Somewhere in the course of our western history, something fundamental has been lost: we have lost track of the wholeness of the psyche, and its membership; in a world which was whole and in which it might feel at home.
Where did this happen? The psyche was whole in Athens – its membership in the family, the polis and the cosmos were so presupposed that there were perhaps no words to express the separation and fragmentation so vivid to us today. I don’t think there was a word for “objective” or “subjective”, nor was there a mind which might be thought of as a blank tablet, upon which an outside world might write. In society there was work, but no word for “job”, with the radical alienation that term implies. I’m not suggesting life was in any sense idyllic – only that for better or for worse, the psyche was intact, and seated in the world.
I’ll leave it to others to explain how this has come about, but somehow we now find ourselves equipped with a mind which is well-furnished with knowledge, indeed, but all too easily likened to a calculative engine, with a memory bank stored with data from an “outside” world. We understand the mind better and better – but only as a marvelously equipped machine.
What is missing would seem to be that faculty once called “intellectual intuition” – the power to see directly and immediately, without the intervention of words, truths which are timeless and fundamental. That old intellect -- for which the Greeks did have a word: NOUS -- was inherentlyi drawn to beauty, which it deeply loved.
I don’t see this as an exercise in nostalgia: there are ways open to us today by which we can recover this power, which is perhaps rather hidden than lost. Other cultures have preserved it in ways we haven’t, and we have much to learn from them. To a large extent it is our conception of “modern science” which denies the evidence of intuitive reason, and reduces the concept of “reason” to accurate symbolic calculation. But there is another way within modern science, equally mathematical and rigorous, but founded in a concept of wholeness, and looking to the whole rather than the parts as the ground of “explanation”. I have spoken about this way – the “Pinciple of Least Action” -- in my lecture, “The Dialectical Laboratory”, elsewhere on this website.
Nothing prevents, I believe, our mending this split between that classic concept of intuitive reason, seated in the world and knowing and loving truth directly -- and the concept current today of reason as a calculative engine making what it can of an “outside” world. We need only retrace our steps and pick up that thread of truth wherever we dropped it. Not easy to do, of course, but worth every effort!
Any suggestions as to how to begin?