Technologies of Sin & Salvatation:
Capital & Technologies of Meaning in the Age of the Perpetual Innovation Economy
Chapter
Two
MEANING
WITHIN REASON
Man
is the measure of all things.
Protagoras
The
instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of
the whole soul be turned
from the world of becoming into that of being.
Plato,
The Republic
FOR
THE NASCENT PERPETUAL INNOVATION ECONOMY, the stasis
of meaning is death. And this will have enormous ramifications
for the evolution of Western social epistemology.
____This
is due to the fact that our early Western theories
of knowledge and meaning were marked by a persistent
conceptual error which continues to color much of
our understanding of value and meaning today, and
which in turn directly impacts the development of
emergent technologies of meaning. Rather than seeking
to address and ameliorate the tensive dissonance which
lies at the heart of human cognition, the Platonic
and Aristotelian conceptions of meaning sought to
transcend it in establishing a priori truths through
rationalism and empiricism respectively. We sought - and
yet seek - to transcend the material "world of
becoming," to literalize our metaphorical constructs,
to hypostasize our cognitive schema in universal and
eternal fact. The Greeks founded their epistemological
legacy upon the metaphorical postulation of a transcendent
a priori revealed in the perfect and fixed "forms"
of Euclidean geometry. Augustine, who began his career
as a Neoplatonist, founded his formulation of the
Judeo-Christian theory of meaning upon Christ's metaphorical
function as the point of intersection between the
transcendent a priori and the fallen world of the
flesh. Ironically, it was this "sin" of
metaphorical abstraction and stasis which the authors
of the Old Testament had admonished against in describing
the perils of "idolatry." Hannah Arendt
has called this the "metaphysical fallacy"
which has perpetuated the "two world theory"
in Western thought. John Dewey termed this the great
"philosophic fallacy." For Hayden White,
this inclination to freeze the flow of human imagination
and meaning in static symbols represented the "temptation
of gnosis." And it was this "epistemological
mistake" which Gregory Bateson argued was more
serious than all of humankind's other "minor
insanities" combined. And yet the sin, error,
fallacy, the alienation, and temptation have persisted.
Is it possible that an evolving political economy
sustained through perpetual figurative transformation
may finally provide the impetus to overturn this legacy
of disembodied and dualistic Western philosophy?
____In
the previous chapter, I reviewed the major political
economic paradigms within and through which the modern
and postmodern West has sought - by sheer force of will
and purposive perfection of its technologies - to attain
an approximation of that lost cognitive unity, or
what Kester termed a "universal subjectivity,"
applying technology to heal the cognitive and existential
dissonances generated by technology. Setting the stage
in this way was necessary to grasp how, through labor,
human subjectivity is recast in successive political
economic paradigms through its changing relationship
with its symbolic, social and material technologies.
I argued that, whatever uses and interests the West's
epistemological heritage have served in the past,
emergent economic and environmental imperatives increasingly
require that we come to terms with the ontological
biases implied and revealed in the political economic
and existential expressions of both our theories and
technologies of meaning. Failing this, we risk the
hyper-accelerated growth of vast and intransigent
external digital networks of value and meaning which
reflect and magnify the constraints and consequences
of these faulty epistemological legacies. In the accelerating
external manifestation of our cognitive networks lies
the essential value and meaning of an embryonic political
economic paradigm which promises to either enliven
or deaden the human subject and the natural world
which is its home.
____This
chapter therefore turns to the task of exploring the
roots of the West's traditionally static, disembodied
epistemology, primarily in Greek and Cartesian thought.
Chapter Three will examine contrasting theories of
meaning and associated technologies developed in the
East. Chapter Four will then trace the redirected
development of Western epistemologies with the advent
of the Industrial Revolution toward embodied, ecological
theories of meaning which have sought to resolve the
West's longstanding epistemological bifurcation through
a gradual conjoining and extrusion of its dominant
philosophical traditions.
____The
West's epistemological journey-from our mythological
fall from grace to our most recent search for deliverance
in cyberspace-is said to have begun with one bite
of an apple, representing humankind's earliest and
most elemental symbolic technology. And with that
first metaphorical signification, humanity was marked
by what the poet and statesman Vaclav Havel described
as a "sense of separation from Being." That
is, a tensive cognitive dissonance which has its roots
in the very nature of metaphorical language, relying
as it does on the simultaneous signification of both
identity and difference (Derrida 1980, Coyne 2000).
