Reason and World Versions: Thoughts on "Men without Chests" in The Abolition of Man

 

    We don’t go to the store and buy the world version of our choice. Partly, we have been socialized into a world version or more than one competing world version. We are usually unaware of the fit between a world version and our concrete social and economic life. Still, it is safe to say that the fit is often not good, that a world version distorts the realities of our social, political (including historical), and economic life (from now on “social life” for short). That can be a form of limited consciousness. That can mean the world version functions ideologically as Lockean liberal individualism functions to mask true economic structures and power relations in the USA or Putin’s postcolonial particularism masks power relations in Russia – or the form of Islam sanctioned by the regime in Iran legitimates the political and economic power of the mullahs and their morality police. The world versions already there influence us already – at the limit in the form of rebellion against one.

   More powerful still are the practices of everyday life, which limit what is intelligible and unintelligible in a world version. I have eaten meat slaughtered in factories for most of my life. That deeply ingrained practice conditions how I think about animals and thus nature, including human nature. This practice therefore limits what world versions I can take seriously as making sense of my life. It is a massive barrier to understanding animals as holy, as limits to my own needs. And as animals are part of nature, it is a barrier to understanding nature as holy. There are other barriers of an intellectual kind to seeing animals or nature as holy: the seeming cruelty of ecologies in which predator and prey are central, for instance. In the scientific world version, animals (including us) have no intrinsic value or meaning; nothing prevents us from treating them a food material to be industrially processed. One version of Christianity, which interprets the Genesis 1:26

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

in a certain way, seems compatible with the industrial reduction of animals and nature. That conflicts with other currents in Christianity that emphasize God’s love for the world, his Creation; His continuing role in causing the world to exist; the idea of Man has been given stewardship over nature, the right to use it well in love, but that it still belongs to its maker who will judge us on our stewardship. This current of Christianity – most people who call themselves Christians are unaware of it – is not easily reconcilable with our meat-eating practices and our reduction of nature in general.

     Now this latter version of Christianity seems right to my head. But it is not such a simple matter even then to just make that part of my world version. Reason is that which accesses reality, either disclosing aspects of it or, when it fails, covering up reality. Not just thoughts or propositions disclose reality – or cover it up (I get this metaphor for truth from Heidegger) – but also emotional responses. In general, I deny we can neatly distinguish between the heart and the head. Both in cooperation are necessary if the most important truths are to be disclosed; both fail together when they are covered up. So intellectually – with my head and partly my heart – I reject the industrial slaughter of animals and the reduction of nature this practice is an aspect of; they are not compatible with the world version I wish l had.

      But here I am using a laptop, thus using electricity to do a task I could do with a pencil and paper. And I feed my boys and myself with industrially produced meat every week. True, if it were cheap and convenient I would change these practices. Equally true is that if I really understood animals and nature as my wished-for world version required, I would be writing with pencil and paper and we would not eat much meat at home – and the only meat we did eat would be produced under conditions compatible with our stewardship. I even I less excuse for I have seen with my own 11-year-old eyes the horrors of the slaughterhouse (a chicken slaughter factory) and have heard more stories from my father, who was more intimately aware of it. My point is this: the practices we live with limit what we can take seriously even if we suspect they are problematic. Reason would mean conforming my thoughts and feelings to reality – to feeling horror over eating factory meat and never doing it as well as having the thought that it is wrong. I will only say I truly understand the wrongness of factory meat when this happens.

   Of course, I could become a responsible consumer of meat and force my boys to limit their diet so that I could, perhaps subconsciously, advertise myself to myself and others as a righteous person, giving myself a self-gratifying feeling of being better than those who eat industrial meat. That is sentimentality, a kind of counterfeit attitude.  That discloses nothing about reality; it moves no one as authoritative or revealing; it rather annoys people, who good antennas for that kind of “virtue-signaling.” But that doesn’t mean that all such lives fail to reveal some truth. Wendell Berry’s writings reveal a life that reveals the truth of the world version I wish I could find compelling enough to live.

   Adopting a world version, it is clear, involves habits and feelings learned from an early age. Plato and Aristotle knew this as  I suppose most people did until recently. Aristotle explicitly writes in the Nichomachaen Ethics that education should aim to induce children to like what they ought to like and dislike what they ought to like. Most cultures as part of their world versions presupposed that the universe was such that emotional responses could be either more or less in harmony with it. When children then reach the age of reflective thought, they will have the power to understand intellectually what goodness requires and what is evil and to be rejected. St. Augustine defines virtue – the most important telos of education – as the realization of the potential to love every object in a way that is appropriate to it. “Children must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful,” to quote C. S. Lewis’s reading of a passage in Plato’s Laws. Before we reach the age of reason, we must learn to feel the truth that goodness, truth, and beauty are loveable. To the extent our emotional dispositions are not so educated, we will be blind to reality, which is to say to that which is good, true, and beautiful – to reality.

      I understand the relationship between feelings and reason somewhat differently from the tradition, however. C. S. Lewis describes the relationship I want to criticize like this:

  No emotion is, in itself, a judgment: in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it (“Men Without Chests,” in The Abolition of Man, p. 29-30 in my edition. It was Lewis who first taught me the importance of emotions in reasoning, I think; or rather highlighted the significance of what I had read in Plato and Aristotle but not really attended to. I fuller treatment of the view I now what to criticize is found in Josef Pieper, Die Wirklichkeit und das Gute, 1949, which gives a Catholic-Thomist view of reason as intellect.)

 

I, as I wrote, believe it makes more sense to conceive of emotion and thought as two aspects of Reason, defined as our capacity to disclose reality, to grasp truth. That means I do not think emotions are blind. They express a form of judgment. Remorse expresses the judgment that I wronged someone; grief expresses the judgment that someone I loved has been taken from me; anger expresses the judgment that I have been unjustly treated, etc. These judgments can be right or wrong, just or unjust, more or less appropriate to reality. Emotions are largely the way children think – I know that stretches the normal use of the words – badly at first because their emotions are most subjective and do not reach reality. It is the job of the educator (parent, teacher) to free the child’s feelings from their own solipsistic inner life to be able to respond to reality, i.e. that which is not reducible to their own inner life (e.g. teaching a child not to be angry at his brother because his brother wins a game of UNO).

