Science too, while no longer enjoying the same degree of sovereignty it possessed during the modern era, continues to retain allegiance for the unrivaled pragmatic power of its conceptions and the penetrating rigor of its method. Because the earlier knowledge claims of modern science have been relativized by both philosophy of science and the concrete consequences of scientific and technological advance, that allegiance is no longer uncritical, yet in these new circumstances science itself has seemingly been freed up to explore new and less-constricted approaches to understanding the world. It is true that individuals who subscribe to an allegedly unified and self-evident “scientific world view” of the modern type are seen as having failed to engage the larger intellectual challenge of the age—thereby receiving the same judgment in the postmodern era that the ingenuous religious person received from science in the modern era. In virtually all contemporary disciplines, it is recognized that the prodigious complexity, subtlety, and multi valence of reality far transcend the grasp of any one intellectual approach, and that only a committed openness to the interplay of many perspectives can meet the extraordinary challenges of the postmodern era. But contemporary science has itself become increasingly self-aware and self-critical, less prone to a naive scientism, more conscious of its epistemological and existential limitations. Nor is contemporary science singular, having given rise to a number of radically divergent interpretations of the world, many of which differ sharply from what was previously the conventional scientific vision.
Common to these new perspectives has been the imperative to rethink and reformulate the human relation to nature, an imperative driven by the growing recognition that modern science’s mechanistic and objectivist conception of nature was not only limited but fundamentally flawed. Major theoretical interventions such as Bateson’s “ecology of mind,” Bohm’s theory of the implicate order, Sheldrake’s theory of formative causation, McClintock’s theory of genetic transposition, Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures and order by fluctuation, Lorenz and Feigenbaum’s chaos theory, and Bell’s theorem of nonlocality have pointed to new possibilities for a less reductionist scientific world conception. Evelyn Fox Keller’s methodological recommendation that the scientist be capable of empathic identification with the object he or she seeks to understand reflects a similar reorientation of the scientific mind. Moreover, many of these developments within the scientific community have been strengthened and often stimulated by the reemergence of and widespread interest in various archaic and mystical conceptions of nature, the impressive sophistication of which is increasingly recognized.
A further crucial development encouraging these integrative tendencies in the postmodern intellectual milieu has been the epistemological rethinking of the nature of imagination, carried out on many fronts—philosophy of science, sociology, anthropology, religious studies—and spurred perhaps above all by the work of Jung and the epistemological insights of post-Jungian depth psychology. Imagination is no longer conceived as simplistically opposed to perception and reason; rather, perception and reason are recognized as being always informed by the imagination. With this awareness of the fundamental mediating role of the imagination in human experience has also come an increased appreciation of the power and complexity of the unconscious, as well as new insight into the nature of archetypal pattern and meaning. The postmodern philosopher’s recognition of the inherently metaphorical nature of philosophical and scientific statements (Feyerabend, Barbour, Rorty) has been both affirmed and more precisely articulated with the postmodern psychologist’s insight into the archetypal categories of the unconscious that condition and structure human experience and cognition (Jung, Hillman). The long-standing philosophical problem of universals, which had been partly illuminated by Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblances”—his thesis that what appears to be a definite commonality shared by all instances covered by a single general word in fact often comprises a whole range of indefinite, overlapping similarities and relationships—has been given new intelligibility through depth psychology’s understanding of archetypes. In this conception, archetypes are recognized as enduring patterns or principles that are inherently ambiguous and multivalent, dynamic, malleable, and subject to diverse cultural and individual inflections, yet that possess a distinct underlying formal coherence and universality.
An especially characteristic and challenging intellectual position that has emerged out of modern and postmodern developments is one which, recognizing both an essential autonomy in the human being and a radical plasticity in the nature of reality, begins with the assertion that reality itself tends to unfold in response to the particular symbolic framework and set of assumptions that are employed by each individual and each society. The fund of data available to the human mind is of such intrinsic complexity and diversity that it provides plausible support for many different conceptions of the ultimate nature of reality. The human being must therefore choose among a multiplicity of potentially viable options, and whatever option is chosen will in turn affect both the nature of reality and the choosing subject. In this view, although there exist many defining structures in the world and in the mind that resist or compel human thought and activity in various ways, on a fundamental level the world tends to ratify, and open up according to, the character of the vision directed toward it. The world that the human being attempts to know and remake is in some sense projectively elicited by the frame of reference with which it is approached.