____Beyond
its felt presence in human experience, perhaps the
clearest evidence for the existence and nature of
this cognitive dissonance and epistemological error
is in the persistent efforts made since ancient times
to redress it. Throughout the ages, however, socioeconomic
constraints imposed by dominant interests have inhibited
individuals who recognized the error and its effects
from carrying the solution to its logical resolution.
Protagoras and Socrates were killed; Plato, Augustine
and Kant became enthralled by the logical systems
they constructed to rise above it; Aristotle and Hegel
turned conservative in the interest of getting along;
and Dewey and Mead were chastised by established academe
when they refused to compromise their quest for a
resolution. Further, a solution would require the
collective efforts of democratic deliberation to inform
and make intelligent the workings of existential,
ecological fact, as against the transcendent status
of hypostasized sociotechnical predication. Though
this resolve was perhaps most famously and radically
articulated in the writings of Marx, it was as early
as the fifth-century B.C. when Protagoras suggested
what may have been the West's first formulation of
what the Buddhists call the "middle path,"
or what cognitive science has termed the process of
"codependent arising." Indeed the intensifying
synergy of political economy and cognitive science
provides what may be our most credible hope for the
West's rediscovery of Protagoras' original premise,
of an integral cognitive ecology which would bring
our epistemological journey full circle and provide
the necessary framework upon which to articulate the
method discussed later in these pages. Again, it is
precisely because the West's philosophical heritage
has generated such deeply engrained biases regarding
the very nature and composition of that meaning and
value so central to today's so-called "Information
Economy," that we must understand and elucidate
the origins of the way we think about "knowledge,"
"information," "meaning," as well
our past hesitancy to validate the vast realms of
human experience which lie beyond reason.
.
. .
Likening
the modern Western mind to an open terrain, one might
say that each quality of our cognitive topography
has a deep-rooted heritage entwined in the dark soil
below with all those other characteristics which have
grown into our current conceptions of value and meaning.
If we were to survey this terrain from a distance,
we would certainly be first struck by a pair of particularly
prominent features.
____Throughout
the past two and a half thousand years, two broad,
well-traveled paths have comprised the accepted modes
of Western inquiry into the nature of "knowledge"
and "truth," or what we prefer to refer
to here as meaning and value. Together, these grand
traditions-rationalism and empiricism-may be seen
as divergent methods of arriving at a priori, objective
facts independent of subjective human intervention
or interpretation. These modes of thought have proven
stunningly successful in defining the normative parameters-the
accepted spheres of inquiry-of all subsequent attempts
to define the nature of knowledge and meaning. It
is increasingly crucial we begin to grasp the most
apparent impacts of these epistemological traditions
in order to understand clearly how it is that both
our economic and environmental realities are today
straining against the confines of the preternatural
human cognitive model inherent in these still dominant
modes of thought. For it might have been otherwise.
____In
the fifth-century B.C., when the Attic philosopher
Protagoras proposed that "Man is the measure
of all things," he offered what we now know with
two and a half millennia hindsight to be a spectacularly
insightful design for an integral design for value
and meaning. Protagoras posited, in essence, that
man makes his own meaning. The distinctive character
of any epistemology in harmony with Protagoras' theory,
as Turner has noted, is its conception of meaning
not as a static truth external to human beings but
rather as a consequence of dynamic cognitive processes
grounded in embodied, affective human experience.
Yet this early theory of meaning is a trail so faint
and overgrown that philosophers such as Whitehead,
Russell, Hobbes, Leibniz and Descartes seem to have
missed its implications almost entirely; scholars
such as Dewey and Mead had to contend with intractable
institutional interests in articulating its epistemological
implications for the 20th century; and the cognitive
and social sciences have formulated its principles
only during the past decade. Protagoras of Abdera
had been a teacher and political counselor, and had
written a treatise entitled On the Gods in which he
argued that, "Of the gods I can know nothing,
neither that they are nor that they are not, nor how
they are shaped if at all. Many things prevent such
knowledge: the uncertainty of the questions and the
shortness of life" (in Dowdy 1998, 140).
____Protagoras
seems to have had little time or patience for postulating
a priori truths, whether they be gods or other "forms."