    The view I am criticizing locates reason entirely in the intellect. The feelings to obey the intellect as the beast pulling the cart should obey the human master (who has a whip if needed). But the intellect alone cannot distinguish between, say, the world version of a Himmler and the world version of Christ any more than AI in the movie the Matrix. It would be like Neo trying to argue to the AI that it should not reduce humanity to a battery because we have human dignity. AI is obviously to human dignity not because it was raised badly but because it has no emotional life, which is to say, no bodily life. But that is a picture of the Intellect uninformed by feeling. The intellect uninformed by feeling is an intellect uninformed by value, by a sense of the Good or beauty. It is more computer-like than human (as the history of modern Empiricism and Nominalism testifies).  As though we can just recognize something with our intellects and our willpower runs the message to our emotions, and our emotions obey. That makes no sense.

    Lewis’s own example makes clear what is wrong with attributing all reasoning powers to abstract thought. He writes that he does not enjoy the company of small children and that he recognizes this as a defect in himself – “just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.” Children (all things being equal) are delightful and a man who cannot experience this does indeed suffer from a form of meaning-blindness. (The same kind of cognitive dissonance I described about meat eating.) He continues:

And because our approvals and dissapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it).

 

Now it is true: our emotions are not self-authenticating. We can feel in ways that are sentimental or counterfeit; we can feel in ways that do the object of our feelings injustice. But that is no reason for making feelings blind, for thoughts expressed as propositions are also not self-authenticating. Both thoughts and feelings – and usually the one accompanies the other when anything outside of science or simple facts are in play, as they are when we are questioning world versions – can reveal or conceal, can be just or unjust. The abstract intellect should not be privileged. The very language Lewis uses is the language of judgment: feelings are recognitions of objective value, responses to an objective order, are in harmony with reality or not. How can they be blind?

    In many areas, thoughts and feelings are blind and deaf without each other. If I wrote “All men are created equal” and then went home to my plantation and the leisure purchased by the labor of people I had enslaved and that I keep in slavery ultimately through the threat of violence, then prima facie my expressed belief in the abstract proposition is, well, empty or lacking at least.

   I would even say our emotions are our first access to reality. I don’t understand the abstract concept of human dignity or a common humanity until I am moved by the suffering or demeaning of people like those enslaved on Jefferson’s plantation. The best Jefferson could do was the cognitive dissonance of I experience with industrial meat. Why? The same reasons: his upbringing, the practices that form the background of his life. Thus the importance of training the child’s feelings, and thus the importance of being gifted with a world version that makes conceptual space for this aspect of reality.

  I would also say imagination is a critical aspect of Reason. The inability to imagine a person of a certain category as morally your equal conditions the ways we feel. A Spartan could not imagine the full humanity of the Helot, and his entire system of education drilled this inability into him.

   How are such vicious circles broken? Often they are not. When they are it is often through the imagination. Something sublime happens: you see the other as a fellow human being; we see the animal as a fellow creature. I cannot go into this further here. But when it comes to world versions, they are just frameworks for seeing things as this rather than that. Feelings and imagination are what condition this seeing in the first place, with intellect often lagging behind. But not always. Sometimes intellect recognizes truths that our feelings and imagination struggle to catch up with. My point here: all are intertwined. All are part of Reason i.e. that which allows reality to disclose itself to us.

   And my overall point: world versions are not like shopping for a vacation. Nor can abstract intellect, divorced from emotion and imagination, do much. That is a big mistake of many philosophers: to treat world versions like scientific theories to be validated or not by speculative reasoning and evidence. Thinking about world versions involves your whole self, heart and soul. It is something we can only do as the individuals we are: there are no neutral techniques or methods. Such fundamental thinking always challenges your life. It is always autobiographical, often confessional. It involves deep understanding of the world we grew up in and live in as well.

 . . .

Another thought in “Men without Chests” (Abolition of Man), which should be read along the little jewel “Meditation in a Toolshed.” Here are the passages I want to focus on.

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty'; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: 'When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime", or shortly, I have sublime feelings' Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: 'This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.' …

    The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant. It is true that Gaius and Titius have said neither of these things in so many words. They have treated only one particular predicate of value (sublime) as a word descriptive of the speaker's emotions. The pupils are left to do for themselves the work of extending the same treatment to all predicates of value: and no slightest obstacle to such extension is placed in their way. The authors may or may not desire the extension: they may never have given the question five minutes' serious thought in their lives. I am not concerned with what they desired but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy's mind. In the same way, they have not said that judgements of value are unimportant. Their words are that we 'appear to be saying something very important' when in reality we are 'only saying something about our own feelings'. No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him. (Men without Chests)

…

 

It is strange: Lewis’s criticism here of logical positivism is just as appropriate to modernists and postmodernists would like to believe that a human being or a human collective constructs reality, and lives in worlds of their own making. Of course, this is possible to some extent. Iris Murdoch wrote that we make pictures and then become like our pictures. Ideology is powerful. We all are to some extent creatures of Plato’s Cave. But our tendency to distort reality for self-interested reasons is not what is at issue here; it is the denial that anything of reality can be disclosed to us, either because reality has no form (like cookie dough our minds cut up any way we want) or because we are cut off from reality, condemned by our having to represent it in some way to experience it. I suppose what distinguishes most “moderns” from many “postmoderns” is the belief that at least science discloses reality. But what both share is the belief that meanings and values are not a part of Being but anthropomorphic projects onto the neutral screen of Being. That is what Lewis is criticizing and I agree with him.

   Galileo is a good place to start with the modern notion that only what science can disclose can possibly be real. Here he is not as a scientist but as a philosopher framing science:

As I form a conception of a material or corporeal substance, I simultaneously feel the necessity of conceiving that it has boundaries of some shape or other; that relatively to others is great or small; that it is in this or that place, in this or that time; that it is in motion or at rest; that it touches or does not touch another body; that it is unique, rare, or common; nor can I by any act of imagination disjoin it from these qualities. I do not find myself absolutely compelled to apprehend it as necessarily accompanied by such conditions as that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, sonorous or silent, smelling sweetly or disagreeably; and if the sense had not pointed out these qualities, language and imagination alone could never have arrived at them. Therefore I think that the senses, smells, colors, etc. with regard to the object in which they appear to reside are nothing more than mere names. These exist only in the sensitive body for when the living creature is removed, all these qualities are carried off and annihilated. I do not believe that there exists anything in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, etc. except size, shape, quantity, and motion.

Here we see the segregation of meaning from Being in action, the de-meaning and de-valuing of the universe at the beginning of its history. It was from here a short step to making size, shape, quantity, and motion human constructs as well. One of my favorite interpreters of our history, Lewis Mumford, puts it like this:

But actually, Galileo committed a crime far graver than any of the dignitaries of the Church accused him of; for his real crime was that of trading the totality of human experience, not merely the accumulated dogmas and doctrines of the Church, for that minute portion which can be observed within a limited time-span and interpreted in terms of mass and motion, while denying importance to the unmediated realities of human experience, from which science itself is only a refined ideological derivative. When Galileo divided experienced reality into two spheres, a subjective sphere, which he chose to exclude from science, and an objective sphere, freed theoretically from man’s visible presence but known through rigorous mathematical analysis, he was dismissing as unsubstantial and unreal the cultural accretions of meaning that had made mathematics – itself a purely subjective distillation – possible.

