Transformation of the modern era

The transformation of the modern era Outline The changing image of the human being from Copernicus through Freud The self-critique of the modern mind From Locke to Hume Kant The decline of metaphysics The crisis of modern science Romanticism and its fate The two cultures The divided worldview Attempted synthesis from Goethe and Hegel to Jung Existentialism and nihilism The Post-modern mind At the millennium What I want to do here is to trace the trajectory of the modern mind as it developed from the foundations and premises of the modern worldview examined in the last chapter Perhaps the most momentous paradox concerning the character of the modern era was the curious manner in which its progress during the centuries following the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment brought Western human beings unprecedented freedom power expansion breadth of knowledge depth of insight and concrete success and yet simultaneously served at first subtly then later critically to undermine the human being s existential situation on virtually every front metaphysical ontological epistemological psychological and finally also biological A relentless balance an inextricable intertwining of positive and negative seemed to mark the evolution of our modern age and my task here is to understand the nature of that intricate dialectic The changing image of the human being from Copernicus to Freud In the same instant that humankind liberated itself from the geocentric illusion of virtually all previous generations humankind also effected for itself an unprecedented fundamental cosmic displacement The universe no longer centered on man man s cosmic position neither fixed nor absolute with each succeeding step in the scientific revolution adding new dimensions to the Copernican effect only served to further propel that liberation and also to intensify that displacement With Galileo Descartes and Newton the new science was forged a new cosmology defined and a new world opened to the West Within this world human s powerful intelligence could act with new freedom and effectiveness Yet simultaneously that new world was disenchanted in creation or nature becoming a mechanism it lost its meaning of all those personal and spiritual qualities that for millennia had given human beings their sense of cosmic significance The new universe was a machine a self-contained mechanism of force and matter devoid of any purpose or goal bereft of intelligence or consciousness its character fundamentally alien to humankind The pre-modern world had been permeated with spiritual mythical and other humanly meaningful categories but all these were regarded by the modern conception as anthropomorphic projections Mind and matter psyche and world were now separate realities The scientific liberation from theological dogma and animistic superstition was therefore accompanied by a new sense of human alienation from a world that no longer responded to human values no longer offered a redeeming context within which could be understood the larger issues of human existence Similarly science s quantitative measurement analysis of the world the methodological experimentation liberation from subjective distortions was accompanied by the ontological diminution of all those qualities emotional aesthetic sensory imaginative and intentional that seemed most constitutive of human experience These losses and gains were noted but the paradox seemed inevitable if human beings want to remain faithful to their own intellectual rigor Science may have revealed a cold impersonal world but it was the true one nonetheless Despite any nostalgia for the venerable but now disproved cosmic womb humankind could not go back Darwin With Darwin these consequences were further affirmed and amplified Any remaining theological assumptions concerning the world s divine government and human beings special spiritual status were severely controverted by the new theory and evidence man was a highly successful animal Man was not God s noble creation with a divine destiny but merely an experiment of nature with an uncertain destiny Consciousness which once ruled the universe and permeated it was now a mere accident in the course of the evolution of matter Consciousness had existed but a short time characteristic of a limited and relatively insignificant part of the cosmos homo sapiens for which there was no guarantee its ultimate evolutionary fate would be any different from that of thousands of now extinct species With the world no longer a divine creation spiritual nobility seemed to have departed from that world an impoverishment that necessarily touched humankind erstwhile it crown While Christian theology had maintained that natural history existed for the sake of human history and that humanity was essentially at home in a universe designed for its spiritual unfolding the new understanding of evolution refuted both claims as anthropocentric delusions All was in flux Humankind was not absolute and human beings cherished values had no foundations outside themselves Human beings character mind and will came from below not from above The structures of religion of society of culture and of reason itself now seemed relatively arbitrary expressions of the struggle for biological success Thus in the mid th c Darwin too was liberating and diminishing at the same time Humankind could now recognize that it rode the crest of evolution s advance nature s most complex and dazzling achievement but humankind also was just an animal species with no higher purpose The universe provided no assurance of the indefinite success of the human species and of course certain assurance of individual demise at physical death Indeed on the longer-term macroscopic scale the growing modern sense of life s contingency was further enforced by th c physics formulation Hermann Helmholtz of the second law of thermodynamics which portrayed the universe as moving spontaneously and irreversibly from order to disorder toward a final condition of maximum entropy or heat death The chief facts of human history until the present were fortuitously supportive of biophysical circumstances and brute survival with no apparent larger meaning or context and with no cosmic security supplied by any providential design from above Freud At the turn of the th c Freud dramatically furthered these developments as he brought the Darwinian perspective to bear more fully on the human psyche presenting persuasive evidence for the existence of unconscious forces determining man s behavior and conscious awareness consciousness was merely the tip of the iceberg most of what mattered was underneath the water In doing so Freud seemingly freed the modern mind from its na ve consciousness aware that it is driven by inner unconscious forces beyond its control giving it a new profundity of self-understanding yet Freud also confronted that mind with a dark deflating image of its true character For on the one hand psychoanalysis served a virtual epiphany for the early th c mind as it brought to light the archeological depths of the psyche disclosed the intelligibility of dreams fantasy and psychopathological symptoms illuminating the sexual etiology of neurosis demonstrating the importance of infantile experience in conditioning adult life discovered the Oedipal complex unveiled the psychological relevance of mythology and symbolism recognized the psychic structural components of id ego and superego revealed the mechanisms of resistance and repressions and brought forth a host of other insights laying open the mind s character and internal dynamics Freud thereby presented a brilliant culmination of the Enlightenment project bringing even the human reason unconscious that last remnant of human freedom under the light of rational naturalistic investigation Yet on the other hand Freud radically undermined the entire Enlightenment project by his revelation that below or beyond the rational mind there existed an overwhelmingly potent repository of non-rational forces which did not readily submit either to rational analysis reason or to conscious manipulation and in comparison with which man s conscious ego was but a frail and fragile phenomenon consciousness as the veneer of civilization Freud thereby furthered the cumulative modern process of casting man out of that privileged cosmic status his modern rational self-image had retained from the Christian worldview Human beings could no longer doubt that it was not only his her body but his her psyche as well for which powerful biological instincts amoral aggressive erotic polymorphous perverse were the most significant motivating factors and that in the face of these the proud human virtues of rationality moral conscience and religious feelings were conceivably no more than reaction formations and delusions i e defense mechanisms of the civilized self-concept consciousness Given the existence of such unconscious determinants human beings sense of personal freedom could well be spurious The psychologically aware individual now knew himself to be like all members of modern civilization condemned to internal division repression neurosis and alienation With Freud in the th c the Darwin in the th c humankind s struggle with nature took on new dimensions as human beings were now constrained to live in eternal struggle with their own nature Not only was God exposed as a primitive infantile projection but the conscious human ego itself with its prize virtue of human reason reason being the last bastion separating man from nature was now dethroned Reason was nothing more exalted than a recent and precarious evolutionary development out of the primordial id This id was the wellspring of human motivations a seething caldron of irrational bestial impulses and contemporary events began to provide distressing evidence for this thesis Not just man s divinity but also his humanity was coming into question As the scientific mind emancipated modern humankind from his illusions humankind seemed increasingly swallowed up by nature deprived of ancient dignities unmasked as a creature of mere material instinct Marx Also in the th c Marx s contribution had also suggested a similar deflation As Freud revealed the mechanism of personal unconscious Marx exposed the mechanisms of social unconscious The philosophical religious and moral values consciousness of each age could be plausibly comprehended as determined by unconscious economic and political factors whereby control over the means of production was maintained by the ruling class The entire superstructure of human belief conscious could be seen as reflecting the more basic struggle for material power The elite of Western civilization for all its cultural achievement might recognize itself in Marx s dark portrait as a self-deceiving bourgeois imperialist oppressor Class struggle not civilized progress was the program of the foreseeable future and again contemporary historical developments appeared to bear out his analysis Between Marx and Freud with Darwin behind them the modern intelligentsia increasingly perceived man s cultural values psychological motivations and conscious reason to be historically relative phenomena derived from unconscious political economic and instinctual impulses of an entirely naturalistic materialistic quality The principles and directives of the Scientific Revolution new science of the Enlightenment the search for material impersonal secular explanations for all phenomena had found new and illuminating applications in the psychological and social dimensions of human experience Yet in the process modern man s optimistic self-estimate from the Enlightenment was subject to repeated contradiction and diminution by his own advancing intellectual horizons These horizons were also radically expanded under the force of scientific discoveries that like the views of Darwin Marx and Freud applied a historical and evolutionary model of change to an increasing array of phenomena That model first emerged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment when European man s recently unbounded intellectual curiosity was combined with a new and emphatic sense of his dynamic progress From these grew a heightened interest in the classical and ancient past from which man had developed and enhanced standards of scholarship and historical investigation From Lorenzo Valla - and Nicolo Machiavelli - in the Renaissance to Voltaire Francois Marie Arouet - and Edward Gibbon - from Giambattista Vico - and Johan Gottfried von Herder - to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - and Leopold von Ranke - attention to history increased as did awareness of historical change and recognition of developmental principles by which historical change could be understood The global explorers had similarly expanded Europeans geographical knowledge and with it their exposure to other cultures and other histories With the continuous growth of knowledge in these areas it gradually became evident that human history extended back in time far longer than had been assumed that there existed many other significant cultures past and present that these possessed views of the world very divergent from the European and that there was nothing absolute immemorial or secure about modern man s present status and values For a culture long accustomed to a relatively static abbreviated and Eurocentric conception of human history indeed universal history as Archbishop s James Ussher s - famous dating of the year of Creation as BCE the new perspectives were disorienting in both scope and character Yet subsequent work by archeologists pressed the horizon still further back uncovering ever more ancient civilizations whose entire rise and fall had occurred before Greece and Rome were born Unending development and variety decay and transformation were the law of history and history s trajectory was disconcertingly long When the developmental and historical perspective was applied to nature as with James Hutton - Scottish geologist and Charles Lyell - Scottish geologist in geology and Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon - Georges Cuvier - Jean Baptiste Lamarck - Charles Darwin - and Ernst Haeckel - ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in biology the time spans within which organic life and the earth were known to have existed were exponentially expanded to thousands of millions of years in comparison with which all of human history had taken place in an astonishingly brief period of time Yet all this was only the beginning for then astronomers empowered by increasingly advanced technical tools applied similar principles toward understanding the cosmos itself resulting in its unprecedented temporal and spatial expansion By the th c the resulting cosmology had posited the solar system as a vanishingly small part of a gigantic galaxy containing a hundred billion other stars each comparable to the sun with the observable universe containing a hundred billion other galaxies each comparable to the Milky Way These individual galaxies were in turn members of a much larger galactic cluster themselves seemingly parts of even vaster galactic superclusters with celestial space conveniently measurable only in terms of distances traveled in years at the speed of light and with the distances between galactic clusters calculated in hundreds of millions of light-years All these starts and galaxies were presumed to be involved in enormously long processes of formation and decay with the universe itself born in a scarcely conceivable let alone explicable primordial explosion some or billion years past Such macroscopic dimensions forced upon human beings a disturbingly humble sense of their own relative minuteness in both time and space dwarfing the entire human enterprise not to mention our individual lives to shockingly