This post is a bit different. I am attempting to link an analysis of psychology to the historical narrative of modern American Christian fundamentalism. Most of the post is the buildup of an argument founded upon modern psychology, while the last third of the post is reserved for more theological questions. Keep that in mind. I think the post gets less dull and more interesting as you move through it. (But I think all of this is fascinating!) Anyway, let’s get started.
An Brief Look at Logic in the Human Mind
Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget spends the first half of his book, “The Psychology of Intelligence,” disposing certain myths about logical thought. Piaget notices that, despite popular belief among logicians of his day, humans do not think entirely logically, nor is logical thought the apex of human thought in general. To him, logic is only a set of operational tools that help us modify other, more intuitive, mental constructions. These mentally created, intuitive concepts are not logical, but they collectively form a sort of “mental universe” in which our minds live and operate. This universe in the mind is a woven web of created thoughts, of unconscious intuition that makes up literally everything you know or take for granted, whether that is the physical space around you, some imaginary concept of the Earth as a whole, your understanding of “self” in the context of your world, etc. These mental constructions lay at the core of human thought, especially religious thought.
Your “mental universe” is modified by new information and logic. Logic fills in gaps in your web of thought, linking concepts to each other. But when you receive new information that structurally contradicts a few other bits of information in your mental universe, your mind goes into a state of “disequilibrium,” and you must logically rearrange either the new data or entire sections of your own massive mental universe. You do this in order to make the new data fit properly within the mental universe, establishing mental “equilibrium.”
Logic is not the foundation of human thought. It is merely an operational tool to help us modify a constantly fluctuating web of related ideas. Without it, we would would just assimilate facts at random, regardless of their compatibility with existing thought structures, and we would be certifiably insane, or perhaps we would have the intelligence of a 2 to 6 year-old (I mean this seriously). Sometimes logical operations are complex, and it may take serious mental effort to keep track of all the operations necessary to logically relate a series of distant ideas. For this reason it sometimes takes incredible mental strain to accomplish rigorous logical tasks. But more often we make easy work of obvious syllogisms. Most of the time, unless we think real hard, we overlook a lot of more subtle logical connections, because those connections do not immediately assault us with mental disequilibrium. These ideas may be simply too logically distant to easily detect their relationship. We only modify our construction of the mental universe when new facts present a logical disequilibrium of the mind. We can handle an incompatible fact (or set of facts) in a couple of ways:
1. We can reject the fact outright, dismissing its conceptual validity and expelling it from the intuitive web of thought in our own minds. This is a common means of protecting our broad constructions of reality. For instance, if you witnessed 5 generations of your ancestors walking around in front of you, perfectly alive and talking to you, your first reaction might be intense fear. You probably cannot handle something so far beyond your mental framework of the possible. After it is all over, however, you might tell yourself it never even happened, and try to believe it never did. You completely deny it. But this should not be confused with rationalizing the fact, which is different. Rationalization is in option 3
2. We can accept the fact, but without any critical insight into it. In psychological terms, we can accept the fact for purposes of recall and other minor uses, but not attempt to perform logical operations that link the fact to problematic sectors of our mental universe. However, as soon as we try to apply it to these incompatible sectors, we are forced to confront it and resort to options 1 or 3, or simply regress back into the non-confrontation we began at in option 2.
3. We can rationalize the fact, playing through the variety of mental actions that may eventually form propositions we call rational ideas. But these ideas should only be understood as rational to the individual, while they may appear irrational to others. Inevitably, the new fact is almost never the object modified by logic. It is almost always our own perception of reality that is modified. We may question the fact, too, but a single idea is less likely at fault than is the structure of the malleable web of intuition that makes up our entire mental universe. In some cases, we will encounter facts that, if we take them seriously enough, will cause us to completely deconstruct whole systems of thought. It is cases like these that constitute the essence of a midlife crisis, or the demythologiziation crisis that occurs in the minds of many young college students.