 

Coming back to Lewis and the responses to the waterfall: for Galileo they all would be “subjective,” as many of my students, followers of Galileo, would say. If the gray of Kilian’s eyes or the brown of Paul James’s eyes are not in their eyes but in my sensitive body alone – my body constructs the colors I see in their eyes; the color is not really in their eyes. Just so, the feelings of awe I have felt in the presence of certain waterfalls are constructed by my psyche and have nothing to do with the waterfalls themselves.

   But why do I have to believe that? Because an android would see them? Because a butterfly would perceive them differently? Because an alien with a differently constructed body would construct the color or the emotional response to the waterfall differently? Because some aspects of reality, perhaps, can only be disclosed to certain kinds of sensitive bodies – why not say that? That a deaf person cannot hear at all or an android cannot really hear the beauty of the Bach Prelude in C major does not make the music or its beauty unreal. Nothing, absolutely nothing, forces me to believe that my senses or my emotions disclose nothing about the world. They might get in the way of doing Galilean physics – which reveals something else about the world, something by the way that gives us the kind of power over it that I would never want to exercise in the presence of the awe-inspiring waterfall. The awe it inspires reveals something deeper than Galilean physics can reveal about it just as my response to Bach’s Prelude reveals something almost infinitely deeper about it than a physical analysis of its sound waves could. In fact, the latter are part of the same reality just abstractly bracketed out.

   I am included to say: Being in general, of the being of my boys’ eyes or the Bach Prelude or the waterfall is the set of all non-sentimental, non-ideological, non-distorting, non-falsifying thoughts, feelings, or imaginings that they give rise to, that are intelligible to any finite or infinite consciousness. That seems circular, I know. There is an analogy to reading and translating literature or poetry. So much has been written about Macbeth, for example, much of it profound, much of it with an axe to grind, etc. But to say it is about the Easter bunny would be falsifying. As long as an interpretation is arguable, we can learn something. That makes more sense than to segregate all these possible meanings and values – disclosed by such responses – from Being. 

. . .

   'How can Paul's eyes objectively be brown when a being whose eyes were differently evolved or in a different light they would appear a different color? Don't considerations like that prove that the color is in our brains and not in reality?'

   - I grant your premises but deny the conclusion. What follows from this premise is that Paul's eyes in reality correspond to a range of colors depending on the eye and light. I say this range of colors all are part of reality. Brown is revealed to me; a different shade perhaps to an imaginary alien. Because a color-blind person doesn't see any color is no reason to believe it is not there. And this is an analogy for other meanings - they eyes as "mirrors to the soul" does reveal something about human eyes. To say some quality is merely subjective only means that it is projected onto reality but in the light of day cannot be fairly said to belong to reality - as when a boy in love and projects only the most saintly qualities on his beloved, unable to see that she is deceiving him and kissing every other boy in the class. That would be an example of a quality being purely subjective. 

. . .

I tend to use feelings and emotions synonymously. I have read of technical uses in psychology. I reject them for my writing because they do not reflect actual usage. Here is the best attempt to make sense of the difference I have come across - by Karla McClaren, "Is it a Feeling or an Emotion?":

It’s the difference between having and knowing

An emotion is a physiological experience (or state of awareness) that gives you information about the world, and a feeling is your conscious awareness of the emotion itself. I hadn’t really understood why the distinction was such a big deal, because I don’t experience a huge gap between emotion and feeling. I mean, if there’s an emotion going on, I feel it. Bing.

But this isn’t true for everyone.

Many people are honestly unaware that they’re having an emotion. For them, the emotion and the consciousness of it are not strongly connected, and they don’t even realize that they’re fearful, or angry, or depressed. Their emotional state has to become so persistent that it drags them into a severe mood (or is pointed out by someone else), and then they can realize, “Oh, I guess I’ve been really sad about my mom, or afraid about money, or angry about work.”

For many people, there’s a disconnect between emotion and feeling; there’s no consciousness of the emotion at all. They have the emotion, but they don’t know about it. The emotion is certainly there, and their behavior displays the emotion (to others at least), but they aren’t feeling it clearly.

 

 

 

 

We Are Metaphysical Beings

 

What does it mean to be “self-conscious” as opposed to sentient or conscious, as are all of the animals closest to us to some degree or other? (It seems plants, especially trees, might even be conscious in some way not well-understood.) There are different ways people have thought about this, including:

·        Having a soul vs. not having a soul

·        Reason vs. instinct

·        Being in the world vs. adapting to a natural environment

·        Having language (ideas, logic, symbols) vs. signals

·        Living in history (having a past, projecting a future) vs. the mere present

·        Having a story (biography) vs. being an exemplar of a master model

·        Living in a realm of meaning vs. instinct

·        Awareness of one’s mortality vs. unawareness

 

One that especially interests me is this: we are metaphysical creatures. That means: we live always assuming or believing some interpretation about Being, reality as such, the world as a (limited) whole. Often these interpretations are in the form of myth. Almost every culture tells stories about the origins of things and what it all means. There are many stories of creation, for example, with the essence of the world depending on the nature of the Creator.

1.    Fundamental constituents of the universe, such as particles, forces, and spacetime, governed by physical laws. No inherent meaning or value.

2.    Transient phenomena without inherent self; ultimate reality is transcending the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

3.    Act of existence received from a necessary Being, who is Love; created beings participate in existence but do not possess it inherently.

4.    Existence devoid of inherent purpose, meaning, or value; life and the universe lack intrinsic meaning. The self creates any meaning.

5.    Being linked to social order and moral virtues, which is embedded in the order of nature; understood through relationships and roles within society.

6.    Essence of Being as an irrational and blind force that drives all existence; the world as a representation shaped by perception.

7.    Single substance constituting reality; all things as modes or modifications of this one substance, which is “God.” Nature is like the body of “God.”

 

The thing is: we necessarily live as though we lived in one of these worlds or another. That fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings, and indeed lives are related to meaning – even to consider something as meaningless sets up a relationship to meaning – forces metaphysics on us since the meaning of anything depends on an overarching account of Being to frame it.