miniscule proportions Superseded by such immensities the earlier expansions of man s world brought about by say Columbus Galileo and even Darwin seemed comparatively intimate The combined efforts of explorers geographers historians anthropologists archeologists paleontologists geologists biologists physicists and astronomers served to expand humankind s knowledge even as they diminished human beings status in the cosmos The distant origins of humankind among the primates and primitives and yet in comparison to the age of the earth their comparative proximity the great size of the earth and the solar system and yet relative to the galaxy their extreme minuteness the stupendous expanse of the heavens in which the earth nearest neighboring galaxies were so unimaginably remote that their light now visible on earth had left its source over a years earlier when Homo Sapiens was still in the old stone age faced with such vistas thoughtful people had good cause to ponder the apparent insignificance of human existence in the greater scheme of things Yet it was not just radical temporal and spatial diminution of human life brought about by science s advance that threatened modern man s self-image but also science s qualitative devaluation of man s essential character As reductionism was successfully employed to analyze nature and human nature as well the individual person and humankind as a whole were reduced With increasing scientific sophistication it seemed likely that the laws of physics were at the bottom of everything The phenomenon of chemistry could be reduced to physics those of biology to chemistry and physics and for many scientists notably in psychology in the th c those of human behavior and consciousness could be reduced to biology ands biochemistry Hence consciousness became an epiphenomenon of matter consciousness became a secretion of the brain a function of the electrochemical circuitry serving biological imperatives The Cartesian program of mechanistic analysis thereby began to overcome the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa as Julien de La Mettrie - and in the th c Pavlov Watson Skinner and others argued that as the universe as a whole could best be understood as a machine so could human behavior and mental functioning be based on the mechanistic principles of stimulus and response compounded by genetics and neuro-chemistry all increasingly subject to manipulation Ruled by statistical determinism man became an appropriate subject for the domain of probability theory Man s future his her very essence appeared to be as contingent and un-mysterious as an engineering input-output problem Although it was merely a regulatory assumption the widespread hypothesis that all complexities of human experience consciousness and of the world in general would ultimately be explicable in terms of natural scientific principles increasingly and often unconsciously took on the character of a well-established scientific principle with profound metaphysical implications The more modern man strove to control nature by understanding its principles to free himself from the power of nature to separate himself from the necessity of nature and above all to rise above it the more completely science metaphysically submerged man into nature and into its mechanistic and impersonal character For if man lived in a mechanistic and impersonal universe and if existence was entirely grounded in that universe then man too became mechanistic and impersonal and his private experience became a psychological fiction In this light man was little more than a genetic strategy for the continuance of the species and as the th c progressed the strategy s success became increasingly uncertain Thus it was the irony of modern intellectual progress that man s genius discovered successive principle of determinism Cartesian Newtonian Darwinian Marxist Freudian behaviorist genetic neurophysiological sociobiological that steadily attenuated belief in his own rational and volitional freedom while eliminating his sense of being anything more than a peripheral and transient accident of material evolution The self-critique of the modern mind These paradoxical developments were matched by simultaneous progress in modern philosophy as it analyzed the nature and extent of human knowledge was it unlimited Could we know everything with increasing rigor subtlety and insight For at the same time as modern man was expanding his effective knowledge of the world his effort to turn towards himself in order to understand how that knowledge was possible epistemology how is knowledge possible it revealed the disquieting limits beyond which his knowledge could not claim to penetrate From Locke - to Hume - With Newton s synthesis of a new science the Enlightenment began with an unprecedented confidence in human reason and the new science s success in explicating the natural world also affected philosophy and this in two ways by locating the basis for knowledge in the human mind rather than in the world in its encounter with the physical material world ontological claim and by directing philosophy s attention to an analysis of the mind that was capable of such cognitive success epistemological claim in explaining the world It was John Locke - Isaac Newton s - contemporary and Frances Bacon s - heir who set the tone for the Enlightenment by affirming the foundational principle of empiricism there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses Nihil est in intellectu guod non antea fuerit in sensu Locke was stimulated by reading Descartes - but also influenced by Newton - Boyle - and the Royal Society and affected by Gassendi s - atomistic empiricism Locke could not accept the Cartesian rationalist belief in innate ideas In Locke s analysis all knowledge of the world must rest finally on human beings sensory experience Through the combining and compounding of simple sensory impressions or ideas defined as mental contents into more complex ideas or concepts by way of reflection on sensations the mind can arrive at sound conclusions Sense impressions and inner reflection on those impressions those are the two fountains of knowledge from whence all ideas we have or can naturally have do spring The mind is first of all a blank tablet tabula rasa upon which experience then writes The mind is intrinsically passive receptor and then receives atomistic impressions that represent external objects causing the impressions in the mind From those impressions the mind then constructs by means of introspection here understood as inner observation a conceptual understanding through its compounding operations so that the mind possesses innate power reflection compounding but not innate ideas Knowledge cognition begins in sensation The British empiricist demand that sensory experience be the ultimate source of knowledge of the world set itself in opposition to the Continental rationalist orientation epitomized by Descartes - Spinoza - and Leibnitz - who all held that the mind alone through its recognition of clear and distinct and self-evident truths could achieve certain knowledge For the empiricists such empirically ungrounded rationalism was as Frances Bacon had said akin to a spider s producing cobwebs out of its own substance The characteristic imperative of the Enlightenment soon to be carried from England by Voltaire to France and the French Encyclopedists held that reason required sensory experience to know anything about the world other than its own concoctions The best criterion of truth was therefore its genetic meaning historical basis sensory experience and not just its apparently rational validity which could be spurious In subsequent empiricist thought rationalism was increasingly delimited to speculation definition mathematical or logical operations Similarly the rationalist belief that science could attain certain knowledge of general truths about the world e g that there were two kinds of stuff extended stuff and non-extended stuff or that everything was composed of monads was increasingly displaced by a less absolutist position suggesting that science cannot make known the real structure of things metaphysics but can only on the basis of hypotheses concerning what appears discover probable truths reason becomes analogous to a probability calculus a heuristic instrumental procedure about the machine of nature Skepticism and empiricism This nascent skepticism in the empiricist position was already visible in John Locke s own difficulties with his theory of knowledge Locke recognized that there was no guarantee that all human ideas of things genuinely resembled external objects that these ideas were supposed to re-present in the mind Nor was Locke able to reduce all complex ideas e g notions of substance or cause to simple ideas or sensations Locke held that there were three factors in human knowledge the mind the physical object and the idea in the mind that represents the object Man knows the object only mediately that is by way of the idea Outside sensory perception there is simply the world of material substances in motion e g Hobbes - the various impressions of the external world that man experiences in cognition cannot be absolutely confirmed as belonging to the world-in-itself Locke however attempted a partial solution this problem of skepticism by making a distinction following Galileo - and Descartes - between primary and secondary qualities That is distinguishing between qualities that inhere in all physical objects as objectively measurable weight height shape and motion and qualities that inhere only in the subjective human experience of those objects taste color odor beauty While primary qualities produce ideas in the mind that genuinely resemble the world secondary qualities produce ideas that are simply the consequence of the subject s perceptual apparatus By focusing on primary qualities science can attain reliable knowledge of the material world secondary properties qualities are merely subjective and uncertain In this way Locke protected the new science from skepticism i e we can know the truth about the world only if we restrict ourselves to primary properties of the machine of nature Berkeley - But Locke was followed by Bishop Berkeley - who pointed out that if the empiricist analysis of human knowledge is carried through rigorously then it must be admitted that all the qualities the mind both primary and secondary can register are ultimately experienced as ideas in the mind and there can be no conclusive inference whether some but not all of these qualities genuinely represent the object Indeed there can be no conclusive inference concerning even the existence of the external world of material objects outside of the mind that produces these ideas solipsism skepticism For there is no justifiable means of distinguishing between objects and sensory impressions and hence no idea in the mind can be said to be like picture resemble represent a material thing so that the latter is re-presented in the mind as it is in itself Since no one can ever get outside the mind to compare the idea with the actual object Berkeley concluded that the whole notion of re-presentation is groundless The same arguments Locke used against representational accuracy of secondary qualities were equally applicable to primary qualities for in the end both types of qualities must be regarded as experiences ideas in the mind even physics was dependent on the ideas in the mind Berkeley concluded that Locke s doctrine of representation must therefore be untenable In Berkeley s analysis all human experience is phenomenal limited to appearances in the mind Man s perception of nature is his mental experience of nature and consequently all sense data must finally be adjudicated as objects for the mind and not as representations of material substances In effect while Locke had reduced all mental contents to an ultimate basis in sensation empiricism Berkeley further reduced all sense data to contents of the mind The Lockean distinction between qualities that belong to the mind and qualities that belong to the world cannot be sustained and with this breakdown Berkeley who was a Bishop in the Anglican Church sought to overcome the atheistic materialism which he felt had unjustifiably arisen with modern new science He agreed that the empiricist rightly affirms that all knowledge rests on experience but Berkeley s point is that in the end all experience is nothing more than experience all mental re-presentations of supposedly material objects are finally nothing but ideas in the mind and therefore the existence of the material world external to the mind is an unwarranted assumption All that can be known with certainty is the mind and its ideas including those that seem to represent the world From a rigorously philosophical point of view to be does not mean to be a material substance rather to be means to be perceived by the mind esse est percipi Of course this epistemological claim which is sometimes known as phenomenalism could mean disaster for the truth of the knowledge achieved by the new science Yet Berkeley held that the individual mind does not subjectively determine its experience of the world as if the world were a fantasy susceptible to any individual s whim of the moment The reason that there is objectivity that different individuals reliably perceive the same world is that the world and its order depend on a mind that transcends individual minds and is universal namely the Mind of God The universal Mind produces sensory ideas in individual minds according to certain regularities the constant experience of which gradually reveals to man the laws of nature It is this situation of the Mind of God that allows for the possibility of science Thus science is not hampered by the recognition that sense data cannot be known to have a material basis for the mind can continue its analysis of objects just as well with the critical knowledge that these are object-for-the-mind recurrent sense qualities and not copies of material substances The philosopher does not have to worry about the skepticism created by Locke s theory of re-presentation because according to Berkeley the world-in-itself as such does not exist The ideas in the mind are the final truth Note how important this epistemological position would make psychology if all truth is in the mind then the science of the mind -psychology - would be the most important science Little wonder that psychology was born in and maintained an allegiance to empiricism In this way Berkeley sought to preserve empiricism and solve the problem of skepticism As importantly of course Berkeley also preserved the spiritual Divine foundation of human experience and of natural science Brilliant Hume - Berkeley was followed by David Hume who pushed the empiricist epistemological critique to the extreme using Berkeley s insights but turning it in a secular direction more characteristic of the modern mind s skepticism following from Montaigne through Pierre Bayle and the Enlightenment Hume agreed with Locke s general orientation He also agreed with Berkeley s criticism of Locke s theory of representation But he disagreed with Berkeley s idealist position sometimes known as subjective idealism to distinguish it from later objective idealism say of Hegel Human experience was phenomenal only of sense impressions but there was no way to ascertain anything beyond sense impression spiritual or material Hume like Berkeley rejected Locke s theory of re-presentation but Hume also rejected Berkeley s theory that ideas were objectively rooted in the Mind of God Hume makes a distinction between sensory impressions and ideas Sensory impressions are the basis of knowledge and they come with force and liveliness that makes them unique Ideas are faint copies of those impressions Thus one can experience through the sense an impression of