The decision to take any one of these steps is usually made in a matter of seconds, but sometimes, when we encounter a large number of congruent facts that line up against our worldviews, we might decide to take option 3 and work it out in our minds. In this case it may take us months or years to form a new stable paradigm. And it can be painful, too. Nothing hurts like knowing we are wrong about the things that mean the most to us. It would be very difficult for a parent to admit to himself that he made horrible mistakes in raising his children. That would be almost impossible to swallow. We can also imagine what it must be like to admit we have been wrong about aspects of religion, especially when we are so sure of our intense, often ecstatic, religious experiences. These experiences are personal, and we hold on to them for dear life. In fact, coping with the deconstruction of long held religious “myths,” as they are called, can drive people mad. Yet this kind of “deconstruction,” as they call it, happens to most people at some point in their lives, though often in completely unique ways. Yet the plus side to deconstruction is that it is naturally followed by a period of “reconstruction.” We build more stable mental universes that way.
On a side note, all pastors and theologians should take note that deconstructing one’s religious ideas can be the most gut-wrenching feeling a person will ever experience. St. Augustine’s conversion comes to mind, but my own experience has taught me more than any book ever could. I have had only a handful of such experiences, but my last one was my deepest felt. It turned my world on its head, and it took me several destructive months to cope with it. With that in mind, I warn pastors not to take someone’s religious conviction lightly, no matter how ridiculous or seemingly illogical it may appear. People have literally killed themselves over these kinds of mental changes.
Bigger than Logic: Narrative
Logic is a means of modifying what we have called an “intuitive web of thought” or a “mental universe.” In general, these terms refer more specifically to a what we call “narrative.” Narrative is the final form of an adult human’s conception of reality.
Narrative may also be called “story,” or what academics call myth. We do not fully develop the capacity to understand narrative until we are fully grown adults. If you try to get a 4 or 5-year-old to tell a story, she will usually spout off a series of random details, never linking them with any sort of logic. She cannot tell stories. But through the normal process of development, she will eventually learn to tell them and understand them.
This development begins in early adolescence, where the first item on the psychological agenda is developing a “myth of self,” or a “personal narrative.” Many call it an “identity crisis.” A normal adolescent is trying to enter the adult world, but she needs a story, a narrative, a myth, to give her life purpose. That is what an identity is. You see, it is in story that we find meaning, and each of our self-created stories are truly unique. If you take a moment to think about who you are, what kind of person you are, you will eventually finish using simple adjectives like “kind” and “smart,” and you will begin recounting your story. You might ponder where that story will lead in the future, or even how it will end. That is why any good movie you watch or book you read has a great story. Stories reflect how we imagine our own lives. You can really only relate to a character when he is living a story you relate to. And you are always the protagonist.
Narrative even applies to religion. The Christian Bible is a case in point. If the Bible simply contained a set of moral rules and quotations from our Heavenly Father, maybe even a scientific explanation of physics and astronomy, nobody would have related to it. It would have been just a boring old book, and I doubt anyone but the most devout nerd would ever open it, let alone preserve it for thousands of years. Nay, its genius, its historical tradition, and its religious meaning—all of that belongs to its narrative.
The Bible doesn’t try to tell us facts. It does so much better. It tells us a story. At first it’s a story of civilization, of a people coping with morality, nature, war, famine, beliefs, politics, even an ancient form of civil disobedience (which you can read about in the Prophets). It proceeds into an account of all the greatness of God finding its way into the flesh of a man, a man who overcomes war, famine, moral dogmatism, death, and even evil itself. His name is Jesus. And this God-in-the-flesh teaches us his ways. He offers us hope and purpose, a guiding “way, truth, and light” for all of humanity to follow. But the story does not end there. It is open-ended. It lets us live out the end of our own story, and it never tells us how we will end up living it.
But Narrative Is Not Just For Individuals—It Is For Communities
To some people, our incapability of flawless logical thought is a fault in human behavior. Many people suggest you should aspire to think only in the most logical terms. Modern science disagrees. In fact, it makes more sense to say that, as organisms in nature, our methods of thought are purely natural. But while we lament that others don’t see eye to eye due to this or that logical “flaw,” we can never rationally expect people to build the same mental constructions of the world that we do. They have different lives. They are basically living in different universes. At least different mental universes. For instance, When you offer someone information that you know to be key to your own understanding of modern politics, that information may have little relevance to the mental universe he lives in, so it’s unconvincing. Tough luck. Try another route.
