber called the differentiation of the cultural spheres "one of the most significant developments in all human history."

===

I'm grateful to Ken Wilber for his sense of fairness in presenting such a balanced view of the gains as well as the losses which resulted from the shift from the pre-Modern to the Modern world view. Thanks to Wilber, I understand much better why the successes of science and the failure of the earlier religious perspectives put science and religion in such conflict.

In a way which I previously did not, I can see that the gains of Modernity provide us with the tools we need for the integration of science and religion in our day.

With the insights of the Post-modern perspectives-- about our need to recover our union with the natural world, our task to be creators of our human world, and our recognition of the value of cultural diversity, where "no single perspective is privileged"-- Modernity's gains open the way for an everyday, down-to-earth practice of the New Cosmology.

sam@macspeno. com

=== +++ ===

Your feedback is welcome.

To send a comment: use either "Click here to send a comment" (below) or click on "Post a Comment" (at the bottom).

If you prefer, send your thoughts, suggestions and questions to my email address (above).

To email a link to this post to a friend, with your own message, click on the little envelope with an arrow (below).

If you would like to be notified when I publish a new post, let me know; I'll put you on the list.

+++

#75. Three Post-modern Movements

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This post is part of the series I began with #73 about two important books concerned with the integration of science and religion: Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution and Ken Wilber's The Marriage of Sense and Soul. They go together as theory and practice. Wilber offers us conceptual understanding and Dowd provides realistic help with the practical details.

===

In the most recent post (#74) I described the three major social-cultural stages of Western history: pre-modern, modern and post-modern. We need to understand them if we are to have a good sense of why science and religion have been in conflict and what's needed for their integration.

All the world's pre-modern religions have some kind of multi-leveled cosmology, a Great Chain or Ladder of Being. The most common three-level expression of it is "matter, mind and spirit"-- referring, of course, to the physical universe, to human consciousness and to divinity in some sense. Although they didn't ignore the lower levels, the pre-modern religions gave their attention primarily to the higher levels.

In the modern (i.e., modernity) phase of European culture, Western society shifted its attention-- due to the immense success of science beginning around 1600 CE-- to the bottom rung of the Ladder. In this modernity stage of the West's cultural development-- already 400 years old-- only the Great Chain's bottom rung was considered real.

Over the last few centuries, the loss of the pre-modern religious perspectives has provoked several major cultural responses. This post is about the three main post-modern reactions to the "collapse," as Wilber calls it, of the Great Chain: Romanticism, Idealism and Deconstructionism.

===

I've found Wilber's explanations of the significance of these post-modern movements especially helpful in understanding our present situation with regard to the convergence of science and religion.

It's taking place in a cultural context where pre-modern religious perspectives were denied validity and modernity's collapse of the Great Ladder was considered enlightened progress, so we need to understand these main post-modern responses to that collapse. Each of them has something positive to contribute to the New Story of the universe and our place in it.

Wilber points out that the shift away from the pre-modern religious worldview left the modern West as "the only civilization ever without a Great Chain." He says that "in not much more than a century" the Western world became a flatland that was "devoid of consciousness, compassion, care, values, depth and divinity."

And there soon arose, as Wilber says, "a post-modern rebellion." It was fueled by the interior realms wanting-- Wilber says they were "screaming"-- to be heard.

So we need to keep in mind that post-modernity is a revolt against that flatland, that these three post-modernity movements are reactions to scientific materialism. We need to understand them well if we are to move beyond our present situation that includes things like environmental disasters, religious conflicts, racial prejudices, cover-ups by church authorities of sexual abuses, and the patriarchal suppression of women.

===

As I mentioned in the previous post, the names of these post-modern movements, at least the first two-- Romanticism and Idealism-- are probably familiar; but if you're like me, you may not be too clear about just what those terms mean.

The third post-modernity movement has so many different aspects that even its name varies depending on which aspects are being emphasized. Examples are Positivism, Behavioralism and Nihilism; sometimes it's just called "post-modernism." Here, I'm using its most general name, Deconstructionism.

