The Western Mind
The ideas which are espoused in the Western mind are on the one hand ingenious, ideas which have pushed science into new categories and into new triumphs, while on the other hand, a mysterious web which has caused us to have a sort of social regress in our ideology. By comparing the "Western" mind with the "Eastern" mind, let's see what we can find out.
Our first observation when dealing with the Eastern mind versus the Western mind is that the Western mind places great quality upon what you think, even moreso than what you actually do. For instance, Freud was visciously maligned for his thoughts on "free sex", to put it as Lavey did, but he himself was practically a model of ascetism. Meanwhile, we constantly forgive preachers, judges, Congressmen, etc. who repeatedly get caught hiring prostitutes or get caught cheating on their wife. These are the very same people who will, of course, state that they are sorry for it, that they hate it with a passion, and that we should scourge it from the Earth. At some point though, this become perfectly okay with us. Our judgements upon how a person acts became less important than what a person thinks about how he acts.
This stands in a very sharp contrast to the Eastern mind, their way of thinking. For example, let's use Judaism. Jews disagreed so much on the interpretation of the Old Testament and Apocryphal portions of the Bible that the saying, "Three Jews, four opinions" rose up, however, their behavior was very uniform. They placed the value, not upon the words or their interpretations, but upon the actions of the person. To quote William Barrett in "Irrational Man":
"The distinction…arises from the difference between doing and knowing. The Hebrew is concerned with practice, the Greek with knowledge. Right conduct is the ultimate concern of the Hebrew, right thinking that of the Greek. Duty and strictness of conscience are the paramount things in life for the Hebrew; for the Greek, the spontaneous and luminous play of the intelligence. The Hebrew thus extols the moral virtues as the substance and meaning of life; the Greek subordinates them to the intellectual virtues…the contrast is between practice and theory, between the moral man and the theoretical or intellectual man."
Heschel, "God in Search of Man" writes, "The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use." p. 34. In today's society, with all of our knowledge, we abound with people who can "use" this knowledge, but we rarely have any people who revere it or who feel any sort of comprehension of it. Within that, there's a loss of sacred principles, or that something is sacred: Human life, animal life, having fun, beauty, etc. There might be limits to "how" sacred something is, for instance, a good song is sacred, but a good song that was the first one you danced with your wife might be considered more sacred, naturally, of course, depending upon how much you valued your wife.
The Western mind is also inherently dualistic, it always wants things into nice, neat labels, and it wants things into categories and sub-categories which can be examined and scrutanized. The Western Mind has the hardest time in accepting "Good versus Good" or "Evil versus More Evil", for a Westerner, there can be only one category. Good versus Evil. This notion is strange to the Eastern mind, who see things as more monistic than dualistic.
"We may be seeing the beginnings of the reintegration of our culture, a new possibility of the unity of consciousness. If so, it will not be on the basis of any new orthodoxy, either religious or scientific. Such a new integration will be based on the rejection of all univocal understandings of reality, of all identifications of one conception of reality with reality itself. It will recognize the multiplicity of the human spirit, and the necessity to translate constantly between different scientific and imaginative vocabularies. It will recognize the human proclivity to fall comfortably into some single literal interpretation of the world and therefore the necessity to be continuously open to rebirth in a new heaven and a new earth. It will recognize that in both scientific and religious culture all we have finally are symbols, but that there is an enormous difference between the dead letter and the living word."
Robert Bellah, "Beyond Belief"
Is there really any such thing as "A priori" evidence?
There are generally two accepted forms of knowledge, those being "a priori" and "a posteriori". A priori knowledge refers to strictly deductive logic without the use of any empirical testing, advocated chiefly by Plato and Socrates. Socrates would use this method to take students through a series of deductive proofs to determine in the end that the person whom he was helping use this logic had "innate" knowledge stored within him. As an easier definition, a priori is sometimes defined as something which is figured out without the use of the five senses, touch, smell, see, hear, and taste. Let me give you an example, and show you why there really is no such thing as a priori logic.