But for the most part, logic is convincing. And, believe it or not, convincing people is its purpose. You regularly use it to convince yourself of ideas, though you might not think of it that way. You also use logic to convince others. According to our discussion on narrative, you use logic to modify your mental universe (I think have officially coined a term here), but you can also present others with the opportunity to modify their own. That is why we communicate in the first place. We may not even be in an argument. If I tell you that the table is already set, and that you don’t have to worry about setting it, I have logically modified your mind to understand your physical universe in a new way. In your old system of thought, the table hasn’t been set yet, but in the new one, it has. Then you adjust your behavior accordingly. You might do something more productive than trying to set the table a second time. Humans do this in the most helpful ways, and social discourse helps us mutually modify our thoughts so that we arrive at more similar mental universes. By seeing the world in similar ways, we form closer communities, ones we feel more psychologically comfortable with. It’s a natural human thing to do.
Look how close they are!
However, left only to our own experiences, we will soon develop some pretty crazy ideas. “Old wives tales” are good examples of this, as are psychologically diagnosed delusions. Without a social influence, our own logic takes us to strange places. With our limited observations and preexisting knowledge, logic on its own will only recognize patterns, and those patterns could indicate strange conclusions. It may seem logical that every time you sacrificed a goat to such-and-such god, he provided you with plenty of food the coming winter. Based on your experience, this might be completely logical, if not rigorously scientific.
This is why logic itself will never lead us to truth. Only by listening to others and joining them in discussion will we ever learn truth. This requires openness to critique. Sometimes we may be unwilling to relinquish our firm beliefs in the face of the harshest criticism. Psychologically, this makes sense. In some cases, relinquishing our most precious beliefs is the equivalent of an apocalyptic destruction of the world itself. To the human mind, this could not be truer. Deconstruction of myth is a real physiological breakdown. It destroys whole sections of your mental universe. You may even begin to question whether anything is true at all. But as you pick up the pieces, you form a new one, one that is more malleable and adaptable. (Typically this happens in young adulthood, but for many people, this kind of intense deconstruction may not ever happen. Some people never complete this sort-of-optional developmental stage.)
Nevertheless, openness to new ideas is at the heart of community formation. But the opposite is also true. Complete rejection of new ideas is at the heart of separation, and at its worst, even war itself. When people desire to understand each other, bonds are made, bridges are built, hands are shaken, peace is established. When no understanding is sought, isolation becomes the norm, and fear sets in, in turn giving more reason to remain isolated.
Given the above tools for understanding human thought, my argument is that “isolation” is the foundation of religious fundamentalism.
The Foundation of Fundamentalism in Isolation
First, let us discuss a historical case of Church self-isolation.
Galileo once based his astronomical work on that of Copernicus. He determined, like Copernicus before him, that the heavens did not revolve around the earth, but that the earth revolved around the sun, an outright heresy in the Catholic Church of his time. In fact, Galileo wrote to the religious authorities basically telling them to back off. He said theologians should stick to their trade, and he would stick to his. This wasn’t only a problem with Catholics, though. Many colleges and universities all over the world began teaching Copernican astronomy as soon as it became public. Harvard was one of the most criticized for Copernicanism, and America was Protestant then. In any case, most the good Christians of the Western world, Catholics and Protestants alike, promptly flipped their lids at the thought of not being the very center of God’s heavenly creation.
But the point here is not to describe any sort of victory of Science over Religion. That question itself is really a fallacy. In fact, in the academic community, the “Science vs. Religion” paradigm is often dismissed, because these two streams of thought are not necessarily at odds.
The point is that it took a lot of convincing to get the Church on board with modern astronomy. It took centuries of theological development before the solar-system was a mainstream concept. These days you will not find many Christians who disagree that we revolve around the Sun. But you may find a lot of disagreement over how to handle the now mainstream concept of evolution. Against both scientific astronomy and modern evolutionism, the Church has always found passages in Scripture to back up the traditional orthodox view. But we don’t use those arguments anymore against scientific astronomy, because the Church has since come up with ways to assimilate it into its theology. Indeed, it is already beginning to assimilate evolutionism, and I suspect evolutionism will be widely taken for granted by the end of the century. But the Church would never have come up with Copernican or Galilean astronomy on its own, not in that age, in its self-isolation. It needed painful convincing.
What about the field of theology itself? Well, let’s look at the Protestant Reformation. The real problem of the medieval Catholic church was not inherently that people could not read the Bible for themselves. The underlying problem was that you could not question Catholic authority. Supplying lay people with Bibles in their native languages was a means for them to challenge authority, to take back control of their minds and religious behavior from the hands of the self-isolated clergy. It was this isolation that kept the religious leaders in scientific and theological darkness, not their desire to lie about what they knew. Catholic leaders felt very strongly that their beliefs were true, and they quickly burned, tortured, and excommunicated those who thought differently. In effect, they isolated themselves from competing ideologies.