We can easily get lost in the words. The important point to keep in mind is that these three post-modern movements are attempts by the people of Western society to deal with the loss of the higher levels of the Great Chain brought about by science. Romanticism and Idealism are opposite responses to that collapse, while Deconstructionism, in contrast, is an attempt to bring about the collapse of science itself.

Little about all this made much sense to me until I read Wilber's Marriage of Sense and Soul. He offers not only an excellent analysis of how things got to be the way they are, but also a very clear presentation of both the positive and the negative aspects of the pre-modernity religious worldview and of the various post-modernity responses to its loss. His fairness and balance are impressive.

(What follows is an intellectual workout, but one that is, I promise, well worth the effort.)

===

Romanticism. If you're like me, you may tend to associate the word "Romanticism" with classical music, especially Beethoven's. But it is also, of course, a form of art, architecture, poetry and literature as well as a cultural-social and philosophical movement.

As a response to the flatland of modernity brought about by the collapse of the Great Chain of Being, Romanticism is, as Wilber calls it, "a philosophical revolt against rationalism."

He says the Romantic movement "bitterly reproached Enlightenment thinkers for 'dissecting man': for mutilating humanity and denying our life, our communion with nature and our self-expression." Some famous names associated with Romanticism are Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman. They tried, says Wilber, "to reweave the web of life, to heal the fragmentation, with intense feeling."

He calls this "unified feeling for life" the central aspiration of Romantics. They yearned for wholeness and unity, "for a return to the Origin, to find the lost Beloved, to go back to nature." Terms like "noble savage" and "simple peasant" may be familiar expressions of the Romantic movement's option for regression to a pre-modernity condition.

I found of special interest Wilber's note that Romanticism also included what he describes as an "admiration of the violently self-centered hero, rediscovery of the artist (expressive self) as supremely individual creator, and exultation of senses and emotions over intellectual activity."

That "admiration of the violently self-centered hero" still shows today in our culture's irrational adulation of rock stars and celebrities, athletes and military heroes, politicians and charismatic religious leaders. And many of the "back to basics" movements in government, religion and education are also expressions of the fundamental thrust of Romanticism.

Wilber says that the most popular place for the Romantics to go back to was Classical Greece, but that there was also the pre-patriarchal Neolithic period of the Great Mother Goddess and the pre-agricultural age of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers-- still promoted in our day by those he calls "retro-Romantics."

He says that in picking and choosing what we admire about a period and ignoring what we don't (he gives as examples "war, slavery and bride-price"), there is a dangerous tendency, as the post-modernist thinker, Michael Foucault, has pointed out, "to evoke a completely mythical past."

So while our reintegration with nature is indeed important, it's clear that pre-modern societies can't serve as models, and that, as protest and revolt, Romanticism can't function as an integrating force between science and religion. With its emphasis on body, life and emotions, Romanticism excludes the rational. But what's needed is to incorporate the rational into the higher realms of religion's Great Chain of Being.

And yet, the Romantic movement's cry of "back to nature," with its desire for communion with the great Web of Life and the cycles of the seasons, was "an aspiration as noble as any that can be conceived," says Wilber. "We owe the Romantics an undying debt of gratitude" because they were "the first to spot the disease and react to it with horror."

===

Idealism. This second post-modernity movement is the very opposite of Romanticism: instead of looking back to the past in response to the collapse of the Great Chain of Being, Idealism looks ahead to the future.

While it's hard to say exactly when, sometime around the end of the 18th century an alternative to the longing for the past appeared-- an evolutionary perspective. Wilber says: "German Idealism was an alternative to German Romanticism's looking backward."

Romanticism, he notes, is like "a religious version of the second law of thermodynamics;" it's the idea that the world is running down in some sense, spiritually. It can be found in traditions such as Native American and Hindu, as well as some contemporary feminist views of the Neolithic period as a time of peace and harmony-- and, of course, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic story of the Garden of Eden. So Romanticism is much like the world's pre-modern religions: in looking back to a "golden age" in the past-- in its urge to go back to nature, back to basics-- Romanticism is the opposite of an evolutionary perspective.

But "within one century," says Wilber, "serious thinkers considered something new: what pre-modern religions had never thought about, that we are growing toward our potential and union with the divine." He calls it "Spirit-in-action" and "God-in-the-making."