A thought experiment. What is intelligible, what is unintelligible for a person inhabiting these world versions if they came upon an ancient forest:

 

1. Fundamental Constituents (Physics)

• Intelligible: The forest's biodiversity, the physical processes governing the ecosystem (photosynthesis, water cycle, soil composition), and the interactions between different species. They would understand the forest as a complex system of energy and matter.
• Not Intelligible: Any notion of intrinsic purpose or meaning within the forest beyond its physical and biological processes. The forest's aesthetic or spiritual significance might not be inherently clear from a purely physical standpoint. Perhaps it would only be intelligible as a subjective-psychological (anthropomorphic) projection. Nothing would be violated if a capitalist deforested it for profit.

2. Transient Phenomena (Impermanence, Non-self)

• Intelligible: The forest as a transient and impermanent entity, constantly changing and evolving. The interconnectedness of all living things within the forest and the absence of a permanent self in any of its inhabitants.
• Not Intelligible: The idea of the forest having a fixed, inherent identity or eternal significance. The concept of owning or permanently preserving the forest in a static state might seem nonsensical. Nothing about the being of the forest makes a claim on us to let it me though as an expression of will or desire it would be undesirable to do so.

3. Act of Existence (Participation in Being)

• Intelligible: The forest as a manifestation of existence, with each element participating in the act of being. The beauty and order of the forest reflecting a higher purpose or design. The interconnectedness of all living things as part of a greater whole.
• Not Intelligible: The view of the forest as merely a collection of random, purposeless entities. The absence of a deeper significance or order behind the forest's existence might seem unintelligible. It makes a claim on us. To damage it might be analogous to damaging a great painting, though in this case the Creator is divine.

4. Existence Without Inherent Meaning (Nihilism)

• Intelligible: The forest as a physical reality devoid of inherent meaning or purpose. The ecological interactions and biological processes occurring within the forest. The forest as a resource or a natural phenomenon.
• Not Intelligible: Any intrinsic meaning, purpose, or value attributed to the forest. The idea that the forest holds spiritual or metaphysical significance might be seen as baseless or irrational. It doesn’t matter what we do with the forest.

5. Social Order and Moral Virtues (Confucianism)

• Intelligible: The forest as a natural setting that could be respected and preserved for the benefit of society. The harmony and balance within the forest reflecting the virtues of order and proper conduct. The importance of stewardship and responsible use of natural resources.
• Not Intelligible: A purely individualistic or exploitative approach to the forest. The idea of the forest existing solely for personal gain without regard for its impact on society and future generations might seem incomprehensible.

6. Irrational and Blind Force (Will)

• Intelligible: The forest as an expression of the irrational and blind force driving existence. The forest's life cycles and struggles as manifestations of this underlying will. The aesthetic and sublime aspects of the forest reflecting the power of nature.
• Not Intelligible: The forest having a rational or ordered purpose beyond the raw expression of the will. The notion of the forest as a tranquil, harmonious place free from the struggles and conflicts inherent in nature.

7. Single Substance Constituting Reality (Pantheism)

• Intelligible: The forest as a mode or modification of the single substance that constitutes reality. The unity and interconnectedness of all things within the forest as expressions of the divine substance. The forest's beauty and complexity as reflections of the divine nature.
• Not Intelligible: The forest being seen as separate or distinct from the divine substance. The idea that the forest lacks any spiritual or metaphysical significance might be unintelligible, as all of nature is seen as part of the divine.

This thought experiment illustrates how different ontologies shape the way individuals understand and interact with the world around them. Each perspective provides a unique lens through which to interpret the discovery of a pristine forest, highlighting the diversity of human thought and experience. Since we will have to respond one way or other – to see the forest as this or that – we are related to some ontology.

 

  Here’s another thought experiment: What would be an intelligible and unintelligible response to the genocidal wars against the Indians in American history?

 

1. Fundamental Constituents (Physics)

• Intelligible: The physical actions and consequences of the wars—such as violence, death, displacement, and ecological impact. They might understand the wars in terms of human behavior influenced by biological and environmental factors.
• Not Intelligible: Moral or ethical judgments about the wars. The concept of intrinsic human rights or the deep cultural and spiritual losses suffered by the Indigenous peoples might not be inherently clear from a purely physical standpoint.

2. Transient Phenomena (Impermanence, Non-self)

• Intelligible: The recognition of suffering and the impermanent nature of human life. They might see the wars as part of the transient nature of human existence and the cycle of samsara, leading to immense suffering and the impermanence of cultures.
• Not Intelligible: Justifying the wars through any sense of permanent gain, power, or superiority. The notion that one group has an eternal right to dominate another would seem contrary to the understanding of impermanence and non-self.

3. Act of Existence (Participation in Being)

• Intelligible: Viewing the wars as a profound violation of the intrinsic dignity and act of existence that all beings participate in. The understanding that each human life has a purpose and is part of a greater whole, making such violence deeply immoral.
• Not Intelligible: The perspective that the wars are justifiable or acceptable. The idea that some beings could be inherently superior and others disposable would be unintelligible, as it contradicts the view that all existence is a participation in the divine act of being.

4. Existence Without Inherent Meaning (Nihilism)

• Intelligible: The acknowledgment of the brutal reality of the wars without attributing intrinsic moral meaning to them. Understanding the wars as expressions of power dynamics and human nature, without inherent purpose or ethical significance.
• Not Intelligible: Any notion that the wars have a deeper, intrinsic moral purpose or meaning. The idea that there is an ultimate ethical framework that makes the wars objectively right or wrong might be seen as baseless.

5. Social Order and Moral Virtues (Confucianism)

• Intelligible: Viewing the wars as a gross disruption of social harmony and moral order. The lack of benevolence (Ren) and proper conduct (Li) in the treatment of Indigenous peoples would be seen as a profound ethical failure.
• Not Intelligible: Justifying the wars through concepts of individual gain or national superiority. The idea that such actions could be morally acceptable or beneficial in the long term would seem nonsensical, as it destroys societal harmony and ethical conduct.

6. Irrational and Blind Force (Will)

• Intelligible: Understanding the wars as expressions of the irrational and blind force driving human behavior—the Will to power and domination. Recognizing the inherent conflicts and struggles as part of the human condition.
• Not Intelligible: The idea that the wars are rational or justified through ethical or moral reasoning. The notion that there could be a rational, ethical justification for such acts would be unintelligible, as they are seen as expressions of irrational will.

7. Single Substance Constituting Reality (Pantheism)

• Intelligible: Seeing the wars as tragic disruptions of the divine unity and interconnectedness of all beings. Recognizing that harming others is ultimately harming oneself, as all are modes of the same substance.
• Not Intelligible: Any belief that the wars are justified or acceptable. The idea that some parts of the divine substance (human beings) are more valuable than others would be incomprehensible, as it contradicts the unity and equality of all within the divine substance.

