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The Enlightenment That Killed

By James L. Secor, Ph.D.

16 February, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Most all of the voices clamoring to explain the collapse of a once thriving civilization are shouting about one or another facet of capitalism. Call it oligarchy. Call it free-market capitalism. Call it just what Marx predicted. All nevertheless are only dealing with an end-result, an effect, as if it were a cause. (Getting wound up with the rhetorician's sophism that every effect is a cause is untenable: this is at least avoidance, at most denial.)

To be a little bit more direct: the financial debacle is an effect, an end-product of a cause that resides deeper within civilization, indeed, that under-girds the development of Western society--particularly America's. (That some may have escaped is not of concern here, though it would be a fruitful avenue to look into as offering up insights that may help future development out of the rubble, much as, once, AIDS research turned to studying those who had been exposed to the viral pandemic but did not become infected, research that was de-funded. Why people or societies are healthy is not of much concern in the face of disease: exclusionist, linear, single-facet thinking.)

Nevertheless, this underlying cause has been exported into the East via both capitalism and Marxism (Cf. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth and Hope and Revolution at http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/
Revolution/WCCTW.intro.htm
; also, Marx, Weber and the Critique of Capitalism at
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/s
pip.php?article1106
). The disease is now a worldwide pandemic threatening to decimate the population. I am not being apocalyptic, as so very many writers are, influenced by their Judeo-Christian heritage, whether or not they are now Christian. Because the economic debacle has spawned, because of science misapplied, a potentially greater collapse. Both, though, stem from the same root cause: Enlightenment Philosophy.

Oh~!--The out-cry. Blasphemy! Heresy!

Nevertheless, I say it. And I am not alone:

The move in seventeenth-century Europe to produce a universal definition of Natural Religion as existing in all societies shows a fragmentation of the unity . . .[of Religion] but also the rise of new discourses and practices connected to modern nation-states. . .[which resulted in] the marginalization of religious institutions. . . . This distinction belongs to a discourse of secularization. . .which assigns religious faith to the private domain. . .without political consequences. The political aspect of religion is often seen as a transgression of what religion is supposed to be. (Peter vander Veer, "Riots and Rituals: The Construction of Violence and public Space in Hindu Nationalism," Religious Nationalism. Hindus and Muslims in India. Also, Talal Asad, "Anthropological conceptions of Religion," Man (NS) XVIII and also his introduction to "Religion and Politics," Social Research LIX, no 1.)

Since I think the present state of the world begins with the implementation of the Enlightenment philosophy in practical government and society, I am going to use the adoption of these ideals in the US as the pivotal event that has resulted in the present debacle. Although, as a Ph.D. I'm supposed to know it all and be pompous and arrogant about it, I could very well be wrong. But both the Enlightenment ideal and this perverted form of Capitalism that has brought the world to its knees were spread from America outward.

So, let me be scholastic--as opposed to politic--and define my terms. What are Enlightenment philosophy's major doctrines?

Perhaps the first, and least associated--at least in the popular understanding--is the pre-eminence of Reason. As if to say Reason, tagged as a higher intellectual function, is more reasonable than Emotion, tagged as a baser intellectual function that itself has baser facets. This raising up of Reason to the exclusion of emotion/feeling as the ultimate human characteristic that will lead humankind out of the cave of darkness and shadows to the bright sunlight of the wide-open plains is a kind of perversion of the Humanist beliefs of the 12th and 13th centuries. The Humanists rightly posited that if humanity were indeed God-made, then reason and intellectual endeavor were as worthy of consideration as spirit, both being, after all, a part of life. Enlightenment philosophers excluded emotion from the worthwhile (Cf. Jonathan Edwards, The Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy and, for a more exhaustive study, Ernst Cassirer, Enlightenment Philosophy, as well as Émile Bréhier, L'histoire de la philosophie, Vol. II).
Enlightenment arguments were so reasonable that people who questioned the relegation of emotion to a baser and all-but-useless instinct became known as Romantics. No one bothered to question just what it was Reason and rationality gave the world that was better and more uplifting than emotion/spirit, more progressive and forward-looking: technology? The Enlightenment philosophers, according to Allen Wood, "By becoming aware of the causes that move them. . .acquire the critical capacity of selecting which causes (which thoughts, conditions, sentiments, and passions) these will be" which smacks to me of a kind of tautological bias, similar to that of the literary genre of Realism: this is what reality is because I say it is (What Is Philosophy?, notes from Wood's Philosophy and Wisdom workshop).

