Boomeritis Sidebar E: The Genius Descartes Gets a Postmodern Drubbing

Boomeritis Sidebar E:  The Genius Descartes Gets a Postmodern Drubbing

“I was wondering.  If a postmodern novel had endnotes, and….”

“Why on earth would a novel have endnotes?” I interrupted.

“I don’t know. Confused author, can’t shut up, has to weigh in on everything.  Let me finish.  If a postmodern novel had endnotes, and in the novel the characters were two-dimensional, doesn’t that mean that in the endnotes they would only be one-dimensional?”

“I guess so, I dunno.  All I know is that I feel like I’m evaporating, sort of wasting away, going pale and anemic, and… Kim…?  Kim?….”

After her lecture on Tuesday, Lesa Powell stayed for an hour or two and talked with interested students about René Descartes, who she said was the first great modern (orange) philosopher and therefore the first great whipping boy of the green postmodernists.  Kim insisted that I stay for this, but why, I don’t know. 

“It will help you understand that idiotic AI you’re involved with.”

“Oh really?”

“Oh really.  The Cartesian dualism is the major sin of modernity, didn’t you know that?”  She began laughing, as if this were some sort of inside joke.  “And you don’t want to be living in sin, do you?  What are you, Wilber, all of 20 years old?  And already living in sin.”

At that point, Powell overheard Kim and interjected, “This young lady—is that you, Kim?  Yes—Kim here is pulling your leg, folks.  The Cartesian dualism is actually the beginning of a brilliant and profound Vedanta for the West, an enormous accomplishment spotted by a few geniuses like Moshe Kroy, but unfortunately a fact completely—and I mean completely—lost on the lemming-like loonies of postmodernism.  Care to hear why?”  And Lesa laughed her easy laugh, white teeth on black skin in the shimmering soft lights of the stage.

I thought, what the hell, I might as well hear this.  My mind had so many stretch marks on it already, I figured, what’s a few more contusions on my cortex, bruises on my brain?  It’s not like I actually needed it.

Woody Allen: “The brain—that’s my second favorite organ.”

“Don’t look so pained, Wilber,” Kim grinned. 

Lesa: “You’ve heard the constant refrain around Integral Center: this or that theorist is ‘half right, half wrong.’  And you know why we say that so often: it’s because no mind—and therefore no theorist—is capable of producing nothing but falsehood.  As Joan quips, ‘No one is smart enough to be wrong all the time.’  That means that every philosophical view and perspective has some sort of truth to it, and our job is put all the partial truths together in a wonderful tapestry of human possibilities, and not pick one partial truth and defend it to the death against all others.

“Well, that goes double for poor Descartes.  Of course he made some mistakes, most of them glaringly obvious to us of today; but the things he got right were profound—absolutely, astonishingly, outrageously profound.  And any sort of truly integral embrace would not be integral without the important, if partial, truths of Cartesianism.

“Almost three decades ago, a person who would eventually become a co-founder of IC wrote an essay called, ‘In Defense of Descartes,’ which began, ‘It has become a fashionable stupidity to rake Descartes over the coals, usually for all the wrong reasons.’  Three decades ago: that was right at the beginning of the postmodern invasion, the rise of the green meme, and the tsunami of the mean green meme.  Needless to say, the fashionable stupidity increased, becoming the first—and arguably the most influential—cornerstone of academic boomeritis.  I guarantee you, when you hear an attack on the Cartesian dualism, you are smack in the face of a nasty case of boomeritis.”

“See, Wilber, this could be fun.”

“I’d rather eat airline food.”

Lesa Powell smiled gently.  “So let’s start with perhaps the most amazing aspect of Descartes’s work, and then suggest a few ways that he might have gotten sidetracked.  To begin with, the cogito.  That is, ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ usually translated as, ‘I think, therefore I am.’  But that translation loses the immediacy of the intuition that impelled Descartes.  As interpreters such as Kroy and Bonnett have pointed out, this pithy phrase really has the meaning of: ‘consciousness, hence being.’ 

“In other words—and this was the basis of the famous Cartesian doubt—there are many things that I can doubt, but I cannot believably doubt my own consciousness in this moment.  My consciousness IS, and even if I tried to doubt it, it would be my consciousness doing the doubting.  I can imagine that my senses are being presented with a fake reality—say, a completely virtual reality or digital reality, which looks real but is merely a series of extremely realistic images.  But even then, I cannot doubt the consciousness that is doing the watching.  