Many groups of Protestants in America do this same thing, just without all the torture. They isolate themselves into communities based on creeds or ideologies. Early on, this took the form of denominations, but denominations were much more regional then. They were more homogeneous, regional entities that resembled the Catholic form of isolation. These days religious groups are much more intermingled in cities, so over the past century they have developed different ways of religiously isolating themselves. This sometimes takes the form of denominations among older generations, but more and more people are creating new groups we call “the emergent church,” the “fundamentalists,” the “new monastics,” and the general trend in young people toward “social justice” church movements. And these movements are extending far beyond the boundaries of denominational lines.
Any group of people tends to become isolated to some degree based on interests and beliefs. The New Monastics may seem to harmfully isolate themselves, but really they are embracing a broad and diverse community, the community of the poor and downtrodden. Instead the group that stands out the most in modern Christianity is the fundamentalist movement. And of course it stands out—it gets all the media coverage, mostly because it provides awesomely controversial soundbites.
Today fundamentalists isolate themselves out of intense fear. In their minds, not only will sin lead them to an eternity in hell, but also wrong ideas about relatively minor things. While the thinkers of the Enlightenment consistently refuted various factual readings of the Scriptures, fundamentalists emerged as a reaction to an encroaching community of critical thought. In retrospect, they should have engaged this intellectual community, but they refused.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, fundamentalists had already isolated themselves into fringe communities, developing all sorts of new myths about their “secular enemies.” I’ve heard many of these myths first hand. Some of them report that outside thought is a demonic attack by Satan or his minions. Likewise, any information causing you to doubt the beliefs of your community are satanic temptations. You can see how this would naturally scare people into intense isolation from society. The most famous myth that came from this movement was the belief in a brutal, hellish account of rapture. In the seventies, Hal Lindsey wrote a book called The Late Great Planet Earth. It sold like wildfire, both to fundamentalists looking for a community narrative and to mainstream onlookers who wanted to watch the insanity unfold. The book depicted a series of future events that would end in the earthly torture of secular outsiders, followed by their destruction and eternity in hell, while the theologically devout, “true,” Christians would escape destruction in a magnificent rapture. Later, in the nineties, the Left Behind series was released, following the same trend, even producing a film adaptation.
Sociologically speaking, These myths were created and adopted by fundamentalists as theological doctrine in order to give them a community narrative. It fulfilled their psychological need for an epic, larger than life, otherworldly purpose. In this case, it also justified their isolation. Their regression from mainstream society was no longer merely the result of their fear of competing ideologies, it was the means of Christian purity. By keeping their beliefs pure they could escape the coming destruction of all things. It also provided a motivation for action and evangelism. All in all, this apocalyptic narrative strengthened the community of American fundamentalists, and for obvious sociological reasons.
What Can We Learn from Fundamentalism?
Narratives are powerful binding forces. They are the glue that holds us together. Stories give us reason to think, to pursue relationships, to find jobs, to fight wars, to build nations, to pray. Stories give us a reason to live. Without our own set of stories, stories we can share with other people, life appears meaningless. But when our narratives keep us in a state of constant fear, they bind us to fearful communities. The fear of outsiders, or xenophobia, leads us to fight otherwise irrational wars, even commit genocide. Only by trying to understand people can we hope to find peace with them.
What can we learn from this knowledge? For us to form healthy communities, especially religious communities, we need to think, speak, read, and learn in community. We can think logically on our own, but logic does not lead to truth or wisdom. When we are left to increasingly small communities, we are limited to our personal experiences and narrow insights. When we open our minds to see things from the perspective of outsiders, foreigners, or even other religions entirely, we can begin to approach true wisdom. If we let people convince us, even just occasionally, our mental universe expands, and we begin to see things from a clearer, wiser perspective.
Best of all, we don’t have to fear the great world outside. We don’t have to fear new theology. We don’t have to fear a different reading of Scripture. If history has anything to teach us, there was never anything to fear, anyway. One of the most often spoken phrases in the entire Bible is, “Do not be afraid.”
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
—John 14:27
Peace.
