Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  In this sense the Romantic impulse continued and expanded the modern mind’s overall movement toward realism. Its goal was to delineate all aspects of existence, not just the conventionally acceptable and consensually validated. As Romanticism extended its compass and shifted its focus in the course of the modern period, it sought to reflect the authentic character of modern life in its lived actuality, not limiting itself to the ideal or the aristocratic, or to traditional subjects from classical, mythological, or biblical sources. It mission was to transmute the mundane and commonplace into art, to perceive the poetic and mystical in the most concrete details of ordinary experience, even in the degraded and ugly. Its quest was to show “the heroism of modern life” (Baudelaire), and its antiheroism as well. By expressing ever more precisely the variegated quality of human experience, the Romantic conveyed as well its confusion, its irresolution, and its subjectivity. Pressing ever deeper into the nature of human perception and creativity, the modern artist began to move beyond the traditional mimetic, representational view of art, and the “spectator” theory of reality underlying it. Such an artist sought to be not merely the reproducer of forms, not even their discoverer, but rather their creator. Reality was not to be copied, but to be invented.

  These radically broadening conceptions of reality, however, could not easily be integrated with the more positivist side of the modern mind. Also alienating to the scientific temperament was the Romantic’s-characteristic openness to transcendent dimensions of experience, and characteristic antagonism to science’s alleged rationalist reductionism and pretensions to objective certainty. As time passed, what had been the medieval dichotomy between reason and faith, which was followed by the early modern dichotomy between secular science and the Christian religion, now became a more general schism between scientific rationalism on the one hand and the multifaceted Romantic humanistic culture on the other, with the latter now including a diversity of religious and philosophical perspectives loosely allied with the literary and artistic tradition.

  The Divided World View

  Because both temperaments were deeply and simultaneously expressive of Western attitudes and yet were largely incompatible, a complex bifurcation of the Western outlook resulted. With the modern psyche so affected by the Romantic sensibility and in some sense identified with it, yet with the truth claims of science so formidable, modern man experienced in effect an intractable division between his mind and his soul. The same individual could appreciate, say, both Blake and Locke, but not in a coherent manner. Yeats’s esoteric vision of history could scarcely be conjoined with the history taught in modern universities. Rilke’s idealist ontology (“We are the bees of the invisible”) could not readily be accommodated by the assumptions of conventional science. As distinctly modern and influential a sensibility as T. S. Eliot’s was yet closer to Dante than to Darwin.

  Romantic poets, religious mystics, idealist philosophers, and counter-cultural psychedelicists would claim (and often describe in detail) the existence of other realities beyond the material and argue for an ontology of human consciousness sharply differing from that of conventional empiricism. But when it came to defining a basic cosmology, the secular scientific mind continued to determine the modern Weltanschauung’s center of gravity. For without consensual validation, the Romantic’s revelations could not overcome their apparent incompatibility with the commonly accepted truths of scientific observation, the bottom line of modern belief. The dreamer held no fragrant rose, tangible and public, with which to demonstrate to all the truth of his dream.

  Thus while Romanticism in this most general sense continued to inspire the West’s “inner” culture—its art and literature, its religious and metaphysical vision, its moral ideals—science dictated the “outer” cosmology: the character of nature, man’s place in the universe, and the limits of his real knowledge. Because science ruled the objective world, the Romantic perception was by necessity limited to the subjective. The Romantics’ reflections on life, their music and poetry and religious yearnings, richly absorbing and culturally sophisticated as those might be, in the end had to be consigned to only a part of the modern universe. Spiritual, imaginative, emotional, and aesthetic concerns had their place, but could not claim full ontological relevance in an objective world whose parameters were fundamentally impersonal and opaque. The faith-reason division of the medieval era and the religion-science division of the early modern era had become one of subject-object, inner-outer, man-world, humanities-science. A new form of the double-truth universe was now established.

  As a consequence of this dualism, modern man’s experience of the natural world and his relation to it underwent a paradoxical inversion as the modern period evolved, with the Romantic and scientific streams virtually mirroring each other in reverse. To begin with, a gradual immersion of man into nature was visible on both fronts. On the Romantic side, as in Rousseau, Goethe, or Wordsworth, there was an impassioned striving for conscious unity with nature, both poetic and instinctual. On the scientific side, man’s immersion into nature was realized in science’s description of man in increasingly, and then entirely, naturalistic terms. But against the harmonious aspirations of the Romantics, man’s unity with nature was here placed in the context of a Darwinian-Freudian struggle with a nature of brute unconsciousness—a struggle for survival, for ego integrity, for civilization. In the scientific view, man’s antagonism toward nature—and thus the necessity of nature’s external exploitation and internal repression—was the inevitable consequence of man’s biological evolution and emergence from the rest of nature.