Through Plato's dialogue Protagoras, we know that
Protagoras argued against those philosophers, and
particularly Parmenides, who held Being as an absolute.
He insisted rather on the notion that, "Man is
the measure of all things: of things that are, that
they are, and of things that are not, that they are
not" (Dowdy, 148). Today, it is largely through
Plato's Protagoras and Theaetetus, in which he depicts
Socrates recalling an argument with the ghost of Protagoras,
that we know anything at all of Protagoras' epistemology.
For Protagoras was eventually driven out of Athens
for his "impiety," and his books publicly
burned. We do know that Plato quite dominated the
debate of his age, as he largely still does our own.
And so, before clarifying the rather unexpected 21st
century revitalization of Protagoras' theory of meaning,
it is to the works of Plato and his protégé
Aristotle that we turn to grasp the deep roots of
our entrenched conceptions of meaning and value as
separate from mind, technology as distinct from humanity,
and the political economy as somehow transcending
human embodiment and natural ecology.
____Plato,
of course, first articulated the elaborate system
of thought known to us as rationalism, which posits
that knowledge and meaning, or "justified true
belief," is to be attained through deductive,
dialectical reasoning. For Plato, the "idea,"
representing the transcendent "form," seen
through the unwavering, reasoning eye, was the highest
principle to which human knowledge and meaning might
aspire. Thus in Phaedo, he argued:
Would
not that man do this most perfectly who approaches
each thing, so far as possible, with the reason alone,
not introducing sight into his reasoning nor dragging
in any of the other senses along with his thinking,
but employs pure, absolute reason in his attempt to
search out the pure, absolute essence of things, and
who removes himself, so far as possible, from eyes
and ears, and, in a word, from his body, because he
feels that its companionship disturbs the soul and
hinders it from attaining truth and wisdom? Is not
this the man, Simmias, if anyone, to attain to the
knowledge of reality? (229)
Here,
as in The Allegory of the Cave, Plato planted his
vivid metaphorical notion of the physical world of
appearance as a mere shadow of that ideal realm of
transcendent forms. Human knowledge, in his system
of thought, thus aspired to the unchanging, hypostasized
Idea, which cannot be known through direct sensual
experience, but only through contemplation of the
purest form of reason.
____Though
Plato argued at times that the geometry of his day
was too bound to the world of forged appearance and
polluted by alogos and "irrationality,"
it appears that he and his pupil Aristotle were yet
profoundly effected by its pervasive presence, as
I will describe later in this chapter. Yet Plato chose
to devote himself to the painstaking articulation
and establishment of dialectical discourse as the
most suitable path to truth and wisdom. In Plato's
later writings, Raymond Williams notes that this dialectical
method had come to refer to the discursive "art
of defining ideas and, related to this, the method
of determining the interrelation of ideas in the light
of a single principle." Further "these two
senses would later be distinguished as logic and metaphysics
respectively" (Dowdy, 1998, 138). And so through
Plato were planted such foundational logical and metaphysical
convictions: truth consists of unchanging ideas which
reflect eternal forms; knowledge of these external
truths is generated through pure deductive reasoning;
the world of appearances is a mere shadow of these
truths; and art is the mere imitation of the mere
shadow of the transcendent forms.
____I
earlier noted Dewey's vital observation that the aesthetic
theory of any scholar "is a test of the capacity
of the system he puts forth to grasp the nature of
experience itself." And further that, "There
is no test that so surely reveals the one-sidedness
of a philosophy than its treatment of art and aesthetic
experience" (From Alexander, 1998, 18). What
might such a test reveal about Plato and subsequent
philosophers' systems of thought?
____The
Republic, of course, contains the first sustained
discussion of art in Western literature and arguably
the most enduringly influential. As Cooper has noted,
few subsequent discussions of the arts and the relations
of art to psychology, ethics and politics have failed
to engage with Plato on these topics. In Book 10 of
the Republic, Plato conducts his most famous assault
on art and literature. The painter-whom Plato discusses
before turning to his more virulent and prolonged
attack on the poet-produces only an imperfect and
constrained imitation (mimesis) of a physical object,
which is again only a facsimile of the true, transcendent
Form. Hyman has offered the variant reading that Plato's
complaint is rather that artists produce "semblances"
which are "deceptive," such as in their
use of perspective and shadowing (Cooper, 1986, 45).