[Update: It has come to my attention that in my discussion of Piaget's theories of logic, I do not make clear the distinction between conventional 'propositional' logic and Piaget's 'serial operations,' and I mistakenly referred to both, interchangeably, under the general name "logic." I did not explain the process of 'serial operations,' so I used a more colloquial 'logic' to describe it. Also, I neglected to cite several sources. The most important of these are James Fowler's "Stages of Faith," Sharon D. Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams," and Paul Tillich's "Dynamics of Faith." I want to make clear that, like James Fowler, I make no qualitative claims for the process of 'de-/reconstruction,' nor do I suggest that 'propositional' logic should be the mode of discourse between communities a la Enlightenment progressivism. I only suggest that discourse with outsiders should be made with efforts to understand them rather than simply fear or antagonize them.]
Woah. Indeed a lot of research went into this post, it shows.
Great work.
i remember having explored a similar theme on my blog. i called it ‘fundamental ATHEISM’. Do find time, sometime.
Thank you so much! I only wish I had done more…
I would love to read your post. I tried to find it but failed. Could you give me the link?
I like your point that the smaller and more isolated a social unit is, the more likely logic is to lead to strange conclusions based on that unit’s limited experience. I would add to this (as an amplification, not a correction), that the fundamentalist is isolated not only from those around, but from those before. Take the case of a small Baptist church that, through ignorance of both Church Tradition and modern criticism, embraces a warped biblical hermeneutic such as dispensationalism. It follows a definite logic, but it is a small logic, foreign to the full community of the Church. Take also the example of someone who never reads old books, or a college student who never talks with and listens to anyone older than thirty. Both will fall victim to the narrow and trendy conceptual frameworks of their generation. It thus seems to me that generational isolation severely limits one’s mental universe.
Nathan, I think you are absolutely right. I never even considered that fact when writing this post, but you are right. Keeping up with history is key to forming rational ideas.
You know, I need to do a new post on fundamentalism itself, but this time on the side of religious or cult leaders. I might do some case studies. It seems that personality cults play a big role in the worldwide epidemic of fundamentalism, though perhaps less so in American culture. But the mechanics are all there. You introduce a crisis, intentionally or accidentally, such as a terrorist attack or an imminent Armageddon, and you can find hundreds or thousands of people clinging to the nearest competent leader, no matter how crazy he may be. This happened with New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, after the 9-11 bombings. People clung to him as he waved his newly charismatic hand. Before then he wasn’t well liked, but after, he was “America’s Mayor.” Cults that predict the end of the world do this sort of thing on a much weirder level. People will die for their leaders. In the American case, other than cases of rare cult appearances, we have had televangelists and authors and religious speakers striking intense fear with their apocalyptic claims. Then they become drawn to those isolated communities.
You could even say that many presidential candidates have had cult followings all through history. The past three elections stick out in my mind as a genuine American hysteria over what I see now as fairly frivolous issues. The rhetoric is almost religious. President Obama had a slight personality cult going for him. He caught America’s awe this his powerful and moving speeches. Ronald Reagan was another similar case, especially in his presidency. So was George Bush, with his “visions” or “dreams” of democracy, as much of the conservative press rallied around his personality in the early years of the Afghanistan War. Celebrities have cultish followings, but they don’t have the element of fear drawing people in like a religious or national leader sometimes has. The whole idea reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism.” Totalitarian governments base themselves almost entirely on the human propensity to cling to competent leaders under fear.
Hi Austin. I haven’t finished reading all the way through this post, but already the thoughts are piling up and I need to get them down before they disappear.
Indeed. If you’ve read the book My Stroke of Insight the author noted in her crisis state that “we are not reasoning beings that feel, but feeling beings that reason” (or words to that effect, don’t have her copy handy at the moment). That, basically, turns the conventional wisdom on its head, and highlights the Cartesian error.
Speaking of which, I know you will appreciate the work of the “speech-thinker” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. His book I Am an Impure Thinker (a collection of essays), begins with a devastating attack on Cartesian metaphysical dualism called “Farewell to Descartes” (which originally appeared as a concluding chapter in his lengthier work Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man). I Am an Impure Thinker is available from the publisher (Argo Books) online. You can access it by clicking here. Wish I could say more about ERH and his “grammatical method,” but this is not the place. More information about ERH is posted on the publishers website, which is exclusively dedicated to publishing the works of Rosenstock-Huessy.
