Why We’re Schizoid

Romantics vs Scientists

Richard Tarnas, more eloquently than almost anyone I’ve read lately, captures how being a late-modern requires the juxtaposition within our collective psyche of a soulful Romanticism with a materialistic Science, and how that leads to a schizoid incoherence that we are all suffering whether we understand its causes or not:

Because both temperaments were deeply and simultaneously expressive of Western attitudes and yet were largely incompatible, a complex bifurcation of the Western outlook resulted. With the modern psyche so affected by the Romantic sensibility and in some sense identified with it, yet with the truth claims of science so formidable, modern man experienced in effect an intractable division between his mind and his soul. The same individual could appreciate, say, both Blake and Locke, but not in a coherent manner. Yeats’s esoteric vision of history could scarcely be conjoined with the history taught in modern universities. Rilke’s idealist ontology (“We are the bees of the invisible”) could not readily be accommodated by the assumptions of conventional science. As distinctly modern and influential a sensibility as T. S. Eliot’s was yet closer to Dante than to Darwin….

It is true that in the twentieth century, both scientist and artist simultaneously experienced the breakdown and dissolution of the old categories of time, space, causality, and substance. But the deeper discontinuities between the scientific universe and human aspiration remained unresolved. The modern experience was still vexed by a profound incoherence, with the dichotomies of the Romantic and scientific temperaments reflecting the Western Weltanschauung’s seemingly unbridgeable disjunction between human consciousness and unconscious cosmos. In a sense the two cultures, the two sensibilities, were present in varying proportion in every reflective individual of the modem West. And as the full character and implications of the scientific world view became explicit, that inner division was experienced as that of the sensitive human psyche situated in a world alien to human meaning. Modern man was a divided animal, inexplicably self-aware in an indifferent universe. (From The Passion of the Western Mind, 1991, pp 375ff. )

There is no more important problem to solve than the way we are divided by these two ‘temperaments’. On one level it seems like an intellectual problem that has little relevance outside a university seminar room, but it’s so much more central to the civilizational breakdown we are currently suffering. It’s at the heart of what is making us so crazy right now. But perhaps more importantly, especially regarding the argument I’ve been trying to make here over the years, It’s what makes us so impotent to fight how we are being dehumanized by the TCM.¹ The Romantics always lose in their confrontation with the scientists because within our current consensus reality their truth is subjective, and the scientists’ truth is objective, and objective seems more real, more provable, more rational. But it is at its heart nihilistic.²

And science always wins in this confrontation because it makes the case that it actually gets stuff done, that it lives in the real, objective world, not in some subjective fantasy world . It’s not that the subjective is unimportant, but it’s private, and so it’s not something that has any authority in the public square. But science doesn’t understand how its methodology creates a reductive, withered version reality that has very little to do with what’s most deeply important about living a deeply grounded, flourishing human life. Subjective truth is the more important kind of truth for living any kind of meaningful life, but it doesn’t line up with the truth that science validates, so, you know, whatever. Believe what you want, but just keep it to yourself.

So finding religion might be a meaning solution for some individuals in their respective subjective spheres, but it doesn’t solve the civilizational problem. The future of civilization requires the integration of the Romantic and the Scientific, and the reason I spend so much time with Iain McGilchrist, David Bentley Hart, and Charles Taylor is that they are at the ‘cutting edge’ of trying to resolve this foundational, paralyzing incoherence. Tarnas himself has ideas about how to resolve it in ways are that are deeply compatible with my own thinking about all this, and so I add him to my list of kindred spirits.

And for Tarnas, as I’ve been writing about here for the last two years, finding a solution requires that we go back to the Germans, and particularly Goethe:

There were those who sought to encompass the schism by bridging the scientific and humanistic imperatives in both method and theory. Goethe led a naturphilosophie movement that strove to unite empirical observation and spiritual intuition into a science of nature more revealing than Newton’s, a science capable of grasping nature’s organic archetypal forms. The scientist could not, in Goethe’s view, arrive at nature’s deeper truths by detaching himself from nature and employing bloodless abstractions to understand it, registering the external world like a machine. Such a strategy guaranteed that the observed reality would be a partial illusion, a picture whose depths had been eliminated by an unconscious filter. Only by bringing observation and imaginative intuition into intimate interaction could man penetrate nature’s appearances and discover its essence. Then the archetypal form in each phenomenon could be elicited; then the universal could be recognized in the particular and reunited with it.