Self-contradictions are generally considered a priori discountable. For instance, a "married bachelor" or a "Square circle" are self-contradictions, thus no need for any sort of empirical evidence to discount them. However, how would you understand the concept of married if you hadn't witnessed it, or if it wasn't explained to you? This is still an extension of sense-data orientation. Now, I am judging "a priori" on the whole as being a bit too limited, taking only the technical definition, (prior to experience), for instance, ignoring the fundamental difference that Kant put up between analytic and synthetic, such as mathematics being a priori the result of time/space. However, in all these things, even taking math to be a priori, without a cognitive form of recognizing units, math would be worthless, so there truly is nothing which is "prior to experience", instead, derived from experiences prior to the experience in question. This raises the question that though most of our mathematical knowledge is acquired through experience, is it a priori because it is justifiable independently of experience? That turns the definition of a priori as being something which can be judged true or false regardless of experience. However, as we said, all knowledge derives from experience, without the five senses, it's impossible to know the difference between the numbers one and ten, or even hear the numbers, nor can the method of "feel" used for deaf/blind people work, that's within the ranges of sense-data as well. (Notably, the logical positivists school denied that synthetic a priori knowledge existed.)
Why is this important? Because in science, a practical proof consists of a hypothesis which is repeatedly tested, however, no scientific statement, even considered to be "laws", is true in the absolute and universal sense. The only thing which can be truthfully stated is that no known contradictions exist to disprove the statement. That means that our definition for what science actually is would be a principle that is not yet disprovable, (though, in fact, it might not be disprovable ever).
In science and physics especially, the main way to identify a concept is through mathematical language. They use definitions of concepts that maintained through axioms that are considered truths, so they must be universal. However, the only role which math has is to provide abstract objects, (numbers, systems of measurements, etc), so that they can be used in reflection of what we have observed, that does not make them, in and of themselves, true. Thus, any scientific theory has at least some level of acceptance upon which no one is disputing the theory. Generally, this is called the postulates of the theory, these are things which the theory does not attempt to justify, they are simply accepted on their own terms. Coincidentally, this is how begging the question occurs, by having certain statements which are disputable, but the end conclusion were these statements to be true is correct.
"It is not possible to establish a logically durable building on verifications [a verification is an observational statement about immediate perception], for they are already vanished when the building begins. If they were, with respect to time, at the beginning of the knowledge, then they would be logically useless. On the contrary, there is a great difference when they are at the end of the process: with their help the test is performed... From a logical point of view, nothing depends on them: they are not premises but a firm end point."
M. Schlick, 'Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis', in Erkenntnis, 4, 1934.
This is what is created in science known as the verifiability principle, a statement is only meaningful if and only if it can be proven true or false, thus, any closed theory is worthless. However, where a believer of post-modern deconstructionalism will say that this is worthless on the grounds of the fact that the verifiability principle is only verifiable by experience, if no such thing as "independant" experience actually exists, in fact, anyone could claim anything about it.
The best example of this would be Newton, who made a number of assumptions in his postulation, which went unchallenged until Einstein. The main one which is serviceable is the theory that there is an absolute and constant flow of time, (though "The Time Machine" actually predicted that time was, in fact, a fourth dimension, now we're at something like 12 dimensions), and even Einstein's theories have been modified and changed.
Ultimately, what this leads to is a list of questions:
Now, what this leads to is one of either two things, post-modern deconstructionalism or mysticism. In mysticism, it is believed that there are no objective truths here, in this World, but somewhere out there is a place that makes sense, thus, the idea is to gain disentanglement from this World and get into the "Other" World where things really are as they are. Post-modern deconstructionalism is a step further, there is no "out there", there is nothing. There are no objective standards of true or false, everything is just a psychosomatic illusion. (Also called "argumentum ad ignorantiam", which states that because a principle can't be proven false, it is automatically true.) I'm not going to make a philosophical argument against it just yet, but I will make a psychological one. (For a good idea on the whole debate, see Bertrand Russell's "Problems of Philosophy", available online).
Because of our dependance upon the external universe, and our simultaneous loss of it, we create a psychological double-bind. To quote Richard Tarnas' "The Passion of The Western Mind":
In Bateson's formulation, there were four basic premises necessary to constitute a double bind situation between a child and a "schizophrenogenic" mother:
- The child's relationship to the mother is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the child to assess communications from the mother accurately.
