B000OVLIPQ EBOK

by Tarnas, Richard

  The first paradigm, familiar to all of us from our education, describes human history and the evolution of human consciousness as an epic narrative of human progress, a long heroic journey from a primitive world of dark ignorance, suffering, and limitation to a brighter modern world of ever-increasing knowledge, freedom, and well-being. This great trajectory of progress is seen as having been made possible by the sustained development of human reason and, above all, by the emergence of the modern mind. This view informs much, perhaps most, of what we see and hear on the subject and is easily recognized whenever we encounter a book or program with a title such as The Ascent of Man, The Discoverers, Man’s Conquest of Space, or the like. The direction of history is seen as onward and upward. Humanity is typically personified as “man” (anthropos, homo, l’uomo, l’homme, el hombre, chelovek, der Mensch) and imaged, at least implicitly, as a masculine hero, rising above the constraints of nature and tradition, exploring the great cosmos, mastering his environment, determining his own destiny: restless, bold, brilliantly innovative, ceaselessly pressing forward with his intelligence and will, breaking out of the structures and limits of the past, ascending to ever-higher levels of development, forever seeking greater freedom and new horizons, discovering ever-wider arenas for self-realization. In this perspective, the apex of human achievement commenced with the rise of modern science and democratic individualism in the centuries following the Renaissance. The view of history is one of progressive emancipation and empowerment. It is a vision that emerged fully in the course of the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though its roots are as old as Western civilization itself.

  As with all powerful myths, we have been, and many perhaps remain, largely unconscious of this historical paradigm’s hold on our collective imagination. It animates the vast majority of contemporary books and essays, editorial columns, book reviews, science articles, research papers, and television documentaries, as well as political, social, and economic policies. It is so familiar to us, so close to our perception, that in many respects it has become our common sense, the form and foundation of our self-image as modern humans. We have been so long identified with this progressive understanding of the human project, and particularly of the modern Western project, that it is only in recent decades that we have begun to be able to see it as a paradigm—that is, to be able to see, at least partly, from outside its sphere of influence.

  The other great historical vision tells a very different story. In this understanding, human history and the evolution of human consciousness are seen as a predominantly problematic, even tragic narrative of humanity’s gradual but radical fall and separation from an original state of oneness with nature and an encompassing spiritual dimension of being. In its primordial condition, humankind had possessed an instinctive knowledge of the profound sacred unity and interconnectedness of the world, but under the influence of the Western mind, especially its modern expression, the course of history brought about a deep schism between humankind and nature, and a desacralization of the world. This development coincided with an increasingly destructive exploitation of nature, the devastation of traditional indigenous cultures, a loss of faith in spiritual realities, and an increasingly unhappy state of the human soul, which experienced itself as ever more isolated, shallow, and unfulfilled. In this perspective, both humanity and nature are seen as having suffered grievously under a long exploitative, dualistic vision of the world, with the worst consequences being produced by the oppressive hegemony of modern industrial societies empowered by Western science and technology. The nadir of this fall is the present time of planetary turmoil, ecological crisis, and spiritual distress, which are seen as the direct consequence of human hubris, embodied above all in the spirit and structure of the modern Western mind and ego. This second historical perspective reveals a progressive impoverishment of human life and the human spirit, a fragmentation of original unities, a ruinous destruction of the sacred community of being.

  Something like these two interpretations of history, here described in starkly contrasting terms for the sake of easy recognition, can be seen to inform many of the more specific issues of our age. They represent two basic antithetical myths of historical self-understanding: the myth of Progress and what in its earlier incarnations was called the myth of the Fall. These two historical paradigms appear today in many variations, combinations, and compromise formations. They underlie and influence discussions of the environmental crisis, globalization, multiculturalism, fundamentalism, feminism and patriarchy, evolution and history. One might say that these opposing myths constitute the underlying argument of our time: Whither humanity? Upward or downward? How are we to view Western civilization, the Western intellectual tradition, its canon of great works? How are we to view modern science, modern rationality, modernity itself? How are we to view “man”? Is history ultimately a narrative of progress or of tragedy?

  John Stuart Mill made a shrewd, and wise, observation about the nature of most philosophical debates. In his splendid essay on Coleridge, he pointed out that both sides in intellectual controversies tended to be “in the right in what they affirmed, though in the wrong in what they denied.” Mill’s insight into the nature of intellectual discourse shines light on many disagreements: Whether it is conservatives debating liberals, parents arguing with their children, or a lovers’ quarrel, almost invariably something is being repressed in the service of making one’s point. But his insight seems to apply with particular aptness to the conflict of historical paradigms just described. I believe that both parties to this dispute have grasped an essential aspect of our history, that both views are in a sense correct, each with compelling arguments within its own frame of reference, but also that they are both intensely partial views, as a result of which they both mis-read a larger story.

