Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  The prevalence of the Kuhnian concept of “paradigms” in current discourse is highly characteristic of postmodern thought, reflecting a critical awareness of the mind’s fundamentally interpretive nature. This awareness has not only affected the postmodern approach to past cultural world views and the history of changing scientific theories, but has also influenced the postmodern self-understanding itself, encouraging a more sympathetic attitude toward repressed or unorthodox perspectives and a more self-critical view of currently established ones. Continuing advances in anthropology, sociology, history, and linguistics have underscored the relativity of human knowledge, bringing increased recognition of the “Eurocentric” character of Western thought, and of the cognitive bias produced by factors such as class, race, and ethnicity. Especially penetrating in recent years has been the analysis of gender as a crucial factor in determining, and limiting, what counts as truth. Various forms of psychological analysis, cultural as well as individual, have further unmasked the unconscious determinants of human experience and knowledge.

  Reflecting and supporting all these developments is a radical perspectivism that lies at the very heart of the postmodern sensibility: a perspectivism rooted in the epistemologies developed by Hume, Kant, Hegel (in his historicism), and Nietzsche, and later articulated in pragmatism, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. In this understanding, the world cannot be said to possess any features in principle prior to interpretation. The world does not exist as a thing-in-itself, independent of interpretation; rather, it comes into being only in and through interpretations. The subject of knowledge is already embedded in the object of knowledge: the human mind never stands outside the world, judging it from an external vantage point. Every object of knowledge is already part of a preinterpreted context, and beyond that context are only other preinterpreted contexts. All human knowledge is mediated by signs and symbols of uncertain provenance, constituted by historically and culturally variable predispositions, and influenced by often unconscious human interests. Hence the nature of truth and reality, in science no less than in philosophy, religion, or art, is radically ambiguous. The subject can never presume to transcend the manifold predispositions of his or her subjectivity. One can at best attempt a fusion of horizons, a never-complete rapprochement between subject and object. Less optimistically, one must recognize the insuperable solipsism of human awareness against the radical illegibility of the world.

  The other side of the postmodern mind’s openness and indeterminacy is thus the lack of any firm ground for a world view. Both inner and outer realities have become unfathomably ramified, multidimensional, malleable, and unbounded—bringing a spur to courage and creativity, yet also a potentially debilitating anxiety in the face of unending relativism and existential finitude. The conflicts of subjective and objective testings, an acute awareness of the cultural parochialism and historical relativity of all knowledge, a pervasive sense of radical uncertainty and displacement, and a pluralism bordering on distressing incoherence all contribute to the postmodern condition. To even speak of subject and object as distinguishable entities is to presume more than can be known. With the ascendance of the postmodern mind, the human quest for meaning in the cosmos has devolved upon a hermeneutic enterprise that is disorientingly free-floating: The postmodern human exists in a universe whose significance is at once utterly open and without warrantable foundation.

  Of the many factors that have converged to produce this intellectual position, it has been the analysis of language that has brought forth the most radically skeptical epistemological currents in the postmodern mind, and it is these currents that have identified themselves most articulately and self-consciously as “postmodern.” Again, many sources contributed to this development—Nietzsche’s analysis of the problematic relation of language to reality; C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, positing that all human thought takes place in signs; Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, positing the arbitrary relationship between word and object, sign and signified; Wittgenstein’s analysis of the linguistic structuring of human experience; Heidegger’s existentialist-linguistic critique of metaphysics; Edward Sapir and B. L. Whorf’s linguistic hypothesis that language shapes the perception of reality as much as reality shapes language; Michel Foucault’s genealogical investigations into the social construction of knowledge; and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism, challenging the attempt to establish a secure meaning in any text. The upshot of these several influences, particularly in the contemporary academic world, has been the dynamic dissemination of a view of human discourse and knowledge that radically relativizes human claims to a sovereign or enduring truth, and that thereby supports an emphatic revision of the character and goals of intellectual analysis.

  Basic to this perspective is the thesis that all human thought is ultimately generated and bound by idiosyncratic cultural-linguistic forms of life. Human knowledge is the historically contingent product of linguistic and social practices of particular local communities of interpreters, with no assured “ever-closer” relation to an independent ahistorical reality. Because human experience is linguistically pre-structured, yet the various structures of language possess no demonstrable connection with an independent reality, the human mind can never claim access to any reality other than that determined by its local form of life. Language is a “cage” (Wittgenstein). Moreover, linguistic meaning itself can be shown to be fundamentally unstable, because the contexts that determine meaning are never fixed, and beneath the surface of every apparently coherent text can be found a plurality of incompatible meanings. No interpretation of a text can claim decisive authority because that which is being interpreted inevitably contains hidden contradictions that undermine its coherence. Hence all meaning is ultimately undecidable, and there is no “true” meaning. No underlying primal reality can be said to provide the foundation for human attempts to represent truth. Texts refer only to other texts, in an infinite regress, with no secure basis in something external to language. One can never escape from “the play of signifiers.” The multiplicity of incommensurable human truths exposes and defeats the conventional assumption that the mind can progress ever forward to a nearer grasp of reality. Nothing certain can be said about the nature of truth, except perhaps that it is, as Richard Rorty put it, “what our peers will let us get away with saying.”7