The emotional-spiritual in man had managed, in searching for a meaning to life, to lift man up out of the mud, if you will, and give him status. Emotion-spirit gave humanity something great about itself and something greater to strive for: it gave humanity an ethic. Reason and science gave us a place--a niggling place at that--in a meaningless chaos at the same time extracting us from our world (nature) and saying we're better because we Enlightenment philosopher-scientists think so--and can prove it because science can think clearly. A kind of tautology. Most of the Enlightenment proofs have since been disproven, including the role of emotion in decision-making (Cf. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority; Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain: "Emotions are learned shortcuts for decision-making, mostly based on our experience"; also Nasri Naqvi, et al., The Role of Emotion in Decision Making).

However, the most devastating teaching from the Enlightenment, that we seem to have taken to heart, is the separation of humanity from its environment, our context. Science, the ultimate reasoning device, has seen fit to separate not only mind (spirit) from body but the human from Nature, a world that is "out there" (Cf. Vining, Melina & Price, The Distinction between Human and Nature and XX, Nature and Us: The Dualism that Produces Our Attitudes Towards the Environment). This perhaps was first truly enshrined by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" which completely missed the fact that without the body-brain there would be no thinking. Still, he separated mind (spirit) and body even more than The Church had; though perhaps not so surprising as he was Jesuit bred. Modern science has continued this division but gone even further by positing, against gathered evidence, that everything about us is in our brain, the organ confined within our skull, including mind. Stephen Pinker especially believes that he can locate a "seat" of mind, of consciousness (Cf. Stephen Pinker, The Mystery of Consciousness; consider Richard Dawkins as well). François Tonneau (Consciousness Outside the Head) and David Rose (Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Neural Theories) go a long way to disprove these theories by noting how there can be no consciousness without external reference. There is more to consciousness than self-consciousness; there is group consciousness, consciousnesses that cut across boundaries so that we are in more than one conscious state at a time.

You are not your brain. You have a brain, yes. But you are a living animal organism that is connected to the world around you, your environment and other people; you are embodied, you dynamically interact with the world around you. So, "We can't explain consciousness in terms of the brain alone because consciousness doesn't happen in the brain alone" (Alva Noë, "The Problem of Consciousness," Edge Interview). We must reject the idea that the mind is "just" something inside us residing in this biological organ the brain that is basically a calculating machine. There is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us, despite neuron firings. Neuron firings, electro- chemical behavior, is nothing more than a sign that something is happening and, indeed, it takes tons of neurons firing to make anything happen, any kind of. . . whatever. Consciousness (and thinking) is something we do that is stimulated by the neurons. Noë goes on to say, in good metaphorical language:

A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of around us. us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world

Human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, something we set in motion, as a way of being us and of being part of a larger process (Alva Noë, "The Problem of Consciousness").

Steven Laureys has noted in his studies of the brain damaged and comatose that mind, consciousness, is in no one location but is a vast connection of neurons (Manfred Dworschak, Discovering Life in Vegetative Patients). This is, however, a fairly recent finding and not well-known outside of Belgium. Nevertheless, biological science remains brain-centred, the place of mind's being. Not only is mind a biological "thing" to modern science, everything about us seems to stem from the brain and we have no control over this: it is a natural biological occurrence. We're stuck with the brain and biology not only ruling our lives but determining our lives-- pre-determining our lives. No more free will! And all because of Enlightenment thinking.