the color blue and on the basis of this impression one can have an idea of that color whereby the color can be recalled Now the question arises what causes sensory impressions If every valid idea has a basis in a corresponding sensory impression then to what impression can the mind point for its idea of causation None If the mind analyzes its experience without preconception it must recognize that in fact all its presupposed knowledge is based on a continuous chaotic volley of discrete sensations and that on these sensations the mind then imposes its own order The mind draws from its experience an explanation that in fact derives from the mind itself not from experience The mind cannot really know what causes the sensations for it never experiences cause as a sensation The mind experiences only simple impressions atomized phenomena and causality is clearly not one of those simple impressions Rather it is through an association of ideas which is only a habit of the human imagination that the mind assumes that there is a cause for the sensation but this assumption in fact has no basis in sensory impressions themselves All knowledge is then based on impressions in the mind and we cannot assume that anything beyond the mind exists the fact that we do assume that something external causes sense impressions is the result of a habit of mind - or what Hume called the association of ideas The causal relation between external object and impression is never directly given in human experience What happens is that the mind continuously receives impressions that suggest that these are caused by external objects existing continuously and independently of the mind But the mind never experiences these objects directly in other words the mind always mediate between ideas and object such that we can never be sure that these ideas are in fact like objects mind as a mediating mechanism does not allow the inference to the external world Thus the mind may receive event A repeatedly followed by event B and on that basis the mind may project that A causes B But the fact that A and B repeatedly follow each other are impressions in close association or constant conjunction does not mean that the causal nexus projected between them has ever been perceived in fact Hume suggested that the causal projection inference is an internal habit accident of the mind In a sense the psychological conjunction of A and B is reified projected as probably real as A causes B Even ideas of space and time are not independent realities as Newton had assumed but are simply the result of experiencing co-existence or succession of impressions Hence space and time are only ways of experiencing objects Hume claimed that all concepts originate in this way the mind moves from the experience of particular impressions to the idea of relationship between among impressions and this relationship is then reified But the idea of relationship is only the mind s habit of associating impressions Thus our knowledge of the world reflects the associative habits of mind and not the nature of reality Note here that the mind becomes the basis for knowledge and hence the role of the study of mind psychology becomes all important epistemology becomes psychology or epistemology is naturalized It was part of Hume s intention to refute the metaphysical claims of philosophical rationalism and its deductive logic Descartes and Leibnitz Hume held that there are two kinds of statements propositions One based on experienced impressions concerning matters of fact and hence propositions that are always contingent e g it is a sunny day and the other based on pure intellect concerning relations between concepts and hence propositions that are always necessary e g all squares have four equal sides But the truths of pure reason e g mathematics are necessary only because they belong to a closed system that need make no reference to the external world that is they are true in virtue of their meaning and hence are always analytical or tautological So that analytical propositions can make no claims concerning metaphysics either of this world or of any other world According to Hume one cannot move from the statements of sensible of impressions to statements of the supersensible since the only basis for such an inductive inference involves the claim to causation and causation is but constant conjunction of impression Without impressions of concreteness and temporality causality is meaningless Hence all rational metaphysical arguments as to what exists e g Descartes and Leibnitz which seek to make claims about reality beyond the temporal of contingent impressions have no epistemological grounding Consequently metaphysics claims to know beyond sensations e g God spirit mind reason but also cause material object etc is no better than mythology having nothing to say about the real world Here we see the displacement of yrs of metaphysics reason able to grasp the way things really are true by epistemology the question of how we could possibly know any claim to what is real true But for the modern secular mind Hume s critical analysis has a more disturbing consequence still one that undermines empirical science and hence the new science altogether The reason is that empirical science is based on induction from the bottom up that is by way of the sense perception and Hume has just demonstrated that induction has no certainty The move from particulars of sense impressions to universal certainty of concepts involves cause and cause is merely constant conjunction subjective or psychological and hence only probable In this context science is possible but it is a science of the phenomenal only of appearances registered in the mind giving only subjective certainty determined not by what is real nature but by what is in the mind - psychology One can appreciate the importance of empiricism quite apart from its scientific status for the emergence of psychology as the discipline that deals with epistemology and of epistemology as replacing metaphysics It is paradoxical and ironical that Hume philosophy began with the intention of applying rigorous Newtonian experimental principles of investigation to human beings inquiring scientists in order to bring the successful empirical methods of the new science to a science epistemology of mind human beings but the ended up by casting doubt on the objective certainty of empirical science altogether If human knowledge is based on empiricism sense impressions and association then induction can not be justified and we can never have certain knowledge of the world and certainly not knowledge beyond the world of God immortality human freedom etc that is metaphysics With Hume the long developing empiricist stress on sense perception from Aristotle and Aquinas to Ockham Bacon and Locke culminated in the extreme Only the chaos of sense impressions exists and any order that these may seem to possess is imposed arbitrarily habitually by the mind Going back to Plato s distinction between knowledge of reality and opinion of appearances Hume held that all knowledge is merely opinion doxa Whereas Plato held sense impressions to be faint copies of Ideas Hume held ideas to be faint copies of sense impression In the long evolution of the Western mind from the ancient idealists realists to modern empiricists the basis for what is real is now entirely reversed Sense experience not ideal apprehension was the standard of truth even as that standard as a standard of truth with Hume was is entirely problematic and hence skeptical probabilistic Locke had retained some faith in the capacity of the human mind to grasp however imperfectly the general outline of the external world by means of his combining operations But for Hume not only was the human mind less than perfect it could never claim access to reality hence truth apart from the habits of order imposed by mind If nothing was in the mind that was not first in the senses and if all valid ideas were derived from sense impressions then our knowledge of the world can only ever be problematic probable because that knowledge could never be simply derived from sense impressions Note what is at stake here is precisely Descartes concern with the question of certitude truth of the new science Pursuing this psychological analysis of human experience still further Hume concluded that the mind itself was nothing but a bundle of disconnected sense impressions without valid claims to substantial unity continuous existence or internal coherence let alone objective knowledge All order and coherence including that leading to the idea of the Self consciousness were simply mind-constructed fictions Human beings required such fictions in order to live adapt survive but there was no way to substantiate them epistemologically philosophically Berkeley held that there was no necessary material basis for experience but he was able to claim that the mind as well as the world had a certain independence derived from the mind of God But Hume s secular skepticism rejected even this much There was no God no order no necessity no substantial existents no personal identity no real knowledge all was contingent constructed and merely probable It was this empiricist skepticism of Hume that was to provoke Immanuel Kant s philosophy in the th c as the central one for the modern era Kant The intellectual challenge that Kant faced in the second half of the th c was an impossible one he had to reconcile the claims of the new science to genuine certain knowledge of the world and the claim of philosophy epistemology that experience could never give rise to such certain knowledge and he had to reconcile the claim of religion that man was morally free and the claim of science man nature including man was determined by necessary mechanical laws Note that the two endeavors are closely connected If the claims of science can ever only be probable as Hume s empiricist philosophy argues then presumably the deterministic laws of science are only probable and then just maybe there is human freedom as religion claims is necessary for man to be moral But the claims of science did yield knowledge of the world in a manner never before attained and hence the conflict Kant faced was between science and religion with philosophy playing a kind of spoiler s role Kant s effort in doing so was complex brilliant and had consequences for the remainder of the th and th centuries to this very day Kant too was intimately acquainted with the Newtonian new science and he had no doubt that this science brought certain knowledge Kant following Hume had come to distrust all rationalist metaphysics as making absolute claims about reality and also was profoundly impressed by Hume s claim that empirical science could not meet the standards of certainty it clearly aspired to and that Kant believed science had attained It was as Kant writes Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers i e Kant s long training in the German rationalist school of Wolff who was Leibnitz systematizer Kant came to see that man could know only the phenomenal world and that all rationalist metaphysical claims concerning nature and universe went beyond experience and so were unfounded All proposition of pure reason rationalism only led to contraries contradictions Whenever the mind tries to know things beyond experience such as God human freedom the immortality of the soul the infinity of the universe it found itself caught up in illusions or contradictions The history of metaphysics shows no progress whatsoever in this he might have agreed with Hume The mind required empirical evidence in order to claim to have knowledge But God freedom immortality of the soul infinity of the universe genes and atoms were not empirical phenomena metaphysics therefore went beyond knowledge that is rationalist metaphysic went beyond the limits of human reason so that human reason had limits in what it could know as true Of course Hume s rejection of metaphysics and his claim that all knowledge depends on sense impressions also undermined the certainty of the truth of Newtonian science But Kant was convinced that Newton s and Galileo s experimental science the new science did yield certain knowledge contra Hume on risk that otherwise we would be beset by an endless skepticism So Kant was confronted by an either or either Newton true knowledge or Hume empiricist skepticism If Hume is correct and there was no certain knowledge and the question then arises how it is that Newton succeeded How could Newton have come to certain knowledge when the only possible knowledge as Hume demonstrated is merely probable Kant wrote much but his main three works were three Critiques First Critique of pure reason Second Critique of practical reason and Third Critique of judgment The First Critique was Kant s effort to try to reconcile Newton s certain science and Hume s skeptical empiricism and in doing so to resolve the modern epistemological problem between empiricism Locke Berkeley and Hume which rejected rationalist metaphysics as well as the epistemologically na ve certitude of Newtonian science The clarity and strict necessity of mathematical truths had long provided the rationalists Descartes Spinoza and Leibnitz with the assurance that in a world of modern doubt the human being had at least one solid basis for certain knowledge reason thinking In fact Kant himself had long been convinced that natural science was scientific to the extent that it approximated the ideal of mathematics certitude Thus mathematics gave observation its certainty Yet Kant had come to appreciate that extending mathematical reasoning to metaphysics could only lead to contradictions Only within the bonds of sensory experience as in natural science was mathematical reasoning patently successful and yielded certitude of knowledge However we have seen that because natural science relies on observation the senses it was also open to Hume s criticism that all knowledge is contingent and its apparent necessity only psychological Kant had to agree with Hume s epistemological argument and so had to conclude that even the certain laws of Euclidean geometry could not have been derived from observation Yet Newton s certain science was based on Euclidean geometry But if the laws of mathematics and logic derived not from observation but from the human mind then how could they pertain to the natural world of the senses of observation Rationalist like Descartes had assumed a mind-world causal interaction or in Leibnitz case a harmony which is why mathematics reason applied to the world but Hume s critique now made this assumption which Locke held and borrowed from Descartes very unlikely Nevertheless the mind-world correspondence was seemingly vindicated in Newtonian science a science of which Kant was certain What then was Kant s solution to the standoff between the certainty of Newtonian science and the skepticism of Hume s empiricism Kant proposed that the mind-world correspondence assumed by the rationalists and by Newton s new science was vindicated in natural science But that the word world was not the na ve world of scientific observation but was the world as ordered constructed by the mind So that for Kant the mind was not passive but active here the bells of Leibnitz in its structuring activity of sense data and that the world is therefore precisely as it conforms to the structures of the mind The world of science corresponds to the principles of mind precisely because the na ve experienced world is always already organized according the structures of mind Cognition of the world is channeled through the mind s categories So the correspondence between mind and world is correct but it is correct because the world is always already structured by the mind The necessity and certainty of scientific knowledge Newton s new science of the world is not knowledge of a world machine