By
Richard Tarnas
A paradox
concerning the character and fate of the
West confronts every sensitive observer: On the one hand, we
recognize a certain dynamism, a luminous, heroic impulse, even a
nobility at work in Western civilization and Western thought. We see
this in the great achievements of Greek philosophy and culture, and
in the profound moral and spiritual strivings of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition. We see it embodied in the Sistine Chapel and other
Renaissance masterpieces, in the plays of Shakespeare, in the music
of Beethoven. We recognize it in the brilliance of the Copernican
revolution and the long sequence of dazzling scientific advances in
many disciplines that have unfolded in its wake. We see it in the
titanic space flights of a generation ago that landed men on the
Moon, or, more recently, in the spetacular images of the vast cosmos
coming from the Hubble Space Telescope that have opened up
uprecendented perspectives reaching back in time and outward into
space billions of years and lightyears to the primal origins of the
universe itself. No less vividly, we find it in the great democratic
revolutions of modernity and the powerful emancipatory movements of
our own era, all with deep sources in the Western intellectual and
spiritual tradition.
Yet at the
same time, if we attempt to perceive the larger reality beyond the
conventional heroic narrative, we cannot fail to recognize the shadow
of this great luminosity. The same cultural tradition and historical
trajectory that brought forth such noble achievements has also caused
immense suffering and loss, for many other cultures and peoples, for
many people within Western culture itself, and for many other forms
of life on the Earth. Moreover, the West has played the central role
in bringing about a subtly growing and seemingly inexorable crisis –
one of multidimensional complexity, affecting all aspects of life
from the ecological and economic to the psychological and spiritual.
To say that our global civilization is becoming dysfunctional
scarcely conveys the gravity of the situation. For many forms of life
on the Earth, catastrophe has already begun, as our planet undergoes
the most massive extinction of species since the demise of the
dinosaurs. How can we make sense of this tremendous paradox in the
character and meaning of the West?
If we
examine many of the major debates in the post-traditional
intellectual culture of our time, it is possible to see looming
behind them two fundamental paradigms, two great myths, diametrically
opposite in character, concerning human history and the evolution of
human consciousness. As genuine myths, these underlying paradigms
represent not mere illusory beliefs or arbitrary collective
fantasies, naive delusions contrary to fact, but rather those
enduring archetypal structures of meaning that so profoundly inform
our cultural psyche and shape our beliefs that they constitute the
very means through which we construe something as fact. They
invisibly constellate our vision. They filter and reveal our data,
structure our imagination, permeate our ways of knowing and acting.
The first
paradigm familiar to all of us from our education, describes human
history and the evolution of human consciousness as an epic narrative
of human progress, a long heroic journey from a primitive world of
dark ignorance, suffering and limitation to a brighter modern world
of ever-increasing knowledge, freedom and well-being. This great
trajectory of progress is seen as having been made possible by the
sustained development of human reason and, above all, by the
emergence of the modern mind. This view informs much, perhaps most,
of what we see and hear on the subject and and is easily recognized
whenever we encounter a book or program with a title such as The
Ascent of Man, The Discoverers, Man's Conquest of Space
or the like. The direction of history is seen as onward and upward.
Humanity is typically personified as “man”
(anthropos, homo, l'uomo, l'homme, el hombre, chelovek, der
Mensch) and imaged, at least
implicitly, as a masculine hero, rising above the constraints of
nature and tradition, exploring the great cosmos, mastering his
environment, determining his own destiny: restless, bold, brilliantly
innovative, ceaselessly pressing forward with his intelligence and
will, breaking out of the structures and limits of the past,
ascending to ever-higher levels development, forever seeking greater
freedom and new horizons, discovering ever-wider arenas for
self-realization. In this perspective the apex of human achievement
commenced with the rise of modern science and democratic
individualism in the centuries following the Renaissance. The view of
history is one of progressive emancipation and empowerment. It is a
vision that emerged fully in the course of the European Enlightenment
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though its roots are as
old as Western civilization itself.
