It's very hard not to feel that there really is no such thing as history. When you stop and consider all of the available lines of thought open to us today, it is almost as if there is no time-or that all of the times, all of the periods in history-mix and intermingle right here and now within our consciousness. It seems to me that our particular "now" is a temporal nexus in which all of the "nows" bleed imperceptibly into one another and that all of the possible things that could exist actually do exist here within the grasp of our understanding. Yet, then again, I realize, with more than a hint of irony, that the only reason I can sit and think such a thing is because of our history, and particularly because of the history of our Western Civilization in the Twentieth Century.
Probably the main theme one can identify looking back over the past hundred or so years here in the West is a continued expansion of our thoughts and perceptions. No sooner is a new plateau of understanding reached and, at that point, it is already obsolete; "old news". The dialectic expansion of thesisantithesissynthesis is constantly compounding upon itself in a dizzyingly magnificent trash heap of accumulated knowledge that seems to be the characteristic of our age. On all the levels of cultural activity this has been the one overriding theme; the exploration of possibilities. Our mass consciousness has flown like a great river into every conceivable nook and cranny that our reality and experience will provide. When you sit and look at all the accomplishments in art, science, philosophy and mathematics, music, poetry and drama, politics and economics, production and consumption, technology, education and all the other endeavors with which we whittle away the time, it really makes one wonder if there's anything left to do. Is there really anything new under the sun? But you, like I, feel that gnawing urge that drives us on, that culturally imbued knowing that, yes indeed, there is more to come. Indeed, the best is yet to come. For after all, this is Infinity and there is room for everything.
If all of this sounds overly dramatic, then forgive my tendencies in such a direction. I just can't help feeling a sense of awe when I look back at the colossal changes and developments that have occurred in only the last century of our species' history. I strongly believe in the dictum; "You don't know a thing unless you know its history". Having a historical view gives us the advantage of appreciating a thing's roots, and gives us the insight that things always seem to fall right in the place they belong. Also, history teaches us that human affairs go like a pendulum, first to one side and then the other. And knowing this we can get a sense of what the future just may hold, and such a sense of anticipation further stirs us on to realizing the future today, in our own lives. On the other hand, if we neglect a thing's history, then it's easier to be intimidated by the thing, to not understand its natural context. In this case the thing becomes decontextualized and some of its essence is lost. The result is that we then put the thing in a new context, and quite inadvertently contribute to the accumulation that we call history.
I make these statements on the basis of my formal education in science where my peers and I were taught, and are taught, the wondrous ideas of the likes of Newton and Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg. Yet these ideas are taught to us in a historical vacuum. No one ever explains to us why these men created these ideas, or just what the factors were in their day that led them into these ideas, or why it is that humans even do science in the first place. No, instead we are taught a bunch of very dry mathematics, dry formulas, dry laboratory techniques in the hopes of acquiring a decent job and gaining approval for surviving the rigor of a science education and being successful in a cold and competitive market place. Then again, I should not sound as if I am complaining, because if we all knew these things from the beginning, then where would that renewing vitality that accompanies each generation's rediscovery of the knowledge of previous generations come from?
So my topic now is: the changing nature of contemporary civilization's values and perceptions into new and broader vistas as a result of the continued expansion of the Western mindset.
Let us start with today. Now-here in the world of today-we live in an era of mass production and consumption, mass communication and mass populations. We are all the products of a civilization whose imagination was sparked by science and a rational approach to our lives and the world around us. We live in a world of machines, machines made in the image of the science that spawned them. And some of us are content, some of us discontented by this reality, and some of us simply don't even think about it. Yet those of us who do think about it spend our time wondering why it is this way, and what we can do about it, and how we should go about making sense of it. Ultimately, these are all of our concerns. And ultimately, I believe that these have been the concerns of all those individuals throughout this century who have contributed to the condition of this world in which we are now asking these same questions.
Today there is a revolution occurring in our thinking. New ways of conceptualization are being explored, old values are being questioned and challenged. Many ideas that were unthinkable even only twenty years ago are beginning to receive serious consideration in modern intellectual circles. In many respects, this situation is a response to the changing needs of our times, a response to challenges that face all of us who are sensitive to the needs of the modern world, those of us sensitive to the need to find new ways of perceiving and understanding a world of ever exploding possibilities. In this quest for new values and new ways of thinking, many are rediscovering old ways of thinking, ancient philosophies from other cultures, and breathing new life and meaning into these ideas, finding in them a relevance to the particular needs and challenges that we perceive to confront us. On every level, this book is itself a contribution to the present revolution occurring in modern thought.