independent of mind but of a world already permeated by mind note the similarity her with Leibnitz Hence causality and necessity of knowledge of the world is possible because the world is already always the world constructed by the mind Knowledge of the world is therefore never merely a matter of sense data impressions observation alone but of these as structured by the mind The laws of science are the laws of the mind-structuring-sense-data Hence the correspondence between mind and world is not the result of the mind conforming to the machine of the world but the world conforming to the structuring activities of the mind presumably below the level of our awareness How did Kant arrive at this epoch making conclusion He began by noting that if all the contents of experience were separated off from mathematical judgments the ideas of space and time still remained This meant that all experience of the senses is located automatically in a framework of spatial and temporal relations He called space and time apriori forms of human sensibility in the sense that they condition all that is apprehended through the senses Thus mathematics could accurately describe the empirical world because mathematical principles necessarily involve a context of space and time and space and time lay at the basis of or make possible all sensory experience of the world Space and time are presuppositions of conditions for experience hence they are apriori Yet space and time cannot be known to exist in nature independently of mind but neither can the world be known by the mind without space and time Thus space and time cannot be said to belong to the world-in-itself rather they are the conditions for perceiving knowing the world in experience From an epistemological perspective space and time are in the nature of perception mind-world and are not ontologically part of the nature of thing-in-themselves Note here that for Kant the naively experienced observed world universe is already always a product of the mind Because mathematical propositions are based on direct intuition of spatial relations they are apriori constructed by the mind and not derived from sense experience and yet they are valid for experience which by necessity conforms to the apriori form for space So while pure reason inevitably gets involved in contradictions if it attempts to apply its ideas to the world as a whole to determine what is true part and beyond all possible experience as in metaphysics e g is the universe infinite or finite in time and space when it comes to the phenomenal world of experience time and space are not just applicable concepts they are rather inherent components of all human experience of the world Furthermore analysis also reveals that the structure of mind is such that the events it perceives in space and time are subject to other principles as well namely the categories of understanding such as causation These categories lend certainty to scientific knowledge Thus all events in the phenomenal world i e constructed world of mind are causally related and hence science can proceed The mind does not derive cause and effect from observation as Hume also noted but the world as experienced is already a world of causes and effects as categories of understanding So too with other categories of understanding such as substance quantity and relation without which the mind could not comprehend the world these are apriori principles of mind and serve as the framework of human perception of the world Our experience would be chaotic and formless without the categories of understanding synthetic apriori Experience depends then on both sensibility and categories of understanding The apriori categories serve then as an absolute condition of possibility for experience The categories are apriori yet empirically applicable and only empirically applicable not metaphysically fore the only world we can know is the phenomenal world i e we can never know the world as it is in and of itself That is the world is always only there relative to human beings sensible intuition and the categories of understanding Knowledge of the world is restricted to the effect sensible things have on us and these appearances are always already structured by the perceiver knower Therefore the mind never can experience what is out-there apart from the mind as if the mind could simply mirror objective reality rather reality is necessarily of human making The world-in-itself is something we can only think about but never know The order we perceive in the world is therefore an order grounded in the mind the world is forced to obey the mind note that Kant was a rationalist even if a very different one from Descartes and Leibnitz All sensibility is channeled through the filter of apriori human structures and therefore we can gain certain knowledge of the world Kant here supports Newton s science but not because we are able to grasp the world-in-itself but because the world we come to know is one that is already saturated with the organization of mind What we know is this organization the world as experienced and not the world-in-itself which we cannot know and which Kant in contrast to the phenomenal world called the noumenal world Knowledge certitude is then possible because what that knowledge is of is the phenomenal world already always structured by mind Kant criticized Leibniz rationalism for believing that reason alone without sensibility can determine what is real since Kant maintained that knowledge requires sensibility of particulars and Kan also criticized Locke and the empiricists for believing that sense impressions alone without apriori categories could lead to knowledge since Kant maintained that particulars of sense are meaningless without apriori concepts Locke was correct to deny innate ideas in the sense of mental representations of physical reality but Locke was wrong to deny innate formal knowledge Just as thought reason without sensation is empty so sensation without thought is blind Only understanding and sensibility together can give us valid knowledge of the world as experienced For Kant the division that Hume made between the pure intellect necessary but tautological propositions and pure sensation factual but contingent propositions required a third more important concept involving both functions sensibility and reason synthetic apriori propositions Without this third kind of proposition combining both reason and sensibility there could be not certain knowledge Hume had shown that empiricism is necessarily accompanied by uncertainty and Kant agreed that there can be no knowledge based on sensation alone But Kant moved beyond Hume in recognizing that the history of science had progressed on the basis of concepts not derived from experience observation alone but concepts that were already imbedded in observation experience Newton and Galileo theories were not just derived from empirical observation but from observations that were already structured by the human mind I already noted that Galileo and Newton depended on the mathematics One cannot get universal laws from mere observation of nature like a pupil waiting for answers but only by putting to nature shrewd questions like a judge that will be deliberately and precisely revealing Science s answers derive from the same source as its questions human beings inquiring The questions scientists put to the world do require experimentation to test nature but testing nature can only come by way of questions posed to nature The case of science reflects the more general case of all human experience The mind can know with certainty only that which in some sense the mind has already put into the experience of nature Knowledge then does not conform to things but things conform to human knowledge i e the mechanism of nature is already a construction of mind Certainty is possible but only in the phenomenal world as it is that phenomenal world which is already the product of the mind s order This is Kant s Copernican revolution just as Copernicus explained the perceived movement of the heavens by the movement of the observer so Kant explained the perceived order of the world by the order of the observer By confronting the seemingly irresolvable dialectic between Newtonian certainty and Humean empiricist skepticism Kant demonstrated that our observations of the world are never neutral or free from apriori conceptual judgments Here the Baconian ideal of empiricism as totally free from anticipations is rejected as impossible Such freedom or neutrality works neither in science nor in daily experience Mind is not passive but creative in science but also in everyday life The world is not simply perceived as it is re-presented and then correlated with concepts rather all perceived particulars are already permeated by concepts in order to be identified as particulars at all Neither empiricism without apriori concepts nor rationalism without sensory evidence can constitute a viable strategy for epistemology Kant redefined the task of the philosopher Philosophy was not metaphysics in the traditional sense of determining what is real but rather philosophy was the analysis of the limits of human reason Reason cannot decide apriori on matters transcending experience but reason can determine those conditions of possibility that enable human knowledge and those conditions belong to the structure of mind Consequences of Kant Now the epistemological consequences of Kant s Copernican revolution were not without some disturbing features Kant had tied the knower to the known they belong together and so Kant can lay claim to being a phenomenologist a term later introduced first by Hegel and the Husserl but the known is no longer objective reality or the object-in-itself It is as if the knower and known are together in a solipsistic prison As Aquinas and Aristotle had already claimed we know because we judge things through the medium of apriori principles but for Kant we have no way of adjudicating whether these principles pertain to being outside of the human mind These principle are merely necessary if we are to account for our experience of the world In Aquinas we have the lumen intellectus agentis the divine light of the active intellect but in Kant there is only the subjective reality of reason of such principles as conditions of possibility for knowledge One might argue that Kant s critical rationalism concepts without sense are empty and Hume s critical empiricism sense without concepts is blind places limits on knowledge we cannot know anything transcendent-metaphysical and we cannot know the world-in-itself In retrospect then Kant s as well as Copernicus revolutions were fundamentally ambiguous they were liberating and they were diminishing of humankind claim to know That is both awakened within humankind an adventurous reality and both displaced man from the center of the cosmos in case of Copernicus and from genuine knowledge of the cosmos in case of Kant Copernican cosmic alienation man is nothing in this vast universe was compounded by Kant s epistemological alienation man cannot ever come to know that vast universe except as it appears phenomenal world However one can also argue that Kant reversed the Copernican revolution If Copernicus displaced man from the center of the cosmos Kant placed man back into the center by virtue of man s role in determining knowledge of the world Of course by making man the center of this knowledge of the cosmos Kant only recognized that man could no longer directly know the intrinsic order of the cosmos this is Kant s rejection of rationalist metaphysics say of Descartes or Leibnitz Kant in a way humanized science all knowledge is empirical but dependent on human sensibility and apriori principles of mind and in doing so he also removed from scientific knowledge all certitude that this knowledge is of the machine of nature as it is in-itself as both Bacon s the empiricist and Descartes the rationalist original program of modern science had assumed So notwithstanding that Kant gave the mind an ennobling central status in the construction of human knowledge in doing so he made all knowledge dependent on human subjectivity reason man could know the cosmos but only human-known cosmos not the cosmos in-itself Thus Kant limited the role of reason in what reason could know in this sense he rejects metaphysics even as he also gave reason man an essential role in coming to know in coming to truth Kant s Copernican revolution thus has two sides in his defense of Newtonian science he proposed apriori forms and categories that would ensure certainty of knowledge against empiricists skepticism and by restricting knowledge to the phenomenal world not things-in-themselves he restricted the capacity of human reason and so made room for religious and moral truth which are not empirical and hence could not be known By restricting reason to the phenomenal Kant freed religion and morality from the intrusion of reason and its effort to establish certain knowledge in these domains Not only did he in doing so counter rationalists effort to ground faith in knowledge but he also countered science s mechanistic world view which would have its determinism deny the freedom of the will which is essential to morality By restricting the competence of science to the phenomenal world Kant opened up the possibility of faith religious belief and moral responsibility Science reason in having been limited to the phenomenal cannot rule out on the possibility of religious moral truths Thus Kant held that one cannot know that God exists yet one must nevertheless believe that God exists in order to act morally Hence belief in God is justified morally and practically even if it is not theoretically knowable but a matter of faith Ideas of God the immortality of the soul and human freedom freedom of the will can not be known in the same way that we come to know the laws of nature Yet for all that one cannot do one s duty be responsible or believe in life after death unless there is a God freedom exists and the soul is eternal These are ideas which must be believed as true so Kant s argument goes for otherwise there is no moral existence With the advance of science the modern mind could no longer base religion on a rational cosmological or metaphysical foundation but instead it could base religion in the structure of the human situation itself practical knowledge and in this way Kant following Rousseau and Luther defined the direction of modern religious thought Man was inwardly free from the lawfulness of the external phenomenal scientific world and this was the true ground of religious meaning Man views himself then under two different and contradictory aspects phenomenally man is subject to the laws of nature and noumenally morally man is a thing-in-itself which can be thought but not known as being free immortal and subject to God In this position the Newtonian and Humean influences on Kant were countered by Rousseau who stressed feeling over reason in religious experience appealing to Kant s German pietistic roots The inner experience of moral duty the impulse to selfless moral virtue permitted Kant to transcend the scientific worldview of the modern mind that had reduced the world to appearance and mechanistic necessity Kant in this way rescued faith from scientific determinism in the same way as he had rescued scientific knowledge from empiricist skepticism But of course he rescued both at the cost of their disjunction and by restricting knowledge to the phenomenal world and subjective certainties reason In his heart it was clear that Kant believed that the laws of the starts and planets were fundamentally harmonious with the moral imperatives he experienced he writes Two things fill the heart with ever new and always increasing awe and admiration the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me But Kant also