  In the longer run, however, the early Romantic sense of harmony with nature underwent a distinct transformation as the modern era grew old. Here the Romantic temperament was complexly influenced by its own internal developments, by the sundering effects of modern industrial civilization and modern history, and by science’s view of nature as impersonal, non-anthropocentric, and random. The overdetermined result was an experience of nature almost opposite from the original Romantic ideal: Modern man now increasingly sensed his alienation from nature’s womb, his fall from unitary being, his confinement to an absurd universe of chance and necessity. No longer the early Romantic’s spiritually glorious child of nature, late modern man was the incongruously sensitive denizen of an implacable vastness devoid of meaning. Wordsworth’s vision had been displaced by Frost’s:

  Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.

  Its contemplation makes us out as small.

  As a brief epidemic of microbes

  That in a good glass may be seen to crawl

  The patina of this least of globes.

  By contrast, and for different reasons, the temperament allied with science and technological development had lauded man’s separation from nature. Human freedom from nature’s constraints, man’s ability to control his environment, and his intellectual capacity to observe and understand nature without anthropomorphic projection were all indispensable values for the scientific mind. Yet this same strategy paradoxically led science to a deepened awareness of man’s intrinsic unity with nature: his ineluctable dependence upon and ecological involvement with the natural environment, his epistemological interrelatedness with the nature he could never completely objectify, and the concrete dangers of the modern attempt at such separation and objectification. Science thereby began to move toward a position not altogether unlike the original Romantic one in its appreciation of man’s unity with nature—though generally without spiritual or transcendent dimensions, and without effectively resolving the theoretical and practical problems of the still fundamental human-world divide.

  In the meantime, the Romantic position had succumbed to the alienation necessitated by that schism. Nature was still impersonal and non-anthropocentric, and the modern psyche’s acute awareness of that cosmic estrangement was scarcely dented by the incipient and partial scientific rapprochement. It is true that in the twentieth century, both scientist and artist simultaneou
sly experienced the breakdown and dissolution of the old categories of time, space, causality, and substance. But the deeper discontinuities between the scientific universe and human aspiration remained unresolved. The modern experience was still vexed by a profound incoherence, with the dichotomies of the Romantic and scientific temperaments reflecting the Western Weltanschauung’s seemingly unbridgeable disjunction between human consciousness and unconscious cosmos. In a sense the two cultures, the two sensibilities, were present in varying proportion in every reflective individual of the modem West. And as the full character and implications of the scientific world view became explicit, that inner division was experienced as that of the sensitive human psyche situated in a world alien to human meaning. Modern man was a divided animal, inexplicably self-aware in an indifferent universe.

  Attempted Syntheses: From Goethe and Hegel to Jung

  There were those who sought to encompass that schism by bridging the scientific and humanistic imperatives in both method and theory. Goethe led a naturphilosophie movement that strove to unite empirical observation and spiritual intuition into a science of nature more revealing than Newton’s, a science capable of grasping nature’s organic archetypal forms. The scientist could not, in Goethe’s view, arrive at nature’s deeper truths by detaching himself from nature and employing bloodless abstractions to understand it, registering the external world like a machine. Such a strategy guaranteed that the observed reality would be a partial illusion, a picture whose depths had been eliminated by an unconscious filter. Only by bringing observation and imaginative intuition into intimate interaction could man penetrate nature’s appearances and discover its essence. Then the archetypal form in each phenomenon could be elicited; then the universal could be recognized in the particular and reunited with it.

  Goethe justified this approach with a philosophical stance sharply divergent from that of his older contemporary Kant. For while, like Kant, he recognized the human mind’s constructive role in knowledge, he nevertheless perceived man’s true relation to nature as overcoming the Kantian dualism. In Goethe’s vision, nature permeates everything, including the human mind and imagination. Hence nature’s truth does not exist as something independent and objective, but is revealed in the very act of human cognition. The human spirit does not simply impose its order on nature, as Kant thought. Rather, nature’s spirit brings forth its own order through man, who is the organ of nature’s self-revelation. For nature is not distinct from spirit but is itself spirit, inseparable not only from man but from God. God does not exist as a remote governor over nature, but “holds her close to her breast,” so that nature’s processes breathe God’s own spirit and power. Thus did Goethe unite poet and scientist in an analysis of nature that reflected his distinctively sensuous religiosity.