- The child receives contradictory or incompatible information from the mother at different levels, whereby, for example, her explicit verbal communication is fundamentally denied by the "metacommunication," the nonverbal context in which the explicit message is conveyed (thus the mother who says to her child with hostile eyes and a rigid body, "Darling, you know I love you so much"). The two sets of signals cannot be understood as coherent.
- The child is not given any opportunity to ask questions of the mother that would clarify the communication or resolve the contradiction. And
- the child cannot leave the field, i.e., the relationship.
In such circumstances, Bateson found, the child is forced to distort his or her perception of both outer and inner realities, with serious psychopathological consequences.
Now if we substitute in these four premises "world" for "mother", and "human being" for "child", we have the modern double bind in a nutshell:
(1) The human being's relationship to the world is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the human being to assess the nature of that world accurately. (2) The human mind receives contradictory or incompatible information about its situation with respect to the world, whereby its inner psychological and spiritual sense of things is incoherent with the scientific metacommunication. (3) Epistemologically, the human mind cannot achieve direct communication with the world. 4) Existentially the human being cannot leave the field.
If we follow Bateson's diagnosis and apply it to the larger modern condition, it should not be surprising what kinds of response the modern psyche has made to this situation as it attempts to escape the double bind's inherent contradictions. Either inner or outer realities tend to be distorted: inner feelings are repressed and denied, as in apathy and psychic numbing, or they are inflated in compensation, as in narcissism and egocentrism; or the outer world is slavishly submitted to as the only reality, or it is aggressively objectified and exploited. There is also the strategy of flight, through various forms of escapism: compulsive economic consumption, absorption in the mass media, faddism, cults, ideologies, nationalistic fervor, alcoholism, drug addiction. When avoidance mechanisms cannot be sustained, there is anxiety, paranoia, chronic hostility, a feeling of helpless victimization, a tendency to suspect all meanings, an impulse toward self-negation, a sense of purposelessness and absurdity, a feeling of irresolvable inner contradiction, a fragmenting of consciousness. And at the extreme, there are the full-blown psychopathological reactions of the schizophrenic: self-destructive violence, delusional states, massive amnesia, catatonia, automatism, mania, nihilism. The modern world knows each of these reactions in various combinations and compromise formations, and its social and political life is notoriously so determined.
But there is one crucial way in which the modern situation is not identical to the psychiatric double bind, and this is the fact that the modern human being has not simply been a helpless child, but has actively engaged the world and pursued a specific strategy and mode of activity-- a Promethean project of freeing itself from and controlling nature. The modern mind has demanded a specific type of interpretation of the world: its scientific method has required explanations of phenomena that are concretely predictive, and therefore impersonal, mechanistic, structural. To fulfill their purposes, these explanations of the universe have been systematically "cleansed" of all spiritual and human qualities. Of course we cannot be certain that the world is in fact what these explanations suggest. We can be certain only that the world is to an indeterminate extent susceptible to this way of interpretation. Kant's insight is a sword that cuts two ways. Although on the one hand it appears to place the world beyond the grasp of the human mind, on the other hand it recognizes that the impersonal and soulless world of modern scientific cognition is not necessarily the whole story. Rather, that world is the only kind of story that for the past three centuries the Western mind has considered intellectually justifiable. In Ernest Gellner's words, "It was Kant's merit to see that this compulsion [for mechanistic impersonal explanations] is in us, not in things." And "it was Weber's to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, that is subject to this compulsion."