These German Idealist philosophers "rail against the idea of return to nature; they see it as regression to sentiment and feeling and anti-rationalism, regression to a less developed state." But we can't go back, says Wilber. The cosmic process is divine self-actualization and self-unfolding. We must move forward to its realization.

So Idealism is a vision of an evolutionary growth toward God. It was spelled out by thinkers and philosophers such as Frederick Schelling, Georg Hegel, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. "In India," says Wilber, "it was given its most accurate spiritual context by Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin made it famous in the West."

In Wilber's book the section on Idealism includes a fascinating discussion of the area of thought known as epistemology-- our "understanding of understanding," as the Biogenetic Structuralists liked to say.

It goes back to the 3rd-century Neo-platonic philosopher, Plotinus, who developed a "complex spiritual cosmology" involving the place of human consciousness in the unity of all things and realization of divinity. Among the German Idealists, says Wilber, Schelling produced "a profound philosophy of spiritual unfolding and Hegel worked out the details."

The main idea is that in creating the world, the Absolute (Ultimate, Divinity) "manifests" or "goes out of itself," so that the world-- and human consciousness within it-- is nothing less than "divinity in process of being self-actualized."

This idea is startling even for most people today; it says that evolution isn't anti-religion, it's what religion is all about. Wilber mentions a neat phrase used by the philosopher Hegel: that the world's evolution is "the life of God."

"The glory of this vision," says Wilber, is that it is "alive to evolutionary development. It's the first philosophy ever to come to terms with the evolution of the universe." It "brought heaven down to earth and took earth up to heaven."

But "this glorious spiritual flower, the finest the West has ever known," had "one crippling inadequacy," Wilber says. It "lacked a yoga."

By that he means that it "possessed no tested practice for reliably reproducing the religious insights and experience that it's all about." 

And lacking a strong spiritual practice, Idealism degenerated quickly: "In less than a century, the glorious vision had come and gone."

I think the work of Michael Dowd in his Thank God for Evolution-- the second of the two important books I'm describing in this series of posts-- goes a long way toward providing us with an understanding of the kind of "strong spiritual practice" that's needed in our day.

===

Deconstructionism. This third post-modern social movement is quite different from the other two. Romanticism looks to the past and Idealism looks to the future, but both are protests against the rationalist materialism of science. In contrast, Deconstructionism tries to undermine rationalism and science itself.

Wilber notes that the key idea for understanding the Deconstructionist worldview is interpretation. As a third post-modern response to the loss of the Great Chain, it doesn't focus on facts about God or the world but, instead, on our human self-awareness and how we interpret the words we use to describe our experiences of God, world and self.

By "interpretation" Wilber means something like what might be called "our communal understanding." His name for it is "inter-subjective understanding." He notes that even in understanding animals, we have to interpret their actions if we are to know what they mean.

And this, he says, is the great contribution of the post-modern perspective: "In the face of faceless flatland, it is a bold reassertion of interiority." Things, including animals and human persons, have an inner reality-- an internal self-organization-- which is no less real than their "without." The higher rungs of the Great Chain are as valid as the bottom rung.

But this post-modern perspective is especially complicated. Not, however, because it affirms the reality of interiority, but because each of us has our own inner understanding of the external world. Each of us has our own interiority!

I found a good expression of this critically important concept in the Textbook of Transpersonal Psychology and Psychiatry: "Transpersonal theorists generally agree that the reality people experience is a construction of the individual. Similarly, Transpersonal psychiatrists would generally agree that any attempt to know reality through observation is not objective but influenced by the observer's biases."

At some level of experience, probably most of us would agree that we all construct our own world, that each of us interprets reality in our own 
way.

But the extreme post-modernists took this understanding too far. They said that there is nothing but interpretation. All we have is interiority. This extreme view denies any objective understanding of the exterior world. In this reversal of flatland, says Wilber, "the only truth is interpretive whim."

"And the wonder of it," he adds, "is that this position managed to convince a fair number of academics as to its truth as a cure for modernity's ills." It is "now the prevalent mood of academia, literary theory, new historicism, much political theory, and all 'new paradigm' approaches."