The poet similarly panders to the least rational aspects
of human nature which, according to Plato, tend toward
the disreputable and are certain to detract from the
preferred life of reason. Whether or not we acknowledge
the debt, our Western conceptions of art and aesthetics
are yet profoundly shaped by Plato's assertion two
and a half millennia ago that, as he summed up, "Representation
and truth are a considerable distance apart."
The ghost of Protagoras would not have approved. In
Plato's system of thought, eternal truths are revealed
in the exclusive conversations of wise (Athenian)
men, and the innovation-or creative production-of
new meaning lay infinitely beyond the ken of the common
man.
____Clearly,
Plato was no disembodied ghost himself. This was a
man who lived during a given historical moment and
in a grounded sociotechnical context. What were Plato's
possible motivations for this unequivocal, and what
must be seen as a rather extreme condemnation of the
aesthetic act and of its willful perpetrators? These
are fair questions, certainly, given the enormous
and lasting affects of the ontological schism implicit
in his dualistic system of thought with its radical
division of subjective representation and objective
truth. Before turning to these questions, however,
it is important to note the origin of the West's second
dominant epistemological tradition in Plato's rebellious
protégé.
____The
Western world's other enduring mode of thought and
inquiry, empiricism, was propounded by Aristotle when
he famously contradicted his mentor Plato, countering
that knowledge and truth must be sought through the
inductive study of the object of inquiry. Aristotle
contended that Plato's conceptualization of "idea"
as "form" was wrong, arguing that form cannot
be isolated from a physical object, nor that it has
an existence apart from sensory perception. Rather,
he posited that an individual thing consists of its
form and physical object or matter, and that knowledge
of forms is always occasioned by sensory perception.
From this empiricist perspective, he argued:
So
out of sense-perception comes to be what we call memory,
and out of frequently repeated memories of the same
thing develop experience; for a number of memories
constitute a single experience. From experience again-i.e.,
from the universal now stabilized in its entirety
within them all-originate the skill of the craftsman
and the knowledge of the man of science, skill in
the sphere of coming to be and science of being. We
conclude that these stages of knowledge are neither
innate in a deterministic form, nor developed from
other higher states of knowledge, but from sense-perception
(in Cooper, 1986, 48).
Thus
Aristotle emphasized the importance of observation
and the repeatable, empirical verification of sense
perception. With such emphasis placed on sensory perception,
one might expect that his views on art and aesthetics
would differ from those of his teacher.
____Yet,
though Aristotle's more earthly system of thought
appears to move toward an epistemology congruent with
the embodied mind generating meaning through interaction
with its environment, his writings on aesthetics clearly
betray his fondness for the viewpoint of the "Unmoved
Mover," and his predilection for discovering
knowledge and meaning through passive observation
of an external and fixed reality.
____For
Aristotle, that which is available to the senses is
an incomplete representation, an imperfect manifestation,
in a teleological journey toward the ideal realization
of the object. This becomes all the clearer when we
note how the student wants to counter his teacher's
round condemnation of poetry as opposed to the tenets
of philosophy; but in the end, like Plato himself,
there can be no doubt that Aristotle saw art as mere
mimesis. Indeed in his Poetics, Aristotle goes to
exhaustive lengths to redeem the notion of art through
his elaborate recipes for those forms of mimesis which
would properly instruct the people and refine their
passions toward an appropriate regard for "truth."
Here, as elsewhere, Aristotle sought to oppose Plato's
categorical censure of art and aesthetics, insisting
that, "What mimesis reveals is precisely the
real essence of the thing" (Cooper, 1986, 46).
Yet in his theory of meaning, art and all humankind's
creations remain mere imitation, and essence and meaning
remain external and aloof from the lived experience
of the embodied-if observant-human mind. Dewey's own
critique of Aristotle on this matter was most clear.