Our view of history and science comes down to us in two forms. The first one is pure Jungian patriarchal hero, the one who goes beyond all bounds, forever moving upward and outward. That is to say that all progress is seen as good, and anything from our time past era's are automatically viewed as worthless garbage. This is because space/expansion only happens upward/outward, and through this, we are always learning more, becoming better, and should, in fact, be at our peak. However, many people feel this is not the case. An example might be made of a conversation I had with a friend who came back from India. He noted that Indians had an entirely different outlook on life, and he also noted that while your average Westerner was more wealthy than your average Indian, they were infinitely more happy than we were with their life. The final question I asked him was, "Who do you think got the better deal out of this story, us or them?" Ultimately, you'll actually receive different answers on that very same question depending upon whom you ask. John Stuart Mill once made an observation that both sides in intellectual controversies tend to be right in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny. This could be said of our human history and human nature. Remember now that the patriarchal hero doesn't just meet the expected quota of the civilzation, he utterly debases it by destroying it. In effect, the patriarchal hero almost always becomes a founder of a new way of thinking, (Mithrainism, Orphics, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, etc.), a new lifestyle, (Christianity), or a new society, (Rome, Babylon, etc., all had mythical founders), in effect, he leaves everything he once knew behind to create something new.
In fact, this overly partiarchal viewpoint has other disasters as well. For instance, did you know that 70% of terrorists are trained in the West? They live with us, excel at our universities, watch our movies, read our literature, and not only do they do all these things, they end up loving our culture. Daniel Pipes, First Things 58, Dec/95, 18-23, tells us exactly what happens to these young terrorists:
'Discussing Mehdi Bazargan, an Iranian engineer who spent the years 1928-35 in France, Hamid Dabashi dissects the process many Muslim students undergo:
'Beginning with the conscious or unconscious, articulated or mute, premise that they ought to remain firmly attached to their Islamic consciousness, they begin to admire "The Western" achievements. . . . They recognize a heightened state of ideological self-awareness on the part of "The West" that they identify as the source and cause of its achievements. They then look back at their own society where such technological achievements were lacking, a fact they attribute, in turn, to the absence of that heightened state of ideological self-awareness.'
....the French analyst Olivier Roy explains, is the rather surprising idea that ideologies are "the key to the West's technical development." This assumption leads Islamists "to develop a modern political ideology based on Islam, which they see as the only way to come to terms with the modern world and the best means of confronting foreign imperialism."'
These radical terrorists start to adopt our overly aggressive attitude on the whole, and transform it into the the same sort of nationalism we know. Again, this is the overly aggressive patriarchal figure which we all know, that there is indeed something bad about a stable nation, and it must be supplanted by this new one. There is no recognition of the great achievements of Arabia and things upon which it can stand on its own rights, instead, it must be supplanted to a terroristic ideal.
This has caused a new view of how the shape of history came to be, one where the loss of the feminine hero took place, where no continuancy of culture was allowed, and only the conquest of culture, even at the expense of the good things of the culture, was the acceptable view. Humankind previously had a connection to nature, the universe, and to the tribe which was within it, and a sense of wonder and mystery, which was gradually erased and subverted. As time grew on, humans became less and less connected with nature, and began to view nature as something which could be exploited, and consequently, took on this same viewpoint with other humans, subverting them as well. This devastation of what was once sacred is a loss to the intimate self, and by this loss, humans become a metaphorical equiavlent of a free radical molecule, something which is missing what once stabilized it, causing it to seek this thing out and take it from others, but only causing an even greater chain reaction by this theft.
Havel writes of these affairs as thus:
Neither the female nor the male was bad, and neither is good. Each, taken to the extremity, is equally destructive. By only wanting stability, stagnation occurs which causes the inability to make solutions for problems which are currently afflicting us. On the other hand, by having a hyper-masculine viewpoint of constant change, and only change, being good, we invite the same problems to repeat themselves, only in new form. To put this into another form, Kerr tells us that if religion were wiped out tomorrow, the atheist must still confront the problem in which he must decide what to do with those feelings which gave rise to it in the first place. In the same way, even if we "conquer" something, the problem will only pop-up again if there is nothing which actually gets to the root of it, change is not always good in this sense unless it changes something which needed to be changed. The male orientation to "fire", (seen alchemically as the element of change), tends to bring in Mars, and Mars wants to make war, not love. Too much of this fire element will burn down the village, but conversely, the feminine principle of water can drown the village just as quick as it can bring life to it. As the Native Americans said, "Fire and water are good servants, but bad masters." Only proper combinations can help us cure the problem which is afflicting the Western Mind.