Such a position emphasizes the immense responsibility inherent in the human situation, and the immense potential. Since evidence can be adduced and interpreted to corroborate a virtually limitless array of world views, the human challenge is to engage that world view or set of perspectives which brings forth the most valuable, life-enhancing consequences. The “human predicament” is here regarded as the human adventure: the challenge of being, in potentia, a radically self-defining entity—not in the context of the no-exit box of the secular existentialist, which unconsciously assumed specific a priori metaphysical limits, but in a universe that is genuinely open. Because the human understanding is not unequivocally compelled by the data to adopt one metaphysical position over another, an irreducible element of human choice supervenes. Hence there enter into the epistemological equation, in addition to intellectual rigor and social-cultural context, other, more open-ended factors such as will, imagination, faith, hope, and empathy. The more complexly conscious and ideologically unconstrained the individual or society, the more free is the choice of worlds, and the more profound their participation in creating reality. This affirmation of the human being’s self-defining autonomy and epistemological freedom has a historical background going back at least to the Renaissance and Pico’s Oratio, appearing in different forms in the ideas of Emerson and Nietzsche, William James and Rudolf Steiner, among others, but has been given new support and further dimensions by a wide range of contemporary intellectual developments, from philosophy of science to sociology of religion.
More generally, whether in philosophy, religion, or science, the univocal literalism that tended to characterize the modern mind has been increasingly criticized and rejected, and in its place has arisen a greater appreciation of the multidimensional nature of reality, the many-sidedness of the human spirit, and the multivalent, symbolically mediated nature of human knowledge and experience. With that appreciation has also come a growing sense that the postmodern dissolving of old assumptions and categories could permit the emergence of entirely new prospects for conceptual and existential reintegration, with the possibility of richer interpretive vocabularies, more profound narrative coherencies. Under the combined impact of the remarkable changes and self-revisions that have taken place in virtually every contemporary intellectual discipline, the fundamental modern schism between science and religion has been increasingly undermined. In the wake of such developments, the original project of Romanticism—the reconciliation of subject and object, human an
d nature, spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, intellect and soul—has reemerged with new vigor.
Two antithetical impulses can thus be discerned in the contemporary intellectual situation, one pressing for a radical deconstruction and unmasking—of knowledge, beliefs, world views—and the other for a radical integration and reconciliation. In obvious ways the two impulses work against each other, yet more subtly they can also be seen as working together as polarized, but complementary, tendencies. Nowhere is this dynamic tension and interplay between the deconstructive and the integrative more dramatically in evidence than in the rapidly expanding body of work produced by women informed by feminism. Carolyn Merchant, Evelyn Fox Keller, and other historians of science have analyzed the influence exerted on the modern scientific understanding by gender-biased strategies and metaphors supporting a patriarchal conception of nature—as a mindless, passive feminine object, to be penetrated, controlled, dominated, and exploited. Paula Treichler, Francine Wattman Frank, Susan Wolfe, and other linguists have meticulously explored the complex relations between language, sex, and society, illuminating the multiplicity of ways women have been excluded or depreciated through the implicit codings of linguistic conventions. New and powerful insights have emerged from the work of Rosemary Ruether, Mary Daly, Beatrice Bruteau, Joan Chamberlain Engelsman, and Elaine Pagels in religious studies; of Marija Gimbutas in archaeology; of Carol Gilligan in moral and developmental psychology; of Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow in psychoanalysis; of Stephanie de Voogd and Barbara Eckman in epistemology; of a host of feminist scholars in history, anthropology, sociology, jurisprudence, economics, ecology, ethics, aesthetics, literary theory, cultural criticism.
Considered as a whole, the feminist perspective and impulse has brought forth perhaps the most vigorous, subtle, and radically critical analysis of conventional intellectual and cultural assumptions in all of contemporary scholarship. No academic discipline or area of human experience has been left untouched by the feminist reexamination of how meanings are created and preserved, how evidence is selectively interpreted and theory molded with mutually reinforcing circularity, how particular rhetorical strategies and behavioral styles have sustained male hegemony, how women’s voices remained unheard through centuries of social and intellectual male dominance, how deeply problematic consequences have ensued from masculine assumptions about reality, knowledge, nature, society, the divine. Such analyses in turn have helped illuminate parallel patterns and structures of domination that have marked the experience of other oppressed peoples and forms of life. Given the context in which it has arisen, the feminist intellectual impulse has been compelled to assert itself with a forceful critical spirit that has often been oppositional and polarizing in character; yet precisely as a result of that critique, long-established categories that had sustained traditional oppositions and dualities—between male and female, subject and object, human and nature, body and spirit, self and other—have been deconstructed and reconceived, permitting the contemporary mind to consider less-dichotomized alternative perspectives that could not have been envisioned within previous interpretive frameworks. In certain respects the implications, both intellectual and social, of feminist analyses are so fundamental that their significance is only beginning to be realized by the contemporary mind.
