We can illustrate the basic difference between primal and modern experience with a simple diagram (Figure 1), in which the inner circle representing the primal self has a porous boundary, suggesting its radical permeability and embeddedness with respect to the world, while the inner circle representing the modern self is formed by a solid line, suggesting the modern experience of a sharp distinction and dichotomy between subject and object, inner and outer. In the primal mind, the shaded area, representing the presence of conscious intelligence and interiority, the source of meaning and purpose, passes without distinction through the entire self/world complex. In the modern mind, the shaded area is located exclusively within the boundary of the self.
The systematic recognition that the exclusive source of meaning and purpose in the world is the human mind, and that it is a fundamental fallacy to project what is human onto the nonhuman, is one of the most basic presuppositions—perhaps the basic presupposition—of modern scientific method. Modern science seeks with obsessive rigor to “de-anthropomorphize” cognition. Facts are out there, meanings come from in here. The factual is regarded as plain, stark, objective, unembellished by the human and subjective, undistorted by values and aspirations. We see this impulse clearly evident in the emergence of the modern mind from the time of Bacon and Descartes onward. If the object is to be properly understood, the subject must observe and analyze that object with the utmost care taken to inhibit the naïve human tendency to invest the object with characteristics that are properly attributable only to the human subject. For genuine and valid cognition to occur, the objective world—nature, the cosmos—must be viewed as something fundamentally lacking in all those qualities that are subjectively, inwardly most present to the human mind as constituting its own being: consciousness and intelligence, sense of purpose and intention, capacity for meaning and communication, moral and spiritual imagination. To perceive these qualities as existing intrinsically in the world is to “contaminate” the act of knowing with what are in fact human projections.
It is easy for us today, still under the influence of the modern vision that reifies modern experience and assumptions as absolute, to believe we truly understand the primal vision when we see it as simply the naïve consequence of primitive fears, wishes, and projections. But to discern more impartially the difference between these two world views, we must grasp the stubborn fact that the primal cosmos was universally experienced, for countless millennia, as tangibly and self-evidently alive and awake—pervasively intentional and responsive, informed by ubiquitous spiritual presences, animated throughout by archetypal forces and intelligible meanings—in a manner that the modern perception does not and perhaps cannot recognize.
Of course this fundamental difference between the primal and the modern did not arise instantly in the seventeenth century, but evolved over thousands of years, in many forms and through many cultural developments. Not just modernity but the entire human project can be seen as impelling the gradual differentiation between self and world. An emergent distinction between subject and object seems to have been present already at the very birth of Homo sapiens, with its novel capacity and impulse to consciously plan rather than act automatically on instinct, to rely on one’s own wits and will to make one’s way in the world, to manipulate and control nature rather than be so embedded in it as to be its passive subject. As soon as our species first developed linguistic symbolization, we began to differentiate ourselves further from the world, objectifying our experience in ways that could articulate the world’s acting on us and our acting on the world. As soon as we first used a tool, we began to act as a subject vis-à-vis an object. All the epochal advances in human evolution—bipedalism and an upright posture, the larger and more complex brain, the making of tools, the control of fire, the development of hunting-and-gathering societies, the division of labor, the domestication of plants and animals, the formation of settled communities and then large urban centers, the increasingly complex and hierarchical social organization, the evolving capacities for linguistic, religious, and artistic symbolization, the emergence of the earliest forms of science and philosophy—all these both reflected and impelled new stages in the progressive differentiation of the human self from the encompassing world.
A memorable image at the beginning of Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey captures one aspect of this larger coherence in the vector of the human epic. In the opening sequence, entitled “The Dawn of Man,” a protohuman primate has just made the primordial discovery of using a tool for the first time, successfully employing a large bone as a weapon in a life-and-death struggle. In the ecstasy of that discovery, he hits the bone over and over again on a rock, on which it eventually shatters and, soaring high into the air, metamorphoses in slow motion into an orbiting space satellite at the turn of the twenty-first century. In that single montage we see the entire Promethean trajectory, the alpha and the omega of the Promethean quest to liberate the human being from the bonds of nature through human intelligence and will, to ascend and transcend, to gain control over the larger matrix from which the human being was attempting to emerge. This quest climaxes in modernity, especially in modern science, where the dominant goal of knowledge is ever-increasing prediction and control over an external natural world seen as radically “other”: mechanistic, impersonal, unconscious, the object of our powerful knowledge.