  Here in a sense the Cartesian critical intellect has reached its furthest point of development, doubting all, applying a systematic skepticism to every possible meaning. With no divine foundation to certify the Word, language possesses no privileged connection to truth. The fate of human consciousness is ineluctably nomadic, a self-aware wandering through error. The history of human thought is a history of idiosyncratic metaphorical schemes, ambiguous interpretive vocabularies having no ground beyond what is already saturated by their own metaphorical and interpretive categories. Postmodern philosophers can compare and contrast, analyze and discuss the many sets of perspectives human beings have expressed, the diverse symbol systems, the various ways of making things hang together, but they cannot pretend to possess an extrahistorical Archimedean point from which to judge whether a given perspective validly represents the “Truth.” Since there are no indubitable foundations for human knowledge, the highest value for any perspective is its capacity to be temporarily useful or edifying, emancipatory or creative—though it is recognized that in the end these valuations are themselves not justifiable by anything beyond personal and cultural taste. For justification is itself only another social practice with no foundation beyond social practice.

  The most prominent philosophical outcome of these several converging strands of postmodern thought has been a many-sided critical attack on the central Western philosophical tradition from Platonism onward. The whole project of that tradition to grasp and articulate a foundational Reality has been criticized as a futile exercise in linguistic game playing, a sustained but doomed effort to move beyond elaborate fictions of its own creation. More pointedly, such a proj
ect has been condemned as inherently alienating and oppressively hierarchical—an intellectually imperious procedure that has produced an existential and cultural impoverishment, and that has led ultimately to the technocratic domination of nature and the social-political domination of others. The Western mind’s overriding compulsion to impose some form of totalizing reason—theological, scientific, economic—on every aspect of life is accused of being not only self-deceptive but destructive.

  Spurred by these and other, related factors, postmodern critical thought has encouraged a vigorous rejection of the entire Western intellectual “canon” as long defined and privileged by a more or less exclusively male, white, European elite. Received truths concerning “man,” “reason,” “civilization,” and “progress” are indicted as intellectually and morally bankrupt. Under the cloak of Western values, too many sins have been committed. Disenchanted eyes are now cast onto the West’s long history of ruthless expansionism and exploitation—the rapacity of its elites from ancient times to modern, its systematic thriving at the expense of others, its colonialism and imperialism, its slavery and genocide, its anti-Semitism, its oppression of women, people of color, minorities, homosexuals, the working classes, the poor, its destruction of indigenous societies throughout the world, its arrogant insensitivity to other cultural traditions and values, its cruel abuse of other forms of life, its blind ravaging of virtually the entire planet.

  In this radically transformed cultural context, the contemporary academic world has increasingly concerned itself with the critical deconstruction of traditional assumptions through several overlapping modes of analysis—sociological and political, historical and psychological, linguistic and literary. Texts of every category are analyzed with an acute sensitivity to the rhetorical strategies and political functions they serve. The underlying intellectual ethos is one of disassembling established structures, deflating pretensions, exploding beliefs, unmasking appearances—a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in the spirit of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Postmodernism in this sense is “an antinomian movement that assumes a vast unmaking in the Western mind … deconstruction, decentering, disappearance, dissemination, demystification, discontinuity, difference, dispersion, etc. Such terms … express an epistemological obsession with fragments or fractures, and a corresponding ideological commitment to minorities in politics, sex, and language. To think well, to feel well, to act well, to read well, according to the épistéme of unmaking, is to refuse the tyranny of wholes; totalization in any human endeavor is potentially totalitarian.”8 The pretense of any form of omniscience—philosophical, religious, scientific—must be abandoned. Grand theories and universal overviews cannot be sustained without producing empirical falsification and intellectual authoritarianism. To assert general truths is to impose a spurious dogma on the chaos of phenomena. Respect for contingency and discontinuity limits knowledge to the local and specific. Any alleged comprehensive, coherent outlook is at best no more than a temporarily useful fiction masking chaos, at worst an oppressive fiction masking relationships of power, violence, and subordination.