And so on many fronts, the postmodern mind’s insistence on the pluralism of truth and its overcoming of past structures and foundations have begun to open up a wide range of unforeseen possibilities for approaching the intellectual and spiritual problems that have long exercised and confounded the modern mind. The postmodern era is an era without consensus on the nature of reality, but it is blessed with an unprecedented wealth of perspectives with which to engage the great issues that confront it.
Still, the contemporary intellectual milieu is riddled with tension, irresolution, and perplexity. The practical benefits of its pluralism are repeatedly undercut by stubborn conceptual disjunctions. Despite frequent congruence of purpose, there is little effective cohesion, no apparent means by which a shared cultural vision could emerge, no unifying perspective cogent or comprehensive enough to satisfy the burgeoning diversity of intellectual needs and aspirations. “In the twentieth century nothing is in agreement with anything else” (Gertrude Stein). A chaos of valuable but seemingly incompatible interpretations prevails, with no resolution in sight. Certainly such a context provides less hindrance to the free play of intellectual creativity than would the existence of a monolithic cultural paradigm. Yet fragmentation and incoherence are not without their own inhibiting consequences. The culture suffers both psychologically and pragmatically from the philosophical anomie that pervades it. In the absence of any viable, embracing cultural vision, old assumptions remain blunderingly in force, providing an increasingly unworkable and dangerous blueprint for human thought and activity.
Faced with such a differentiated and problematic intellectual situation, thoughtful individuals engage the task of evolving a flexible set of premises and perspectives that would not reduce or suppress the complexity and multiplicity of human realities, yet could also serve to mediate, integrate, and clarify. The dialectical challenge felt by many is to evolve a cultural vision possessed of a certain intrinsic profundity or universality that, while not imposing any a priori limits on the possible range of legitimate interpretations, would yet somehow bring an authentic and fruitful coherence out of the present fragmentation, and also provide a sustaining fertile ground for the generation of unanticipated new perspectives and possibilities in the future. Given the nature of the present situation, however, such an intellectual task appears surpassingly formidable—not unlike having to string the great Odyssean bow of opposites, and then send an arrow through a seemingly impossible multiplicity of
The intellectual question that looms over our time is whether the current state of profound metaphysical and epistemological irresolution is something that will continue indefinitely, taking perhaps more viable, or more radically disorienting, forms as the years and decades pass; whether it is in fact the entropic prelude to some kind of apocalyptic denouement of history; or whether it represents an epochal transition to another era altogether, bringing a new form of civilization and a new world view with principles and ideals fundamentally different from those that have impelled the modern world through its dramatic trajectory.
At the Millennium
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.…
Surely some revelation is at hand.
William Butler Yeats
“The Second Coming”
As the twentieth century draws to its close, a widespread sense of urgency is tangible on many levels, as if the end of an aeon is indeed approaching. It is a time of intense expectation, of striving, of hope and uncertainty. Many sense that the great determining force of our reality is the mysterious process of history itself, which in our century has appeared to be hurtling toward a massive disintegration of all structures and foundations, a triumph of the Heraclitean flux. Near the end of his life, Toynbee wrote:
Present-day man has recently become aware that history has been accelerating—and this at an accelerating rate. The present generation has been conscious of this increase of acceleration in its own lifetime; and the advance in man’s knowledge of his past has revealed, in retrospect, that the acceleration began about 30,000 years ago … and that it has taken successive “great leaps forward” with the invention of agriculture, with the dawn of civilization, and with the progressive harnessing—within the last two centuries—of the titanic physical forces of inanimate nature. The approach of the climax foreseen intuitively by the prophets is being felt, and feared, as a coming event. Its imminence is, today, not an article of faith; it is a datum of observation and experience.9
A powerful crescendo can be sensed in the dramatic seri
es of pronouncements, uttered by some of the West’s great thinkers and visionaries, concerning an imminent shift in the ages. Nietzsche, in whom “nihilism became conscious for the first time” (Camus), who had fore seen the cataclysm that would befall European civilization in the twentieth century, realized within himself the epochal crisis that would finally come when the modern mind became conscious of its destruction of the metaphysical world, “the death of God”:
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?10
And so also the great sociologist Max Weber, who saw the ineluctable consequences of the modern mind’s disenchantment of the world, saw the yawning void of relativism left by modernity’s dissolution of traditional world views, and saw that modern reason, in which the Enlightenment had placed all its hopes for human freedom and progress, yet which could not on its own terms justify universal values to guide human life, had in fact created an iron cage of bureaucratic rationality that permeated every aspect of modern existence:
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