As
with all powerful myths, we have been, and many perhaps remain,
largely unconscious of this historical paradigm's hold on our
collective imagination. It animates the vast majority of contemporary
books and essays, editorial columns, book reviews, science articles,
research papers, and television documentaries, as well as political,
social, and economic policies. It is so familiar to us, so close to
our perception, that in many respects it has become our common sense,
the form and foundation of our self-image as modern humans. We have
been so long identified with this progressive understanding of the
human project, and particularly of the modern Western project, that
it is only in recent decades that we have begun to be able to see it as
a paradigm – that is to be able to see, at least partly, from
outside of its sphere of influence.
The
other great historical vision tells a very different story. In this
understanding, human history and the evolution of human consciousness
are seen as a predominantly problematic, even tragic narrative of
humanity's gradual but radical fall and separation from an original
state of oneness with nature and an encompassing spiritual dimension
of being. In its primordial condition, humankind had possessed an
instictive knowledge of the profound sacred unity and
interconnectedness of the world, but under the influence of the
Western mind, especially its modern expression, the course of history
brought about a deep schism between humankind and nature, and a
desacralization of the world. This development coincided with an
increasingly destructive exploitation of nature, the devastation of
traditional indigenous cultures, a loss of faith in spiritual
realities, and an increasingly unhappy state of the human soul, which
experienced itself as ever more isolated, shallow and unfulfilled. In
this perspective, both humanity and nature are seen as having
suffered grievously under a long exploitative, dualistic vision of
the world, with the worst consequences being produced by the
oppressive hegemony of modern industrial societies empowered by
Western science and technology. The nadir of this fall is the present
planetary turmoil, ecological crisis and spiritual distress, which
are seen as the direct consequence of human hubris, embodied above
all in the spirit and structure of the mordern Western mind and ego.
This second historical perspective reveals a progressive
impoverishment of human life and the human spirit, a fragmentation of
original unities, a ruinous destruction of the sacred community of
being.
Something
like these two interpretations of history, here described in starkly
contrasting terms for the sake of easy recognition, can be seen to
inform many of the specific issues of our age. They represent two
basic antithetical myths of historical self-understanding: the myth
of Progress and what in its earlier incarnations was called the myth
of the Fall. These two historical paradigms appear today in many
variations, combinations, and compromise formations. They underlie
and influence discussions of the environmental crisis, globalization,
multiculturalism, fundamentalism, feminism and patriarchy, evolution
and history. One might say that these opposing myths constitute the
underlying argument of our time: Whither humanity? Upward or
downward? How are we to view Western civilization, the Western
intellectual tradition, its canon of great works? How are we to view
modern science, modern rationality, modernity itself? How are we to
view “man”?
Is history ultimately a narrative of progress or of tragedy?
John
Stuart Mill made a shrewd, and wise, observation about the nature of
most philosophical debates. In his splendid essay on Coleridge, he
pointed out that both sides in intellectual controversies tended to
be “in
the right in what they affirmed, though in the wrong in what they
denied.” Mill's insight into the nature of intellectual discourse
shines light on many disagreements: Whether it is conservatives
debating liberals, parents arguing with their children, or a lovers'
quarrel, almost invariably something is being repressed in the
service of making one's point. But his insight seems to apply with
particular aptness to the conflict of historical paradigms just
described. I believe that both parties to this dispute has grasped an
essential aspect of our history, that both views are in a sense
correct, each with compelling arguments within its own frame of
reference, but also that they are both intensely partial
views, as a result of which they both misread a larger story.
It
is not only that each perspective possesses a significant grain of
truth. Rather, both historical paradigms are at once fully valid and
yet also partial aspects of a larger frame of reference, a
metanarrative, in which two opposite interpretations are precisely
intertwined to form a complex, integrated whole. The two historical
dramas actually constitute each other. Not only are they
simultaneously true; they are embedded in each other's truth. They
underlie and inform each other, implicate each other, make each other
possible. One might compare the way the two opposites coalesce while
appearing to exclude each other to those gestalt-experiment
illustrations that can be perceived in two different equally cogent
ways, such as the precisely ambigous figure that can be seen either
as a white vase or as two black profiles in silhouette. By means of a
gestalt shift in perception, the observer can move back and forth
between two images, though the figure itself, the original body of
data, remains unchanged.