Goethe justified this approach with a philosophical stance sharply divergent from that of his older contemporary Kant. For while, like Kant, he recognized the human mind’s constructive role in knowledge, he nevertheless perceived man’s true relation to nature as overcoming the Kantian dualism. In Goethe’s vision, nature permeates everything, including the human mind and imagination. Hence nature’s truth does not exist as something independent and objective, but is revealed in the very act of human cognition. The human spirit does not simply impose its order on nature, as Kant thought. Rather, nature’s spirit brings forth its own order through man, who is the organ of nature’s self-revelation. For nature is not distinct from spirit but is itself spirit, inseparable not only from man but from God. God does not exist as a remote governor over nature, but “holds her close to her breast,” so that nature’s processes breathe God’s own spirit and power. Thus did Goethe unite poet and scientist in an analysis of nature that reflected his distinctively sensuous religiosity. (378-79)

I’d argue that what Tarnas describes in the previous paragraph is pretty much what Thomas Aquinas understood to be true. It was lost in the Christian West after Scotus and Occam.³ But it’s picked up again with Ficino and the artists who were influenced by his Christian Neoplatonism in the late 1400s. The Germans around the turn of the 18th Century add a more evolutionary dimension to it, and that, in turn, was picked up later by figures like A.N. Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and Teilhard de Chardin in the first part of the 20th Century. They all became fringe figures in the post-WWII period, but they can make a comeback. They deserve to be taken more seriously than they have been.

Three hundred years earlier, Leonardo, like Goethe, united within himself the artist and scientist , but it’s a hard tension to hold in balance. Few have been able to achieve it, and if they have, we never hear about them because it’s not something that interests the TCM-dominated consensus reality. Nevertheless both model how to integrate the soul’s aspirations and with those of science, and it’s they from whom we must learn to do it, not just as individuals, but as a civilization. It’s an approach that needs to be embraced by the public intellectuals who will shape the future consensus reality. It doesn’t seem possible now, but I believe it will when all the dust clears from the collapse of the prevailing consensus reality we are now living through. The political collapse is just a symptom of the deeper cultural collapse. That’s something too many Liberals don’t understand yet.

Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind came out about thirty-five years too early. Everyone who is concerned about imagining a soulful human future should read it now. We can’t imagine an achieveable human future unless we understand who we are and where we came from. I think there’s a receptivity for imagining something new in this moment that there was not in the early 90s except among a very few fringe types. Is what was fringe then working its way gradually to the center? Too early to tell, but I hope so.

1. TCM = Techno-Capitalist Matrix, a metaphor that describes how the consensus reality of modern societies is captured by a totalizing materialist/mechanistic metaphysical imaginary. Social Darwinism and Transhumanism are its ideologies.

2. As David Bentley Hart says,

PSYCHE: I fear—I dread—a nihilistic narrative reaching its ineluctable nihilistic terminus. Whatever else modernity is, good and bad alike, it’s most definitely also the project of a fully realized nihilism, in the most neutral philosophical sense of that term: the belief that there’s no eternal scale or realm or horizon of meaning and moral verity, and that instead the will in each of us stands before a universe devoid of any intrinsic structure of moral truths, and is now at liberty to create or destroy values as it chooses.

No doubt, in its dawn, this reduction of lived existence to the dialectic between an objectively meaningless cosmos and a subjectively self-creating will must have felt like a kind of emancipation; but it has always also been the metaphysical accomplice of a project of setting loose the will to power, now unencumbered by any sense of anything inviolable or sacred, or any sense of the self’s dependency upon a higher order of truth….

It’s pure ideology dissembling itself as scientific realism; it’s the will to power wrapping itself in the stolen garments of disinterested reason. It’s also pure insanity. Systematic disenchantment is, as it turns out, a mad and destructive delusion, which sees everything as machinery and so makes everything into a machine—a delusion that sees everything as already dead, and then contrives with boundless ingenuity and ease of conscience to prove the point by progressively killing the world. It’s all a cruel alienation from life . . . the very death of nature . . . of the soul. (pp 547 ff.)

3. I address this shift in The Cathedral lectures from a partiicpative ontology/epistemology to one that frees God from his role as the infrastructure of creation, but Tarnas explains it very nicely in his chapter on the late medieval period.