 

Here some overlap between different ontologies shows itself: for example, the wars appear morally wrong from both the Thomist and Confucianism world versions.

 My point is that every meaningful phenomenon implies a relation to an ontology, an interpretation of whatever (a child, a fly, a home, a tree, etc.) and its place in Being. To say “I don’t give two shits” about something, as the women’s basketball coach for Team USA said about all the Caitlin Clark fans, is to deny that the phenomenon has any meaning. The dumbest modern urbanite, by not caring about what things mean at all, expresses an attitude towards Being and an implicit interpretation of it.

  And the second point I want to make is this: any possible world version or ontology must be a projection on the whole of Being from a position in it, from what makes sense of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and lives within it. We can’t get out of Being to compare our interpretations with the thing itself, with Being as known by God – or as would be known by God if God existed. We are in the position of characters in a novel making projections about the whole story – known only to the author – from our place within the story.

  All this makes our lives different from the lives of bears and wolves (I think).

 . . .

I would add that the propositions that express these ontologies or world versions are not like simple factual propositions (e.g. It is 29.2 degrees Celsius in this room at this moment.) or scientific laws (e.g. "The concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere is directly proportional to the amount of heat energy trapped by the atmosphere, leading to an increase in global average temperatures and significant changes in climate patterns"). You can directly check them because they are not statements about a particular state of affairs or phenomena. They are about everything and they are about meaning. The best analogy for them might be statements that purport to interpret a whole, very complex book like Dante's Divine Comedy. The analogy though is logically like talking about God using human categories. Humans love. God loves. There must be some overlap of meaning to justify applying the same concept - love - to God and humans. But God is infinite whereas humans are finite. We really don't know what divine love is, except "through a glass, darkly." The same with the analogy of statements about a poem: the poem is finite. Statements about Being are necessarily "through a glass, darkly."

 We would have to see the world as if from no place in it, as a limited whole, sub specie aeternitatis. Which actually makes no sense. 

 That we inhabit a realm of meanings - made possible by birth, by the stories we tell, by our knowledge of our own mortality, by sex and love, by good and evil - relates us to a fundamental mystery that we have no choice but to project our hopes and fears on. 

. . .

"It all means nothing! Human beings in their weakness project meaning onto the cold, indifferent, cruel screen of the universe." "That is just as metaphysical as any of the other statements. It explains part of experience - I guess most of yours. It does not prove anything. It cannot be verified or falsified. It is an interpretation of Being based on your perspective. If it seems powerfully true to you, the cause is in your life - in your inability to love perhaps. It is not in Being."

 

 

 Sunday Meditation

                                                                    12 Levels of Being

 

There are two levels to most authentically religious expression.

1) The consciousness of sin.

2) The corresponding consciousness of the need for redemption.

 

Most people today have no experience of either. More, such plays no role in their lives, in the form of life they are part of. It is unintelligible that these two attitudes to life – two aspects of one attitude actually –  can be a part of any serious person’s life. This religious attitude is only intelligible to most people as a form of neurosis or narcissism.

 

The consciousness of sin comes from the gap between understanding what goodness requires and your ability always to do and be what good requires you to do and be.

C. S. Lewis wrote: “Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. . . . They do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.”

I don’t like the concept of law in this context. States enact laws to set up limits that preserve the state. To characterize my betrayal of Ela as breaking the law seems offkey. I broke faith. I violated a sacred vow. I demeaned our life together and thus her life. I caused her tremendous suffering. And for what? So I could live out a sexual love fantasy. These are the sources of my remorse and not breaking a natural law. “Oh my God, what have I done! I broke the Law of Nature!” Nonsense. If I wanted to formulate an abstraction to cover all such transgressions, I would say I violated reality: Ela’s reality, my reality, D’s reality, God’s reality. Just like taking a terrible drug like meth damages your body doing evil violates souls, the soul of the evil doer most of all. The only medicine is forgiveness and the constant will to do whatever is possible to make amends and heal damage. At a further level of abstraction we can make principles of action: Don’t violate reality. And you can imagine that on analogy to laws if you want. But to me the law analogous doesn’t add anything to my understanding. It confuses me rather.

Evil is like poisoning the roots of a flower to get something you desire. There was a Cadfael episode, a rose bush in the yard of a house bequeathed to the Abbey on the understanding the monks could care for the bush was poisoned so that the evil-doer could fulfill his desire of taking the property. The rose bush is a metaphor for reality; the poison for the evil act that damages or destroys a part of reality; greed was the source of the evil act. In my case, my marriage and friendship with Ela was the rose bush; my adultery the evil act; not lust but a deep desire for erotic love the source of the evil act.

Reason – and the heart as the metaphorical center of our feelings is part of reason – is that which can disclose and relate us to reality. My intellect understands that betrayal is evil. My heart feels the pain of remorse for having betrayed Ela. Both are part of reason; both disclose reality and relate me to reality. The thought “I deserve to be happy and my needs are not being met” distorts reality, seeing it through the darkened mirror of the deep desire for erotic love that was the source of my evil act. The feelings of ecstasy were not a response to my reality but a denial thereof. Thoughts and feelings, intellect and heart are part of reason, either disclosing and relating you to reality or distorting and cutting you off from it.

The weird thing is that I am not alone. What I did was a variation of something so common, so all-to-human, as to be universal. Breaking out of fantasy and achieving a grasp of reality in thought and feeling is like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. You are lucky if you make it part of the way. Only the saints make it far enough to see the mountaintop from a distance – and I am not sure there are any saints. And this is our condition. Not like animals that just do what they do and are what they are. We have been given the gift of reason and learn very early on that reality in its highest expressions is loveable and yet unable to feel worthy of love ourselves (the original sin) we are trapped in fantasies – like spider webs – designed to make us believe we are loveable (by the wrong standards) trapped in the web of our own making when in fact we are loveable outside the web we can’t or won’t free ourselves from. We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.

 

And usually after the fact we can understand what we did damaged something good, that we did evil. And if we suffer remorse, we get reconnected to reality and can begin to understand it. We are released from a section of the spider’s web. Why is it that only pain teaches us?

 

And only forgiveness allows us to live with the pain of remorse. Yet we still are bound to the web – just not as tightly.

