Other major characteristics of this emerging intellectual vision include a deeper understanding of the pivotal role of the imagination in mediating all human experience and knowledge; an increased awareness of the depth, power, and complexity of the unconscious; and a more sophisticated analysis of the nature of symbolic, metaphoric, and archetypal meaning in human life. Behind many of these themes can be seen a rejection of all literalistic and univocal interpretations of reality—of the tendency, as Robert Bellah has put it, to identify “one conception of reality with reality itself.” Equally fundamental to this shift is a growing recognition of the need for and desirability of a radical opening of the mainstream Western intellectual and cultural tradition to the rich multiplicity of other traditions and perspectives that have evolved both within the West and in other cultures.
Yet this emphatic embrace of pluralism has been balanced by—and to a great extent been in the service of—a profound impulse for reintegration, a widely felt desire to overcome the fragmentation and alienation of the late modern mind. Underlying the variety of its expressions, the most distinctive trait of this new vision has been its concern with the philosophical and psychological reconciliation of numerous long-standing schisms: between human being and nature, self and world, spirit and matter, mind and body, conscious and unconscious, personal and transpersonal, secular and sacred, intellect and soul, science and the humanities, science and religion.
For some time this emerging consensus of convictions and aspirations has seemed to me, as to many others, the most interesting and hopeful intellectual development of our age and perhaps the one most likely to produce a viable successor to the rapidly deteriorating modern world view. Yet from its beginning this new vision or paradigm has confronted a seemingly insurmountable problem. The present world situation could hardly be more ripe for a major paradigm shift, and many thoughtful observers have concluded that such a shift, when it comes, should and very probably will be based on principles resembling those just cited. But to succeed in becoming a broad-based cultural vision, or even to achieve its own implicit program of psychological and intellectual integration, this new outlook has been lacking one essential element, the sine qua non of any genuinely comprehensive, internally consistent world view: a coherent cosmology.
In retrospect it is evident that the fundamental intellectual turning point of Western civilization was the Copernican revolution, understood in its largest sense. Nothing so effectively bestowed confidence in the supreme power of human reason. Nothing so emphatically and comprehensively affirmed the superiority of the modern Western mind over all others—all other world views, all other eras, all other cultures, all other modes of cognition. Nothing emancipated the modern self from a cosmos of established pregiven meanings more profoundly or more dramatically. It is impossible to think of the modern mind without the Copernican revolution.
Yet the luminosity of that great revolution has cast an extraordinary shadow. The radical displacement of the Earth and humanity from an absolute cosmic center, the stunning transference of the apparent cosmic order from the observed to the observer, and the eventual pervasive disenchantment of the material universe were all paradigmatic for the modern mind, and these have now come to epitomize humankind’s underlying sense of disorientation and alienation. With the heavens no longer a separate divine realm and with the Earth no longer embedded in a circumscribed celestial order of planetary spheres and powers, humanity was simultaneously liberated from and thrust out of the ancient–medieval cosmic womb. The essential nature of reality underwent an immense shift for the Western mind, which now engaged a world possessed of entirely new dimensions, structure, and existential implications.
For all the exalted numinosity of the Copernican birth, the new universe that eventually emerged into the light of common day was a spiritually empty vastness, impersonal, neutral, indifferent to human concerns, governed by random processes devoid of purpose or meaning. At a deep level human consciousness was thereby radically estranged and decentered. It no longer experienced itself as an essential expression and focus of an intrinsically meaningful universe. “Before the Copernican revolution,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “it was natural to suppose that God’s purposes were specially concerned with the earth, but now this has become an unplausible hypothesis”: mankind must instead be regarded as a “curious accident.” The Copernican revolution was the modern mind’s prototypical act of deconstruction, bringing both a birth and a death. It was the primordial cataclysm of the modern age, a stupendous event which destroyed an entire world and constituted a new one.
Not only the subsequent evolution of modern cosmology, from Newton and Laplace to Einstein and Hubble, but virtually the entire modern intellectual trajectory has sustained and magnified the primary Copernican insight: Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus. From seventeenth-century rationalism and empiricism to twentieth-century existentialism and astrophysics, human consciousness has found itself progressively emancipated yet also progressively relativized, unrooted, inwardly isolated from the spiritually opaque world it seeks to comprehend. The soul knows no home in the modern cosmos. The status of the human being in its cosmic setting is fundamentally problematic—solitary, accidental, ephemeral, inexplicable. The proud uniqueness and autonomy of “Man” have come at a high price. He is an insignificant speck cast adrift in a vast purposeless cosmos, a stranger in a strange land. Self-reflective human consciousness finds no foundation for itself in the empirical world. Inner and outer, psyche and cosmos, are radically discontinuous, mutually incoherent. As Steven Weinberg famously summarized modern cosmology, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” With the encompassing cosmos indifferent to human meaning, with all significance deriving ultimately from the decentered and accidental human subject, a meaningful world can never be more than a courageous human projection. Thus did the Copernican revolution establish the essential matrix for the modern world view in all its disenchanting ramifications. The most celebrated of human intellectual achievements, it remains the watershed of human alienation, the epochal symbol of humanity’s cosmic estrangement.
