Patterning in Time and the History (and Future) of Philosophy

Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future

One of the most useful things Creative Systems ideas do is help us put specific truths in historical perspective.  We can apply the Creative Function to help delineate how our different ways of thinking about truth—scientific truth, religious truth, artistic truth, the evolution of our ideas about government, education, or the human body—have evolved through time.  We find particularly good example in how it provides a big picture vantage for thinking about philosophical truth.

Right off, Creative Systems Theory alerts us to inherent limits. Philosophy, even when interpreted very broadly, as here, means ideas that can be verbally articulated and put in some rational form (even if their focus is the non-rational).  Thus while  philosophy claims to be about truth itself, the perspective it views truth from often limits what it is capable of seeing.  John Keats voiced the limitation as a rhetorical question, “Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy?”

But with that recognized, philosophical truth provides a valuable window. It is at least representative of broader understanding.  And because it tends toward verbal descriptions and logical analysis it is more amenable to brief synopsis (ignoring for the moment that philosophers are rarely brief) than say the historical “beliefs” of art, government, or religion.

The first current includes thinkers such as Plato and philosophers of more religious bent who believed that in the end what we can most rely on is inner experience, whether mental or spiritual.  The second includes thinkers who in one way or another believed we rely ultimately (or at least most usefully) on our senses, such as the early natural philosophers, Aristotle, and most of modern science.  Creative Systems Theory expands on this recognition by using its notion that polarities organize creatively. The history of ideas becomes a chronicling of the diverse ways this two-handed interplay has been perceived through time, and from different perspectives at any particular point in time.

If nothing else, this observation offers the possibility of synopsis and an antidote to that common lack of brevity in philosophical writings.  From this perspective, two basic changes shape this philosophical trek through time—both now familiar.  The first is that gradual shift from left-hand to right-hand emphasis over the course of creative differentiation.  Left-handed cosmologies predominate in earliest cultural periods while more right-handed worldviews come to the fore as we move toward the present.  The second is the role of cultural stages.  Incubation, inspiration, perspiration, and polishing tasks give each hand identifiable characteristics depending on which hand predominates.  Here these creative tasks translate into the animistic thought of tribal times, the more magical thought of the earlier civilizations, the morally-focused philosophies of the Middle Ages, and the opposed material and romantic perspectives of the Modern Age.

What follows is highly (even absurdly) abridged.  But given our task in these pages, more detailed analysis is best left for other writings.  In deference to space, I will mention thinkers without great elaboration.  Some familiarity with Western philosophy’s people and traditions is helpful, but the most important recognitions concern the suggested underlying patterns.

Many people would consider where we must start not really philosophy. Tribal (Pre-Axis) times precede written language.  But the animistic assumptions of Pre-Axial realities represent a particular kind of worldview.  Framed creatively, we see a reality in which left-hand sensibilities strongly predominate.  It is not that right hand elements are denied, rather, simply, that they are not yet  strongly present.  All is seen as connected—tribe, nature, spirit, time—and these connections define truth.  People assume more right-hand and left-hand roles.  A tribal chief’s duties are more “secular” than those of a shaman.  But differences manifest within an almost entirely unitary holding of experience.

The cosmologies of civilization’s early rise (Early-Axis) more overtly acknowledge both hands of truth, but the left hand retains dominance.  The magical and mythic beliefs of ancient Egypt, the Incas and Aztecs, classical India, or Olympian Greece, each, to varying degrees, gave final word to the archetypally feminine.   Plato’s philosophy belongs in this left-hand tradition, though he conceived of truth’s left hand more in terms of mind than spirit.  In Plato’s cave, external reality is a play of shadows cast by internal essences—the “forms” or “ideas.”  Aristotle, along with the earlier Greek natural philosophers focused more outwardly, on phenomena that could be understood with the senses: the natural world, speech, behavior.  They laid the foundation for modern scientific thought.

But even Aristotle’s ideas made but a start to the right.  Aristotle saw divine action as what began it all—the “unmoved mover”—and invisible causal forces behind motion of every sort.

With culture’s perspiration stage (Middle-Axis) the strength of truth’s two hands became more balanced.  Because philosophy tends to take expression from the more reflective side of our rationality (in contrast to politics or economics), medieval philosophical writings tend still to lean toward the archetypally feminine.  This continued left-handed emphasis is particularly evident in expressly theistic formulations such as the fourth century ideas of St. Augustine of Hippo or those of medieval mystics such as Meister Eckhard or Hildegard of Bingen.  But the Middle Ages saw also a manifesting of expressly secular philosophy.  While St. Thomas Aquinas’s ideas were deeply grounded in religious principle, they followed on and extended the tradition of Aristotle.  William of Ockham went even further in pressing against the constraints of orthodox religious cosmology.