One
is reminded here of Niels Bohr's axiom in quantum physics, “the
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth,”
or Oscar Wilde's “A
truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.” What is
difficult, of course, is to see both images, both truths,
simultaneously: to suppress nothing, to remain open to paradox, to
maintain the tension of opposites. Wisdom, like compassion, often
seems to require of us that we hold multiplies realities in our
consciousness at once. This may be the task we must begin to engage
if we wish to gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of human
consciousness, and the history of the Western mind in particular: to
see that long intellectual and spiritual journey, moving through
stages of increasing differentiation and complexity, as having
brought about both a progressive ascent to autonomy and a tragic fall
from unity – and, perhaps, as having prepared the way for a
synthesis on a new level. From this perspective, the two paradigms
reflect opposite but equally essential aspects of an immense
dialectical process, an evolutionary drama that has been unfolding
for thousands of years and that now appears to be reaching a
critical, perhaps climactic moment of transformation.
Yet
there is another important party to this debate, another view of
human history, one that instead of integrating the two opposite
historical perspectives into a larger, more complex one appears to
refute them both altogether. This third view, articulated with
increasing frequency and sophistication in our own time, holds that
no coherent pattern
actually exists in human history or evolution, at least none that is
independent of human interpretation. If an overarching pattern is
history is visible, that pattern has been projected onto history by
the human mind under the influence of various non-empirical factors:
cultural, political, economic, social, sociobiological,
psychological. In this view, the pattern, the myth or story –
ultimately resides in the human subject, not the historical object.
The object can never be perceived without being selectively shaped by
an interpretive framework, which itself is shaped and constructed by
forces beyond itself and beyond the awareness of the interpreting
subject. Knowledge of history, as of anything else, is ever-shifting,
free-floating, ungrounded in objective reality. Patterns are not so
much recogized as read into them. History is, finally, only a
construct.
On
the one hand, this robust skepticism that pervades much of our
post-modern thought is not far from that necessary critical
perspective that allows us to discuss paradigms at all, to make
comparisons and judgments about underlying conceptual structures such
as those made above. Its recognition of the radically interpretive
factor in all human experience and knowledge – its understanding
that we are always seeing by means of myths and theories, that our
experience and knowledge are always patterned and even constituted by
various changing a priori and usually unconscious structures of
meaning – is essential to the entire exercise we have been
pursuing.
On
the other hand, this seemingly paradigm-free relativism, whereby no
pattern or meaning exists in history except as constructed and
projected onto history by the human mind, is itself clearly another
paradigm. It recognizes that we always see by means of myths and
interpretive categories, but fails to apply that recognition
consistently to itself. It excels at “seeing
through,” but perhaps has not seen through enough. In one sense,
this form of the postmodern vision may be best understood as a direct
outgrowth, possibly an inevitable one, of the progressive modern mind
in its ever-deepening critical reflexivity – questioning,
suspecting, striving for emancipation through critical awareness –
reaching here in its most extreme development what is essentially a
stage of advanced self-deconstruction. Yet this perspective may also
be understood as the natural consequence of the Enlightenment vision
beginning to encounter its own shadow – the darkly problematic
narrative articulated by its opposing historical paradigm – and being challenged and reshaped by that encounter.
For just this reason, the deconstructive postmodern perspective may
present a crucial element in the unfolding of a new and more
comprehensive understanding. There is a deep truth in this view,
though it too may also be a deeply partial truth, an essential aspect
of a much larger, more embracing, and still more complex vision. The
postmodern mind may eventually be seen as having constituted a
necessary transitional stage between epochs, a period of dissolving and
opening between larger sustained cultural paradigms.