 

We understand only dimly the goodness of at least the highest forms of reality. If I saw the birth trees in my backyard as the Creator sees them – as they are in reality – I would hug them, try to paint them, be glad of them in ways I cannot. Our very bodily life, at least in the spiderweb we have constructed and we call the world, limits our access to reality as it perhaps is. Perhaps reality is like this painting:

           

 But this is all our reason allows us to access:

                          

But through the lens of our constructed world, of our fantasy, we can only see  it like this:

     

We can only with faith, hope and love informing our imagination try to image how it truly is. For to violate the image of reality seen through fantasy doesn’t appear to us as evil. Only if you see it at least close to how it really is does the evil appear. And only if you imagine it as part of the larger picture – which we have no access to and as far as we can know might not even exist –  does the full dimension of the sinfulness of evil appear. Even the purest forms of remorse are based on only a partial vision of reality. If this is what you see

                                             

                                  

you will respond differently to this face as you would if you saw this one, which is higher up on the hierarchy of reality:

                          

 

And of course, if you could see her as God does, in the light of God’s love, our response would be at a qualitatively different level from that. Here the best human attempt to picture that seeing (for me):

 

"God sees not with the eyes of men. God sees the heart." - Brother Cadfael.

 . . .                                     

 

  How does the part of life that is under an obligation to try to see the world right and respond to it accordingly – avoiding evil, doing good – fit in with the otherworldly aspect of religion: the incarnation and resurrection, the drama of salvation for Christianity?  This moral dimension I have been gesturing toward we all more or less understand. You have to be brainwashed like a Nazi or a MAGA to lose that deepest part of your humanity.

  Can’t I find Jesus’s moral teaching compelling without believing in the mythology surrounding Jesus: the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the belief in these supernatural historical events as a condition of forgiveness and eternal life in “the kingdom of God.” And without believing in the theology and rites of the church, the rational attempt to conceptualize and symbolize these mysteries: the Trinity, Mary’s sinlessness, Jesus’s reality as God and man, baptism, the Eucharist, confession, etc.?

   In my life, I have mostly been inclined to answer in the affirmative. The Church doesn’t like that answer because its authority, perhaps its raison d’etre depends on the rites, which relate the soul to this mystery, the supernatural dimension. Is not all this church building and maintaining? Priests as the medium between this world and a higher (non-existent) world as a mode of power and influence in this world? This seems to be the same strategy in every culture. I can’t count the times I have heard priests disparagingly talk about those who see Jesus as a great teacher or even a prophet and not the key to the gates of Heaven. And to get there you have to believe things that are contrary to what we know through science about the universe and contrary to common sense. The punishment for failing to believe in these supernatural teachings is Hell, or at least Purgatory – even if you are perfectly virtuous. (Dante has all the virtuous pagans in Limbo, which is part of Hell. There is no torment but no hope either – that is, no hope of Heaven, which is the telos of human existence. Without the Church, not even Socrates makes it to Heaven.) So we should believe whether it makes sense or not. And that makes no sense to me: to believe in things that make no sense in order to get to Heaven. You can’t really believe things that make no sense to you, not even on faith. Thus C. S. Lewis – the greatest Christian apologist – and of course many others try to make sense of these mythological events that are also part of human history.

   Perhaps the moral and the supernatural are related because we lack the capacity for perfect goodness. Even our best is mediocre. Thus there is – incredibly – a chasm between what we can be on earth and what we should be; between what we can understand and what we would need to understand to become what we should be. We are analogous to – condemned to – a fate of only fulfilling our purpose for existence if we can draw on paper a perfectly geometrical circle, which is impossible since the perfectly geometrical circle is an Idea that judges as (relatively) good or bad any possible actual circle that we draw. We need to be saved not only because of the imperfect circles we draw but because we are the kind of being judged by a standard we are not capable of fulfilling. Hopeless from the outset. I can understand why this whole paradigm is rejected by people of sense.

   Yet, I cannot completely let it go because it resonates with something deep down. Perhaps it is the feeling that Goodness is sublime, like a leak from another world or dimension. To see other people in the light of love is to see them from a higher dimension than our nature and nature as we know can explain.

 My Interpretation of Dominant Postmodernism - A Reaction Against Enlightenment

                                                                          Charles Taylor

 As I said, my first introduction to three figures associated with postmodern philosophy – Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida – was in a course in social theory called Conservative Thought (or something like that) (Ted Schatzki was the professor, a good one). Since they all seemed left of Marx, that puzzled me. I did understand the reasons for their inclusion during the seminar.  Conservative was defined in opposition to Enlightenment.

   A professor (and friend), Georg Bluhm, once characterized the Enlightenment thus: Each individual – regardless of ascriptive factors like caste, class, race, gender, etc. – defines their own life purposes. A paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson’s “inalienable” right to the “pursuit of happiness.” This in turn presupposes the more fundamental belief: “all men are created equal” – not in terms of talents (I am not the equal of Einstein in math and physics) but rights: in particular, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

     He discussed this in the context of a discussion of India and its political culture (this was in the early 80’s). The caste system in India, deeply rooted in Hinduism, was his antithesis to the Enlightenment, and he discussed Nehru’s failed attempt to introduce aspects of Enlightenment into India and the cultural resistance to him. Traditionally Hinduism divides society into hierarchical groups called varnas, which are further divided into sub-castes or jatis. The four primary varnas are Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders and agriculturists), and Shudras (laborers and service providers). Additionally, there are those outside the varna system, often referred to as Dalits or "untouchables," who historically have performed tasks considered impure. Economically, the caste system functions by assigning specific roles and occupations to each caste. This system historically ensured a division of labor where each caste had its traditional occupations. For example, Brahmins would perform religious rituals and teaching; Kshatriyas would engage in warfare and governance; Vaishyas would handle trade and agriculture; and Shudras would serve the other three castes through various forms of manual labor. If your father was a smith, which typically falls under a specific jati within the Shudra varna, it would traditionally be your duty to continue in the same occupation. This continuity is seen as dharma, or duty. Dharma encompasses the moral and ethical duties corresponding to one's caste and life stage. Therefore, taking up your father's occupation as a smith would be considered fulfilling your dharma.

   This is a very different human image than what the Enlightenment bequeathed to “modernity.” This is obviously not an example of the individual defining their own life purposes without regard to ascriptive factors!

  Another source I learned much from was the philosopher Charles Taylor, who visited my seminar and in additional gave a talk about his at the time new book Hegel and the Modern World, which I read along with this Hegel. (Taylor, and I following him, were attracted to Hegel because he attempted in thought reconcile the Enlightenment with tradition and the romantic-conservative reaction against the Enlightenment. I felt intuitively at the time that all these conflicting worldviews had some validity.) As he put it: “The essential difference [between the Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment cultures] can perhaps be put this way: the modern subject is self-defining, where on previous views the subject is defined in relation to a cosmic order.”  The “data” of our subjectivity is underdetermined. We can at times “be ‘in touch’ with ourselves, with our central concerns, we can be clear about who we are and what our purposes are; while at other times we are confused, unclear, or distraught, torn this way and that, obsessed with the inessential, or just giddily forgetful.” I want to quote Taylor at length here:

 

Many concepts and images can be used to describe these opposed conditions: harmony vs. conflict, depth vs. superficiality, self-possession vs. -loss, self-centring vs. dispersal. And of course none is neutral, in the sense that each proposes an interpretation of what is at stake which can be contested. For different notions of the subject suggest very different interpretations.

