is hardly the point of being human. Cultural historian William I. Thompson says it best: “For the mechanists, the flesh is slow, sloppy, and wet, and, therefore, primitive.…[But] slow and wet is the ontology of birth and the act of making love.…Fast is fine for the programmed crystalline world of no surprises and no discoveries, but slow is better for the creative world of erotic and intellectual play.”24 It is exactly our inefficiency that gets to the heart of the human condition. Being embedded in our biological messiness explains our mortality; the sting of death, loss, and grief; and the joy and struggle of loving, of bringing up a child, writing a song, dancing, and philosophizing. Embracing this keeps us close to the irreducible mystery of the way nature works itself into the body, the body into consciousness, and consciousness back into nature.
The philosopher of science E. A. Burtt, in his 1925 masterpiece The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, talked of “metaphysical barbarism” as the price we paid for the power of modern science, which he, along with many others since, thought worthwhile. Today, in an age marked by genocide, weapons of mass destruction, and ecocide, it seems long past due to renegotiate the terms of our culture’s Faustian bargain.
The Contradictory Logic of the Heart — Dialectics
One of the great ironies of modernity is that we have now exposed the philosophical absurdity of the Cartesian world-machine at exactly the same time that machinery has become nearly ubiquitous, defining almost every aspect of our direct experience of reality. Virtually every object in the room where I write — books, chairs, tables, computer, phone, and lamp — has been machine made. The components of the house itself — the sheetrock walls, the windows and blinds, the doors and floors — were all fashioned by machines. We live our lives moving from one manufactured interior to another. The primary reality of our wilderness origins has been eclipsed from direct experience, literally buried under our ever expanding cities. Faith in the Cartesian abstraction has led us to create a secondary reality that embodies that abstraction. We experience the world-as-machine because we live in a machine-made world.
The logic that got us here goes back to an original act of splitting: between agriculture and wilderness, or the fence that separated the civilized farm from undomesticated nature. From this has flowed a whole series of related, supporting splits: the outer objective world of matter from inner, subjective life, the rational from the irrational, idea from emotion, the human from the animal. One can trace a philosophical thread from Descartes back to humankind’s original alienation from wilderness. In each case of the above pairs, the first term is privileged over the second in a hierarchical dualism that is tearing our world apart. This brings up a fundamental issue about types of logic that we need to be clear about in recovering the quest.
Splitting reality into pairs of absolute opposites requires the deductive logic of noncontradiction, also called syllogistic logic. This stipulates that one thing, or A, cannot be something else, such as B, and still be A (A cannot be not-A). This seems self-evident and very useful, since it allows us to define pieces of reality unambiguously, as if they existed like parts of a machine. Each thing is understood as wholly distinct in itself and distinguishable from everything else. Defining each individual thing as isolated requires a related process of abstraction from the field of experience, taking things apart and then analyzing how they fit together. Our primary methodological habits have become abstraction, analysis, and critique. But the process of dismantling and separating cannot, in principle, make meaning. Meaning requires putting things together, making connections; it requires narrative description, integration, reconstruction, and synthesis, all of which run on a different logic.
For example, what of Descartes’s poor cat? In strict Cartesian fashion we can describe the beating heart of a living animal in abstract, measurable terms, even accounting for its changing dimensions over time — the volume of its chambers, the force of contraction, and the speed and pressure of the blood flow. But the truth is, when disconnected from the body, the heart no longer works, and neither does its owner. A living heart can only be understood in context. The separated pieces need to be reconnected and related through a process of creative integration and synthesis. This recognizes that the beating heart requires breathing lungs and healthy kidneys, oxygenating and detoxifying the blood flowing in the coronary arteries, feeding the heart muscle. We deepen our understanding of the healthy heart by recognizing the role of diet, exercise, environment, and general lifestyle. Further, as we consider these issues, in order to evaluate any particular heart, we ultimately must account for the mental and emotional state of the whole living creature in relationship with its total living environment. The bigger the picture, the more relations established, the deeper and more meaningful the understanding. We refer to this simply as wholistic thinking.
The search for meaning and value — the quest — requires integration and synthesis, which rests on the nonsyllogistic, contradictory logic of seeing how opposites give each other meaning. There is no up without connection to down, no hot without cold, no black without white, no A without not-A. Not surprisingly, we see this as a foundational principle in non-Western philosophies like Zen Buddhism or Taoism, where the meaning of yin is in relationship to its opposite, yang: female requires male, outer requires inner, matter requires mind, and so on. Such logic is common in primal and shamanic cosmologies, where knowledge based on direct experience and the closeness of wilderness immediately confronts one with the paradoxical structure of consciousness. We can call this dialectical as opposed to dualistic logic. This is the logic that is expressed in the dialektike of Socratic discussion, which recognizes that meaning begins and ends with unique, fully embodied human beings who inevitably experience the world differently. Understanding comes through face-to-face discussion, where the partial truth of thesis is challenged by the partial truth of antithesis, so that both can be integrated and transcended in a more-inclusive synthesis. This then becomes a new thesis, and so on. Western thinkers typically stumble over dialectical thinking and get stuck on one side or the other of paradoxical dualisms — mind-body, civilization-wilderness, human-animal.
In practice, we engage in dialectical synthesis all the time; it is necessary and unavoidable. Yet we have also failed to honor it and to cultivate it as a habit. This is striking in higher education, where one hears endless calls for teaching analytical and critical thinking skills but almost nothing about synthesis and constructive and creative skills. Without these complementary opposites we remain stuck. Wholistic, big-picture thinking is either neglected or produces frozen structures of meaning, blocking an understanding of integrated, organic, growing wholes — the whole person, the whole society, the entire species, the planet.
“There Is No Such Thing as Society”
Descartes helped eliminate the method for making meaning from the inner, emotional, qualitative data of the wisdom quest. Classical Liberalism eliminated the motive for even pursuing it. The clearest argument for this comes through the lineage of the classical Liberal philosophers, starting with Thomas Hobbes and proceeding through John Locke, Adam Smith, and America’s founding fathers, who embodied these ideas in the Constitution of the United States. American democracy offers the clearest example of a society created de novo according to the principles of Lockean Liberalism. This model is now in the final stages of globalizing under the guidance of the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower. In this sense the United States is the paradigmatic modern polity, demonstrating with great clarity both its most life-affirming and destructive aspects. While the following discussion focuses on America, in principle it is increasingly applicable globally.
As I’ve said, the creation of the political vision of Liberalism emerged from the truth quest — from a reflective, passionate concern with the good of the whole. But the Liberal values of personal freedom, private property, and competitive individualism were presented in Cartesian fashion as absolutes, abstracted from the whole without a living connection to their opposites: altruism, generosity, service to and responsibility for others, and love of community. As a result, the less-tangible, hard-to-measure, supreme values — love,
