Two Greatest Ideas

In the summer of 1973 and in advance of my final year at St Andrews, I read Bertrand Russell’s magisterial History of Western Philosophy, which gave me my first real understanding of the trajectory of Western thought. Then in 1994, Anne Baring drew my attention to the equally magisterial The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, which adopts a very different take of evolution towards a participatory worldview, a thesis related to that of the present book under review, of which more below. As it happens, neither of these books is in the bibliography. The two greatest ideas of the title are that the human mind can grasp the universe and secondly, that the human mind can grasp itself. The book is a brilliant, panoramic and original contribution to the history of ideas, providing a new framework that sheds light on many of our current social and political tensions.

Pythagoras and his successors made a seminal contribution to the development of the first great idea that we can grasp the universe– incidentally, Russell referred rather disparagingly to Pythagoras as a cross between Einstein and Mary Baker Eddy. The key was understanding the structure of the universe as numerical, which provided the connection between mathematics, harmonics, astronomy, as well as ethics and politics on the basis of harmony. This implies a rational structure (Kosmos, which is also beauty), where universal natural laws correspond to moral laws so that morality means to live in harmony with these (’morality exists because the interior of a person follows the same principles as the cosmos). This idea was also influenced by monotheism. The big shift from the first to the second idea pivots on Descartes, and the key differences are set out in a table (p. 15) and summarised in this passage:

’The first great idea focuses the mind on the world as a whole [mind as open window]. A human being is a person, defined by its place in the universe and grounded in the property of rationality. The dominant moral value is harmony with the world, a world governed by reason. In order to achieve harmony, individuals need the virtues. The second great idea focuses the mind on the mind. A human being is a self, defined by its property of subjectivity. The dominant moral value is autonomy in the sense of self-governance. Moral discourse focuses on rights rather than virtues. Duties are the complement of rights, not the responsibilities of individuals to the whole.’

Further distinctions are that the first idea sees the mind as having no fixed edge, while with the second it has a fixed boundary; in the first, philosophy begins with metaphysics, while in the second, significantly, epistemology becomes primary. The individual chapters proceed historically, and also address the implications for art and architecture, poetry and the novel in a way similar to Pitirim Sorokin’s Crisis of our Age. The author discusses the importance of henosis (gnosis) in the context of both the Upanishads and Neoplatonism, interpreting enlightenment as realising the identity of Atman with Brahman. I think this line could have been further developed in the final chapter on intersubjectivity as the next potential phase. By definition, the experience of unifying the knower with knowing and the known is non-dual and the ultimate Self-knowledge. There is no grasping here either in the first or second context, significant because the very words comprehend and concept imply the duality of grasping with (cum) - the Latin words prehendere and capere both mean to grasp, as David Bohm noted. Ironically in some respects, Russell also regarded mind’s union with the universe as its highest good, though almost certainly in an impersonal sense. (p. 59)

Descartes’s revolution was to propose that the mind precedes the world – he was certain only about his own mind and its conscious states: ‘he knows his own mind first, then God, and then the world’ by representation, introducing a sharp division between objective and subjective corresponding to that between realism and idealism, and primary and secondary qualities where only the quantitative, visible and measurable is real. This in turn gives rise to subjectivity and qualia in the same way that it is assumed that matter is primary, and the brain generates consciousness. The author shows how these ideas are developed by the empiricists, Fichte, Kant and others, as well as subjectivity in art.

A key shift, the reverberations of which are only too present, is the change in the ground of morality from living in harmony with the world to individual autonomy, which one can see broadly reflected in liberal and conservative attitudes with respect to social harmony and the protection of individual rights. This is also expressed in the distinction expressed above between persons and selves as outer and inner categorisations: ‘the value of the person is the value of rationality. The value of the self is the value of subjectivity’ (p. 111) – which is reflected in different conceptions of dignity.

The last two chapters ask if we can grasp all of reality, proposing second-person intersubjectivity as the third greatest idea. This can be approached either from the inside out or the outside in, and in asking if the eye can see itself, the author could have reached for Eckhart who memorably said that the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees [in] me – pure and non-dual s/Self-reflexivity. Both these perspectives leave a missing piece to try to fit in, so maybe we should say that they are codependently arising and not try to achieve consilience by reducing one to the other.

In the final chapter, the author draws on phenomenology and could have brought in the I-Thou approach of Martin Buber. She does discuss Heidegger, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, also referring to the work of Iain McGilchrist. The precondition for the first idea to become significant is what she calls a revolution in subjectivity on the scale of the scientific revolution. What she advocates is in fact already developing through the more contemplative scientific approach of Goethe and what Brian Goodwin called a science of qualities, as well as through transpersonal psychology mapping the depths of human experience. Goethe pointed out that in contemplation we are one with what we contemplate, while in observation we separate ourselves – this seems to point back to the work of Richard Tarnas and others in developing not only a participatory worldview, but also participatory methodologies through cooperative enquiry and action research. Maybe we are further along the track than the author realises, but her original approach and analysis provide a great point of departure for further development.