Here we face the crux of our present predicament. For it is this post-Copernican cosmological context that continues to frame the current effort to forge a new paradigm of reality, yet that context, utterly at variance with the deep transformations now being urged, thereby confounds them. Although many of the post-Copernican ramifications (Cartesian, Kantian, Darwinian, Freudian) have been grappled with, criticized, and reconceived to one extent or another, the great starting point for the whole trajectory of modern consciousness remains untouched. The cosmological metastructure that implicitly contained and precipitated all the rest is still so solidly established as to be beyond discussion. The physical sciences of the past hundred years have flung open wide the nature of reality, dissolving all the old absolutes, but the Earth still moves—along with, now, everything else, in a postmodern explosion of centerless, free-floating flux. Newton has been transcended but not Copernicus, who has rather been extended in every dimension.
For all the notable strides made in deconstructing the modern mind and moving towards a new vision, whether in science, philosophy, or religion, nothing has come close to questioning the larger Copernican revolution itself, the modern mind’s first principle and foundation. The very idea is as inconceivable now as was the idea of a moving Earth before 1500. That most fundamental modern revolution, along with its deepest existential consequences, still prevails, subtly yet globally determining the character of the contemporary mind. The continuing implacable reality of a purposeless cosmos places an effective glass ceiling on all attempts to reconstruct or soften the various alienating post-Copernican ramifications, from Descartes’s subject-object dualism to Darwin’s blind evolution. A straight line of disenchantment extends from astronomy and biology to philosophy and religion, as in Jacques Mo
nod’s well-known synopsis of the human condition in the later twentieth century: “The ancient covenant is in pieces: Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.”
From the cosmological perspective, the various movements now pressing for the creation of a more humanly meaningful and spiritually resonant world have been taking place in an atomistic void. In the absence of some unprecedented development beyond the existential framework defined by the larger Copernican revolution, these less primordial intellectual changes can never be more than brave interpretive exercises in an alien cosmic environment. No amount of revisioning philosophy or psychology, science or religion, can forge a new world view without a radical shift at the cosmological level. As it now stands, our cosmic context does not support the attempted transformation of human vision. No genuine synthesis seems possible. This enormous contradiction that invisibly encompasses the emerging paradigm is precisely what is preventing that paradigm from constituting a coherent and effective world view.
As a long line of thinkers from Pascal to Nietzsche have recognized, the cosmic spaces of meaningless vastness that surround the human world silently oppose and subvert the meaning of the human world itself. In such a context, all human imagination, all religious experience, all moral and spiritual values, can only too readily be seen as idiosyncratic human constructs. Despite the many profound and indispensable changes that have taken place in the contemporary Western mind, the larger cosmological situation continues to sustain and enforce the basic double bind of modern consciousness: Our deepest spiritual and psychological aspirations are fundamentally incoherent with the very nature of the cosmos as revealed by the modern mind. “Not only are we not at the center of the cosmos,” wrote Primo Levi, “but we are alien to it: we are a singularity. The universe is strange to us, we are strange in the universe.”
The distinctive pathos and paradox of our cosmological situation reflects a deep historical schism within modern culture and the modern sensibility. For the modern experience of a radical division between inner and outer—of a subjective, personal, and purposeful consciousness that is incongruously embedded in and evolved from an objective universe that is unconscious, impersonal, and purposeless—is precisely represented in the cultural polarity and tension in our history between Romanticism and the Enlightenment. On the one side of this divide, our interior selves hold precious our spiritual intuitions, our moral and aesthetic sensibilities, our devotion to love and beauty, the power of the creative imagination, our music and poetry, our metaphysical reflections and religious experiences, our visionary journeys, our glimpses of an ensouled nature, our inward conviction that the deepest truth can be found within. This interior impulse has been carried in modern culture by Romanticism, understood in its broadest sense—from Rousseau and Goethe, Wordsworth and Emerson all the way through to its spirited renascence, democratized and globalized, in the post-Sixties counterculture. In the Romantic impulse and tradition, the modern soul found profound psychological and spiritual expression.
On the other side of the schism, that soul has dwelled within a universe whose essential nature was fully determined and defined by the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. In effect, the objective world has been ruled by the Enlightenment, the subjective world by Romanticism. Together these have constituted the modern world view and the complex modern sensibility. One could say that the modern soul’s sustaining allegiance has been to Romanticism, whereas the modern mind’s deeper loyalty has been to the Enlightenment. Both live within us, fully yet antithetically. An impossible tension of opposites thereby resides deep in the modern sensibility. Hence the underlying pathos of the modern situation. The biography of the modern soul has taken place completely within a disenchanted Enlightenment cosmos, thereby contextualizing and rendering the entire life and striving of the modern soul as “merely subjective.” Our spiritual being, our psychology, is contradicted by our cosmology. Our Romanticism is contradicted by our Enlightenment, our inner by our outer.