Dewey pointed to the essence of Aristotelian empiricism
as propounding a "spectator view of reality"
in which we grasp the world of objects according to
their categories, and in which mind and language function
as an index system. As Dowdy notes, "Reasoning
this way, Aristotle advanced his mentor's hypostatic
'spectator view' of existence, and an essentially
timeless 'picture theory' of reality" (1998,
274). As will be discussed later, where Aristotle
would have it that these categories of fact are immutable
and fixed, Dewey would later echo Protagoras' claim
that technological schema are constructed, deconstructed
and reconstructed for the convenience of human beings
seeking to function-and experience more fully-within
a dynamic and changing environment. And Dewey's view
would later gain tremendous theoretical and empirical
support through advances in cognitive science. Varela
et al would term this self-modifying process "codependent
arising."
____Of
course, as noted earlier, neither Plato nor Aristotle
lived in a vacuum, and so it is important we seek
to clarify the purposes and interests these epistemologies
sought to serve in the time and place of their origin.
We know that Plato was very much grounded in Athens,
was thoroughly rooted in the political-economic life
of the city-state, and was therefore deeply invested
in that specific sociotechnical environment. We know,
too, that Aristotle was a far more peripatetic soul,
has been described as the West's first cosmopolitan
philosopher, and thus developed a broader, cross-cultural
worldview. To take this analysis further, however,
I turn briefly to Dowdy's extensive examination of
Plato and Aristotle's lives, times and systems of
thought, for its detailed and subtle account of, among
other things, the complex sociotechnical environments
within which these men constructed their epistemological
legacies.
For example, there is a compelling argument to be
made that Plato's theory of meaning and his dialectical
method were direct reactions against the then-emergent
technology of monologos, or spoken and written monologues.
Though it may be difficult at the dawn of the 21st
century to envision a time when the rhetorical innovations
of monologue and their written equivalents represented
challenges to the established order, it ought not
to be too difficult to sympathize with the general
political economic disorder concomitant with such
jarring shifts in the use of communications "technologies."
The difference is arguably merely one of historical
perspective. In Phaedrus, for example, Plato conducted
what may be seen as one of the earliest and most damning
technology assessments when he depicts Thamus rebuking
Thoth, the inventor of writing, thus:
This
discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the
learners' souls, because they will not use their memories;
they will trust to the external written characters
and not remember themselves. The specific which you
have discovered is an aid not to memory but to reminiscence,
and you give your disciples not truth, but only the
semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things
and will have learned nothing; they will appear to
be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they
will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom
without its reality (1961, 518).
Dowdy
suggests that Plato's devotion to establishing dialectic
as the crucial methodological component of his epistemology
was motivated in part by a shift toward the use of
rhetorical monologue as an instrument of intensifying
influence and power within the Greek political economic
system of that time. In fact, Plato vividly immortalized
his mentor as the archetypal sacrificial hero, depicting
him dying tragically at the hands of those wielding
the irrational force of monologos, and thus providing
what he surely intended as a dramatically pointed
lesson in the malignant spread of new-fangled rhetorical
techniques. Plato clearly wished to caution his fellow
Athenians regarding the dangers and deceptions of
these new technologies of meaning. Though his intended
meanings are at times obscure and difficult to decipher,
and though disparate interpretations of his dialogues
and letters abound, one thing seems clear: Plato prescription
for salvation was conversation among the wise. In
his ideal Republic, wise men like himself would spend
their days translating the eternal Forms into perfect
knowledge through the medium of dialogue, which would
then define the normative parameters within which
others would do the work of manifesting this Vision.
This contemplation of truth by an elite class of men
is perhaps the strongest and most basic link between
Platonic and Aristotelian thought. Within such epistemologies
in which meaning is external, truth a priori, and
the keys to the kingdom held by a privileged few philosopher-kings,
the innovation of communicative technologies which
simultaneously manifest and institute new forms of
meaning would be tragic indeed. Wise men and heroes
would die. And here we begin to see clear signs of
the profound and untenable constraints of such fixed
and ancient methods and theories of meaning on the
21st century context, and on a political economy which
has come to be predicated on the perpetual figurative
transformation of value in new meanings.
____We
have inherited these Platonic and Aristotelian theories
of meaning through intermediate philosophers by modern
epistemology's two mainstreams: Continental rationalism
and British empiricism. Nearly two millennia after
the time of their philosophical progenitors, Descartes
and Locke illustrate the resilience of Platonic and
Aristotelian thought, as well as the attendant constraints
on the political-economic parameters and ontological
possibilities within these hitherto indomitable epistemologies.