This is more depressing and pessimistic than Sartre's existentialism (No Exit, Nausea). Even Camus was more optimistic than the biology separatists.

Because biological science has taken our environment away from us, isolated us in a hostile world that is only there for us to use (a very literalist religionist doctrine, that the Earth is here for us to use as we will, that has reasonably been adopted by science), we have no context and no direction to our behavior. An unfeeling, irreactive environment is a hostile environment because it does not give back. We see ourselves in competition with it. We fight it because we must overcome. We are, after all, superior because we reason, Enlightenment philosophy tells us (via science). Nature cannot, in the rational, reasonable Enlightenment science think or feel or react, it just is, out there. It does not affect us. It has no effect on us. This is, however, being disproven, in part via desertification, flooding and mud slides, wild fires and water-air pollution poisoning. Even more to the point are the experiments of Guillermo Murphy and Dr. Susan Dudley and David Anderson that show what we humans should consider emotions a little more carefully as they are also found in nature (Can a plant be altruistic? and Scientists find emotion-like behaviors, regulated by dopamine, in fruit flies at www.physorg.com). We call these findings "emotion" as we have no other way of conceiving of them than with our language, the language of our life. We cannot ever talk about another universe because our language limits us to this one (Cf. Humberto Maturana generally).

So that, aside from making nature into an unfeeling, non-reactive object--only humans really have feelings and "do" things --this Enlightenment philosophy- derived biological science law has kind of stripped us of meaning: Who are we? Where do we fit in?

We are lost.

And we have no control.

The next major tenet for Enlightenment philosophers was an end to tyranny, specifically religious tyranny, which required a separation of the secular (the State) from religion (not just the Church but the Reformation protestant beliefs that were just as intolerant if not more so than Roman Catholicism); Christianity in all its forms. The idea was that any one particular religion as a State religion (theocracy) was dictatorial and tyrannical should be avoided in secular dealings. An individual's religion was a private matter, not a public one. And it is here that not only the prior attitude toward nature is further enhanced but, more importantly, it has led to the downfall of this present civilization. Why? Because in the separation of humanity in society from humanity in his emotional spirit, we have a parallel to the separation of humanity from nature, from the environment. Because Reason can only lift out and separate one thing from another and make extensive and detailed lists of "things"-- and then forgets to put them back into context, much less back together. Only science can so compartmentalize, an action that Ernst Cassirer finds erroneous for religion and language (Cf. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man) because Religion (Theology, Theosophy) is a social event, a social action (An Essay on Man; Karen Armstrong echoes this in The Case for God). It is about morals and ethics and how to get on with others.

So, who are we? Where do we fit in?

We are lost.

And we have no control.

Because we have no standards. Enlightenment Reason has backfired on itself.

Once before, the God Tyranny did it to us; now the Biological Science Tyranny is doing it to us: taking our life away, our life and our living. Meaning is down the drain: it's just biological. Humanity is just biological.

But the salient feature of this separation of earthly and heavenly powers is that it is exclusionist thinking, a type of thinking that is considered false logic (Cf. David Hackett Fischer, The Historian's Fallacy and Stephen Toulman, The Uses of Argument and List of Logical Fallacies at The Nizkor Project at http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies). Reason seems to do this, separate things from other things, isolating some things from other things and, therefore, there is no interplay and, really, no context. . .and, therefore, no meaning. It is, in Enlightenment philosophy, a kind of rationalizing reductionism (note Wood above). We end up with a bunch of pieces and not knowing who we are or where we stand or even what is good or bad. That is, there is a separation of moral guidelines from secular living that leads to an inability to follow any standard and an ability to rationalize any kind of behavior, much as the Jin Dynasty rulers of China (circa 1115-1234, known also as the Jurchen) did with Laozi's teachings, perverting his doctrine that it all works out in the end into "we can do whatever we fucking want to, it's of no consequence" and so they went on a rampage of violence and corruption toward their own, a Reign of Terror that only Genghis Kahn and the French could top--until the Modern Era and the US, beginning with the totally unnecessary use of the Atomic Bomb in 1945. Only with no guidelines for moral-ethical behavior can such a State of Chaos reign under the rubric of being right and just (Obama winning the Nobel Peace prize: Mao Zedong as the Champion of Human Rights.) Well. . .in a chaotic nature (world) where there are no meanings, any meaning is good, right?
Yet again, who are we? Where do we fit in?

