"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it"
Tagore
I'd qualify on logic. It depends. Be careful of applying nothing but critical reason, it is a universal acid that deconstructs but is incapable of engaging in the work of reconstruction (which is to say, critique and construction need to be in relation). Be careful of seeing the world as nothing but logic. When the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to speak, he baffled them by constantly breaking off from the philosophy to read the poems of Tagore. Moritz Schlick turnd to a colleague and said: "I don't think he's one of us." He wasn't. Russell was clueless. He thought that Wittgenstein's attraction to mysticism was merely that it allowed him to stop thinking.
Russell had connived to give Wittgenstein a PhD, so he could be awarded a grant and a permanent position; the thesis Wittgenstein presented was the Tractatus. Russell and G.E. Moore conducted the oral exam, which ended with Wittgenstein telling them, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.”
For Wittgenstein, what can be said can be said clearly or not at all, and what can be said is the fairly simple and relatively unimportant stuff. The interesting stuff, the stuff that makes life worth living, lies outside the realm of fact and logic. Build a world on fact and logic, and watch it die.
The new education will close the gap between the analytical and the aesthetic to bring about a shift from the quantitative to the qualitative, from matter to spirit - or to an appreciation that matter, properly understood, is immaterial.
The root problem of our civilisation is that is approaching, and may well have long since surpassed, the limits of ecological health. The task of the age, then, is to shift our fundamental orientation from an endless outer expansion to an inner cultivation. From a disembodied "rationality" to Pascal's "reasons of the heart." From a colonising economics to the ecology of the human heart. "The heart has its reasons." The heart has its qualities of apperception, evaluation, appreciation, intuition, emotion, sympathy, discernment, imagination, vision, creativity, and such like. These are the qualities required for the sane and ecological society. A society focused on quantity has neglected to educate for quality, leaving us without the capacities to restore a civilization that, in Jung's words, has "sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts." Max Weber, influenced by Marx and Nietzsche, saw it coming. Weber, arguably, stripped Marx and Nietzsche of their optimistic theses and retained only their dark forebodings of the age to come. But he got the nullity of this age right:
"No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said:’ “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved”
(Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p123-124).
Heart, soul, spirit.
Forget the behaviourists and technocrats, it is the dramatists, novelists, poets, artists, tragedians, musicians, and dancers who are the artists of the heart and soul, the scientists of the spirit, the custodians of the qualitative.
And that entails educating human beings into their truly human form. Which sounds remarkably like Plato and Paideia and politeia as the regimen for human flourishing.
Ironically, many (post)-moderns see Plato's curriculum as the origin of modernity's domineering instrumental rationality. It is more like educating human beings into Pascal's "reason's of the heart," to the extent that Plato knew that reason does not and cannot govern alone. Rousseau was the greatest Platonist of the modern world, giving us a Plato for the democratic age (if such thing could be possible, then it is Rousseau and no-one who realized the possibility - and clueless conservatives persist in denouncing Rousseau as a liberal and libertarian!). Rousseau presented human beings not simply as rational beings but as rational, sensing, feeling, and intuiting beings. People get excited by talk of uniting left and right brain thinking. Plato did it long ago, and so did Rousseau. Catch up! It's the modern of specialism that broke it all up and made us stupid, dangerous, and destructive. A true education would foster aesthetic appreciation, nourish the reasoning heart, cultivate the moral and intellectual virtues, build up our stock of metaphors (an abundance of metaphots, wrote Aristotle, is the mark of genius and the spring of creative endeavour), free the imagination, heighten intuition and emotion, teach judgment and discernment, and immerse us in a deeper realism. Such an education would enrich us physically, psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually. And it would inoculate us against one of the greatest of delusions of this age of 'self-made man' — the idea that one's own self-created gods, goods, and values are the only ones worthy of service and that one's own view of reality is the only legitimate view of reality. The question is how to draw back people accustomed to their liberation from codes and constraints back into what Rousseau called a voluntary servitude in the cause of public community and its legitimate, self-imposed, chains. The evidence seems to be that such 'free' individuals are only ever brought back to reality by way of an involuntary necessity. And that's going to be decidedly ugly. Civilisation needs a new mind, and the restoration of the old heart and soul.
A very different mode of reasoning than that which has been dominant in the mechanical age. It's incredible how mechanical the realm of practical reason remains, in its economics and politics, in its behavioural psychology and neurotic nudging. The world of science is long past materialism and mechanicism and shows nature to be alive, animate, mind-infused, and - I'll go the whole hog - and say purposive. And immaterial. Politics and economics, the practical affairs of human civilisation, need to catch up. The question is not poetry versus physics, exalting the one over the other, but establishing the two in balance so that it becomes impossible to separate the dancer from the dance.
The tragedy of the moderns is that in gaining a world of their own creation, they may or may not have sold their soul to the devil but have assuredly lost their old dancing grounds. With separation from the community of others comes separation from the self. The result is an anxious isolation in which individuals lack solidarity with others and yet cannot escape the judgement of others. Autonomy, then, is not true autonomy but a dependency upon the opinion of others. The loss of common connection and collective joy results in separation, isolation, anxiety, and depression. This is what happens when the human community comes to be considered a machine composed of discrete parts. The loss of the old dancing grounds cannot but come to imprison the self in the prison of the ego. Friedrich Nietzsche, as lonely and tormented an individual as could be imagined, understood the therapeutics of collective ecstasy better than anyone else. At a time when the autonomous "self" was being almost universally lauded, he dared tell the unpallatable truth of the "horror of individual existence.” (The Birth of Tragedy). He glimpsed relief in the ancient Dionysian rituals in which "each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him—as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness . . . He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams."
The great tragedy of the moderns is that the very social forces that disposed them to depression also systematically removed its tried and tested cure. “They could congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration, and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that accompanied modern European 'progress,' they had done something perhaps far more damaging: They had completed the demonization of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of help—the mind-preserving, lifesaving techniques of ecstasy.” (Barbara Ehrenreich Dancing in the Streets 2008 ch 7).
“Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.”
Rabindranath Tagore
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