  Properly speaking, therefore, there is no “postmodern world view,” nor the possibility of one. The postmodern paradigm is by its nature fundamentally subversive of all paradigms, for at its core is the awareness of reality as being at once multiple, local and temporal, and without demonstrable foundation. The situation recognized by John Dewey at the start of the century, that “despair of any integrated outlook and attitude [is] the chief intellectual characteristic of the present age,” has been enshrined as the essence of the postmodern vision, as in Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”

  Here, paradoxically, we can recognize something of the old confidence of the modern mind in the superiority of its own perspective. Only whereas the modern mind’s conviction of superiority derived from its awareness of possessing in an absolute sense more knowledge than its predecessors, the postmodern mind’s sense of superiority derives from its special awareness of how little knowledge can be claimed by any mind, itself included. Yet precisely by virtue of that self-relativizing critical awareness, it is recognized that a quasi-nihilist rejection of any and all forms of “totalization” and “metanarrative”—of any aspiration toward intellectual unity, wholeness, or comprehensive coherence—is itself a position not beyond questioning, and cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself. Such a position presupposes a metanarrative of its own, one perhaps more subtle than others, but in the end no less subject to deconstructive criticism. On its own terms, the assertion of the historical relativity and cultural-linguistic bondage of all truth and knowledge must itself be regarded as reflecting but one more local and temporal perspective having no necessarily universal, extrahistorical value. Everything could change tomorrow. Implicitly, the one postmodern absolute is critical consciousness, which, by deconstructing all, seems compelled by its own logic to do so to itself as well. This is the unstable paradox that permeates the postmodern mind.

  But if the postmodern mind has sometimes been prone to a dogmatic relativism and a compulsively fragmenting skepticism, and if the cultural ethos that has accompanied it has sometimes deteriorated into cynical detachment and spiritless pastiche, it is evident that the most significant characteristics of the larger postmodern intellectual situation—its pluralism, complexity, and ambiguity—are precisely the characteristics necessary for the potential emergence of a fundamentally new form of intellectual vision, one that might both preserve and transcend the current state of extraordinary differentiation. In the politics of the contemporary Weltanschauung, no perspective—religious, scientific, or philosophical—has the upper hand, yet that situation has encouraged an almost unprecedented intellectual flexibility and cross-fertilization, reflected in the widespread call for, and practice of, open “conversation” between different understandings, different vocabularies, different cultural paradigms.

  Looked at as a whole, the extreme fluidity and multiplicity of the contemporary intellectual scene can scarcely be exaggerated. Not only is the postmodern mind itself a maelstrom of unresolved diversity, but virtually every important element of the Western intellectual past is now present and active in one form or another, contributing to the vitality and confusion of the contemporary Zeitgeist. With so many previously established assumptions having been called into question, there remain few, if any, a priori strictures on the possible, and many perspectives from the past have reemerged with new relevance. Hence any generalizations about the postmodern mind have to be qualified by a recognition of the continuing presence or recent resurgence of most of its major predecessors, the topics of all the previous chapters of this book. Various still-vital forms of the modern sensibility, of the scientific mind, of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, of Renaissance syncretism, of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism—all of these, at various stages of development and ecumenical interpenetration, continue today to be influential factors. Even elements of the Western cultural tradition going back to the Hellenistic era and classical Greece—Platonic and Presocratic philosophy, Hermeticism, mythology, the mystery religions—have been reemerging to play new roles in the current intellectual scene. Moreover, these in turn have been joined, and affected, by a multitude of cultural perspectives from outside the West, such as the Buddhist and Hindu mystical traditions; by underground cultural streams from within the West itself, such as Gnosticism and the major esoteric traditions; and by indigenous and archaic perspectives antedating Western civilization altogether, such as Neolithic European and Native American spiritual traditions—all gathering now on the intellectual stage as if for some kind of climactic synthesis.

  The cultural and intellectual role of religion has of course been drastically affected by the secularizing and pluralistic developments of the modern age, but while in most respects the influence of instit
utionalized religion has continued to decline, the religious sensibility itself seems to have been revitalized by the newly ambiguous intellectual circumstances of the postmodern era. Contemporary religion has been revitalized as well by its own plurality, finding new forms of expression and new sources of inspiration and illumination ranging from Eastern mysticism and psychedelic self-exploration to liberation theology and ecofeminist spirituality. Although the ascendance of secular individualism and the decline of traditional religious belief may have precipitated widespread spiritual anomie, it is evident that, for many, these same developments ultimately encouraged new forms of religious orientation and greater spiritual autonomy. In growing numbers, individuals have felt not only compelled but free to work out for themselves their relationship to the ultimate conditions of human existence, drawing on a far wider range of spiritual resources to do so. The postmodern collapse of meaning has thus been countered by an emerging awareness of the individual’s self-responsibility and capacity for creative innovation and self-transformation in his or her existential and spiritual response to life. Following suggestions implicit in Nietzsche, the “death of God” has begun to be assimilated and reconceived as a positive religious development, as permitting the emergence of a more authentic experience of the numinous, a larger sense of deity. On the intellectual level, religion no longer tends to be understood reductively as a psychologically or culturally determined belief in nonexistent realities, or explained away as an accident of biology, but is recognized as a fundamental human activity in which every society and individual symbolically interprets and engages the ultimate nature of being.