We are lost.

And we have no control.

Science, scientific reasoning of the Enlightenment variety, is a tyranny of the kind the Enlightenment wished to rid humanity in the name of progress. Meaning comes from the deep emotional feelingness of humanity. We know we are alive, that we are more than a biological organism doing mindless biological things. We have words for this: spirit, soul. Things that have been ripped from us via Enlightenment philosophy.

What is "spirit"? What is "soul"? These conceptual terms are bandied about by both sides of the argument as if there is a common definition. Neither side can define them. Modern religions say they are indefinable; science just denies their existence altogether, as science is wont to do: if it doesn't understand something, it says it doesn't exist. Like James Randi and the Psycops. Let me try, approaching it from the impersonal scientific, reasonable, rational side of the argument. I'm going to stand my friend before you: Minna vander Pfaltz. And I'm going to tell you all that she is, according to science. Bear with me. This may be a fairly long list, which is just what science engages in: list-making (Cf. the Der Spiegel Interview with Umberto Eco, 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die"): two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth, one heart, gonads. . . . Nothing else. That's all there is to you, say the Tyrants of Science. And I say, where's personality? Where's character? Come on, Mr. Science, point to these things. Show me where they are.

Yet they exist. Like our feelings.

Can you, Mr. Science, show me "love"? Do you know what it is? How can you describe it in anything other than non-scientific language? Science simply says it's all in your head: a matter of a release of chemicals in a certain order and ending up looking like lust or some other form of sensual stimulation. A series of events, occurrences that just happen that we have no control over. In truth, they cannot talk of emotions--at least not without sounding like a religionist. What about the kind of love that has motored civilization: Tristan and Isolde, Troilus and Cresside, Parsifal and Blanchefleur, Romeo and Juliet, Mellors and Lady Chatterley, Cyrano de Bergerac and Roxanne. What is it that motivated these characters and remains a model, an ideal down to the present day? Biological warming of the blood, expansion of the iris, icy tingling of the skin, widening of the nostrils, shortness of breath? I can get you those by frightening the hell out of you. Like roller coasters? I do. I get all of those symptoms when I ride a roller coaster. But I don't love roller coasters like I love a human--and I certainly wouldn't have sex with one! The ultimate end of Enlightenment reasoning has separated us from ourselves, our world.

These things--character, love, feelings--are supra-biological. They are supra- mundane. And science can classify all it wants but it cannot explain them, just as the atheists cannot, at least, not without resorting to the same kind of language that religion uses to explain itself. This is because language is limited. Language, too, limits our world. Indeed, according to Humberto Maturana, language makes our world (Cf. The Tree of Knowledge and generally; also, "We Living Systems," and the interview with Arjen Mulder in The Art of the Accident; Cf. also Lara Boroditsky, How Does Language Shape the Way We Think? at Edge, June 12, 2009). He is, of course, not the only one to hold this view of language. Cassirer, Deakon, Plato. . . . Language is part and parcel of who we are. It is all we've got. Without it, who would know we are conscious, not only of ourselves but of others? (Consciousness being socio-cultural as well as individual, see François Tonneau.) But in describing how it feels to feel, to be alive, to be living requires our much evolved discursive language to dip back again to its origins and become highly symbolic, metaphoric. Because these aspects of us are beyond reason, beyond science's ability to define in discursive tones. The Biology-Science Tyrants cannot give us this feelingness. Enlightenment Reason does not give us this. And so, secularism does not offer us any ethico-moral standard of behavior and inter-relationship, just a bunch of facts and observations strung together. People are lost and seeking a meaning in this chaos of Reason and Science.