Even here, however, Wilber shows his outstanding sense of fairness and intellectual balance. He insists that that the core assumptions of this post-modern perspective contain what he calls "moments of truth" which are accurate and need to be honored.

(Please hang in there! The final sprint in this intellectual workout is a quick look at these three "moments of truth.")

The first of these "moments of truth" which needs to be honored is that our understanding of reality is not "pre-given." By this Wilber means that we are, in fact, always interpreting the world, always "constructing" our understanding of reality.

A second "moment of truth" in the post-modern viewpoint, according to Wilber, is that the meaning of any expression of our understanding is always dependent on the context in which we express that understanding.

The point here is that while interpretation is in fact an essential ingredient in our understanding of the cosmos and we can't deny that there's some objective ground for our interpretations, it's also the case that the meaning of whatever words we use to express our experience depends on the context of those words we use. So to insist that no context has any more validity than any other-- as the extreme Deconstructionists do-- just isn't helpful.

The great value of these first two "moments of truth" is that they allow us to see that human consciousness, expressing itself via language, isn't simply a representation of a pre-given reality but a participation in the very construction of our world. This understanding is what was ignored-- overlooked and missed-- by modernity's flatland perspective: that language is, in fact, a powerful creative force. "Language creates worlds," says Wilber.

The third "moment of truth" is perhaps the most important of all; it's that "no single perspective is privileged." The post-modernity worldview values diversity: it recognizes that multiple contexts and perspectives need to be taken into account.

"All ideas need to be understood as partial-- possibly even distorted-- truths," says Wilber. "We need to add up all the perspectives, attempting to grasp the integral whole of the multiple contexts that disclose the cosmos."

And we need to see, he adds, that doing so "results in not just a representation of our world but a performance of it."

===

"Performance" may seem an odd word, at least at first, but it helps to clarify the immense positive values given to us in all three of these post-modern movements. Yes, as Romanticism says, we need to recover our communion with the natural world. And Yes, as the Idealists' insight has it, the natural world is nothing less than the unfolding of the "life of God."

But Yes also-- I'd say especially-- to the perspectives of Deconstructionism that offer us an integral understanding of our participatory role-- our place, job, task-- in the evolution of the universe. They provide us with a job description for the New Cosmology.

As I see it, Ken Wilber (with his theoria in Marriage of Sense and Soul) and Michael Dowd (with his praxis in Thank God for Evolution) are helping us to figure out the nature of our cosmic job description-- and how we can go about evaluating our job performance.

(End of workout!)

sam@macspeno.com

=== +++ ===

Your feedback is welcome.

To send a comment: use either "Click here to send a comment" (below) or click on "Post a Comment" (at the bottom).

If you prefer, send your thoughts, suggestions and questions to my email address (above).

To email a link to this post to a friend, with your own message, click on the little envelope with an arrow (below).

If you would like to be notified when I publish a new post, let me know; I'll put you on the list.

+++

#14. Person as Process

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts:
http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This is the third of three blog postings dealing with the Mystery of Person in light of the neurological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism.

The two previous postings dealt with the neurological understanding of consciousness as the cognitive extension of prehension (#12) and as cognized environment (#13).

That first post (#12) is about how the human spirit is both free and also rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process; it's relatively easy to understand, despite the jargon. The second (#13) isn't so easy: the idea is that we're not just part of the universe but in fact are "the universe become conscious of itself." It's an unfamiliar concept for most of us.

This third posting on the Mystery of Person is even more challenging; it's about how neurological studies help us to understand ourselves as a process. We know we're not just an object or thing, but process? We've really got to work at this one!

===

From one point of view, the idea is clear enough. If we are the universe internalized ("cognized"), and the universe is a dynamic (not static) process, then logically we, too, must be a dynamic process.

But logic isn't everything.

And yet that logic does confirm one of our fundamental intuitions (gut feelings), that persons really are something more than mere objects or things.

It's that "more" that this posting is about.

===

In some sense, of course, we are things. We're not a vacuum or emptiness. We're something, but we're not just some thing. Not a thing, but not nothing.

