Rick, Glenn and all MOQers:
I picked up a copy of Wilber's "SEX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY" to take a look
at what he says about Joe Campbell and Mythology, but found that it has
quite alot to say about the failure of the enlightenment. In fact, it treats
the problem with alot more detail than does Pirsig. (It also has some
interesting things to say about the distinction between social and
intellectual level thinking, but that's a topic for a different thread, the
language-derived thread.) Wilber confirmed some of my hunches about this
topic AND added to them.
KW says, "What modernity differentiated, postmodernity must integrate". I
should point out that what he calls modernity is The Enlightenment, the Age
of Reason, and that postmodernity begins with Kant. You know, the Critique
of Pure Reason and all that. So its interesting to note, I think, that great
thinkers have been dealing with this failure for two hundred years and the
poststrucuralists and deconstructionists are just the latest in a long line
of critics. But returning to KW's pithy little quote, what he means is that
The Enlightenment project was all about making distinctions between the
three major domains; science, morals and art. In the previous era, the
social level if you will, all of these were tightly woven together into a
complete picture of reality, but it was a mythic reality, a different sort
of reality. In order to move beyond that level it was necessary to unravel
that whole cloth. This is precisely what bothers guys like Looy, or any
fundamentalist you'd care to name. But that's just the reactionary critique,
which is far less interesting and their kind of objections will never help
to solve the problem.
The failure comes in going too far, going beyond what was necessary, so that
the big three were not just differentiated, but radically dissociated. I
mean today's science doesn't claim that morals are entirely unreal, its just
that science sees itself as divorced from such matters, it is concerned with
physical reality and has no scientific way of dealing with morals or art.
For the most part, those issues are seen as the other guy's problem. As KW
would put it, science is concerned with "its", art is concerned with "I" and
morals are concerned with "we". As Pirsig would put it, you'll never find
morals under a microscope. KW says, "Kant was well aware of this
(particularly in his essay, "What is Enlightenment?"), and his immediate
successors, and critics, are all INESCAPABLY oriented now to a worldspace in
which art, science and morality are not only differentiated, but are in
danger of flying apart completely." And he says, "Schelling was simply the
first of many "doctors of modernity" who would try desperately to heal the
fragments that began to cascade around them. For not only does modernity
(and postmodernity) have to worry about how to integrate what are now
irrevocable differentiations in the growth process, it has to deal
"theapeutically" with those differentiations that GO TOO FAR into actual
dissociation."
There's no going back. We couldn't return to the mythic world even if we
wanted to. This is why reactionary movements are so wrong-headed. And we
can't rest with the accomplishments of modernity as it stands today either.
It was a great liberating movement, but the task is imcomplete. To finish
what the scientific revolution, and the liberal political revolutions have
begun, there needs to be a re-integration. This is what so many of the
post-modern critics have been trying to do in various ways. I'd certainly
count Wilber and Pirsig among these critics. And hopefully that's part of
what we're doing here too. Or at least we should be trying to understand the
problem, no?
Thanks for the eyeballs,
DMB
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