I have the impression, from reading parts of this post, that you’re ripe for the work of cultural historian Jean Gebser. His major and massive work, The Ever Present Origin might be a bit much to dive into right off the bat, but check out the websites dedicated to promoting his extremely novel and insightful interpretation on human history. The Jean Gebser Society page (http://www.gebser.org/publications/index.html) might be a good place to start, but there is also a massive online collection of his works in both English and German on a German website. Another good introduction to Gebser’s history and philosophy is located here.
Finally, something you wrote above reminded my of Nietzsche’s challenge to the Euro-centric mind to engage constructively with Islam (and Buddhism) in order to break out of its narrow nook-and-corner perspectivist trap and rediscover itself within a whole. Recently, I came across an essay that explored Nietzsche’s challenge in further detail as it relates to our present attempts to outrun and avoid any kind of “clash of civilisations”. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-tutt/european-crisis-over-isla_b_907860.html
Now, back to the reading….
Ah ha! I found this lying around in my spam filter… Sorry about that. Again, thanks for the information. It’s very helpful.
Would like to make a comment on the first section of your post dealing with operational/instrumental intelligence, which we call “logic”. The overlooked operation that precedes discursive thought is the act of perception. Before I have something to “think about”, I must first have perceived this something about which I think. It would appear that the act of perception precedes the thinking. We could just as easily state our situation as: “to perceive is to be”. At least, it seems more intelligible and more primary than “cogito, ergo sum”.
But, about the act of perception, there is very, very little written. The only major work about perception that comes to mind is that of the phenomenologist, M. Merleau-Ponty and his great (but damned fat book) The Philosophy of Perception.
I’ll definitely have to read that. Thank you for the recommendation. I have to disagree about the “perception” being the ‘operation.’ I don’t get the idea from Piaget that they are the same. Instead, Piaget imagines the operation as an ‘action.’ Perception is something your body does, to be sure, but acting on that perception is the baseline of intelligence. An ant does this. Rather, a basic ‘operation’ is an action that would normally be performed by the body which the mind mimics internally. A newborn baby begins close to that base line of intelligence. Piaget calls it the “preoperational stage” of development. Here the baby moves and grasps and sucks on things in order to figure out how his/her body works. But intelligence is formed when children can mentally ‘operate,’ that is, when they can perform actions hypothetically (operationally) instead of physically. Successive and extremely rapid ‘operations’ of the mind allow us to play with physical situations hypothetically, and then categorize and structure whole trees of operations and reversed operations into concepts. Then we take whole concepts and operate with them to form abstract thought. And we do this at a basic level without any strain. We feel intellectual strain when we operate on objects of greater and greater distance in physical space, not directly perceived (such as the process of the solar system), and objects of greater and greater abstraction generally. An example would be pulling facts from history books and political science classes to put together a concept of cultural evolution in an ancient society. The concept is highly abstract, because the object in question must be perceived via operational thought involving smaller, but still highly complex concepts. In proverbial words, seeing the trees and figuring out the unknown forest (or its converse, with “reversed operations”) is the test of intelligence.
Maybe you already knew that
Anyway, that seems to be Piaget’s model of operations in a nutshell. As far as perception goes, Piaget does discuss that. But for him, perception is not the base of thought. We would still think in similar ways without much perception, but without perception we would have very little content with which to mentally ‘operate.’ That would drive us clinically insane.
But you are right. Not much is done on perception alone. But there is the less philosophical works on neuropsychology that attempt to explain the link between the biological mind and thought. I haven’t done all my homework there. Psychology is not really an official field of study. I just really enjoy it.
I take the act of perception quite seriously, and probably understand more by it than Piaget perhaps defined it. I’m thinking of William Blake, for example: if we would cleanse the doors of perception, we would see everything as it truly is, infinite (ie, unbounded, which recalls the Buddha’s same claim that nothing has self-nature, therefore also unbounded). This resembles the great Sufi poet Rumi’s equal exhortation, “purify your eyes and see the pure world!”
Nietzsche draws heavily on Rumi, by the way. But may have gotten much of his stuff via German Orientalist writers, and perhaps Goethe. There are passages in Zarathustra that are lifted right out of Rumi’s works and could easily have had Nietzsche charged with plagiarism. I’ve always been puzzled why no commentators on Nietzsche’s writings have ever noticed that.