was well aware that he could not prove this harmony a la Leibnitz and so the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and material cosmos took on a new and deepened form in Kant That is for Kant this dualism was now place inside man him herself between man s phenomenal being and his noumenal moral being It was to be Kant s fate that the power of his epistemological critique outweighed his positive clams Thus ironically the room he made for faith by severely limiting what reason could know began to resemble a vacuum since faith had now lost its support in reason and of course also in empirical science Faith became a psychological option Thus ironically the effort Kant made to assure the certainty of scientific knowledge apriori principles which was at the cost of a mind-independent necessity cause lost further support when in the th c the Euclidean and Newtonian categories which Kant assumed absolute apriori principles of reason were overturned by the new physics If Kant was wrong about the new science because Newton and Euclid were wrong then Kant s effort to save the new science from skepticism both rationalist and empiricist in his newly proposed critical rationalism realism was also doomed to fail we did not need a distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal world With this distinction Kant had in effect pulled the rug out from under any human pretension to know the world-in-itself Subsequent developments in the Western mind - the deepening relativism introduced by Einstein Bohr and Heisenberg but also by Darwin Marx and Freud by Nietzsche Dilthey Weber Heidegger and Wittgenstein by Saussure Levi-Strauss and Foucault by Godel Popper Quine and Kuhn radically magnified this effect altogether eliminating any ground for subjective certainty that Kant still felt All human experience was structured by unconscious principles and none of these were timeless or absolute Rather these principles varied with culture era class language persons and existential contexts In effect after Kant in the th and th centuries science religion and philosophy all had to find their own grounds for justification for none could claim access to the universe s intrinsic nature and Kant s effort to limit reason in what it could accomplish also vanished there was no limit on what scientific inquiry could accomplish vastly extending the limits Kant set for it in the First Critique The decline of metaphysics The course of modern philosophy changed under the impact of Kant s epochal distinctions At first Kant s successors in Germany pursued his thinking unexpectedly in the idealist direction In the Romantic climate of European culture in the late th and early th c Fichte Schelling and Hegel suggested that Kant s cognitive categories of reason of mind were in some sense ontological categories of the universe that is human knowledge did not point to divine reality but was itself that reality and on that basis constructed a metaphysical system with a universal Mind that revealed itself through human reason activity a much more ambitious and radical claim than Leibnitz could ever imagine or accept given his Christian faith in a transcendent God For the idealists Kant s transcendental ego the ego that legislates the categories and heuristic unifying principles on experience to yield knowledge could be radically extended as an Absolute Spirit constituting all reality Thus if Kant held that it was the mind that supplied the form of experience with the content given by sensibility his idealist successors held that both form and content were determined by an all-encompassing Mind so that nature became an image or symbol of Mind rather than an independent existent Of course among the scientifically minded modern thinkers the speculations of the idealists could not command widespread acceptance especially after the th c for these speculations were not empirically testable nor did idealism fit the scientific tenor of an objective and ontologically distinct conception of the universe nature as machine Scientific materialism the opposite metaphysical idealism seemed to better reflect the quality of contemporary scientific evidence Yet materialism also seemed to assume an ultimately untestable substance matter rather than spirit and materialism also failed to account for the subjective phenomenology of human consciousness and man s sense of personal volition very different from the unconscious impersonal external world But because materialism or at least naturalism the position that all phenomena could ultimately be explained by natural causes appeared most congruent with the scientific account of the world it constituted a more compelling framework than did idealism Still there was much in materialism that did not seem acceptable to the modern sensibility such as its apparently incompleteness the uncertainty of scientific knowledge ambiguities of scientific evidence or because of various conflicting religious or psychological factors The other available metaphysical position apart from idealism and materialism was some form of dualism reflecting either the mind-body dualism of Descartes or else the phenomenal-noumenal dualism of Kant for this reflected the disjunction between objective physical world and subjective human awareness With increasing reluctance of the modern mind to postulate any transcendent divine dimension the nature of the Cartesian-Kantian position both of which as we have seen postulated such a transcendent dimension was to prevent any coherent metaphysical position in the th and th centuries Given the discontinuity of the modern experience e g between man and world and mind and matter as well as the epistemological quandary implied by this discontinuity how can man presume to know what is essentially different from his own awareness metaphysics necessarily lost its preeminence in philosophy Instead one could investigate the world as a scientist or human experience by way of introspection or one could avoid the discontinuity by admitting the human world s irresolvable ambiguity and contingency arguing instead for its existential and pragmatic transformation through a human act of will A universal order rationally intelligible to the contemplative observer was now precluded and hence modern philosophy progressing in accord with Descartes and Locke eventually undercut its own traditional reason-for-being While from one perspective the problematic entity for the modern human being was the external world in its dehumanized objectification from another perspective the human mind itself the cognitive mechanism could no longer be fully trusted The reason is that man could no longer assume that his mind s interpretation of the world was mirror-like of the way things actually are It was now possible that the mind itself was alienating not just the world Thus Freud and the depth psychologists now shed doubt on the rational nature of mind From Hume and Kant through Darwin Marx and Freud an unsettling conclusion became inescapable human thought was determined structured and distorted by a multitude of unsettling factors innate but non-absolute mental categories habits history culture social class biology language imagination emotion personal unconscious and collective unconscious In the end the human soul consciousness could not be counted on as an accurate judge of reality The original Cartesian certitude cogito ergo sum that served as the foundation of modern confidence in reason was no longer defensible As a result philosophy changed as well concerning itself now largely with the clarification of epistemological problems with an analysis of language with the philosophy of science or with existential phenomenological analysis of human experience While there is a lot of disagreement among the different schools of philosophy in the th c they share in one crucial point it is impossible to apprehend an objective cosmic order with human intelligence This point of agreement is shared by such diverse philosophers as Russell Heidegger and Wittgenstein Because only empirical science could render provisionally corroborated knowledge about the contingent natural world of sense experience all unverifiable and untestable metaphysical claims concerning the world as a whole were without meaning this position became know in the th c as logical positivism Because human experience is all that man could know finite conditioned problematic and individual human subjectivity and the very nature of being human necessarily permeated negated or made inauthentic any attempts at an impartially objective world this position became known in the th c as existentialism and phenomenology Because the meaning of any term could be found only in its specific use and context and because human experience was fundamentally structured in language and yet no direct relation between language and an independent deeper structure in the world could be presumed philosophy should concern itself only with the therapeutic clarification of language without any commitment to a particular abstract conception of reality this became known in the th c as linguistic analysis or analytic philosophy On the basis of these and other converging insights the belief that the human mind could attain or should attempt any objective metaphysical overview as traditionally understood was virtually relinquished in the thc With a few exceptions philosophy was directed towards analysis of linguistic problems scientific and logical propositions or the raw data of human experience all without any metaphysical implications in a classical sense If metaphysics still had a viable function aside from being the handmaiden of scientific cosmology it could only involve the analysis of those factors that structured human experience continuing Kant s work but relativistically by examining historical social cultural linguistic existential and psychological factors that affect knowing But all efforts at metaphysical cosmic syntheses were rejected Philosophy then became increasingly concerned with technical methodological and logical niceties and philosophy became increasingly specialized as an academic discipline having nothing to say to the lay person Semantics became more important to philosophical clarity than universal speculations but for most laypeople semantics held no interest Philosophy s traditional mandate and status had been obviated by its own development There was no all-encompassing or transcendent or intrinsically deeper order in the universe to which the mind could lay legitimate claim The crisis of modern science With both religion and philosophy in such a problematic condition it was science alone that seemed to rescue the modern mind from pervasive uncertainty Science achieved a golden age in the th and early th c with extraordinary advances in all its major branches with widespread institutional and academic organization of research and with the practical applications rapidly proliferating on the basis of systematic linkage between science and technology The optimism of the age was directly tied to confidence in science and its power to improve indefinitely the state of human knowledge health and general welfare Religion and metaphysics continued their slow and long decline as science s progress was accelerating Its claim to valid knowledge of the world even subject to post-Kantian idealist critique continued unquestionably In the face of science s supreme cognitive effectiveness and rigorous impersonal precision of its explanatory structures religion and philosophy were compelled to define their position relative to science just as in the medieval era science and philosophy were compelled to define themselves relative to religion For the modern mind it was science that presented the realistic and reliable worldview even as that worldview was limited to technical knowledge of natural phenomena and despite its lingering existentially disjunctive implications mind-body person-world But two developments radically challenged science s cognitive and cultural status one theoretical and internal to science and the other pragmatic and external The theoretical challenge internal to science occurred when the classical Cartesian-Newtonian cosmology gradually broke down under the cumulative impact of several astonishing developments in physics Beginning in the late th c with Maxwell s work with electromagnetic fields the Morley-Michelson experiment and Becquerel s discovery of radioactivity then in the early th c with Planck s isolation of quantum phenomena and Einstein s special and general theories of relativity and culminating in the s with the formulation of quantum mechanics by Bohr and Heisenberg the long-established certainties of modern science were radically undermined By the end of the third decade of the th c virtually every major postulate of the earlier scientific conception of the new science had been overturned The atoms as solid indestructible and separate building blocks of nature Space and time as independent absolutes The strict mechanistic causality of all phenomena The possibility of the objective observation of nature All these changes fundamentally altered the scientific world image and no one felt this more than the physicists themselves Confronted by contradictions at the sub-atomic level Einstein wrote All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this knowledge failed completely It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one could have built Heisenberg similarly realized that the foundations of physics have started moving and this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from under science Thus solid Newtonian atoms were now discovered to be largely empty Hard matter was no longer the fundamental substance of nature Matter and energy were interchangeable Three-dimensional space and uni-dimensional time had become relative aspect of a four-dimensional space-time continuum Time flowed at different rates for observers moving at different speeds Time slowed down near heavy objects and under certain circumstances even stopped The laws of Euclidean geometry no longer provided the universal structure of nature The planets moved in their orbits not because they were pulled towards the sun by an attracting force acting at a distance but because the very space in which the planets moved was curved Subatomic phenomena displayed a fundamentally ambiguous nature observable both as particles and waves The position and momentum of a particle could not be measured simultaneously The uncertainty principle radically undermined and replaced strict Newtonian determinism Scientific observation and explanation could not proceed without affecting the object observed The notion of substance dissolved into probabilities and tendencies to exist Non-local connections between particles contradicted strict causality Formal relations and dynamic processes replaced hard discrete objects The physical world of the th c physics resembled in Sir James Jean s words not so much a great machine as a great thought The consequences of this extraordinary revolution were again profoundly ambiguous On the one hand the continuing modern sense of intellectual progress leaving behind ignorance of the past eras while reaping the fruits on new technology was bolstered Even Newton could be corrected and improved upon Moreover for those who regarded the mechanistic and materialistic universe as antithetical to human values the quantum revolution represented an unexpected and welcome broaching of new possibilities Matter s hard substantiality had given way to a new spiritual interpretation Freedom of the human will was given new force if subatomic particles were indeterminate The principle of complementarity governing waves and particles suggested a broader application in a complementarity between mutually exclusive ways of knowledge like science and religion