I begin with a confession. I am ataxophobic. I like order. I like an orderly desk, orderly files, bookcases, ideas, events, liturgies, etc. I realize that puts be at odds with the tack of modern society. We spend a good deal of time playing at organizing meetings and schedules, a considerable amount of cash (or credit) on organizational systems for everything from computers to closets, but, in general, we flutter about, within and without, from one thing to another, our attention caught by the slightest whiff of movement or novelty. We buzz about and scurry after the latest stimuli to enter our sensory field. Our lives are drowning in chattering and scattering about. We have no grounding—in ourselves or in the universe. We are all flux and no substance. That is not how we are made, not at least, how our minds are made. We have become so busy, so addicted to gorging ourselves with information and opportunities, so consumed in ingesting stuff that we no longer digest stuff. We take in, but we fail to process. We have lost our minds, because they exist to filter, process, and order, and all we care to do is react to stimuli.
Of course, a good deal of recent educational practice has reinforced this psychotic inclination. Theoreticians liberated themselves from reason and decreed children ought not to have their instincts hampered by discipline, the experience of failure, or the regimes of schedules and set curricula. The thesis that everyone ought to be free to respond to whatsoever stimulates and in due course the civil and civilized will emerge is rubbish. It is in no way or degree different from the spurious notion that a room full of monkeys sitting at keyboards will in due time write the works of Shakespeare. Discipline, following a set order, accepting a set order as a course to the fulfilment of a task, be it the making of dinner or the leading of a moral life, is the fundamental requisite of living a life worthy of the names human and civilized.
Thus, more and more we live as if wild; our lives exude a wilderness, and this is manifest in too common feelings of ennui and alienation, in our social self-identification as consumers continuously consuming an endless flow of disposable items. We trumpet our technological advances as the herald of our civility. But are they worthy of our self-definition? The Greek word from which we derive our word technology refers to something skilfully made. We are indubitably a skilful society, but we are not artful, and we are not wise. We do not have that acquired taste for what is right and good and transcending of the moment. In Latin the word to describe that acquired taste is sapiens, as in homo-sapiens, sapient man. Have we lost the taste for wisdom? Have we lost the ability to look beyond the “bottom line” or the moment of pleasure? Can we still look far up or deeply within and reside in, bask in, the awe and wonder that enwraps all–within and without?
So many are at a loss to deal with the tantrums of a “terrible two” or the uncooperativeness and belligerence of a pre-pubescent because more and more of us are not psychologically developed far beyond these states ourselves, not adults, not whole and free, but imprisoned, developmentally arrested. Because such people are psychologically children they shun the adult, and empower others like themselves, making, ever trying to make, the world a kindergarten, a playground without teacher or guide, without a voice to cry “Stop”, without a power to summon “Grow up!”. Too many no longer so much value the fullness of personality, the integrated person (that constant and vivifying balancing of the deep seated powers from the animus/anima to superego) so much as exalt the defiant ego (the conscious and concrete acclamation of “Me”). This is evidenced in the home and school and business and government in the rise of the bully, the thug, the liar, the thief, the con-man, the evader, in whatever form, of any constraint or value that defies the “Me”. It is there to see in the valuation assent of the technician over the artist, in the dissipated power of ritual and symbol, in the advancing impotence of anything that bespeaks a level within man not concrete to consciousness—to “My” here and now power and pleasure—despite the fact that this in itself acts to depauperate the very font of all pleasure and power, the subliminal wells of creativity resident within. Ecce Homo? Behold mindless-man.
Into what are we evolving? Are we evolving? Is devolution a bio-social horizon for the species? Where is such mindlessness taking us? Humanity need not to worry about being overrun by automatons, we have already rendered ourselves robots gone rampant over rubbish. We adulate the machine, worship technology, and most sadly here, that which we worship we yearn to become. Blobs and streaks of colour become “art”, barcodes only a machine can cathect. Bolts and blasts of sound, rivets of beat, the noise of the factory floor, is dubbed “music”. We topple one over the other for the latest bit of “news”, the most recent “communication” devise, the newest shard of exhibitionism touted as “reality”. Ecce homo? Behold the machine.
In my childhood I picked up a copy of Augustine’s Confessions in the hope that I would learn how to make my requisite visits to the confessional more authentic. Alas, it is not that type of text. In my defence, I was a child. Augustine’s musings did, however, awaken me, after anfractuous re-readings, to the world of epistemology, to the analysis of how we think, how we know, how we organize ideas, how we value ourselves and our world. Augustine was in his philosophical considerations beholden to the theories of Plato, and Plato was, among our cultural ancestors, among the first to systematize his reflections on the nature of knowledge.
Every scholar investigating our processes of acquiring knowledge admits that there are two fundamental items: sensation from particular, individual things, and abstract universal ideas. The constant drip of disagreement among investigators is caused by the sundry understandings of the limitations of these two items and how these two are related. The critical issue in all of this resides in the fact that “god” and “soul” are the terms usually applied to the highest or ultimate categories: “the basis of all that is” and “all that is me”. Talk of god and soul in the everyday world, and often enough in the world of academia, is confusing and confused because we, as a culture, are the heirs of so very many disparate ideas, notions, and visions of these two holophrases. I shall briefly glance upon the major currents contributory to the present eddies of thought and understanding.
Before I launch this venture, I give three caveats. First, while this review may seem more an endeavour of philosophy or the history of philosophy, I would remind my reader that the ancient and mediaeval philosophers were usually also the great theologians of their time, and that modern theologians invariable have tacked their course and terminology upon one or another system in modern philosophy. The intimate relationship betwixt philosophy and theology in terms of both subject matter and terminology, and the vast variances in modern philosophy caused the Church of Rome in the nineteenth century to set upon the scholastic umpirage of Thomas Aquinas as the paradigm for Roman theological enunciation. While such a diktat secures organizational ideational and linguistic uniformity, it, unfortunately, also constrains growth. Protestant theology, on the other hand, has felt itself free to explore the many modern visions of reality such as those set forth by Kant, Schelling, Feuerbach, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Bergson. Such varied scope of investigation may not lend itself to a synthesis, but an absolutist vision has never been the mandate of the reformation churches.
Second, taking a slightly different tack, I must note that while no investigation into religion or its abiding questions–Whence is all? and What am I?—can shield itself from the realm of mythology (which endeavours to pronounce the great symbolic language of the mind), or the undertakings of psychology (which attempts to analyse such symbolic language), our work here is not to comment upon how these items arise in the mind, or how they are represented in the enduring symbols constitutive of our collective psyche, merely to try to elucidate the maze of logical considerations to which we stand as coparsenaries.
Third, while some consideration of the varied theories regarding the processes by which we come to know any object are necessary to the task, I do not judge a comprehensive restatement of particular epistemologies as necessary. Thus, I shall sketch only such aspects that serve as mise-en-scène to an understanding of the divine and personal principles, focusing, at times, more upon the temperament of the times or the individuals that enclose the theorizing, for despite our propensity to apotheosize intellect, we are so very complexly more.