     If we pick ‘self-presence’ as against ‘distraction’ or ‘dispersal’ as provisional terms to designate the oppositions here, then we can say that the view of the subject that came down from the dominant tradition of the ancients, was that man came most fully to himself when he was in touch with a cosmic order, and in touch with it in the way most suitable to it as an order of ideas, that is, by reason. This is plainly the heritage of Plato; order in the human soul is inseparable from rational vision of the order of being. For Aristotle contemplation of this order is the highest activity of man. The same basic notion is present in the neo-Platonist vision which through Augustine becomes foundational for much medieval thought.

     On this view the notion of a subject coming to self-presence and clarity in the absence of any cosmic order, or in ignorance of and unrelated to the cosmic order, is utterly senseless: to rise out of dream, confusion, illusion is just to see the order of things. We might say that on this view, there is no notion of the self in the modern sense, that is, of an identity which I can define for myself without reference to what surrounds me and the world in which I am set. Rather, I am essentially vision of...either order or illusion.

           . . .

Plainly the obverse relation holds as well, and to dispense with the notion of meaningful order was to re-define the self. The situation is now reversed: full self-possession requires that we free ourselves from the projections of meanings onto things, that we be able to draw back from the world, and concentrate purely on our own processes of observation and thought about things. The old model now looks like a dream of self-dispersal; self-presence is now to be aware of what we are and what we are doing in abstraction from the world we observe and judge. The self-defining subject of modern epistemology is thus naturally the atomic subjectivity of the psychology and politics which grow out of the same movement. The very notion of the subject takes on a new meaning in the modern context, as a number of contemporary writers have pointed out. (Taylor, from Hegel, 6-7)

    A radically new cosmology, indeed ontology emerged:

Understanding the world in categories of meaning, as existing to embody or express an order of Ideas or archetypes, as manifesting the rhythm of divine life, or the foundational acts of the gods, or the will of God; seeing the world as a text, or the universe as a book (a notion which Galileo still makes use of) this kind of interpretive vision of things which in one form or another played such an important role in many pre-modern societies may appear to us the paradigm of anthropomorphic projection onto the world, suitable to an age in which man was not fully adult.

  What was the basis in reality for this elevation of the individual over community and tradition (and authority); of the dissolution of a meaningful, moral order of reality in favor of "autonomy"? Dr. Bluhm put it like this: the individual man or woman (though that took a while) is competent. At least unless some oppressive authority prevents us from developing our competence. Competence implies the skills, knowledge, education not only to make a living and raise a family but to “know yourself” and your core interests well enough to determine your own life purposes. It implied “reason” or “rationality.” Reason is a fairly empty term meaning: that part of our intellect that allows us to “know an at least partly knowable universe” (as Dr. Bluhm put it). But also to know ourselves and our social situation. My reason is why I am uniquely qualified to define my interests and life purposes – better than a priest, teacher, or parent, for example. It is rational to submit to the authority of my piano teacher if I want to learn how to play the piano. But only I – not my priest or father – can determine whether playing the piano should be part of my life purpose. The same reasoning applies to choosing how to make a living, choosing whom I want to marry or whether I want to go to church, and so on. Doing what my father did also seems like a rejection of my own autonomy, a form of “bad faith” to myself, as Sartre would later put it.  

   This is now so ingrained in our regime it is hard to think of just how destabilizing and revolutionary it was when it erupted into history.

  Note how sinful is such an attitude for the dominant Christian culture of Europe. For Christian thought autonomy was the defining characteristic of Satan. Our nature – our will, our reason – has been corrupted by sin. Christ, through the Church, makes grace possible, but only if the individual embraces the authority of the Church. The Eucharist is the center not only of religion but community. Only as part of the Christian community can we thrive according to our nature. Only by sublimating individual desires to define ourselves can we live in community with others, and practice the virtues of justice, self-restraint, courage, and practical commonsense wisdom. Only in the community of the Church can we live the theological virtues of hope, faith, and love, on which everything else depends. Economically, the point is to find our vocation. While not as rigid as the Hindu caste system, tradition did rightly under this regime guide people in their choices. If my father was a farmer, it was natural for me to become a farmer. I learn from him (and the community of farmers) what they learned from their father (and community) and so on. The cumulative local knowledge of the land and farming is passed on. The skills need to make a living and sustain a family and community were passed on.

  Sounds good in theory. In practice, the majority of people who worked were oppressed (more or less greatly, depending on the region) by feudal elites, who left them only a subsistence. (I cannot see the great palaces of Europe without thinking of the millions of farmers and craftsmen (and their families) who were deprived of the fruits of their labor by their oppressors – all justified by the Church. Most traditional societies were characterized by mass poverty and, outside of the skills and knowledge needed to remain productive, of literacy and education.  Within these oppressed communities, other forms of oppression were no doubt common: of men against women, of adults against children.

   The Enlightenment was revolutionary. Its logic applies across the board of traditional or preindustrial cultures undermining everything from the role of women to the authority of traditions and religions – and of course, the desirability of the community itself insofar as its requirements posed limits on men’s inalienable right to determine his own life purposes in equality.  From the perspective of the Enlightenment, all “pre-modern” or “pre-industrial” cultures – from Samurai-ruled Japan to the Islamic cultures of the Ottoman Empire to the Hindu culture of India as well as Catholic Europe – become “backward.” Such cultures chained the individual to irrational, power-hungry authorities – often through torture and horrific forms of execution. They prevented human flourishing by repressing our innate potential for autonomy. Conformism through repression of the individual; superstition-based authority through the repression of reason: that is the name of the pre-Enlightenment game.

    The Enlightenment was not just a new anthropology and a universal conception of reason (I haven’t dealt with that here). It was an umbrella for diverse expressions of it. There was the scientific Enlightenment and capitalist industrialism with the acceleration of technological change. Again I will quote Taylor, who explains this better than I could:

...the modern shift to a self-defining subject was bound up with a sense of control over the world – at first intellectual and then technological. That is, the modern certainty that the world was not to be seen as a text or an embodiment of meaning was not founded on a sense of its baffling impenetrability. On the contrary, it grew with the mapping of the regularities in things, by transparent mathematical reasoning, and with the consequent increase of manipulative control. That is what ultimately established the picture of the world as the locus of neutral, contingent correlations.