Behind the Enlightenment/Romanticism division in high culture (mirrored in the academic world by the “two cultures” of science and the humanities) looms the deeper and more ancient cultural schism between science and religion. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, many spiritually sensitive individuals have found resources to help them cope with the human condition in the modern cosmological context in ways that, to one extent or another, answer their religious longings and existential needs. Paradoxically, it seems to be this very context, with its absolute erasure of all inherited orders of pregiven cosmic meaning, that has helped make possible in our time an unprecedented freedom, diversity, and authenticity of religious responses to the human condition. These have taken a multitude of forms: the pursuit of the individual spiritual journey drawing on many sources, the personal leap of faith, the life of ethical service and humanitarian compassion, the inward turn (meditation, prayer, monastic withdrawal), involvement with the great mystical traditions and practices from Asia (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Sufi) and from diverse indigenous and shamanic cultures (Native North American, Central and South American, African, Australian, Polynesian, Old European), recovery of various gnostic and esoteric perspectives and practices, the pursuit of psychedelic or entheogenic exploration, devotion to creative artistic expression as a spiritual path, or renewed engagement with revitalized forms of Jewish and Christian traditions, beliefs, and practices.
Yet all these engagements have taken place in a cosmos whose basic parameters have been defined by the determinedly nonspiritual epistemology and ontology of modern science. Because of science’s sovereignty over the external aspect of the modern world view, these noble spiritual journeys are pursued in a universe whose essential nature is recognized—whether consciously or subconsciously—to be supremely indifferent to those very quests. These many spiritual paths can and do provide profound meaning, solace, and support, but they have not resolved the fundamental schism of the modern world view. They cannot heal the deep division latent in every modern psyche. The very nature of the objective universe turns any spiritual faith and ideals into courageous acts of subjectivity, constantly vulnerable to intellectual negation.
Only by strenuously avoiding the reality of this contradiction, and thus engaging in what is in essence a form of psychological compartmentalization and denial, can the modern self find any semblance of wholeness. In such circumstances, an integrated world view, the natural aspiration of every psyche, is unattainable. An inchoate awareness of this underlies the reaction of religious fundamentalists to modernity, their rigid refusal to join the seemingly impossible spiritual adventure of the modern age. But for the more fully embracing and reflective contemporary sensibility, with its multiple commitments and alertness to the larger dialectic of realities in our time, the conflict cannot be dismissed so readily.
The problem with this dissociative condition is not merely cognitive dissonance or internal distress. Nor is it only the “privatization of spirituality” that has become so characteristic of our time. Since the encompassing cosmological context in which all human activity takes place has eliminated any enduring ground of transcendent values—spiritual, moral, aesthetic—the resulting vacuum has empowered the reductive values of the market and the mass media to colonize the collective human imagination and drain it of all depth. If the cosmology is disenchanted, the world is logically seen in predominantly utilitarian ways, and the utilitarian mind-set begins to shape all human motivation at the collective level. What might be considered means to larger ends ineluctably become ends in themselves. The drive to achieve ever-greater financial profit, political power, and technological prowess becomes the dominant impulse moving individuals and societies, until these values, despite ritual claims to the contrary, supersede all other aspirations.
The disenchanted cosmos impoverishes the collective psyche in the most global way, vitiating its spiritual and moral imagination—“vitiate” not only in th
e sense of diminish and impair but also in the sense of deform and debase. In such a context, everything can be appropriated. Nothing is immune. Majestic vistas of nature, great works of art, revered music, eloquent language, the beauty of the human body, distant lands and cultures, extraordinary moments of history, the arousal of deep human emotion: all become advertising tools to manipulate consumer response. For quite literally, in a disenchanted cosmos, nothing is sacred. The soul of the world has been extinguished: Ancient trees and forests can then be seen as nothing but potential lumber; mountains nothing but mineral deposits; seashores and deserts are oil reserves; lakes and rivers, engineering tools. Animals are perceived as harvestable commodities, indigenous tribes as obstructing relics of an outmoded past, children’s minds as marketing targets. At the all-important cosmological level, the spiritual dimension of the empirical universe has been entirely negated, and with it, any publicly affirmable encompassing ground for moral wisdom and restraint. The short term and the bottom line rule all. Whether in politics, business, or the media, the lowest common denominator of the culture increasingly governs discourse and prescribes the values of the whole. Myopically obsessed with narrow goals and narrow identities, the powerful blind themselves to the larger suffering and crisis of the global community.
In a world where the subject is experienced as living in—and above and against—a world of objects, other peoples and cultures are more readily perceived as simply other objects, inferior in value to oneself, to ignore or exploit for one’s own purposes, as are other forms of life, biosystems, the planetary whole. Moreover, the underlying anxiety and disorientation that pervade modern societies in the face of a meaningless cosmos create both a collective psychic numbness and a desperate spiritual hunger, leading to an addictive, insatiable craving for ever more material goods to fill the inner emptiness and producing a manic techno-consumerism that cannibalizes the planet. Highly practical consequences ensue from the disenchanted modern world view.
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