From the time of Bacon and Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, and more pervasively in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, the modern understanding is gradually so transformed that the world is no longer seen as a locus of pregiven meanings and purposes, as had been true not only in the immemorial primal vision but also for the ancient Greeks, medieval Scholastics, and Renaissance Humanists. With the full ascension of the modern mind, the world is no longer informed by numinous powers, gods and goddesses, archetypal Ideas, or sacred ends. It no longer embodies a cosmic order of meanings and purposes with which the human self seeks to be aligned. Rather, the world is viewed as a neutral domain of contingent facts and potential means to our secular purposes. In Max Weber’s famous term at the beginning of the twentieth century, which developed Schiller’s insight of a century earlier, the modern world is “disenchanted” (entzaubert): It has been voided of any spiritual, symbolic, or expressive dimension that provides a cosmic order in which human existence finds its ground of meaning and purpose. Instead, the world is viewed entirely in terms of neutral facts, the detached rational understanding of which will give the human being an unprecedented capacity to calculate, control, and manipulate that world.
Yet such a great shift in understanding also accomplishes something else of scarcely less importance for the modern self. Disenchantment, the denial of intrinsic meaning and purpose, essentially objectifies the world and thereby denies subjectivity to the world. Objectification denies to the world a subject’s capacity to intend, to signify intelligently, to express its meaning, to embody and communicate humanly relevant purposes and values. To objectify the world is to remove from it all subjective categories, such as meaning and purpose, by perceiving these as projections of what are now regarded as the only true subjects, human beings. This in turn tremendously magnifies and empowers human subjectivity: the felt interior capacity of the human being to be self-defining, self-revising, self-determining—to be both outwardly world-shaping and inwardly consequential and autonomous. It makes possible a new freedom from externally imposed meanings and orderings that had previously been seen as embedded in the cosmos, and that had typically been upheld and enforced by traditional structures of cultural authority, whether religious, social, or political. Charles Taylor has well described the consequences of this deep shift for the modern self:
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 long
er 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.
Depriving the world of subjectivity, of its capacity for intentional significance, by objectification and disenchantment radically enhances the human self’s sense of freedom and autonomous subjectivity, its underlying conviction that it can shape and determine its own existence. Simultaneously, disenchantment enhances the human being’s capacity to view the natural world as primarily a context to be shaped and a resource to be exploited for human benefit. As the world loses its traditional structures of pregiven meaning, as these are successively “seen through” and deconstructed, the conditions of human existence—both outer and inner—become increasingly open to change and development, ever more subject to human influence, innovation, and control. It was through just this extraordinary shift of vision that there developed an effective psychological and philosophical foundation for the rapid ascent of modern science, secular society, democratic individualism, and industrial civilization.
The history of the human mind’s movement from a state of participation mystique to a more fully differentiated mode of awareness is in many respects the history of the human mind itself. Impelled by the powerful human drive to achieve ever-greater autonomy relative to the conditions of existence, virtually the entire evolution of human consciousness has served this psychological and epistemological impulse to distinguish the human self from the world, subject from object, part from whole. The Promethean project seems to be intrinsic to the human condition. Yet this project has been carried out most vigorously and brilliantly by the Western mind, above all by the modern mind, that avatar and apex of Promethean progress.
If we look again at the comparison (Figure 2) between the primal experience of participation mystique and the modern experience of a subject-object dichotomy, we can readily see what has happened in the process of moving from the world view depicted on the left to that depicted on the right. In the long evolution from primal to modern consciousness, there has taken place a complexly intertwined and interpenetrating two-sided process: on the one hand, a gradual differentiation of the self from the world, of the human being from nature, of the individual from the encompassing matrix of being; on the other hand, a gradual disenchantment of the world, producing a radical relocation of the ground of meaning and conscious intelligence from the world as a whole to the human self alone. What once pervaded the world as the anima mundi is now seen as the exclusive property of human consciousness. The modern human self has essentially absorbed all meaning and purpose into its own interior being, emptying the primal cosmos of what once constituted its essential nature.
But we misunderstand this evolutionary process if we consider it only in the generally secular terms so far discussed. The modern differentiation of the autonomous human self and the disenchantment of the empirical cosmos were also profoundly influenced and even impelled by the historical evolution of religion, again particularly in the Western context—ancient, medieval, and early modern. From its beginnings, the Western self was informed by the momentous disclosure of humanity’s special relationship to a transcendent divine reality, a monotheistic supreme being who was both the creator of the world and the ultimate locus of meaning and value: “Man was made in the image of God.” Thus God’s absolute uniqueness, separation, and superiority with respect to the mundane world of mortal finitude and unredeemed nature deeply strengthened the human being’s sense of uniqueness, separation, and superiority with respect to the rest of nature and the created universe.