...

 My suggestion is that one of the powerful attractions of this austere vision, long before it ‘paid off’ in technology, lies in the fact that a disenchanted world is correlative to a self-defining subject, and that the winning through to a self-defining identity was accompanied by a sense of exhilaration and power, that the subject need no longer define his perfection or vice, his equilibrium or disharmony, in relation to an external order. With the forging of this modern subjectivity there comes a new notion of freedom, and a newly central role attributed to freedom, which seems to have proved itself definitive and irreversible....

    In any case, . . . we can discern the development in these countries of a modern notion of the subject, which I have characterized as self-defining, and correlative to this a vision of things as devoid of intrinsic meaning, of the world as the locus of contingent correlations to be traced by observation, conforming to no a priori pattern. I have spoken above of this vision of the world as ‘disenchanted’ using Weber’s term, or as ‘desacralized’ in speaking of the religious development. Perhaps I can introduce the term of art ‘objectified’ here to cover this denial to the world of inherent meaning, that is, the denial that it is to be seen as embodied meaning. The point of using this term is to mark the fact that for the modern view categories of meaning and purpose apply exclusively to the thought and actions of subjects, and cannot find a purchase in the world they think about and act on. To think of things in these terms is to project subjective categories, to set aside these categories is thus to objectify’. This marks a new, modern notion of objectivity correlative to the new subjectivity.

    The new notion of objectivity rejected the recourse to final causes, it was mechanistic in the sense of relying on efficient causation only. Connected with this it was atomistic, in that it accounted for change in complex things not by gestalt or holistic properties, but rather by efficient causal relations among constituents. It tended towards homogeneity in that seemingly qualitatively distinct things were to be explained as alternative constructions out of the same basic constituents or basic principles. One of the most spectacular results of the new physics was to collapse the Aristotelian distinction between the supra- and sub-lunar to account for moving planets and falling apples in the same formula. Thus this science was mechanistic, atomistic, homogenizing, and of course saw the shape of things as contingent. (Hegel, 8-9)

 

 

Pause: I think the traditional view is absolutely right but it was perverted by injustice in every known society to me into an ideology justifying oppression. Putin's power system is not much different from that of Henry VIII, kleptocracy being perhaps the most common form of regime in European history. 

  Thus, the autonomous or self-defining self presupposes a segregation of meaning from nature. To be able to manipulate nature technologically, the whole industrial and scientific revolutions, confirms the reality of the autonomous self and kills the idea of nature as Creation, as a meaningful order of reality to be understood and followed. The industrial and scientific conquest of nature proves and celebrates the "disenchantment" (Max Weber) of Being. 

   If nature is not meaningful, if our reality is not part of a larger world of meanings, then we define what is real and good at least as far as the meaning of things go. The industrial capitalist is free to deforest the upper peninsula of Michigan or the ancients forests of Appalachia or the West coast because they are nothing but raw materials that become valuable only when translated into human use values. The very human awe some people may feel in the presence of such forests are subjective-psychological projections onto the blank and meaningless screen of nature. From the perspective inside a cosmos like the Catholic-Christian, meaning and value are objective, woven into the fabric of Creation, present eternally as Ideas in the mind of God. Reason and reality require the recognition of the Ideas, the patterns, and conforming your intellect, heart, and life to them. Outside the perspective of a meaningful cosmos – Creation in Christian-Catholic terms – we are little centers of self-consciousness, absolute within ourselves, self-contained autonomous units of will defining ourselves and the world outside of us. Science, modern technology, and industrial capitalism – actually one regime – presuppose the latter view.  

. . .

   Dr. Bluhm was a passionate adherent of the Enlightenment: an understandable response to the irrationality and horrors of the Nazi period that he experienced first hand. He and many of his generation are probably right in believing that the hostile, conservative reaction of many German intellectuals to the Enlightenment. (There are reasons for this having to do with the fact that Germany was not a country for the longest time, but smaller regions, territories, duchies, etc. Religion was for these reasons also a stronger cultural force in the German territories than in the centralized countries especially France but also of England. No time to go into all of that here.)

  Under Dr. Bluhm I studies the various ‘revolutions of modernity’: the “successful” revolution in Japan under the Meiji emperor; the rather unsuccessful attempt to ‘modernize’ India by Nehru; the rather unsuccessful attempt to modernize Turkey under Ataturk. Why did Japan succeed whereas Turkey and India had only very partial success? That was the question. The answer was partly culture: some cultures – Islamic and Hindu cultures in particular – are more resistant to Enlightenment than others. I was amazed at the culture war Ataturk made against the Islamic clergy, even forcing them to cut off their beards. (The Samurai in Japan also had to cut their long hair.) I should not say Enlightenment. These regimes wanted the pay-off of Enlightenment – science, modern technology, and capitalism – more than the self-defining subject. The reason is simple: power. Western countries with their regime of Science-technology-capitalism were more powerful. And imperialistic. The West was the blueprint. You either modelled your country on that blueprint for the sake of the payoff in power or your country was threatened with colonization.

   Indeed, as modern autocrats still bemoan, Enlightenment – liberalism as well as Marxism are products of the Enlightenment – is revolutionary. Its individualism undermines religion, community, tradition, and authority. This undermining is the necessary precondition to conquer nature – eventually also human nature. It is in all its forms a universal blueprint for transforming traditional societies into modern (Western) societies based on individualism, individual rights, self-determination – and the regime of science, technology, and capitalism, forces that radically undermined the very goals of the Enlightenment that unleashed them. [All that is left of autonomy is the autonomy of the consumer – defining lifestyle is analogous to consumerism in every way and usually includes purchased products.]

    Conservatism in its original form was based on the rejection of Enlightenment: the rejection of universal reason, anti-community individualism, anti-tradition-and-authority rationality. The sacred – nature and human nature as part of a larger moral cosmos – had to be recovered. Local culture had to be protected from what was experienced as an imperialist movement of anti-culture. And this is the form of thought that links conservativism with postmodernism. I shall want to qualify this and see postmodernism as Enlightenment in different form. Later.

   [Marxism and liberal capitalism, as a side note, the big enemies of the Cold War, were both Enlightenment products. Marx wrote of India and all traditional societies – I can’t find the quote – that in European capitalism, in the smokestacks of Manchester, they were looking at the future of their own countries. (Marx gets heavily criticized for his “Eurocentrism” by postmodern critics.)]

Charles Taylor, Hegel, 1975. 

Also important as criticisms of modernity:

       Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, 1970.

       E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, 1977. 

       Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology,          1992.