It is well known and broadly discussed that science and the amazing advances which have stemmed from modern science are in large part responsible for the many unprecedented situations in the world today. It is, however, becoming even more commonplace to be of the opinion that it is not so much science itself that is responsible for our contemporary world situation, but how we perceive and utilize science that is the fundamental factor. That is, focus is shifting to an analysis of the underlying assumptions behind the scientific orientation of contemporary civilization. The values and metaphysics underlying our present day sciences are being discussed increasingly, and also being challenged increasingly. Nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary physics with the popularization of the developments and revolutions in modern physics beginning with Relativity and Quantum Mechanics at the turn of this century and continuing today with the advent of the new theories of Chaos and Fractal Geometry.
In recent times there has been much written about the new metaphysics underlying these advances, and claims put forth that the supposedly new metaphysics behind these scientific advances are not really so new, but are in actuality the old metaphysics of other cultures in a new disguise1. It is currently quite fashionable to speak of quantum physics in the same breath with ancient metaphysical doctrines of the East, such as Taoism or Buddhism. There is much merit to this approach.
Primarily these new attitudes reflect a new openness and willingness to embrace other doctrines and worldviews. This approach is also indicative of a new flexibility to our thought. We are not so insecure anymore that we must defend our conceptions at the expense of alternative ways of perceiving the world. On other levels these movements in contemporary thought reflect a type of cultural diffusion, and in many respects are laying the groundwork for altogether new forms of culture based on a synthesis of both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western approaches. In every respect this is nothing but a positive development in our cultural evolution. It is the purpose of this book to continue this synthesis, this quest to embrace new and old views, to find similarities in ideas that were previously thought to have nothing in common.
It was the contention of the positivists that the world could be known rationally and completely solely within the scope of mathematical and scientific logic. It was Gödel who proved, using the very heart and soul of the positivists doctrine- mathematics-that it is impossible to ever conceive of such a system of logic. It is not my desire here to go into the details of Gödel's proof because it has been amply documented elsewhere2. My point here is that Gödel's proof reflected an important turning point in the nature of the twentieth century intellect, a turning away from broad, monolithic approaches of understanding, toward a new type of pluralistic intellectualism.
A similar trend was also experienced a few years earlier in the physics community with the advent of quantum mechanics. Here, for the first time, physicists were forced to allow a new complementarity into physics, in which mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomena were admitted to be acceptable under the appropriate circumstances. I am of course referring to the famous "wave/particle" duality presented in 1929 by Niels Bohr and his "Copenhagen" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Again, the twentieth century intellect was forced, by its own standards, into replacing a previously monolithic mindset with a more pluralistic approach.
Both of these developments were only surprising within the expectation that the world and our experience could be captured within the framework of one unified and complete system of rational thought. Up into the twentieth century this was the underlying and dominating motivation behind the intellectual endeavors of the West. Alan Watts in Beyond Theology3 goes into great detail as to the historical origins of this metaphysics, relating it to the Christian origins of contemporary civilization.
Today it is becoming increasingly understood that the truly valid approach to a rational understanding of ourselves and Nature requires the use of many different perspectives. Gödel's proof spells out the implication that we cannot understand the world solely in terms of mathematics. The principle of complementarity in physics, that is, the wave/particle duality of matter, also tells us that more than one perspective is necessary even to describe the possibilities inherent in physical matter. We are today beginning to appreciate that the phenomena of Nature exist in their own terms at their own unique levels and that the terms used to describe one level of phenomena may or may not apply to phenomena at other levels. Thus we return to the essential theme of this work: that through a plurality of approaches to understanding, we may truly come to appreciate the vast mysteries and complexities of Nature and the human experience.
Notes: Chapter 1
1The two current books that espouse the relation between
quantum theory and mysticism most clearly are: Capra, (1976), and
Zukav, (1979).
2For discussions of Gödel's Theorem in various contexts see:
Hofstadter, (1979) for discussions of this theorem in the context
of self-referential; Kline, (1980) in the context of the history
of mathematics; Guillen, (1983) in the context of modern
mathematical theory; Rucker (1982), in the context of
mathematical theories of infinity. Or, Kurt Gödel's actual paper
is reprinted in Davis, (1965).
3Watts, (1973).
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Writings of Donald DeGracia