  In a similar spirit, the metaphysical speculations of the German Idealists after Kant culminated in the extraordinary philosophical achievement of Georg W. F. Hegel. Drawing on classical Greek philosophy, Christian mysticism, and German Romanticism to construct his all-encompassing system, Hegel set forth a conception of reality that sought to relate and unify man and nature, spirit and matter, human and divine, time and eternity. At the foundation of Hegel’s thought was his understanding of dialectic, according to which all things unfold in a continuing evolutionary process whereby every state of being inevitably brings forth its opposite. The interaction between these opposites then generates a third stage in which the opposites are integrated—they are at once overcome and fulfilled—in a richer and higher synthesis, which in turn becomes the basis for another dialectical process of opposition and synthesis.5 Through philosophy’s comprehension of this fundamental process, Hegel asserted, every aspect of reality—human thought, history, nature, the divine reality itself—could be made intelligible.

  Hegel’s overriding impulse was to comprehend all dimensions of existence as dialectically integrated in one unitary whole. In Hegel’s view, all human thought and all reality is pervaded by contradiction, which alone makes possible the development of higher states of consciousness and higher states of being. Each phase of being contains within itself a self-contradiction, and it is this that serves as the motor of its movement to a higher and more complete phase. Through a continuing dialectical process of opposition and synthesis, the world is always in the process of completing itself. Whereas for most of the history of Western philosophy from Aristotle onward, the defining essence of opposites was that they were logically contradictory and mutually exclusive, for Hegel all opposites are logically necessary and mutually implicated elements in a larger truth. Truth is thus radically paradoxical.

  Yet for Hegel the human mind in its highest development was fully capable of comprehending such truth. In contrast to Kant’s more circumscribed view, Hegel possessed a profound faith in human reason, believing it was ultimately grounded in the divine reason itself. While Kant had argued that reason could not penetrate the veil of phenomena to reach the ultimate reality, since man’s finite reason inevitably became caught in contradiction whenever it attempted to do so, Hegel saw human reason as fundamentally an expression of a universal Spirit or Mind (Geist), through the power of which, as in love, all opposites could be transcended in a higher synthesis.

  Hegel further argued that Kant’s philosophical revolution did not establish the final limits or necessary foundations of human knowledge, but rather was one of a long sequence of such conceptual revolutions by which man as subject repeatedly recognized that what he had thought was a being-in-itself actually received its content by means of the form given to it by the subject. The history of the human mind constantly replayed this drama of the subject’s becoming conscious of itself and the consequent destruction of the previously uncriticized form of consciousness. The structures of human knowledge were not fixed and timeless, as Kant supposed, but were historically determined stages that evolved in a continuing dialectic until consciousness achieved absolute knowledge of itself. What at any moment was seen as fixed and certain was constantly overcome by the evolving mind, thereby opening up new possibilities and greater freedom. Every stage of philosophy from the ancient Presocratics onward, every form of thought in human history, was both an incomplete perspective and yet a necessary step in this great intellectual evolution. Every era’s world view was both a valid truth unto itself and also an imperfect stage in the larger process of absolute truth’s self-unfolding.

  This same dialectical process also characterized Hegel’s metaphysical and religious understanding. Hegel conceived of the primal being of the world, the universal Mind or Spirit, as unfolding itself through its creation, achieving its ultimate realization in the human spirit. In Hegel’s understanding, the Absolute first posits itself in the immediacy of its own inner consciousness, then negates this initial condition by expressing itself in the particularities of the finite world of space and time, and finally, by “negating the negation,” recovers itself in its infinite essence. Mind thereby overcomes its estrangement from the world, a world that Mind itself has constituted. Thus the movement of knowledge evolves from consciousness of the object separate from the subject, to absolute knowledge in which the knower and the known became one.

  But it was only through a dialectical process of self-negation that the Absolute could achieve its fulfillment. Whereas for Plato the immanent and secular was ontologically dismissed in favor of the transcendent and spiritual, for Hegel this world was the very condition of the Absolute’s self-realization. In Hegel’s conception, both nature and history are ever progressing toward the Absolute: The universal Spirit expresses itself in space as nature, in time as history. All of nature’s processes and all of history, including man’s intellectual, cultural, and religious development, constitute the teleological plot of the Absolute’s quest for self-revelation. Just as it was only through the experience of alienation from God that man could experience the joy and triumph of rediscovering his own divinity, so it was only through the process of God’s becoming finite, in n
ature and in man, that God’s infinite nature could be expressed. For this reason, Hegel declared that the essence of his philosophical conception was expressed in the Christian revelation of God’s incarnation as man, the climax of religious truth.