Overcoming a world split into two
Recovering from modernity
They are stubborn, these splits bequeathed to us by the modern era. Once Descartes moved authority into the interiors of the individual, in his case in terms of cognition or rationality (“I think, therefore, I am”), the world was halved. By halved, I mean split into pairs with one member of the pair being superior. Descartes contributed directly to a mind-body split, where cognition is the seat of knowing, even aquiring, the world. Ironically, the body became “immaterial,” or secondary, to personhood built around knowing things. In fact, it might be better to call this a mind-world split. Some call the Cartesian split a “turn to the subject,” the world becoming objects to be mastered. Mind/body, subject/object.
Other attending splits are the fact/value and the public/private. These go together as facts are deemed to be gounded or secured knowledge, superior to values which are more personal. Facts, therefore, are public in the sense that they are universally true, whereas values are unprovable and held by individuals—they are private. Politics, science, and commerce belong to the public world, with faith and religion belonging to the private. In this halved world, tradition takes a beating. The newly discovered is epistemologically superior to traditions often seen as built on superstitions and unprovable appeals to values. It’s ok to have values, just don’t impose them on others.
I could describe other splits, but I want to end with modern views of language, a split within the realm of the private. For philosophers like Locke, language was representational. By that, language was believed to be made up of signs or symbols (words) that had a stable relationship to that which they referred. They refer, in other words, to things in the mind that correspond to things in the world. This diminished symbols as merely representations of things that were real. So, people living under the spell of modernity will say things like, “that’s merely a symbol,” or “baptism is the outward sign of an inward reality” (a phrase I doubt was ever uttered before the turn to the subject. The sign doesn’t actually do anything, but only represents a deeper, inward reality. Saying a prayer is a much shorter route to the inner sanctums of the human heart. Baptism becomes optional, like leather seats in your new car.
Hermeneutical philosophers like Paul Ricoeur have done much to recapture the “productive” notion of language. That is, language doesn’t just represent reality, but participates in its production. Metaphors, for instance, don’t represent something in a fancier wrapping, but through “semantic impertinence” bring multiple images together in juxtaposition that makes new meaning. This generative capacity of metaphors suggests that language can disclose reality more than just represent it. (Note: This goes beyond Wittgenstein’s “language games,” which are limited to the use of language in the everyday, to a truly more participatory and generative sense).
Ok, let’s get back to our world halved by modernity, a world of split consciousness. The way to overcome, say the fact/value split, is not to emphasize the importance of values over facts, leaving the split intact just shifting the weight from one side to the other. Rather, it is to overcome the split itself with moves that are more holistic or integrative. We want to overcome the epistemological priority of modernity with its emphasis on knowing, with the more ontological/integrative priority of being.
Seen from an epistemological vantage point, a symbol simply represents reality. But from on ontological perspective, the symbol is an irreplaceable aspect of reality. It’s doing more than standing in for a deeper reality, but participating in the mystery of it all. The symbol, or ritual, is capable of gathering up the multiple realities that are doing something in the deployment of the symbol, including the reality of God.