  It is not simply that each perspective possesses a significant grain of truth. Rather, both historical paradigms are at once fully valid and yet also partial aspects of a larger frame of reference, a metanarrative, in which the two opposite interpretations are precisely intertwined to form a complex, integrated whole. The two historical dramas actually constitute each other. Not only are they simultaneously true; they are embedded in each other’s truth. They underlie and inform each other, implicate each other, make each other possible. One might compare the way the two perspectives coalesce while appearing to exclude each other to those gestalt-experiment illustrations that can be perceived in two different, equally cogent ways, such as the precisely ambiguous figure that can be seen either as a white vase or as two black profiles in silhouette. By means of a gestalt shift in perception, the observer can move back and forth between the two images, though the figure itself, the original body of data, remains unchanged.

  One is reminded here of Niels Bohr’s axiom in quantum physics, “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth,” or Oscar Wilde’s “A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.” What is difficult, of course, is to see both images, both truths, simultaneously: to suppress nothing, to remain open to the paradox, to maintain the tension of opposites. Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once. This may be the task we must begin to engage if we wish to gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of human consciousness, and the history of the Western mind in particular: to see that long intellectual and spiritual journey, moving through stages of increasing differentiation and complexity, as having brought about both a progressive ascent to autonomy and a tragic fall from unity—and, perhaps, as having prepared the way for a synthesis on a new level. From this perspective, the two paradigms reflect opposite but equally essential aspects of an immense dialectical process, an evolutionary drama that has been unfolding for thousands of years and that now appears to be reaching a critical, perhaps climactic moment of transformation.

  Yet there is another important party to this debate, another view of human history, one t
hat instead of integrating the two opposing historical perspectives into a larger, more complex one appears to refute them both altogether. This third view, articulated with increasing frequency and sophistication in our own time, holds that no coherent pattern actually exists in human history or evolution, at least none that is independent of human interpretation. If an overarching pattern in history is visible, that pattern has been projected onto history by the human mind under the influence of various non-empirical factors: cultural, political, economic, social, sociobiological, psychological. In this view, the pattern—the myth or story—ultimately resides in the human subject, not the historical object. The object can never be perceived without being selectively shaped by an interpretive framework, which itself is shaped and constructed by forces beyond itself and beyond the awareness of the interpreting subject. Knowledge of history, as of anything else, is ever-shifting, free-floating, ungrounded in an objective reality. Patterns are not so much recognized in phenomena as read into them. History is, finally, only a construct.

  On the one hand, this robust skepticism that pervades much of our postmodern thought is not far from that necessary critical perspective that allows us to discuss paradigms at all, to make comparisons and judgments about underlying conceptual structures such as those made above. Its recognition of the radically interpretive factor in all human experience and knowledge—its understanding that we are always seeing by means of myths and theories, that our experience and knowledge are always patterned and even constituted by various changing a priori and usually unconscious structures of meaning—is essential to the entire exercise we have been pursuing.

  On the other hand, this seemingly paradigm-free relativism, whereby no pattern or meaning exists in history except as constructed and projected onto history by the human mind, is itself clearly another paradigm. It recognizes that we always see by means of myths and interpretive categories, but fails to apply that recognition consistently to itself. It excels at “seeing through,” but perhaps has not seen through enough. In one sense, this form of the postmodern vision may be best understood as a direct outgrowth, possibly an inevitable one, of the progressive modern mind in its ever-deepening critical reflexivity—questioning, suspecting, striving for emancipation through critical awareness—reaching here in its most extreme development what is essentially a stage of advanced self-deconstruction. Yet this perspective may also be understood as the natural consequence of the Enlightenment vision beginning to encounter its own shadow—the darkly problematic narrative articulated by its opposing historical paradigm—and being challenged and reshaped by that encounter. For just this reason, the deconstructive postmodern perspective may represent a crucial element in the unfolding of a new and more comprehensive understanding. There is a deep truth in this view, though it too may also be a deeply partial truth, an essential aspect of a much larger, more embracing, and still more richly complex vision. The postmodern mind may eventually be seen as having constituted a necessary transitional stage between epochs, a period of dissolving and opening between larger sustained cultural paradigms.

  To begin to explore how all this might be so, and to understand better the historical and philosophical context for the perspective introduced in this book, let us take a more precise look at the basic nature of the modern world view.