Clearly building directly upon Plotinus' Neoplatonic
heritage, Descartes famously proposed his four foundational
rules for rational thinking. These are worth noting
here for the fact that these maxims represent so concisely
and explicitly the methodological cornerstones implicit
and rarely acknowledged in our contemporary conceptions
of the object of knowledge:
The
first of these was to accept nothing as true which
I did not clearly recognize to be so: that is to say,
carefully avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments,
and to accept in them nothing more than what was presented
to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could
have no occasion to doubt it.
The
second was to divide up each of the difficulties which
I examined into as many parts as possible, and as
seemed requisite in order that it might be resolved
in the best manner possible.
The
third was to carry on my reflections in due order,
commencing with objects that were the most simple
and easy to understand, in order to rise little by
little, or by degrees, to knowledge of the most complex,
assuming an order, even if a fictitious one, among
those which do not follow a natural sequence relative
to one another.
The
last was in all cases to make enumerations so completely
and reviews so general that I should be certain of
having omitted nothing (in Nonaka and Takeuchi 1997,
53).
____Though
Descartes had appropriated the tenets of Platonic
rationalism, he was famously explicit in further extrapolating
that ultimate truth could be deduced only by the uniquely
verifiable existence of a thinking self. The above
method led him to the conviction that this "thinking
self" was autonomous and separate from body or
matter, arguing that whereas embodied matter manifests
a temporal-spatial existence, or "extension,"
available to our senses, but which does not think,
the mind by contrast manifests no temporal-spatial
presence, yet it thinks. Thus the infamous Cartesian
split, which, in so audaciously taking Platonist rationalism
to its "logical" extreme, simultaneously
revealed and exacerbated that yawning discontinuity
fundamental to mainstream Western thought.
____The
raft of treatises in recent years pointing to "Descartes'
Error" in his unnatural separation of mind and
body trailed by over three hundred years rebuttals
by the individual most credited with ensuring Aristotelian
empiricism would remain foundational to Enlightenment
and post-Enlightenment Western epistemology: John
Locke. Invoking the oft-quoted metaphor of mind as
a tabula rasa, or "white paper void of all characters,"
Locke opposed Descarte's assumptions of rationalism
as a priori human nature and rejected the rationalist
argument that the human mind is furnished with innate
ideas and conceptions of truth. Like Aristotle, Locke
argued that only verifiable sensory perception could
provide the mind with its ideas. Crucial to our discussion
here, he further distinguished between what he perceived
to be the two modes of human experience: sensation
and reflection. Sensation, for Locke, referred to
sense perception, which is "the great source
of most of our ideas." Reflection, in contrast,
meant "the perception of the operation of our
own mind within us," which is "the other
fountain from which experience furnisheth the understanding
of ideas." And so, echoing Aristotle's voyeuristic
conception of knowledge, these dualistic modes of
experience remained necessarily and tellingly incapable
of more than absorbing and indexing the meaning always
already external and latent in the object itself.
Thus Locke did no better than his French antagonist
in locating the human mind in the body, and placing
the human individual in active intercourse with its
environment in the ongoing ontogenesis of meaning.
____Before
turning the corner on this brief survey of the roots
of our modern Western notions of knowledge, value
and meaning, it is important to make several points
regarding the issues we have covered so quickly. First,
it must be made clear that, though it would be difficult
to overstate the myriad of profound effects Platonic
and Aristotelian thought have had on the West's conceptions
of meaning, I do not mean to argue categorically that
these schemas have constrained the parameters of actual
human experience. On the contrary, I want to suggest
that, in countless ways, in an immeasurable number
of lived moments, human experience has time and time
again called into question the most basic tenets of
these venerable theories of meaning. How is it possible,
then, in the two and a half millennia since the time
of Protagoras through the time of Descartes, Locke
and the Western Enlightenment, that no major epistemologies
were successfully posited or planted which could be
said to effectively counter the vast suppositions
and implications of the rationalist and empiricist
epistemologies? Even if some very wise Greek men were
able to articulate and establish such theories millennia
ago, how have these biases persisted to the present
day?
____Though
there may be other explanations for this, I would
like to argue three key reasons. First, returning
to the cognitive error, the metaphysical-philosophic
fallacy, which Dewey, Arendt and others have addressed,
provides one set of answers to this riddle. And this
brings us back to two elemental technologies: metaphor
and zero. Another reason may simply be that these
epistemologies were able to recruit some of the finest
minds in Western history toward redirecting and channeling
the visions of those rare heretics, prophets and scholars
who articulated alternative courses back into these
epistemological mainstreams. But first we turn to
the question of metaphor.