Language is inadequate because we're not yet used to thinking in dynamic or evolutionary terms; the static worldview has prevailed for so many centuries in western culture. But as the developmental perspectives coming from contemporary science filter down to the popular level, we can expect to be able to express these ideas about ourselves more readily.

We really do live in a tremendously transitional time. In terms of our understanding of the world and of the place of humanity within it, words such as the Great Turning, Immense Transition and the Second Axial Period are being used to describe our time in human history.

And among the many adjustments we're being called to make in our perceptions of things, it may be that coming to see ourselves as process may be the biggest adjustment of all.

===

One of the 20th century's great geniuses, Buckminster Fuller, saw it. He entitled one of his books I Seem to Be a Verb (Bantam Books, 1970). And it's already more than fifty years since the famous British biologist Julian Huxley made his now well-known statement that humanity is "the universe become conscious of itself."

But even back in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas, working in the context of Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, described the human soul as "that which can become all things." It was his way of distinguishing human souls from the souls (life-principle) of animals.

Of course he didn't have the modern evolutionary perspectives and the findings of neuro-physiology available to him, so his statement is probably a working out of a profound intuitive perception on his part. 

But he was saying something very much like what neuro-science means when it uses terms such as "cognized environment" and "process" to describe the mystery of personal consciousness.

Those neurological perspectives help us to understand just what it means to say that we are one with the universe (that we can "become all things") and that we are the activity of that dynamic process reflecting back on itself at its most complex stage of development (that we can "become all things").

===

We struggle for words to describe the Mystery of Person.

One frequently used term is subjectivity. We say that a person is not an object but a subject. "Not an it but a thou," in Martin Buber's words.

Another frequently used term is interiority. Religious language has included talk about the "interior life" for many centuries.

In our day, the style in which we live our interior life has come to be known as a spirituality, and it appears that our personal spirituality-- the way in which we are religious, how we live our inner life-- depends to a great extent on our inborn personality type. Our style of spirituality seems to depend on the genetic material the universe provides us with when we are called forth from within the cosmic evolutionary process. I hope to share some thoughts along those lines in future posts.

Words like reflection, reflexive and reflective also have been commonly used in western culture to describe the intuitive insight that human consciousness is somehow the world "convoluted" or "doubled back" on itself. It's the "somehow" of that process which neurophysiology helps us understand better.

As I spelled out in some detail in the previous posting (#13 on Cognized Environment), the basic idea about the reflexive nature of consciousness is that "any sense data that enters the brain is immediately compared with already-there previously-stored sense data." New information is compared with already-present information.

That's our brain's reflective ability. It emerged originally as an adaptive evolutionary mechanism: in-coming data is processed in terms of how it fits with previous information already stored in the brain, so that threatening things in the environment can be avoided and beneficial things can be pursued.

It's this activity of the brain which accounts for the external world (what neurology calls the "operational environment") becoming internalized (become "cognized"). And it's the neurological mechanism which, although obviously unknown to Aquinas, is what he was trying to describe by saying that the soul "can become all things."

In neurological jargon, the soul (personal consciousness or neuro-gnosis) is the "informational content" of the media of nerve cells and networks of neural structures in which this information is "coded" and by way of which it gets modified via our life experience.

"Coding" refers to the fact that awareness is the "informational content" of the neurological structures; it's "coded" into those structures in the same way that information about gender, body build and hair color, for example, is coded in our DNA structures.

The difference between DNA and brain structures helps us to be more clear about the second and third levels of complexity in the cosmic process. DNA is essentially a very large molecule made of millions of atoms; it is located inside the nucleus of each living cell and its activity accounts for the emergence of self-transforming life-forms. In contrast, the human brain is made of millions of cells-- as many cells as there are stars in our galaxy-- and the activity of its incredibly complicated structure is what accounts for the emergence at the third level of complexity of personal consciousness.

So in terms of what's going on in the brain, it may be that information processing isn't such a bad way to understand the mystery of person.

===

A problem is that we tend to think of knowledge or consciousness as something we have, not as something which we are. But that's still thinking in terms of the old static worldview. In the perspectives of a dynamic evolutionary universe, being a person isn't something that we are so much as something which we do.

Another problem is that it may seem that this is, once again, a reduction of the mystery of person to the level of matter. But it's not. 