  Forging the Self, Disenchanting the World

  Our world view is not simply the way we look at the world. It reaches inward to constitute our innermost being, and outward to constitute the world. It mirrors but also reinforces and even forges the structures, armorings, and possibilities of our interior life. It deeply configures our psychic and somatic experience, the patterns of our sensing, knowing, and interacting with the world. No less potently, our world view—our beliefs and theories, our maps, our metaphors, our myths, our interpretive assumptions—constellates our outer reality, shaping and working the world’s malleable potentials in a thousand ways of subtly reciprocal interaction. World views create worlds.

  Perhaps the most concise way of defining the modern world view is to focus on that which distinguishes it from virtually all other world views. Speaking very generally, what sets the modern mind apart is its fundamental tendency to assert and experience a radical separation between subject and object, a distinct division between the human self and the encompassing world. This perspective can be contrasted with what has come to be called the primal world view, characteristic of traditional indigenous cultures. The primal mind does not maintain this decisive division, does not recognize it, whereas the modern mind not only maintains it but is essentially constituted on it.

  The primal human being perceives the surrounding natural world as permeated with meaning, meaning whose significance is at once human and cosmic. Spirits are seen in the forest, presences are felt in the wind and the ocean, the river, the mountain. Meaning is recognized in the flight of two eagles across the horizon, in the conjunction of two planets in the heavens, in the unfolding cycles of the Moon and Sun. The primal world is ensouled. It communicates and has purposes. It is pregnant with signs and symbols, implications and intentions. The world is animated by the same psychologically resonant realities that human beings experience within themselves. A continuity extends from the interior world of the human to the world outside. In the primal experience, what we would call the “outer” world possesses an interior aspect that is continuous with human subjectivity. Creative and responsive intelligence, spirit and soul, meaning and purpose are everywhere. The human being is a microcosm within the macrocosm of the world, participating in its interior reality and united with the whole in ways that are both tangible and invisible.

  Primal experience takes place, as it were, within a world soul, an anima mundi, a living matrix of embodied meaning. The human psyche is embedded within a world psyche in which it complexly participates and by which it is continuously defined. The workings of that anima mundi, in all its flux and diversity, are articulated through a language that is mythic and numinous. Because the world is understood as speaking a symbolic language, direct communication of meaning and purpose from world to human can occur. The many particulars of the empirical world are all endowed with symbolic, archetypal significance, and that significance flows between inner and outer, between self and world. In this relatively undifferentiated state of consciousness, human beings perceive themselves as directly—emotionally, mystically, consequentially—participating in and communicating with the interior life of the natural world and cosmos. To be more precise, this participation mystique involves a complex sense of direct inner participation not only of human beings in the world but also of human beings in the divine powers, through ritual, and of divine powers in the world, by virtue of their immanent and transformative presence. The participation is multi-directional and multidimensional, pervasive and encompassing.

  By contrast, the modern mind experiences a fundamental division between a subjective human self and an objective external world. Apart from the human being, the cosmos is seen as entirely impersonal and unconscious. Whatever beauty and value that human beings may perceive in the universe, that universe is in itself mere matter in motion, mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by chance and necessity. It is altogether indifferent to human consciousness and values. The world outside the human being lacks conscious intelligence, it lacks interiority, and it lacks intrinsic meaning and purpose. For these are human realities, and the modern mind believes that to project what is human onto the nonhuman is a basic epistemological fallacy. The world is devoid of any meaning that does not derive ultimately from human consciousness. From the modern perspective, the primal person conflates and confuses inner and outer and thus lives in a state of continuous magical delusion, in an anthropomorphically distorted world, a world speciously filled with the human psyche’s own subjective meaning. For the modern mind, the only source of meaning in the universe is human consciousness.

  Another way we might describe this situation would be to say that the modern mind enga
ges the world within an implicit experiential structure of being a subject set apart from, and in some sense over against, an object. The modern world is full of objects, which the human subject confronts and acts upon from its unique position of conscious autonomy. By contrast, the primal mind engages the world more as a subject embedded in a world of subjects, with no absolute boundaries between or among them. In the primal perspective, the world is full of subjects. The primal world is saturated with subjectivity, interiority, intrinsic meanings and purposes.

  From the modern perspective, if I see the world as if it were communicating humanly relevant meaning to me in some purposeful, intelligent way, as if it were laden with meaning-rich symbols—a sacred text, as it were, to be interpreted—then I am projecting human realities onto the nonhuman world. Such an attitude toward the world is regarded by the modern mind as reflecting an epistemologically naïve state of awareness: intellectually undeveloped, undifferentiated, childish, wishfully self-indulgent, something to be outgrown and corrected through the development of a mature critical reason. Or worse, it is a sign of mental illness, of primitive magical thinking with delusions of self-reference, a condition to be suppressed and treated with appropriate medication.