____The
enshrinement of the cognitive construct and its separation
from the human subject is a phenomenon as old as humanity
itself, at least since that time when that first symbolic
signification allowed conscious cognition to splinter
off from affective embodiment. In Life of the Mind,
Arendt described the "actual function" of
metaphor in language and thought: "The metaphor,
bridging the gap between inward mental activities
and the world of appearances, was certainly the greatest
gift language could bestow on philosophy." Yet
she cautions that, "the metaphor itself is poetic
rather than philosophical in origin." Perhaps
in their determination to provide a method of dialectical
discourse as rigorously rational as the science of
geometry, Plato, Aristotle and those who followed
in their footsteps, sought to treat metaphor in discourse
as a quasi-mathematical function, such as in the formula
"A:B = C:D." Arendt notes that in imposing
this mathematical universality on metaphor, the philosophers
missed a crucial point about how human language actually
functions. Drawing a poetic parallel between internal
states and shared sensory experience serves to elucidate
the internal state. In the sonnet which begins, "Shall
I compare thee to a summer's day?" Shakespeare
suggests distinctions of similarity and difference
which allow us to understand the love he feels for
this woman. Arendt points out that metaphor doesn't
work the other way around. The poem teaches us nothing
about summer weather. Arendt argues that the actual
irreversibility of metaphor, as we discover through
poetry rather than through philosophy, indicates the
"absolute primacy of the world of appearances,"
the embodied nature of consciousness. Thus, "The
two-world theory … is a metaphysical delusion
with which the experience of thought is plagued. Language,
by lending itself to metaphorical usage, enables us
to think, that is, to have traffic with non-sensory
matters, because it permits a carrying-over, metapherein,
of our sense experiences. There are not two worlds
because metaphor unites them" (in Dowdy, 176).
____As
I will show in the following chapter, at least one
culture in the Eastern hemisphere had begun, before
the time of Socrates, to delve deeply into this question
of human perceptual error and the foundational existential
impacts it was believed to engender. Seife's historical
analysis suggests that the difference may be indicated
in the West's virulent rejection of the mathematical
concept of "zero" and specifically in Aristotle's
abhorrence of the notion of "nothingness."
This would lead to an inability-or unwillingness-to
accept the epistemological possibility of the absence
of an a priori. When Aristotle's pupil, Alexander
the Great, brought the concept of zero back with him
to Athens following his conquest of Babylonia in 326
B.C., Euclidean geometry had been woven deep into
the fabric of Greek social epistemology. To have accepted
zero into the world of these established principles
would have been to admit the existence of irrational
numbers, a possibility which was anathema to the theories
of meaning which had been built around geometry's
universal and eternal forms. Zero would undermine
Aristotle's meticulous proof of the Unmoved Mover
at the outermost reaches of the celestial orbs. Seife
describes how the concept of zero or nothingness was
considered so disruptive and dangerous to the fabric
of Athenian society that those who spoke of it could
be sentenced to death. And they were. And so, in the
absence of nothingness, the a priori space of metaphysical
virtuality became an epistemological necessity, instituting
the staggering, preternatural two-world theory, the
alienation of mind and body, of humanity and its own
creations.
____Augustine
provides a compelling example of the way in which
one potentially divergent social epistemology was
effectively reconciled with classical Greek thought. Though this is not the place to enquire into the origins
of Christian theology, it is arguable that Jesus of
Nazareth's teachings were never designed to adhere
strictly to either the traditional rationalist or
empiricist theories of meaning. Though written accounts
of his views appear to resonate somewhat with the
Platonic notions of the duality of spirit and matter,
scholars such as Kenneth Burke and Walter Spong have
contended it is a safer bet that the Christian prophet's
intention was to speak more explicitly against the
vast, megalithic Roman "Empire of venality,"
and to recast human meaning within a reinvigorated
and (at the time) radical devotion to family, community
and brotherly love.