People who are searching for direction and meaning gravitate toward some framing device or another, even if they make up their own (like present-day Pagans). In recent years, died-in-the-wool atheists have gravitated, with the help of their high priests Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins, to the Church of Science as having all the answers. This kind of framing device continues the separation of humanity from its context (environment, nature) and keeps alive the Enlightenment philosophy that is bringing down civilization because there are no moral codes of behavior here. There is only chaos and meaninglessness and, in astrophysical engenderings, the utter inconsequence of humanity in the Big Scheme of Things (Cf. Joseph Smecker, "Against Prometheus: An Interview with Derrick Jensen on Science and Technology," and generally in Jensen's writing; but Alex Geisinger's Sustainable Development and the Domination of Nature: Spreading the Seed of the Western Ideology of Nature cannot be discounted; see also, above, Nature and Us). If you are inconsequential, you are worthless. Yet the mind of humanity cannot tolerate this. The mind strives for meaning; meaning is not inconsequential, it places humanity within an objective world (Cf. Suzanne Langer, Mind, and Feeling and Form; and Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man). Enlightenment philosophy removes it.

There is something in the human animal--and we are animals--that keeps us tied to nature, our context and world, a something that is inexplicable for science and that it sluringly calls metaphysics which, I guess, would be the world above and before physics (science) got to it. And changed it. Took it--and us--out of context. Jung called this underlying feeling or need for context and meaning the collective unconscious, the archetype, as found in hero myths, legends and folk tales (Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols and Symbols of Transformation; Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces and Myths to Live By; as well as Sibylle Birkhäuser-Oeri, The Mother: Archetypal Image in Fairy Tales and Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero). Thus, it would seem, too, that science has ripped us apart, split us off from ourselves. If the world is fractured and the self is fractured, there would seem to be no context for proper behavior, what Zoroaster labeled "good reflection, good word, and good deed" and sounds very similar to the Buddhist teachings on proper behavior (The Noble Eightfold Path). Which is what ethics and morals are all about establishing: proper behavior among people.

And here is the crux of the matter: Theology gives humanity a code of ethico- moral behavior and the State gives us laws of right and wrong and the twain shall never meet. Whence so many discomfitures and dissatisfactions and discontinuities, if for no other reason than the American propensity of believing that "you can't legislate morals (ethics)." If you can't, how are you supposed to live an upright and proper life? How are you to know what is good and what is bad, for your religious beliefs are your personal choice and cannot be brought into the secular world, according to Enlightenment philosophy. We are living in a world in which there is no inherent human ethic to guide us in our relations with other people, in our relations with our context (environment). And, so, as with the Jin, anything goes.

A kind of conundrum arises here in that a particular religious ideal being kept out of the State is a good thing yet this leads to tyranny (and witch hunts); but some kind of moral guideline must be in place in order to satisfy the deep-seated human need for definition, for placement, for meaning. We must live with others and we must live with nature and so our relations must be put into some kind of code. The legal world cannot satisfy this need, for it comes from the outside: it is, in fact, not just to humanity. Not the organism "human," but the spirit, the consciousness that is "humanity" and makes us different from our animal cousins--we think: there is Koko. . .and the Bonobos and even the chimpanzees to consider. But Enlightenment Reason and rationality separates us from our context, our environment.

How are we to come to any kind of consensus of what is "good reflection, good word, and good deed" when we are separated from ourselves. Our heritage has been stripped from us, our humanity has been flayed from our bodies. However are we going to come to a universal-comparative ethical framework when our literature, our art, our very life expression has been relegated to the ashcan by Enlightenment Reason? Our biological being may be satisfied but our psychological being (spirit, consciousness) is not. As it is spirit and consciousness that make us function as higher animals, we are now at a messy impasse.

