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The Return of the Sacred |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / THE SACRED AND THE CHALLENGE OF MODERNITY |
| Author: Antonio de Nicolas |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1986 |
| Size: 8,534 Words, 48,752 Characters |
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The context of the present symposium is that of modernism. Modernism has been with Western tradition for a long time and it will, in all probability, continue for some time to come. The advantage of the present time to that for the first time in his history, modernism has exhausted itself and has come to form part, at least theoretically, of past history, of one of the shores of the next dialectical move in the movement of history. Properly speaking, what we are doing here today is part of a new period known as post-modern.
Modernism has had a long history with us. Though it is mostly identified with the rise of Cartesianism, i.e., the identification of knowing to only that which can be known by reducing human and other bodies to systems functioning as if they were machines, its roots go as far back as Aristotle. Aristotle made fashionable an external division of the world through genera and species, separating philosophy and fashion from the legitimation of inner acts that divide the world by an inner lineage of quality, as Plato had suggested. Augustine contributes to the spread of modernism through an exaggeration of individuality and the individual will, while identifying (reducing) transcendental power (the Trinity) to the model of the human powers (human brain) discarding imagining and introducing ideology as the main faculty of reason. Through ideology thinking is reduced seriatim to having thoughts, and thoughts to behavior and finally information. Knowing, ultimately, and decision-making, will be reduced to manipulation of information. Knowing and power will be linked together in the public domain, from politics to religion, to education.
It is in this context that the human soul suffers from an agonizing dualism. On the one hand it has developed a habit of reading the world (theories of knowledge) through theories that give form to possible experience and legitimize it. On the other hand it has to contend with a theory of verification that claims that it is a reflection of real experience (empiricism). Human life, under this metaphysical constraint, defines itself as a continuous series of experimentations, as temporary commitments, as the absence of maps, as a decentered chaos at the root of identity. Difference is the only center, and this difference lets out an internal shout of a soul affirming its own power in a reverberation of madness, as its own eternal movement of eternal difference. The soul witnesses in itself the rise of the spectral simulacra of its own decentered affirmation. The false has risen to power. The Same and the Life (in Plato's sense), the model and the copy, have fallen under the power of the false (the simulacrum). Hierarchies have been made to disappear and thus there is no possible participation in anything, in the determination and distribution of value. The world of humans has become an eternal difference of nomadic and consecrated anarchies. Foundations have floundered and the only hope (entelechy) is the total collapse, the joyous event the modern soul looks forward to.
Taking hold of this historical moment, one hopes to single out those qualities of modern society and those qualities of modern humans that could be cultivated for the advent of the new age, the post-modern age.
Recovery of the Sacred
And to those of you who are no longer children, I leave Memory and the poetry of the Ages.
--Last Will and Testament of a Poet
The boundaries of the present paper are marked by what is normally or abnormally understood as Western culture. The "recovery of the sacred" is proposed as a project that encompass two moves; the first, listening to the poetic and mystical voices of the West; the second, embodying the technologies that make those voices possible.
The alternative we are trying to divert is that of the "prophetic voices" of the same tradition, those from the Old Testament and those prophetic voices from modern and ancient philosophy. Why mix philosophy in this project? The answer is inevitable. Philosophy, as actually practiced in the last twenty centuries in this same tradition, has been the metalanguage and legitimation domain of the social practices of Western people. Those social practices, be they religion, theology of the sacred, or science, do not have their own legitimation language in their practice. Thus philosophy has proceeded through the 'legitimation' of conflicting claims about knowledge that historically appeared to be incommensurable without actually (inspite of such practice) disqualifying philosophy as a way to legitimate knowledge.
But both philosophy and the prophetic voices have proceeded in the past as if neither Plato's project for philosophy nor the 'composition' of the New Testament (how the Christian documents were humanly created) had ever t...
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...Images should tell more directly a story I have so laboriously tried to build in prose and with concepts. My object in doing so was to describe the acts through which the sacred appears and simultaneously build their justification in the narrative of philosophy Plato left us. The poems, on the other hand, should join us more effectively and affectively into the community we wish to become.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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