____Three
centuries after the death of Christ, and by the time
Augustine had converted from his earlier Neoplatonic
allegiance to the Christian faith, the once-indomitable
Roman Empire had also adopted Christianity as its
own official doctrine of faith. And Rome was in a
state of profound crisis and disarray. There was the
threat of the Manichean heresy with which to contend,
the dualistic Neoplatonic religion to which Augustine
had belonged for nearly a decade of his adult life,
then widely current in the Western Roman Empire. These
followers of the second-century sage Mani held that
the cosmos had at one time consisted of pure Light
and spirit, but had been invaded by the physical realm
of Darkness. The religion's followers had successfully
institutionalized many of Plato's teachings in a theological
division of members into the elect, who preached and
performed no labor, and the far more numerous auditors,
who hoped to be reborn as elect in return for devoting
their lives to the physical labor upon which the communities
subsisted. In addition, the Donatists, one powerful
Christian sect, posed another significant threat to
the cohesion of the Christian Roman Empire in holding
that the sacraments were invalid unless administered
by a sinless ecclesiastic. And the Pelagians presented
yet another serious dilemma for the Roman Church in
their steadfast denial of the doctrine of original
sin. As bishop of Hippo, one of the most besieged
cities in the Empire, and as Rome's preeminent theologian
of the day, Augustine devoted himself to the task
of negotiating this embattled epistemological terrain,
to appeasing the vying interests, and crafting a tightly
constructed cognitive schema within a viable and united
Christian institution. Beyond battling these specific
fractions, Augustine was further forced to explain
how it was that Roman life was so much more secure
when Rome was under Pagan rule when it was crumbling
under the auspices of the Christian faith. In his
rather heroic efforts to save Rome from disintegration
and redeem Christianity, Augustine developed his cognitive
schema of original sin and divine grace, divine sovereignty,
and predestination. And, though history shows he was
unable to prevent the dissolution of the Empire, his
cognitive institution-building laid the lasting foundation
upon which Roman Catholic and Protestant theology
alike are largely based to this day. And this was
accomplished through metaphor.
____As
Burke and Dowdy have argued, it was Augustine's use
of an elegantly effortless metaphorical device which
provides the key to understanding how Augustine managed
to fuse disparate theologies, defuse the warring inconsistencies
of Platonic and Christian thought, and construct the
overarching institutional epistemology we know of
as modern Christianity. This was, of course, Augustine's
notion of "the turning." His conception
of the City of Man, which could only ever be the earthly
and fallen incarnation of The City of God until its
ultimate "turning" toward the divine, was
his grand apologia and answer to the crisis of Rome
under Christian dominion. And his conception of the
ecclesiastic "turning," the priest's miraculous
sanctification in the act of delivering the sacrament,
did ultimately appease the Donatists, though not before
their forces conquered the city Hippo and took the
life of its esteemed bishop. Yet it was Augustine's
meticulous articulation of these sociotechnical aesthetic/religious
devices, and his metaphorical "turning"
in particular, which enabled Augustine to construct
the robust cognitive schema which would lastingly
bridge the once-yawning schism between the Platonic
and Christian designs for meaning, and between the
transcendent life of the spirit and the persistent
fact of the flesh.
____Yet,
despite the remarkable persistence of the Platonic
and Aristotelian legacies, in 18th and 19th century
Europe Western epistemology took a sudden turn toward
a concern with earthly human experience. Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine and Descartes had assiduously constructed
what had-by the time of the Industrial Revolution-come
to be an epistemological, labyrinthine stronghold
of established cognitive schemas. This cognitive framework
had, in part due to an alchemy of trade, proselytizing
and military incursions, been fortified, extended
and enshrined throughout Europe and much of Western
Asia. Throughout the church, academe, and the increasingly
robust, mechanized political economy, Western man's
devotion to those cognitive constructions of transcendent
truths appeared unshakeable. And the human being's
embodied, affective experience and dynamic interaction
with its natural environment was consigned to that
vast heap of worldly and unworthy concerns. The massive
existential transformations of the Industrial Revolution,
however, would finally redirect the course of Western
thought-and from this point on Western conceptions
of value and meaning would never be quite the same.
____And
yet, in a parallel time, in the Eastern cultures of
India, China and Japan, an altogether different and
unique ontological space was being mapped and populated
with technologies and subjectivities. And it is to
these cultures and their social epistemologies that
we must first turn for insights into how it might
have been.
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