“Likewise, I can imagine that my consciousness is delivered to me by a complex brain mechanism of neurotransmitters, synapses, and the like, so that my consciousness is merely a byproduct, an epiphenomenonon—but that is merely a rational deduction, and even that deduction is known only in my immediate consciousness.  This does not deny that the brain is involved in consciousness; it simply points out that unless the immediate reality of my own present consciousness is included in the equation, I am missing a reality that I cannot believably doubt in any event.

“Consciousness, hence being.  The very undeniability of my present awareness, the undeniability of my consciousness, immediately delivers to me a certainty of existence in this moment, a certainty of Being in the now-ness of this moment.  I cannot doubt consciousness and Being in this moment, for it is the ground of all knowing, all seeing, all existing.  This, of course, is exactly the path that had been taken by Vedanta, by Vajrayana, by the Neoplatonists, and by many other great wisdom traditions.  It is the path of I AM, and this great I AMness is said to open directly on to, or even to directly be, nothing other than pure Spirit, radiant God/dess, the Atman that is Brahman, timelessly and eternally—a supreme equation secreted in the fact that you cannot doubt the Immediacy of your own Now-ness.  Consciousness, therefore Being.  And Being is God in the state of I AM. 

“Who am I?  Ask that question over and over again, deeply.  Who am I?  What is it in me that is conscious of everything?  This self-inquiry was used by Sri Ramana Maharshi to realize the Self, the Self that is one with the entire Kosmos in all its radiant splendor.  In other words, Sri Ramana Maharshi was using the Cartesian doubt to drive to heart of the Atman that is Brahman—although, of course, the technique is centuries old.  Descartes did not invent it, he merely rediscovered it.  In Descartes’s burning desire to know ‘What is ultimately true?  What is so true that it can never be doubted?,’ he turned his attention inward with such a fierce and awesome dedication to Truth that he eventually was brought—as all such sincere and prolonged self-inquiry is—directly to the Self that is the Witness of all worlds, a Self that can never be believably doubted because it is always already ever-present.  Consciousness IS Being, even here and now.

“How similar was this Cartesian doubt to the Path of Awakening in the great wisdom traditions?  Here is only one example, taken from Dzogchen Buddhism, generally regarded as the highest of the Buddha’s teachings.  This is from the great Paltrul’s ‘Self-Liberated Mind’:

“‘At times it happens that some meditators say that it is difficult to recognize the nature of the mind (note: in Dzogchen, ‘the nature of the mind’ means the ultimate reality of pure Emptiness or primordial Spirit).  Some practitioners believe it to be impossible to recognize the nature of mind.  They become depressed with tears streaming down their cheeks.  There is no reason at all to become sad.  It is not at all impossible to recognize.  Rest directly in that which thinks that it is impossible to recognize the nature of the mind, and that is exactly it.’” 

Lesa Powell looked up.  “In other words, if you think that you know Spirit, or if you think you don’t, Spirit is actually that which is thinking both of those thoughts.  So you can doubt the objects of consciousness, but you can never believably doubt the doubter, never really doubt the Witness of the entire display.  Therefore, rest in the Witness, whether it is thinking that it knows God or not, and that witnessing, that undeniable immediacy of now-consciousness, is itself God, Spirit, Buddha-mind.  The certainty lies in the pure self-felt Consciousness to which objects appear, not in the objects themselves.  You will never, never, never see God, because God is the Seer, not any finite, mortal, bounded object that can be seen!  (Consciousness, therefore Being—not: objects of Consciousness, therefore Being.) 

“Thus, this pure I AM state is not hard to achieve but impossible to avoid, because it is ever-present and can never really be doubted.  Spirit is not hard to find but impossible to avoid: it is looking at this page right now.  Why on earth do you keep looking for God when God is actually the Looker?

“Therefore, simply rest in the ever-present Witness.  As Patrul also says: ‘There are some meditators who don’t let their mind rest in itself or in basic immediateness, as they should.  Instead they let it watch outwardly or search inwardly.  You will neither see nor find the mind by watching outwardly or searching inwardly (for it is the Seer, not the seen!).  There is no reason whatsoever to watch outwardly or search inwardly.  Let go directly into this mind that is watching outwardly or searching inwardly, and that is exactly it.’ 