We need to keep in mind that we're not talking here about rocks or clouds but living matter at the most complex organizational level we know of in the entire universe. If the activity of DNA inside cells can produce whales and roses, we can expect that the activity of the millions of cells operating together inside our brain produces something more.

So maybe "information processing" is a very good way of understanding the mystery we are.

===

It's often said that we live in an "Information Age." Adding information or information processing to the list of words-- such as mind, soul, spirit, awareness-- we use to name personal consciousness might in fact be a breakthrough. It provides us with a new and better way to appreciate just what we mean by a human person. For the first time in humanity's cultural development, and with thanks especially to contemporary neurological studies, we can value persons in a way that wasn't part of our thinking in past ages.

We may be coming into the Age of the Person.

It sounds like hype, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a way of saying that for the first time in human history, we're coming to recognize the significance of persons in a cosmic context.

It's surely a big improvement over Aristotle's definition of a human being as a "rational animal" and of Rene Descartes' description of a person as a "thinking reed." We know so much more about the world and thus about ourselves than those earlier thinkers ever could!

Understanding persons in terms of information processing helps us not only to move out of the centuries-old prison of religious and rationalist dualism, it allows us to see ourselves at the very center of the cosmic process.

So even though it's not easy to think of ourselves as information-processing, we may be on to something of great significance. It's here that we can see that the findings of contemporary science begin to converge with the deepest perspectives of our religious traditions.

===

I started this blog for "sharing thoughts about the convergence of science and religion" back at the end of 2006. It was sparked by media reports of the science-religion controversies. More correctly, it was sparked by my impatience with the naivety of many of those reports.

By far the best of them was the cover essay of US News (15 Oct 06), "Is There Room for the Soul?". It was written by Jay Tolson of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC and included a review of highlights of contemporary consciousness studies. You might like to check out Tolson's article and/or that first blog entry (On Recent Developments in Science and Religion).

In his article, Tolson brings up the problems involved in recognizing that personal consciousness "is not a thing." He emphasizes that this "doesn't mean that consciousness isn't real or that the mind doesn't exist, but only that 'thing' may not be an accurate way to understand it."

He suggests that we can profit from what he calls the wisdom of Buddhism... "where the inner self is correctly understood not as an entity or substance but as a dynamic process." His suggestion is a good example of the convergence of an ancient spiritual perspective with the findings of contemporary neuro-science.

But we don't need to be Buddhists to know that information processing is a good way to understand ourselves. It's something we know from personal experience. We are always learning and changing as a result of what we do and what happens to us.

In neurological jargon, the process is called the Empirical Modification Cycle. It has, as I mentioned in posting #10 (Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism), "a central place in the scientific understanding of our personal and cultural development." I hope to spell out some of those ideas, especially with regard to symbol, ritual and meditation, in future postings.

We need to be careful not to let the neurological jargon, Empirical Modification Cycle, get in the way. A blog reader sent this brief description of what Biogenetic Structuralists mean by it: "physical changes in the brain because of outside events."

That description is a good way to summarize the idea that the information already in the cells and structures of our brain is constantly being modified via our life-experience.

We know that life-experience changes us. Each of us has attended the "school of hard knocks" and we feel good about our successful accomplishments. But what a difference in perspective when we place those experiences, good or bad, and the changes they bring about in us, in the context of the dynamic cosmic process!

One thing we can immediately recognize is that all the problems and challenges we encounter as we live our lives are aspects of the evolution of the universe. Our personal struggles are the cosmic process in action. I put it this way at the end of the previous posting: "Our personal relationships and the products of our creative imagination and technical know-how are not just private activities. They are the cosmic process doing its thing through us."

Understanding ourselves as cosmic process isn't easy. As I said at the beginning of this posting, we've really got to work at it. But it's worth it.

The biogenetic (evolutionary) and neurological perspective provides us a sense of meaning and purpose we just can't have in a static worldview. In the dynamic perspectives of contemporary science, we can see that what we do and what happens to us has cosmic significance.

Just saying that begins to sound like religious language. Meaning, purpose, significance: the religious implications of this scientific view of personal consciousness are immense.

So much to investigate!

sam@macspeno.com