Skreeworld - A New Paradigm 3

Skreeworld - A New Paradigm 3
The cosmological estrangement of modern consciousness initiated by Corpernicus and the ontological estrangement initiated by Descartes were completed by the epistemological estrangement initiated by Kant: a threefold mutually enforced prison of modern alienation.
There is a striking resemblance between this state of affairs and the condition that Gregory Bateson famously described as the "double bind"; the impossibly problematic situation in which mutually contradictory demands eventually lead a person to become schizophrenic. In Batesons formulation, there were four basic premises necessary to constitute a double bind situation between a child and a "schizophrenogenic" mother:
1: the child's relationship to the mother is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the child to assess communications from the mother accurately.
2: The child receives contradictory or incompatible information from the mother at different levels, whereby, for example, her explicit verbal communication is fundamentally denied by the "meta communication", the none verbal context in which the explicit message is conveyed (thus the mother who says to her child with hostile eyes and a rigid body, "Darling, you know I love you so much"). The two sets of signals cannot be understood as coherent.
3: The child is not given any opportunity to ask questions of the mother that would clarify the communication or resolve the contradiction.
4: The child cannot leave the field, i.e, the relationship. In such circumstances, Bateson found, the child is forced to distort his or her perception of both outer and inner realities, with serious psychopathological consequences.
Now if we substitute in these four premises 'world' for mother, and 'human being' for child, we have the modern double bind in a nutshell:
1: The human beings relationship to the world is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the human being to assess the nature of that world accurately.
2: The human mind receives contradictory or incompatible information about its situation with respect to the world, whereby its inner psychological and spiritual sense of things is incoherent with the scientific metacommunication
3: Epistemologically, the human mind cannot achieve direct communication with the world.
4: Existentially, the human being cannot leave the field.
The differences between Batesons psychiatric double bind and the modern existential condition are more in degree than in kind: the modern condition is an extraordinarily encompassing and fundamental double bind, made less immediately conspicuous simply because it is so universal. We have the post Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful and personal subject confronting an unconscious, purposeless and impersonal universe, with these compounded by by the post Kantian dilemma of there being no possible means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence. We are evolved from, embedded in and defined by a reality that is radically alien to our own, and moreover can never be directly contacted in cognition.
This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognised in one form or another since at least Pascal: "I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces." Our psychological and spiritual predispositions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfilment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely different to that quest, soulless in character and nullifying in its effects. We are at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.
If we follow Batesons diagnosis and apply it to the larger modern condition, it should not be surprising what kinds of response the modern psyche has made to this situation as it attempts to escape the double binds contradictions. Either inner or outer realities tend to be distorted: inner feelings are repressed and denied, as in apathy and psychic numbing, or they are inflated in compensation, as in narcissism and egocentrism; or the outer world is slavishly submitted to as the only reality, or it is aggressively objectified and exploited. There is also the strategy of flight, through various forms of escapism: compulsive economic consumption, absorption in the mass media, faddish, cults, ideologies, nationalistic fervour, alcoholism, drug addiction. When avoidance mechanisms cannot be sustained there is anxiety, paranoia, chronic hostility, a feeling of helpless victimisation, a tendency to suspect all meanings, an impulse toward self negation, a sense of purposelessness and absurdity, a feeling of irresolvable inner contradiction, a fragmenting of consciousness. And at the extreme, there are the full blown psychopathological reactions of the schizophrenic: self destructive violence, delusional States, massive amnesia, catatonia, automatism, mania, nihilism. The modern world knows each of these reactions in various combinations and compromise formations, and it's social and political life is notoriously so determined.
Nor should it be surprising that modern philosophy finds itself in the condition we now see. Of course modern philosophy has brought forth some courageous intellectual responses to the post Copernican situation, but by and large the philosophy that dominated last century and the early years of this resembles nothing so much as a severe obsessive compulsive sitting on his bed repeatedly tying and untying his shoes because he never quite gets it right - while in the meantime Socrates, Hegel and Aquinas are already high up the mountain on their hike, breathing the bracing alpine air, seeing new and unexpected vistas.
But there is one crucial way in which the modern situation is not identical to the psychiatric double bind, and this is the fact that the modern human being has not simply been a helpless child, but has actively engaged the world and pursued a specific strategy and mode of activity - a Promethean project of freeing itself from and controlling nature. The modern mind has demanded a specific type of interpretation of the world: it's scientific method has required explanations of phenomena that are concretely predictive, and therefore impersonal, mechanistic, structural. To fulfil their purposes, these explanations of the universe have been systematically "cleansed" of all spiritual and human qualities. Of course we cannot be certain that the world is in fact what these explanations suggest. We can be certain only that the world is to an indeterminate extent susceptible to this way of interpretation. Kants insight is a sword that cuts two ways. Although on the one hand it appears to place the world beyond the grasp of the human mind, on the other hand it recognises that the soulless and impersonal world of modern scientific cognition is not necessarily the whole story. Rather, that world is the only kind of story that for the past three centuries the Western mind has considered justifiable in Ernest Gellners words, "It was Kants merit to see that this compulsion (for mechanistic impersonal explanation) is in us, not in things." And, "it was Webers to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, that it is subject to this compulsion."
Hence one crucial part of the modern double bind is not airtight. In the case of Batesons schizophrenogenic mother and child, the mother more or less holds all the cards, for she unilaterally controls the communication. But the lesson of Kant is that the locus of the communication problem - i.e., the problem of human knowledge of the world - must be viewed as centring in the human mind, not in the world as such. Therefore it is theoretically possible that the human has more cards than it is playing. The pivot of the modern predicament is epistemological, and it is here that we should look for an opening.


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