“Well, all of that is good Cartesianism—although, again, Descartes didn’t invent it, he just rediscovered it in his own I AMness.  This path of self-inquiry—and the Great Liberation that is secreted in the ever-present I AM state—goes back at least 2,000 years (although the traditions always claim, not completely convincingly, that it goes back tens of thousands of years or more).  We find it in Plato and therefore Neoplatonism (and therefore virtually every mystical school in the West), where it appears as a basic Wakefulness present even in sleep; it is clearly announced in India in the Upanishads, where this Atman that is Brahman is the doorway to Enlightenment; we find it in Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism (when faced with those who thought that the attainment of nirvana depended on prayers and chanting, Zen asked instead: ‘WHO is that chants the name of the Buddha?’); we find it in the great Christian mystics, such as Boethius, who in his great distress cried out to Philosophia, who ever-so-gently whispered in his ear: ‘You have forgotten who you are.’  Because who you are is…  Spirit itself, even when you think you can never find it.

“At the beginning of the modern world—that is, somewhere between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—Descartes looked into this own mind and found the Looker.  From Descartes this I AM realization poured into modern Western philosophy.  When Husserl explains that the world could end and it wouldn’t affect the pure Self, or when he describes the splitting of the witnessing self from empirical self (e.g., in section 15 of Cartesian Meditations), or when Fichte describes the pure Observing Self as being infinite and supraindividual Spirit—this is Western Vedanta at its finest.  To varying degrees we find it in Kant, Spinoza, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Heidegger…  oh, it is a long list!  

“And I am getting quite ahead of the story!”  Powell laughed, shifted her position sitting on the stage, and continued.  “Several scholars have suggested that Descartes’s major satori occurred in an altered state of consciousness when he climbed into an old stove and curled up on himself.  He is quoted as saying something like, When I came out, my entire philosophy was formed.

“Well, what we do know is that Descartes very probably had a peak experience of the causal realm.  A peak experience of the pure Self, the formless Witness, the pure Consciousness that cannot believably be doubted because it is the ground of all Being and all doubt.  A peak experience of Atman, a peak experience of the ever-present I AM: no wonder Descartes was the first great modern philosopher, powered by that fuel! 

“But—and this is crucial—we also have good reason to believe that Descartes’s frontal development—that is, his average center of gravity—was at the orange meme (this was, after all, the beginning of modernity).  And therefore Descartes did pretty much what integral psychology predicts that he would do: he interpreted his altered state or peak experience of the causal realm in terms of the orange meme.  Aye, and there’s the rub.

“We can find no evidence that Descartes was permanently developed to the causal realm—the causal was therefore only a passing state, not a permanent trait.  Recall that integral psychology maintains that a person at virtually any stage of development (infant, child, adult—purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, etc.) can have an altered state or peak experience of any of the great states of consciousness—gross, subtle, causal, nondual (corresponding to waking, dreaming, sleeping, and nondual).  But the person will tend to interpret that altered state in the terms of their present general stage of development.  And that appears to be just what happened to Descartes: he had a profound altered state of the causal realm and then interpreted that in the general terms of the orange meme—and there, in a nutshell, is the dignity and the disaster of the Cartesian worldview.

“Descartes was not permanently developed to the causal as a stage or wave; he was permanently developed more-to-less to the egoic-rational wave, the orange meme.  But even that part—his embrace of the orange wave—was an aspect of his evolutionary brilliance and his developmental genius.  Descartes was indeed the first great modern philosopher, because he was the first philosopher to identify with the orange-wave worldview and therefore start asking questions from within that worldview.  Most (not all) of the previous, premodern philosophers of Europe were still asking questions from within the mythic-membership worldview, from within the blue meme.  But in a burst of developmental brilliance rarely seen anywhere in history, René Descartes punched through the herd mentality of blue and started asking, and answering, orange questions.  I mean, this was, this was… absolutely amazing.”  Lesa Powell paused, smiled, and looked over her shoulder, dreamily, for the longest time.

“Okay.  So, at this point we have to take a four-quadrant view to get a sense of what happened to these two basic truths—and their strange admixture—that Descartes possessed: namely, (1) a peak experience of pure I AMness, a peak experience of causal Consciousness that is undeniable, unqualifiable Being, a peak experience that (2) was interpreted through the orange meme, or the egoic-rational worldview as it broke through the mythic-membership worldview.  Both some very good news and some very bad news awaited the final results.  And the critics, at this point, are not altogether wrong in some of their postmodern pontifical pronouncements.”  Powell smiled, looked at us with a sparkle that hinted of things to come.