Human consciousness at least observation and interpretation was given a more central role in the larger scheme of things with a new understanding of the role of the subject s influence on the observed object The deep interconnectedness of phenomena encouraged a new holistic thinking about the world with many social moral religious and implications Increasing numbers of scientists began to question modern science s pervasive if often unconscious assumption that the intellectual effort to reduce all reality to the smallest measurable components of the physical world would eventually reveal that which was most fundamental in the universe The reductionist program of scientific materialism dominant since Descartes now appeared myopically selective and likely to miss the most significant nature of things Of course such implications and inferences were neither universal nor even common among physicists Modern physics was perhaps open to a spiritual interpretation but it did not compel such an interpretation Nor was the larger population conversant with the arcane conceptual changes wrought by the new physics Moreover the revolution in physics not did affect comparable theoretical reformulations in the other natural and social sciences even as their theoretical programs were largely based on the mechanistic principles of physics Nevertheless many did feel that the old materialistic worldview had been irrevocably challenged and that the new scientific models of reality offered possible opportunities for fundamental rapprochement with humanistic aspirations Yet these ambiguous possibilities were countered by other more disturbing factors To begin with there was no coherent conception of the world comparable say to Newton s Principia that could theoretically integrate the new data Physicist showed no consensus as to how the new data should be integrated with any conception of the ultimate reality of things Conceptual contradictions disjunctions and paradoxes were everywhere and stubbornly resisted resolution Richard Feynman writes I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics A certain irreducible irrationality already recognized in the human psyche by Freud and others now also emerged in the structure of the physical world To this incoherence was added unintelligibility for the conceptions derived from the new physics were not only difficult for the layperson to comprehend the presented seemingly insuperable obstacles to human intuition generally a curved space finite yet unbounded a four-dimensional space-time continuum mutually exclusive properties by the same subatomic entity objects that were not really things at all but processes or patterns of relationship phenomena that took no decisive shape until observed particles that seemed to affect each other at a distance with no know link the existence of fundamental fluctuations of energy in a total vacuum Moreover for all the apparent opening of science to a less mechanistic less materialistic conception of the world there was no real change in the essential modern dilemma The universe was still an impersonal vastness in which man with his her peculiar capacity for consciousness was still an ephemeral inexplicable randomly produced minutia Nor was there any compelling answer to the looming question as to what ontological pretext preceded the big-bang birth of the universe Nor did leading physicists believe that the equations of quantum theory described the actual world Scientific knowledge was confined to abstractions mathematical symbols and shadows Such knowledge was not of the world itself a world that now seemed even more remote form the compass of human cognition So the contradictions and paradoxes of the new physics intensified the sense of human relativity and growing alienation that had emerged since Copernicus Modern man was being forced to question his inherited classical Greek faith that the world was ordered in a manner accessible to human intelligence P W Bridgman writes the structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all The world fades out and eludes us We are confronted with something truly ineffable We have reached the limit of the vision of the great pioneers of science the vision namely that we live in a sympathetic world in that it is comprehensible to out minds see Huston Smith Beyond the post-modern era What philosophy has already concluded now science also concluded Reality may not be structured in a way that the human mind can objectively discern Thus incoherence unintelligibility and an insecure relativism compounded the earlier modern predicament of human alienation in an impersonal cosmos When relativity theory and quantum mechanics undid the certainty of the Newtonian paradigm science demonstrated in a way that Kant as a convinced Newtonian could not have imagined the validity of the Kantian skepticism concerning the human mind s ability to know the world-in-itself Because Kant was certain of Newtonian science Kant had argued that the categories of human cognition congruent with Newton s science were absolute and that these alone provided the basis for Newton s achievement and for human epistemological competence in general This was Kant s defense of Hume s empiricist skepticism But with the revolution in th c physics even this last certainty of Kant s was lost The fundamental Kantian aprioris of space time substantiality causality etc were no longer applicable to all phenomena Scientific knowledge after Einstein Bohr and Heisenberg was limited and provisional Similarly quantum mechanics revealed in unexpected fashion the radical validity of Kant s thesis that the nature described by physics was not nature-in-itself but man s relation to nature nature exposed to human questioning What had been implicit in Kant s critique but obscured by the apparent certainty of Newtonian physics now became explicit Because induction can never render certain general laws and because scientific knowledge is the product of human interpretative structures that are themselves relative variable and creatively employed and finally because the act of observation in some sense produces the objective reality science attempts to explicate the truths of science are neither absolute nor unequivocally objective In the combined wake of th c philosophy and th c science the modern mind was left free of absolutes but also disconcertingly free of any solid ground whatsoever This problematic conclusion was reinforced by the newly critical approach to the philosophy and history of science in the second half of the th c influenced by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn Drawing on the insights of Hume and Kant Popper noted that science can never produce knowledge that is certain or even probable Man observes the universe as a stranger making imaginative guesses about its structure and workings He cannot approach the world without such bold conjectures in the background for every observed fact presupposes an interpretative focus In science these conjectures must be continually tested yet no matter how many tests are successfully passed any theory explanation can never be viewed as but an imperfectly corroborated conjecture At any time a new test could falsify it No scientific truth is immune to such a possibility Even the basic facts are relative always potentially subject to reinterpretation in a new framework Man can therefore never claim to know the essence of things Before the virtual infinity of the world s phenomena human ignorance itself is infinite The wisest strategy is to learn from inevitable mistakes here the methodology of science begins to take on an evolutionary character While Popper maintained the rationality of science by upholding a fundamental commitment to the rigorous testing of theories and its fearless neutrality in the quest for truth Thomas Kuhn s analysis tended to undermine even this security Kuhn agreed that all scientific knowledge required interpretative structures based on fundamental paradigms or conceptual models that allowed researchers to isolate data formulate theories and solve problems but with reference to the history of scientific progress Kuhn pointed out that the actual practice of scientists seldom conformed to Popper s ideal systematic self-criticism by means of attempted falsification of existing theories Thus science typically proceeded by seeking confirmations of prevailing paradigms gathering facts in the light of the paradigm performing experiments on the basis of the paradigm extending the range of applicability of the paradigm further articulating the structure of the paradigm and attempting to clarify residual problems concerning the paradigm Thus scientists seldom submit the paradigm to testing Normal science attempts to interpret all data in conformity with the paradigm or else neglecting the data altogether The nature of normal science it to validate the governing paradigm even as this quest is often unconscious and the paradigm acts as a lens through which all observations are filtered and so the paradigm is maintained as the authoritative bulwark by common convention Through teachers and texts scientific pedagogy sustains the inherited paradigm and ratifies its credibility tending to produce a firmness of conviction and theoretical rigidity not unlike education in systematic theology Kuhn also argued a historical thesis Thus the gradual accumulation of conflicting data will produce a paradigm crisis and a new imaginative synthesis eventually wins scientific favor in a scientific revolution that is far from rational This revolution revolutionary science depends as much on established customs of the scientific community on aesthetic psychological sociological historical factors root metaphors and analogies unpredictable imaginative leaps Gestalt switches and on dying an aging conservative scientists as on disinterested tests and arguments In fact the rival paradigms are seldom genuinely comparable they are selectively based on differing modes of interpretation and hence different data sets Each paradigm creates its own gestalt so comprehensively that scientists working within different paradigms seem to be living in different worlds Nor is there any common measure such as problem solving ability or theoretical coherence or resistance to falsification that all scientists will agree upon as a standard of comparison What is an important problem for one group of scientists is not for another Thus for Kuhn the history of science is not one of linear rational progress moving towards an ever more accurate and complete knowledge of objective truth but it is one of irrational shifts of vision in which a multitude of non-rational and non-empirical factors play a crucial role Whereas Popper attempted to temper Hume s skepticism by demonstrating the rationality of choosing the most rigorously tested conjecture Kuhn s analysis restored Hume s skepticism Kuhn s work was an outgrowth of the history of science made a generation earlier by Alexandre Koyre and Frank Lovejoy Also important was the work of Wittgenstein as well as the logical empiricism of Rudolf Carnap and W Quine The widely accepted conclusion of that argument was a relativized Kantian position one that cannot in the last analysis compute complex truths out of simple elements based on direct sensation because all such simple elements are ultimately defined by the ontology of a specific language and there exists a multiplicity of languages each with its own mode of construing reality The choice of language in the end depends on one s purposes and not on objective fact This was an attack on inductivism With these philosophical and historical critiques and with the revolution in physics a more tentative view of science became widespread in intellectual circles Science was still patently powerful of course but scientific knowledge also became a relative matter relative to the observer physical context scientific paradigm social context and theoretical assumptions Moreover science s first principles might be overthrown at any point in the face of new evidence Moreover by the latter th c the conventional structure of the other sciences including Darwinian evolution was coming under increasing pressure from alternative theories Above all the bedrock of the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview for centuries acknowledged as the epitome of human knowledge and still pervasively influential in the cultural psyche had been shattered The post Newtonian world order was neither intuitively accessible nor internally coherent indeed there is scarcely any order at all Yet for all this science s cognitive status would still have maintained preeminence Scientific truth might be increasingly esoteric and provisional but it was a testable truth continually improving more accurate in its formulations and practical in its technological progress industry agriculture medicine energy production communication transportation technology All provided evidence for science s claims to viable knowledge of the world Paradoxically it was this same tangible evidence of progress that was to prove antithetical to the modern mind s trust in the scientific tradition Early in the th c already Ralph Waldo Emerson had warned that man s technical achievements might not be unequivocally in his own best interests things are in the saddle and ride mankind By the turn of the th c just as technology was producing new wonders like the automobile and the widespread applications of electricity a few observers began to sense that such developments might signal an ominous reversal of human values By the midst th c modern science s brave new world had started to become the subject of wide and vigorous criticism Technology was taking over and dehumanizing man placing him in a context of artificial substances and gadgets rather than live in nature in unaesthetically standardized environments where means had subsumed ends where industrial labor requirements implied the mechanization of human beings where all problems were deemed soluble by technical research at the expense of genuine existential response The self-propelling and self-augmenting imperatives of technological functioning were dislodging man and uprooting him from his fundamental relation to the earth Human individuality seemed increasing tenuous disappearing under the impact of mass production mass media and the spread of bleak and problem ridden urbanization Traditional structures and values were tumbling With increasing technological innovation modern life was subject to unprecedentedly disorienting rapidity of change Gigantism and turmoil excessive noise speed and complexity dominated the human environment The world of man was becoming as impersonal as the cosmos of his science In this context retaining any semblance of humanity seemed increasingly in doubt The question of human freedom and of man s capacity to maintain mastery over his own creation had become acute Compounding these humanistic critiques of science technology were more disturbing signs of science s untoward consequences The critical contamination of the planet s water air and soil the manifold harmful effects on plant and animal life the extinction of innumerable species the deforestation of the globe the erosion of topsoil the depletion of groundwater the vast accumulation of toxic wastes the apparent exacerbation of the greenhouse effect the breakdown of the ozone layer in the atmosphere the radical disruption of the entire planetary ecosystem all these emerged as direly serious problems within creasing force and complexity Even from a short-term perspective the accelerated depletion of irreplaceable natural resources had becoming an alarming phenomenon Dependence on foreign supplies of vital resources brought a new precariousness into global political and economic life New stresses in the social fabric