Ah, I see. So you mean perception as more of an act of experiencing the world, as opposed to the basic physical ‘senses.’ I understand. As a side note, this awareness is something I greatly admire in Buddhism. Even if initially dogmatic at face value, the concept of ‘impermanence’ is a very powerful image to me, personally.
Might also add (while I have some time on my hands… storming today) that perception for Merleau-Ponty also doesn’t have much to do directly with the senses, which would be an even earlier operation (sensation). For M-P, the field of perception extends beyond the range of the physical senses — in effect, a field of aperception. He makes strong arguments for it in his book.
There is some considerable body of scientific evidence to support M-P’s views. See, for example, Harold Saxton Burr’s research on L-Fields recorded in The Fields of Life. A brief description of his work (and views) is located at :http://www.wrf.org/men-women-medicine/dr-harold-s-burr.php
In the work of Jean Gebser (mentioned above… redundantly in turns out) perception is a structured modality of consciousness which characterises civilisational types: archaic, magical, mythical, mental-rational, integral. It can be characterised as unperspectival, perspectival, or aperspectival, under some conditions, corresponding to the “structure of consciousness” in which it is operative and which typifies the civilisational type. Ours, for example, is considered “mental-rational” (but in transit to the integral, so Gebser feels. Rosenstock-Huessy also feels this way, only he calls it “Johannine Age”). The mode of perception in the integral he calls “aperspectival”, characteristic of the globalist vision of Picasso’s works, and the switch from a three-fold, dialectical logic to a four-fold logic necessitated by the disclosure of time as a fourth dimension of thought. Presently, then, we are in contemporary conflict between an older “mental-rational” structure of consciousness based on three dimensions (pyramidal, perspectival, triune in character) now become “deficient” in his terms, and an emerging “integral structure” characterised by the fourfold (ecological, integral, holistic, aperspectival). In other words, Modern Era and Planetary Era in development since the World Wars are considered very different creatures.
I’ve read some reviews of Gebser, and I’m amazed that he hasn’t received the widespread acclaim he apparently deserves. I have already ordered a copy of “Ever Present Origin.” I am looking into M-P, as well.
Sorry, just realised I gave the title of M-P’s book wrong. It’s called The Phenomenology of Perception
I’m not really sure if the longer, more lengthy comment I posted to your article earlier actually made it into the moderation queue. I suspect no. So, here it is (somewhat) again.
As I was reading your post on fundamentalism and mental isolation, thoughts began to pile up. I posted them to your blog, but that comment seems to have evaporated for some reason. Too bad, as it had a lot of important links.
If you are not already familiar with the works of the “speech-thinker” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, check him out. I think you’re in his stream. A sample work is available online from his publisher Argo Books called I Am An Impure Thinker and it can be downloaded in .pdf format (one or two other works are available at the argo books site). The first essay in the collection called “Farewell to Descartes” was the concluding chapter to his major (fat) work Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, but I think you will find it very interesting (as well as some of the other essays in the collection). This books was actually conceived as a companion volume to Speech and Reality. Another of his volumes that you might be interested in looking at is The Christian Future, or the modern mind outrun. His is an integralist and globalist approach, well worth study. I’ve struggled with him for decades.
In regards to some of the other points made in your post, check out a recent essay by D. Tutt on Nietzsche and Islam, as it was Nietzsche’s interest to break out of this same “isolation” of the European mind by engaging with other value systems like Islam and Buddhism.
I also think you are very ripe for the work of cultural historian Jean Gebser. Check him out. His major work, The Ever Present Origin might be a bit difficult to dive into right away (1,000 pages of very small print), but there are many websites dedicated to the study of his intriguing and novel approach to history, such as the Jean Gebser Society (www.gebser.org) and a massive archive of Gebser’s work in German and English on a German site. What you are calling “isolation” is what Gebser calls “deficient rationality” and deficient “perspectivisation”, which he now feels is a major problem for the West.
I really appreciate all the recommendations, Scott. I have added these to my list of reading, which is already extensive. But as soon as I make some time, I’ll get right onto it. Gebser looks particularly interesting. I am fascinated with history, especially the 19th and 20th centuries. And I am a huge fan of Nietzsche, not because I agree with his philosophy or anything, but because he’s one of the most interesting philosophers of all time.
I’m really into Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt right now. Oliver Cox has also caught my eye. I’m just a nerd about this stuff, so I appreciate all the good nerd food!