“In other words, we want to do an integral historiography of Descartes: all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states.  [See Sidebar A: Integral Historiography.]  I won’t do an exhaustive ‘historiograph’ right now, but I’ll mention a few major items.   We just gave a brief rundown on the ‘states and stages’ features of Descartes’s breakthrough philosophy: namely, a temporary causal state interpreted by the orange stage (and, I would add, specifically in the cognitive line).  So that is a brief summary of the levels (orange), lines (cognitive), and states (causal) aspects of the integral historiograph of our friend René. 

“In the quadrants—well, we just gave the Upper-Left quadrant, we just gave a brief summary of his integral psychograph as best as we can piece it together today.  But what about the profoundly important collective quadrants?  In the Lower-Right quadrant—which in some ways is the most important historically, because it is the material-social engine that drives so much of human activity, an insight not lost on Marx—we notice first and foremost that the social system is fast approaching the industrial revolution.  Now, Descartes is not fully of the industrial era.  He wrote his Essays in 1637; the Englishman Thomas Newcomen invents the steam engine in 1705 and James Watt perfects it in 1769.  But all of the four-quadrant forces that would eventually give rise to the Industrial Era are starting to simmer beneath the surface.  And the genius Descartes can smell a coming revolution.  Or, if you’re into postmodern poststructuralism and you fairly despise all things modern, then you would say that Descartes was the first canary to drop dead in that coming mine shaft disaster.

“The point is that Descartes is indeed riding the emerging orange wave, both good and bad.  Putting this all together into an integral historiograph (however abbreviated): 

“In the Lower-Right quadrant we find that—in empirical hindsight via a reconstructive science, and NOT in an a priori (Hegelian or Platonic) determinism—this emergence would involve a variety of social systems all resting on the techno-economic mode of industrialization; in the Lower-Left quadrant, a variety of cultural worldviews would emerge that involved, one way or another, a postconventional, worldcentric, egoic-rational unfolding of the universe (postconventional worldviews that, among other things, eventually extended individual rights of agency to all human beings, resulting in everything from feminism to the abolition of slavery in every industrialized nation on earth); in the Upper-Left quadrant, a center of psychological gravity that switched from blue to orange (at least in the cultural elite), liberating reason from its confinement in ethnocentric myth; and in the Upper-Right quadrant, a series of behaviors focused on the individual and his or her freedom of action under institutionalized laws.

“One other major item needs to be mentioned.  The rise of modernity—or the egoic-rational worldview, or Gebser’s era of perspectival reason, or Habermas’s emergence of an ego identity form a role identity—in short, the rise of orange as a significant and often governing societal structure that supplanted blue and its medieval mythic-membership structures—this emergence also involved the vitally important differentiation of the Big Three—that is, the differentiation of art, morals, and science; or the I, the We, and the It; or the beautiful, the good, and the true.  This differentiation—which is common in the general cognitive shift from conop to formop—was a central feature of the European historiograph throughout much of the 1700s.  And this differentiation, as many scholars from Weber to Habermas have suggested, was indeed the basis of the great dignities that modernity brought: democracy could supplant monarchy, science could challenge myth, egalitarianism would erode aristocracy, freedom would fight slavery—the incredibly positive gains of the Enlightenment were about to descend the world with revolutionary results. 

“However, for various reasons that some of my colleagues have discussed (see, e.g., Sex, Ecology, Spirituality), the rise of modernity also marked not just the differentiation of the value spheres of art, morals, and science—which was the great dignity of modernity—but the dissociation of those spheres—which was the great disaster.  In combination with: a tilt to agentic rationalism pervading culture in the Lower Left (an ‘overly’ orange worldview, a valuation of science over morals and art); a pervasive personal dissociation of reason and feeling in the Upper Left (most likely due not to any pathology but simple adolescent enthusiasm); and a rampant industrialization in the Lower Right (which put a massive emphasis on purposive-rational structures and a pandemic materialism of Its), a strange thing happened: the It domain began to aggressively dominant the I and the We domains—what Habermas calls ‘the colonization of art and morals by science.’  The famous ‘disenchantment of the world’ was about to begin.  Put bluntly, the Right-Hand quadrants just squished the daylights out of the Left-Hand.