Modifying our diagram accordingly, we can recognize the crucial intervening stage in the evolution from the primal world view to the modern one provided by this immense religious development. With the revelation of a transcendent divine being as the ultimate ground of meaning and value, supraordinate to and separate from the empirical world of nature, combined with the human being’s unique association with that transcendent divinity, an enormous intellectual and psychological step is taken in the separative elevation of the human from a universe gradually voided of intrinsic meaning. In the monotheistic revelation, a self-subsistent divine Subject created the world as Object, within which the special human subject and its divinely ordained history unfolds. As the diagram in Figure 3 suggests (and as Descartes’s careful arguments for the existence of God at the birth of modern philosophy affirm), what eventually becomes the modern self receives its unique ontological status from its privileged association with the transcendent divine reality that stands above an empirical cosmos that has been increasingly emptied of all inherent significance and value apart from the human.
This epochal transformation of the triadic relationship between divinity, humanity, and the world was already set in motion with the emergence of the great world religions and philosophies of transcendence during that period of the first millennium BCE named by Karl Jaspers the Axial Age. The differentiation between self, world, and God was given special force and new definition with the unfolding of the biblical tradition from the later Hebrew prophets through early Christianity to Saint Augustine and the medieval era. It was decisively forwarded, and in a sense absolutized, by the Reformation’s militant desacralizing of the world in service of the human being’s exclusive allegiance to the sovereign majesty of the Creator. Finally, in the wake of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, this privileged position of the human vis-à-vis the rest of creation was assumed and expanded in entirely secular terms—here too, partly as a result of forces set in motion by the Western religious legacy—as the modern self progressed in its unprecedented development of autonomy and self-definition.
A host of significant complications and exceptions, ambiguities and nuances could be usefully discussed concerning this long and complex historical development.1 But speaking very broadly, we may say here that as the human self, guided by its evolving cultural, religious, philosophical, and scientific symbolizations, has gained increasing substantiality and distinction with respect to the world, that self has increasingly appropriated all the intelligence and soul, meaning and purpose it previously perceived in the world, so that it eventually locates these realities exclusively within itself. Conversely, as the human being has appropriated all the intelligence and soul, meaning and purpose it previously perceived in the world, it has gained more and more substantiality and distinction with respect to the world, accompanied by ever-greater autonomy as those meanings and purposes are seen as ever more malleable to human will and intelligence. The two processes—constellating the self and appropriating the anima mundi—have been mutually supportive and reinforcing. But their joint consequence has been to gradually empty the external world of all intrinsic meaning and purpose. By the late modern period, the cosmos has metamorphosed into a mindless, soulless vacuum, within which the human being is incongruently self-aware. The anima mundi has dissolved and disappeared, and all psychological and spiritual qualities are now located exclusively in the human mind and psyche.
It appears that this evolutionary trade-off has fostered the emergence of a centered autonomous self, one decisively set off from yet dynamically engaged with the encompassing world, a world that in turn has been voided of all those qualities with which the human being is uniquely identified. The forging of the self and the disenchantment of the world, the differentiation of the human and the appropriation of meaning, are all aspects of the same development. In effect, to sum up a very complex process, the achievement of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation. How precious the former, how painful the latter. What may be viewed as the fundamental epistemological strategy of the evolving human mind—the systematic separation of subject from object—one carried forth to its fullest extent by the modern mind, has proved to be powerfully effective and indeed liberating. Yet many of that strategy’s long-term co
nsequences have also proved to be highly problematic.
The Cosmological Situation Today
In the course of the past century, the modern world view has seen both its greatest ascendancy and its unexpected breakdown. Every field and discipline, from philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics to physics, ecology, and medicine, has brought forth new data and new perspectives that have challenged long-established assumptions and strategies of the modern mind. This challenge has been considerably magnified and made more urgent by the multitude of concrete consequences produced by those assumptions and strategies, many of them problematic. As of the first decade of the new millennium, almost every defining attitude of the modern world view has been critically reassessed and deconstructed, though often not relinquished, even when failure to do so is costly. The result in our own, postmodern time has been a state of extraordinary intellectual ferment and fragmentation, fluidity and uncertainty. Ours is an age between world views, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated. Yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like.
Recently there have been emerging from the deconstructive flux of the postmodern mind the tentative outlines of a new understanding of reality, one very different from the conventional modern view. Impelled by developments in many fields, this shift in intellectual vision has encompassed a wide range of ideas and principles, among which can be identified a few common themes. Perhaps the most conspicuous and pervasive of these can be summed up as a deeper appreciation of both the multidimensional complexity of reality and the plurality of perspectives necessary to approach it. Closely related to this new appreciation, as both cause and effect, is a critical reappraisal of the epistemological limits and pragmatic consequences of the conventional scientific approach to knowledge. This reappraisal includes a more acute sensitivity to the ways in which subject and object are mutually implicated in the act of knowing, a revised understanding of the relationship of whole and part in all phenomena, a new grasp of complex interdependence and subtle order in living systems, and an acknowledgment of the inadequacy of reductionist, mechanistic, and objectivized concepts of nature.
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