With the Modern Age (Late- Axis), archetypally masculine philosophical sensibilities moved forefront.  In the empiricism of Bacon, Locke, and Hume, right-hand esthetics were assumed to shape the left.  Positivist formulations, such those of Saint-Simon and Comte relied almost exclusively on truth’s right hand as did the more extreme of materialist and early scientific views (Hobbes and Laplace). (I say extreme because most early scientists, and most we associate with the birth of the Scientific Age, were deeply religious.)  Dualism became explicit in the seventeenth-century thinking of Rene’ Descartes (and in a less absolutely cleaved form in the ideas of Leibnitz). We see the greatest right hand preeminence in current times with the claims of behaviorism and scientism that material explanation is all we need.

Modern Age left-hand cosmologies arose either as a counterbalance to or reaction against this new right-hand supremacy.  The most important include modern forms of idealism (Berkeley, Kant, Hegel) along with eighteenth- and nineteenth- century romanticism (Rousseau, Schelling, Goethe).  Idealist cosmologies acknowledge the validity of both of truth’s hands and assume that they interact—but, in the end, truth’s left hand defines the right.  Spinoza’s equating of God with nature set the stage for romanticism’s polar response to the growing dominance of right-hand sensibilities.

Note that this progression brings us eventually to the impasse we encountered in the last chapter.  As left-hand sensibilities more and more give over dominance to right, eventually we confront that Dilemma of Trajectory. Thought’s history describes a step-by-step  replacing of mysticism by “objectivity.”  Modern thought represents a final victory for the objective (and assumes that future thought will simply reap the rewards of that victory).

We are left with the question of whether there is anywhere left to go.  At the least, we are left with whether philosophy has anywhere left to go.  If extreme advocates of right-hand truth are correct and right-hand truth is all there ever really was (the left-hand was just a pleasant illusion) then in effect we’ve arrived. Philosophy has appropriately reached the end of its usefulness—now an historical artifact (its functions now replaced by economics, science, and technology).

Certainly philosophy confronts difficulties. (Being that philosophy always draws somewhat on the more reflective, left-hand side of the rational, the Dilemma of Trajectory puts philosophy in an ultimate quandary.)    At Cultural Maturity’s threshold, the empirical and the transcendental threads each reflect their respective Transitional Absurdities.  An extreme objectivity that leaves out half of the data can hardly be considered objective.  And an extreme subjectivity that leaves out the subject—at least in any embodied sense—is ultimately useless.  (It is understandable that the newspaper might list so few job openings for philosophers.) And as we’ve seen, Transition’s picture has more than just philosophical problems.

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Philosophy as Patterning in Time

How Cultural Maturity resolves the transitional predicament is now familiar.  Cultural Maturity’s Integrative Meta-Perspective does three things with regard to philosophy’s right- and left-hand traditions.  First, it challenges claims from either side to the last word.  Second, it asserts that we must find ways to draw a circle around polar extremes.  (It proposes that even just making right- and left-hand truths separate but equal—as with Cartesian dualism—is not enough.)  And finally, it proposes that such a circle must embrace not just here and now difference, but differences through time (that task of Reengagement—necessary if bridging is to make any real sense given Transition’s Dilemma of Trajectory).

Cultural Maturity proposes not just that these changes provide a way to go on, they open the door to greater sophistication of understanding all the way around.  Neither hand gets away unscathed and neither does truth as a whole.  (The mythic gatekeeper steps aside to reveal neither the right hand’s hoped for pot of gold nor the left hand’s hoped for flash of final enlightenment.)  But the truths of both hands become each more overt in their significance, more robust, more multi-hued in conception, and more extensive in their appropriate concerns.  And our conscious recognition of truth as a whole becomes a more vital expression of the full magnitude of human experience.  In some small way, we see this with any bridging.  And it is just as true for truth’s most encompassing of systemic relationships.

A person might appropriately ask whether culturally mature perspective is accurately thought of as philosophy?   The post-modern argument for the end of philosophy—at least as a pursuit of final abstracted truths—is legitimate.  And culturally mature truth is never just philosophical.  It is always as much about politics, science, sociology, religion, or art.  But with regard to questions of what makes truths true, its concerns certainly parallel those of philosophical inquiry.  I’ve proposed that the future is requiring us all to be philosophers.

Indeed, we can think of Cultural Maturity’s vantage as offering fresh life to the philosophical enterprise.  Similar to what we saw for the study of history, integrative perspective offers that philosophical inquiry might be newly vital and substantive.  Take the left hand out of endeavors that require at least a touch of it for their significance and they become desiccated and irrelevant.  But add it back in an integrative fashion and they can flower with special beauty.  And how Reengagement revitalizes philosophical concerns is the smaller part of it.  Cultural Maturity expands philosophical possibilities.  Here we’ve witnessed one key way culturally mature perspective earns its philosophical mettle in the help it often provides for grappling with eternal conceptual quandaries.

At the least, Cultural Maturity makes the “big picture” newly relevant, indeed, essential.  What culturally mature truth gives us is necessarily more humble than the ultimate answers to which classical philosophy aspired.  But it succeeds in providing new appreciation for the wonders (along with the wondrous absurdities) of being human.  And it offers a kind of practical applicability that philosophy has rarely been able to provide.  Perhaps a time will come when parents no longer cringe—appropriately—when they hear their child has chosen philosophy as a college major.