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The Return of the Sacred
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10591 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
8,534 Words |
| Author
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Antonio de Nicolas
Antonia de Nicolas is the author of Habits of Mind,
Remembering the God to Come, Avatara, and other works. He
teaches philosophy at SUNY at Stony Brook, N.Y. |
The context of the present symposium is that of modernism. Modernism has been with Western tradition for a long time and it will, in all probability, continue for some time to come. The advantage of the present time to that for the first time in his history, modernism has exhausted itself and has come to form part, at least theoretically, of past history, of one of the shores of the next dialectical move in the movement of history. Properly speaking, what we are doing here today is part of a new period known as post-modern.
Modernism has had a long history with us. Though it is mostly identified with the rise of Cartesianism, i.e., the identification of knowing to only that which can be known by reducing human and other bodies to systems functioning as if they were machines, its roots go as far back as Aristotle. Aristotle made fashionable an external division of the world through genera and species, separating philosophy and fashion from the legitimation of inner acts that divide the world by an inner lineage of quality, as Plato had suggested. Augustine contributes to the spread of modernism through an exaggeration of individuality and the individual will, while identifying (reducing) transcendental power (the Trinity) to the model of the human powers (human brain) discarding imagining and introducing ideology as the main faculty of reason. Through ideology thinking is reduced seriatim to having thoughts, and thoughts to behavior and finally information. Knowing, ultimately, and decision-making, will be reduced to manipulation of information. Knowing and power will be linked together in the public domain, from politics to religion, to education.
It is in this context that the human soul suffers from an agonizing dualism. On the one hand it has developed a habit of reading the world (theories of knowledge) through theories that give form to possible experience and legitimize it. On the other hand it has to contend with a theory of verification that claims that it is a reflection of real experience (empiricism). Human life, under this metaphysical constraint, defines itself as a continuous series of experimentations, as temporary commitments, as the absence of maps, as a decentered chaos at the root of identity. Difference is the only center, and this difference lets out an internal shout of a soul affirming its own power in a reverberation of madness, as its own eternal movement of eternal difference. The soul witnesses in itself the rise of the spectral simulacra of its own decentered affirmation. The false has risen to power. The Same and the Life (in Plato's sense), the model and the copy, have fallen under the power of the false (the simulacrum). Hierarchies have been made to disappear and
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