continued to appear directly or indirectly tied to the scientific image urban overdevelopment and overcrowding cultural and social rootlessness numbing mechanical labor increasing disastrous industrial accidents automobile and air travel fatalities cancer and heart disease alcoholism and drug addiction mind-dulling and culture impoverishing television film and sports growing levels of crime violence and psychopathology Even science s most cherished successes paradoxically entailed new and pressing problems as when medical relief of human illness and the lowering of mortality rates combined with technological advances in food production and transportation exacerbated the threat of global overpopulation In other cases advances in science presented new Faustian dilemmas such as are implied in genetic engineering stem cell research and reproductive technologies More generally the scientifically unfathomable complexity of all relevant variables whether global of local in social systems or the human body made the consequences of technological manipulation of those variables unpredictable and often pernicious Now all these developments reached an ominous climax when natural science and political history produced the atomic bomb It seemed supremely if tragically ironic that the Einsteinian discovery of the equivalence of mass and energy by which a particle of matter could be converted into an immense quantity of energy a discovery by a dedicated pacifist reflecting a certain apex of human intellectual brilliance and creativity precipitated for the first time in history the prospect of humanity s self-extinction With the dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima faith in science s intrinsic moral neutrality and unlimited power of benign progress could no longer be upheld During the protracted and global schism of the Cold War that followed the numbers of unprecedentedly destructive nuclear weapons relentlessly multiplied until the entire planet could be devastated many times over Civilization was now brought into peril by virtue of its own genius The same science that drastically lessened hazards and burdens of humankind now presented the gravest menace to human survival The great succession of science s triumphs and cumulative progress was now shadowed by a new sense of science s limits dangers and its culpability Thus the modern scientific mind found itself beleaguered on several fronts at once by epistemological critiques by its own theoretical problems arising in various fields by the increasingly urgent psychological necessity of integrating the human-world divide and above all by its adverse consequences and intimate involvement of planetary proportions The close association of scientific research with political military and corporate establishments continued to belie science s traditional self-image of detached purity The very concept of pure science was now deemed illusory The belief that the scientific mind had unique access to the truth of the world that it could register nature like a perfect mirror reflecting an extra-historical universal objective reality was not only seen as epistemologically na ve but also as serving either consciously or unconsciously specific economic and political agenda often aimed at social and ecological world domination The aggressive exploitation of the natural environment the proliferation of nuclear weapons the threat of global catastrophe all pointed to an indictment of science and of human reason itself humankind was in the thrall of self-destructive irrationality If all scientific hypotheses were to be rigorously and disinterestedly tested then it seemed that the scientific worldview itself the governing meta-hypothesis of the modern era was being decisively falsified by its deleterious and counterproductive consequences in the empirical world The scientific enterprise which in its earlier stages had presented a philosophical cultural religious social and psychological predicament now provoked a biological emergency The optimistic belief that the world s dilemmas could be solved by science and social engineering had been confounded The West was losing its faith not in religion this time but in science and the autonomy of human reason Of course science was still highly valued and even revered But science had also lost its untainted image of the liberator of humanity Science lost its secure claim to virtual absolute cognitive reliability It productions were not benign its reductionist understanding of the nature scientific materialism was deficient science was susceptible to political and economic bias and its previously unqualified trustworthiness could no longer be confirmed On the basis of these several interacting factors something like Hume s radical epistemological skepticism mixed with a relativized post-Kantian apriori structures seemed publicly vindicated After modern philosophy s acute epistemological critique the principle remaining foundation for the validity of reason was empirical science but with science s concrete consequences so terribly problematic reason now lost its last foundation Not just philosophers but many thoughtful people were forced to reevaluate the status of human knowledge We might think that we know a lot of things scientifically or otherwise but we clearly have no such guarantee Man has no apriori access to universal truths empirical data are always theory-soaked and relative to the observer and the previously reliable scientific worldview was open to fundamental question Scientific knowledge was stupendously effective but those effects suggested that much knowledge from a limited perspective was a dangerous thing Romanticism and its fate The two cultures From the complex matrix of the Renaissance had come forth two distinct streams of culture two temperaments or general approaches to human existence characteristic of the Western mind One emerged in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and stressed rationality empirical science and skeptical secularism The other was its polar complement sharing common roots in the Renaissance and Greco-Roman culture and in the Reformation as well but tending to express just those aspects of human existence suppressed by the Enlightenment s overriding spirit of rationalism Conspicuously present in Rousseau then in Goethe Schiller and Herder and German Romanticism this side of Western sensibility emerged fully in the late th and early th c and continues to be a potent force in Western culture from Blake Wordsworth Coleridge Holderlin Schelling Schleiermacher the Schlegel brothers Madame de Stael Shelley Keats Byron Hugo Pushkin Carlyle Emerson Thoreau Whitman and onward in many others and many diverse forms counterculture and otherwise to the present The late th and early th centuries Romantic temperament shared much with its Enlightenment opposite and it is their complex interplay that defines our modern sensibility Both movements tended to be humanist in their high estimate of man s powers and their concern with man s perspective on the universe Thus both looked to this world nature as the setting for the high drama of human endeavor Both looked to human consciousness and were concerned with the nature of its hidden structures Both found in classical culture a rich source of insight and values Both were profoundly promethean in their rebellion against tradition and in their celebration of individual human genius its restless quest for human freedom fulfillment and bold exploration of the new But in all these commonalities there were also deep divisions In contrast to the spirit of the Enlightenment the Romantic vision perceived the world as a unitary organism rather than an atomistic machine the ineffability of inspiration rather than the power of sheer reason the inexhaustible drama of human life rather than the calm predictability of static abstractions Whereas the Enlightenment temperament s high evaluation of man rested on man s unequaled rational intellect and man s power to apprehend and exploit the laws of nature the Romantics valued man for his imaginative and spiritual aspirations his emotional depth his artistic creativity and powers of self-expression and self-creation e g Herder The Enlightenment celebrated the genius of Newton Franklin and Einstein while the Romantics celebrated Goethe Beethoven and Nietzsche On both sides the autonomous world-changing will and mind of modern man were apotheosized bringing the cult of the hero and the history of great men and their deeds On many fronts at once the Western ego gained substance and impetus whether in the titanic self-assertions of the French Revolution and Napoleon the new self-awareness of Rousseau and Byron the advancing scientific clarities of Lavoisier and Laplace the incipient feminine confidence of Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand or the many sided richness of human experience and creativity realized in Goethe But for the two temperaments Enlightenment and Romantic the character and aims of that autonomous self were very distinct Bacon s utopia of infinite progress contrasted sharply with the visions of William Blake For the Enlightenment-scientific mind nature was the object of observation and experiment theoretical explanation and technical manipulation but for the Romantic mind nature was a live vessel of spirit a translucent source of mystery and revelation The scientist wished to penetrate nature and reveal its mystery through distanced and sober analysis the Romantic sought to unite the soul with nature in overcoming the existential dichotomy and the revelation to be discovered was spiritual essence not that of mechanical law While the scientist sought truth that was testable and concretely effective the Romantic sought truth that was inwardly transfiguring and sublime Thus William Wordsworth saw nature itself as ensouled with spiritual meaning and beauty and Friedrich Schiller saw the impersonal mechanisms of science as but a poor substitute for the Greek deities who had animated nature of the ancients Both these modern temperaments looked to present human experience and the natural world for fulfillment but what the Romantic found was radically different namely oneness unity self from what the scientist found namely lawfulness and predictability The two temperaments also had very different attitudes towards the phenomena of human consciousness The Enlightenment examined the mind empirically and epistemologically gradually becoming focused on sense perception cognitive development and quantitative behavioral studies In contrast beginning with Rousseau s Confessions the modern Romantic sequel to the ancient RC Confessions of St Augustine the Romantics interest in human consciousness was fueled by a newly intense sense of self-awareness and a focus on the complex nature of the human self and was in all this unconstrained by science Emotion and imagination not reason and perception were of prime importance Not only was there a concern with exalted and noble but also with the contraries of darkness evil death the demonic and irrational Generally ignored in the optimistic clarified light of rational science these themes now pervaded the work of Blake and Novalis Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard Hawthorne and Melville Poe and Baudelaire Dostoevsky and Nietzsche The Romantics turned ever inward to discern the shadows of existence They explored the mysteries of interiority of moods and motives love and desire fear and angst inner conflict and contradictions memories and dreams experiences of the extreme and incommunicable state of consciousness that could only be grasped inwardly in epiphanic ecstasy plumbing the depth of the human soul bringing unconsciousness to consciousness knowing the infinite In contrast to the scientist s quest for general laws defining a single objective reality the Romantic glorified in the unbounded multiplicity of realities pressing in on his subjective awareness and on the complex uniqueness of each object event experience presented to his soul Truth discovered in divergent perspectives was valued by the Romantic above the monolithic and univocal ideal of empirical science For the Romantic reality was symbolically resonant through and through and was therefore fundamentally multivalent a constantly changing complex of many-leveled meanings even of opposites In contrast the scientific mind saw reality as concrete literal and univocal Against this view the Romantic pointed out that even the reality constructed and perceived by the scientific mind was at bottom symbolic but its symbols were of an exclusively specific kind mechanistic material impersonal and were interpreted as uniquely valid From the Romantic s perspective the conventional scientific view of reality was essentially a jealous monotheism in new clothes wanting no other gods before it only that of scientific materialism The literalism of the modern scientific mind was for the Romantic a form of idolatry myopically worshipping an opaque object as the only reality rather than recognizing that object as a mystery a vessel of deeper realities Imagination Goethe The search for a unifying order and meaning remained central for the Romantic but in that task the limits of human knowledge were radically expanded beyond those imposed by the Enlightenment and a larger range of human faculties were considered necessary for genuine cognition Imagination and feeling now joined sense and reason to render a deeper understanding of the world Goethe in his morphological studies sought to experience the archetypal form or essence of each plant and animal by saturating the objective perception of plant or animal with the content of his own imagination Schelling proclaimed that to philosophize about nature means to create nature for nature s true meaning could be produced only from within man s intellectual imagination The historians Vico and Herder took seriously the mythological mode of cognition that informed previous eras and believed that the historian s task was to feel himself into the spirit of other ages through an empathic historical sense to understand from within by means of sympathetic imagination Hegel discerned overarching rational and spiritual meaning in the vast data of history by means of logic of passion Coleridge wrote that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling and that the artist s esemplastic power of the imagination gave to the human mind the ability to grasp things in their entirety to create and shape coherent wholes out of disparate elements Wordsworth recognized the numinous vision of the natural child as possessing a deeper insight into reality tan did the opaque disenchanted perspective of the conventionalized adult And Blake recognized imagination as the sacred vessel of the infinite the emancipator of the bound human mind the means by which eternal realities came to expression and consciousness Indeed for many Romantics imagination was in some sense the whole of existence the true ground of being and the medium of all realities The imagination pervaded consciousness and constituted the world Will Nietzsche For the Romantics the human will too was deemed essential in the attainment of human knowledge The will was a force preceding knowledge and freely impelled man and the universe forward to new levels of creativity and consciousness It was Nietzsche who combined the Romantic spiritual passion with the Enlightenment skepticism to synthesize a paradigmatic Romantic position about the relation of the will to truth knowledge According to Nietzsche the rational intellect could not achieve objective truth nor could any perspective ever be independent of interpretation of some sort Thus against positivism there are only phenomena facts Nietzsche held that all facts are interpretations This holds true not merely for morality but also