But people are still searching for meaning--even the new breed of atheists. Meaning in context. Humanity is part of the world at large and it relates to that world as that world relates to humanity: living is a whole, a unity. As humanity reacts to and acts upon nature, nature adjusts and reacts and acts back. The present geophysical situation is an in-your-face reminder of this, though it is logos has conveniently brought us this debacle. Reason has brought us to our near destruction --I am not armageddonist--because it has isolated its other half: mythos, Religion (Theosophy), the search for meaning and Nature, our environment. When Dr. Jekyll tried to kill his other half, Mr. Hyde, he killed himself. Inherent in this search for meaning there is an ethos, a moral vision of how humanity should behave, in the world and with itself, its others. Science, reason, rationality abides no ethics or morals: things are as they are.

A fine mess the Enlightenment's gotten us into!

And yet again, who are we? Where do we fit in?

We are lost.

And we have no control.

What the Enlightenment has given us in the secular world is a place of no ethos. Oh, it tried, via laws and regulations. The reason is not that such kinds of laws cannot be crafted (reasonably) and enacted, but that they come from outside of humanness. They do not touch the inner need, the spirit of humanity. And, so, people become ethically ambivalent or, as some might say, ethically challenged: because this reasonable and rational behavioral guide does not "touch" us. It is not satisfying. It has no spirit. It's half-assed.

What the Enlightenment did via getting rid of any particular religion's tyranny was to get rid of Religion (Theosophy). And, so, there is no guide, no guidance for crafting a society with ethical laws that arise from the needs of the people, the needs of the people in context. Yet, even in its reasonableness, Enlightenment State Designers could not escape their "lesser" heritage--just as the Mahayanists cannot escape their Hinayanist heritage--for they crafted into the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution "inalienable" (God-given) rights. . .and then did a God thing by coming up with 10 "amendments" (commandments?) to protect these God-given, symbolic, mythic behavioral prerogatives--and then another 17. These "framers" got close on only two items: freedom of speech, which is also freedom of thought, and the right to privacy. Why do I say this? For these are the two rights that are most upsetting in the present political environment. A tyranny, a theocracy, takes away these personal, metaphysical rights because they are the most intensely personal, they are the most intensely effective and expressive of living and coping and making the world. They are what makes us human and are not necessarily "reasonable," à la Enlightenment Philosophy worldview. Take these away and there is no freedom, no Free-will. The Tyranny of Science--Reason--takes away free will.

Zoroaster had it right: "good reflection, good word, and good deed." And Free-Will.

What is needed, then, to counter the ill-effects of Reason, rationality and science is some kind of synthesis or "good reflection, good word, and good deed." For any belief system, religious or scientific, that is chosen people-centred and believes, in good fascist manner, that its way is right (and, thereby, all others are wrong) is exclusionist and, as philosophers tend to believe, exclusion of even one human from the crowd is a sign of a pathologic order, a pathological society (Cf. Stephen Pepper and Karl Popper generally). Science and Reason further discount our environment, as it is something other, outside of us. Enlightenment philosophy has done this to us.
Logos, reason, has given mythos a bad name in the modern times, such a bad name that it tries to supplant its roots with itself; for the "reason," the science before logos' science was mythos. Always trying to discover or invent something new, logos has denigrated into the pits of hell its other half, mythos. And so logos, reason, rationality, science, is like a one-legged football player. It is half-assed, for it still cannot explain what it is like to be human, what it feels like to be alive and living in this world. We have been separated from our nature, our roots. . .our context. We don't know how to behave with other peoples.

Only when we have put mythos back into our secular State can we find our context and begin to live again. Only when we are whole instead of half-assed can we expect to find a full and satisfying life again. A life in context.

Nature is a part us. We must be in harmony with our world. We must nurture it and be nurtured by it because we are part of it. We need an ethos. (Cf. Dave Belden, Religion is good for this, 1 June 2004 at
http://www.opendemocracy.net/
faith/article_1929.jsp
). Enlightenment philosophy has stolen this from us and needs to be put back in context.



 

 


 

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