for physics which is also but a specific perspective to suit specific needs and desires Every way of viewing the world was a product of hidden impulses Every philosophy revealed not an impersonal system of thought but an involuntary confession Unconscious instinct psychological motivation linguistics distortion cultural and history prejudice affected every human inquiry and perspective Against the long Western tradition of asserting the unique validity of one system of concepts and beliefs whether religious philosophical or scientific that alone mirrors then Truth Nietzsche set forth a radical perspectivism There exists a plurality of perspectives through which the old can be interpreted and there is no authoritative independent criterion according to which one system can be determined as more valid than another But if the world is radically indeterminate it could be shaped by a heroic act of will to affirm life and bring forth triumphant fulfillment The highest truth Nietzsche prophesied was being born within man through the self-creating power of the will All human striving for knowledge and power would fulfill itself in a new being who would incarnate the living meaning of the universe To achieve this birth man would have to grow beyond himself so fundamentally that his present limited self would be destroyed What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal Man is something that must be overcome For man was the way to a new dawn and new horizons beyond the compass of the present age The birth of this new being was not a life-impoverishing other-worldliness fantasy to be believed by ecclesiastical religious decree but a vivid tangible reality to be created here and now through the heroic self-overcoming of the great individual Such an individual superman or overman had to transform life into a work of art within which he could forge his character embrace his fate eternal return and recreate himself as a heroic protagonist of the world epic Man had to reinvent himself anew imagine himself into being Man had to will into existence a fictive drama into which he could enter and live imposing a redemptive order on the chaos of a meaningless universe without God Only then could the God who had long been projected to the beyond be born within man within the human soul Only then could man dance god-like in the eternal flux free from all foundations and all bounds beyond all metaphysical constraint Truth was not something one proved or disproved it was something created In Nietzsche as in Romanticism more generally the philosopher became a poet a worldview was not judge abstractly rationally or empirically but was an expression of courage beauty and imaginative power of the will The Romantic sensibility advanced new standards and values for human knowledge Through the self-creating power of imagination and will the human being could body forth unborn realities penetrate invisible but altogether real levels of beings comprehend nature and history and the cosmos unfolding and indeed participate in the very process of creation A new epistemology was claimed both possible and necessary So that the limits established by Locke Hume and the positivist side of Kant s First Critique were boldly defied by the Idealists Romantics Past The th c Enlightenment and the th c Romantic temperaments also held very different views towards the two classical pillars of Western culture Greco-Roman classicism and the Judeo-Christian religion Increasingly the Enlightenment-scientific mind employed classical thought only to the extent that it provided a useful starting point to investigation theory formulation Beyond that every ancient was viewed mainly for its antiquarian interests In contrast the Romantic temperament was still living in the realm of Olympian images and personalities its artistic creations from Homer and Aeschylus onward were still its exalted models its imaginative and spiritual insights still pregnant with newly discoverable meaning While both temperaments encouraged the recovery of the classical past they had very different motives for doing so one positivism for the sake of accurate historical knowledge the other Romanticism to revivify the past to enable it to live again in the creative spirit of modern man The rational mind viewed tradition in skeptical terms - as a contrast to currently genuine knowledge while the Romantic mind while similarly rebellious towards to the past and sometimes even more so found in tradition something mysterious a repository of collective wisdom accrued insight into a people s soul and a living and changing force with its own evolutionary dynamism and autonomy Such wisdom is not merely past empirical or technical knowledge but spoke of deeper realities hidden to common sense and mechanical experiments The Romantics initiated a new appreciation of Greco-Roman past for the spiritually resonant Middle Ages for Gothic architecture and folk literature for the ancient and the primitive for the Oriental and the exotic and for esoteric traditions of all sorts for the Volkgeist of the Germanic and other peoples and for the Dionysian wellsprings of culture A new awareness of the Renaissance emerged followed by a new consciousness of Romanticism itself Thus Romanticism rejected the Enlightenment s belief in progress superiority over the past and modern man s rational inevitable fulfillment but accepted Nietzsche s eternal return Religion The issue of religion posed the same contrast Both the Enlightenment and Romantic temperaments derived from the Reformation for individualism and personal freedom were common to both yet each developed different aspects of the Reformation legacy The spirit of the Enlightenment rebelled against the strictures of ignorance and superstition imposed by theological dogma and belief in the supernatural in favor of a straightforward empirical and rational knowledge and a liberating embrace of the secular Religion was either rejected altogether or maintained only as rationalist deism or natural law ethics In contrast the Romantic temperament towards religion was much more complex The Romantic also rebelled against hierarchies and institution of traditional religion against enforced belief and moralistic restrictions and hollow ritual yet religion itself was a central and enduring element of the Romantic spirit in various versions whether in transcendental idealism Neo-Platonism Gnosticism pantheism mystery religion nature worship Christian mysticism Hindu-Buddhist mysticism Swedenborgianism theosophy esotericism religious existentialism neo-paganism shamanism Mother Goddes worship evolutionary human divinization or some syncretism of these The Romantics continued to hold the sacred as a viable category where this category had long since disappeared in science God was rediscovered in Romanticism not the God of orthodoxy or deism but the God of mysticism pantheism and immanent cosmic process not the Judaic-Christian God the monotheistic juridical patriarch but a divinity more ineffably mysterious pluralistic all-embracing neutral or even feminine character not an absentee creator but a numinous creative force within nature and within the human spirit Art itself music literature drama painting took on an almost religious status for the Romantics In a world made mechanical and soulless by the aftermath of the new science the pursuit of beauty for its own sake took on extraordinary psychological importance Art provided a unique point of conjunction between the natural and the spiritual and for many modern intellectuals disillusioned with orthodox religion art became the chief spiritual outlet and medium The problem of grace focused on the enigma of inspiration now was a more vital concern to artists than to theologians The artistic endeavor was elevated to an exalted spiritual role whether as poetic epiphany or aesthetic rapture as divine afflatus or revelation of eternal realities as creative quest imaginative discipline as devotion to the Muses and existential imperative or liberating transcendence from the world of suffering Even the most secular of moderns could worship the artistic imagination and hold sacred the humanistic tradition of art and culture The creative masters of the past became the saints and prophets of that culture and the critics and essayists its high priests In art the disenchanted modern psyche could yet find meaning and purpose a hallowed context for spiritual yearnings a world open to profundity and mystery The artistic and literary culture also presented the modern mind with virtually an alternative if more complex and variable world picture to that of science The cultural power of for example the novel in reflecting and shaping human experience from Rabelais Cervantes and Fielding through Hugo Stendhal Flaubert Melville Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and on to Mann Hesse Lawrence Woolf Joyce Proust and Kafka constituted a constant and often unassailable counterpoint to the power of the dominant scientific world conception Having lost belief in the theological and mythological master plots of earlier eras the literate culture of the modern West turned its instinctive hunger for cosmic coherence for existential order to the narrative plots of imaginative fiction Through the artist s ability to give new contour and significance to experience in the mystical crucible of aesthetic transfiguration a new reality could be made a rival creation in Henry James words In the novel as in the theatre and poetry and the other arts was expressed a concern with the phenomena of consciousness as such as well as with the qualitative details of the outer world so that artistic realism could survey the whole field Henry James Here in the realms of art and of literature was pursued with rigor and nuance a broad phenomenology of human experience that was also entering into formal philosophy through William James Henri Bergson Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger Rather than conducting an experimental analysis of an objectified world this tradition focused on its unceasing ambiguity its spontaneity and autonomy its uncontainable dimensions its ever deepening complexity In this sense the Romantic impulse continued and expanded the modern mind s movement toward realism in delineating all aspects of existence not just the conventionally and consensually validated As Romanticism expanded its compass and shifted its focus in the course of the modern period it sought to reflect the authentic character of modern humankind as it is actually lived not limited to the ideal or aristocratic or traditional subject from classical mythological or Biblical sources Its mission was to transmute the mundane and commonplace into art to perceive the poetic and mystical in the most concrete details of ordinary experience even in the degraded and ugly Its quest was to show the heroism of modern life Baudelaire and its anti-heroism as well By expressing ever more precisely the variegated quality of human experience the Romantic Movement conveyed also its confusion its irresolution and its subjectivity Pressing ever deeper into the nature of human perception and creativity the modern artist began to move beyond the traditional mimetic representational view of art and the spectator theory of reality underlying it The Romantic artist sought not merely to reproduce forms not even to discover forms but to create forms Reality is not something copied it is something created These radically broadening conceptions of reality could of course not be easily integrated into the positivistic scientistic side of the modern mind Nor did the Romantic s openness to the transcendental dimension of experience and its anti-science attitude resisting all rationalist reductionism and pretensions to objective certitude sit easily with science As time passed what had been medieval dichotomy between reason and faith followed by the early modern dichotomy between secular science and Christian religion now became a more general schism between scientific rationalism and the multifaceted Romantic humanistic culture with the latter including a diversity of religious and philosophical perspectives loosely allied with literary and artistic tradition The divided worldview Because the Enlightenment and Romantic temperaments were deeply and simultaneously expressive of Western attitudes and yet were deeply incompatible with one another a complex bifurcation resulted in the Western worldview With the modern psyche deeply affected by the Romantic sensibility and yet with the truth claims of science so formidable modern man experienced an intractable division between his mind reason and his soul aspirations and desires Thus for example the same person could appreciate both Blake and Locke but not in a coherent manner Yeats esoteric vision of history could scarcely be joined with academic history as taught in the universities Rilke s idealist ontology we are the bees of the invisible could not readily be conjoined with the assumption of conventional science Even such an influential sensibility as T S Eliot was closer to Dante than it was to Darwin Romantic poets religious mystics idealist philosophers and counter-culture psychedelicists would claim and often describe in detail the experience of other realities beyond the material and argue for an ontology of human consciousness sharply differing from that of conventional empiricism But when it came to defining basic cosmology the secular scientific mind continued to be determined the modern worldview s center of gravity For without consensual validation the Romantic s revelations could not overcome their apparent incompatibility with the commonly accepted truths of scientific observation which remained the bottom line of modern belief The dreamer held no fragrant rose tangible and public with which to demonstrate to all the truth of his dream Thus while Romanticism in the general sense continued to inspire the West s inner culture its art and literature its religious and metaphysical vision its moral ideals science dictated its outer cosmology the character of nature man s place in the universe and the limits of his real knowledge Because science ruled the objective world the Romantic perception was necessarily limited to the subjective The Romantics reflections on life their music and poetry and religious yearnings richly absorbing and culturally sophisticated a those were in the end had to be consigned to only a part of the modern universe Spiritual imaginative emotional and aesthetic concern had their place but could not claim full ontological relevance in an objective world whose parameters were fundamentally impersonal and opaque The faith-reason distinction of the medieval era and the religious-science distinction of the early modern era had become one of subject-object inner-outer man-world humanities-science distinction A new form of the double-truth universe was now established As a consequence of this dualism modern man s experience of the natural world and his relation to that world underwent a paradoxical inversion as the modern period evolved with the Romantic and scientific streams virtually mirroring each other in reverse To begin with a gradual immersion of man into nature was visible on both fronts of this dualism On the Romantic side as in Rousseau Goethe or Wordsworth there was an impassioned striving for conscious unity with nature both poetic and instinctual On the scientific side man s immersion into nature was realized in science s description of man in increasingly and entirely naturalistic terms Darwin first then late genetic and neuroscience But against the harmonious aspirations of the Romantics man s unity with nature was here in the scientific context of a Darwinian-Freudian struggle with a nature of brute consciousness a struggle for survival for ego integrity for civilization