Part III

Part I Part II Part III

     "The second major post-Enlightenment movement was that of the Idealists, particularly Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. The Idealists attempted to heal the split between the Big Three (I, We, and It)—which were all parts of the secondary Cartesian dualisms of self versus body versus world—with the use of mature vision-logic, or turquoise thinking. Now, as we just saw, the Romantics had tried to heal the same splits with green cognition, which also opened them to boomeritis, a regressive slide, the Regress Express, a rampant narcissism and endless self absorption. No surprise that the Idealists reserved their sharpest polemic for the Romantics. Fichte and Hegel in particular were absolutely brutal in their polemical onslaughts addressed to the regressive trends in Romanticism—which, needless to say, considerably upset the sensitive green-meme self ('Just how spiritual can that arrogant Hegel be, like you know?'). What we actually see in those barbed exchanges are historically two things: the first major pre/post fallacies—which the Romantics have the dubious honor of committing—and the first great and devastating critiques of those pre/post fallacies—issued by Fichte, Hegel, and crew.

     "On balance, the great Idealists were clearly second-tier thinkers, and they managed more than any other post-modern, post-Enlightenment movement to integrate the four quadrants (or the Big Three). Even more important, they actually addressed the original or primary Cartesian dualism. To Johann Gottlieb Fichte belongs the credit for elucidating, in fine Vedanta fashion, the relation between the infinite Self as it gives rise to the finite self and finite world. He was, needless to say, almost completely misunderstood on this topic (simply because so few have had an altered state, let along stage, of the pure formless Self). The critics assumed that Fichte was talking about, not the infinite formless Self, but merely the finite rational ego, his personal ego, and so... well, never mind. To Fichte also goes the credit for first major insight that genealogy was the key to an authentic hermeneutic of the Kosmos: what is required, he said, is a 'reconstruction of the pragmatic history of consciousness.'

     "Good lord, dear friends, that is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Because out of it was born the developmental and evolutionary perspective. So important were Fichte's insights that even Kant, late in his life, was furiously rewriting his work in response to the developmental perspective (as Hegel later said of Kant's structures: 'They can only be conceived as ones that have developed'). Schelling took these developmental insights and gave them an astonishingly profound formulation, integrating the Big Three through a series of peak experiences and profound insights into the causal and even the Nondual, and Hegel hammered out the details in a series of relentlessly bright and boring treatises, while his friend Holderlin took the more poetic route for expressing these extraordinary experiences. But the evidence strongly suggests that for all of them, as with Descartes, these peak experiences were merely temporary states, not permanent traits, a fact that would eventually lead to several insuperable difficulties with the Idealist approach.

     "There is indeed substantial evidence suggesting that many of the Idealists had peak experiences of the causal and occasionally the Nondual, but they did exactly what Descartes did, only a notch higher, as it were: they interpreted their experiences of the Nondual in the terms of the turquoise meme ; they applied their intuition of the Nondual to vision-logic; and thus, at least by the time of Hegel, they imagined that integrative, embodied, nondissociated Reason could capture the Kosmos. The higher states and stages, qua higher states and stages, were not merely interpreted through vision-logic but reduced to vision-logic : a major catastrophe in itself.

     "The difficulty, the problem, is that you cannot heal the primary Cartesian dualism with thinking, not even turquoise thinking. You can think all you want that the world is a unified system of dynamic relationships between nature, body, mind, culture, and spirit—but you are still on this side of your face looking at the world out there, yes? The problem is that they had no yoga, no systematic interior exemplars and injunctions for bringing forth the third tier of consciousness, and so they remained stuck in second tier (misinterpreting all higher consciousness downward into embodied, integrative, dialectical Reason, a turquoise Reason definitely higher than orange rationality or green pluralism, but still far short of the Nondual mark).

     "In other words, neither the Romantics nor the Idealists actually healed the primary Cartesian dualism or the ultimate Shiva/Shakti split, although both of them offered extremely important insights into the 'lesser' Cartesian problems of the hyper-agentic, egoic-rational self and its dissociations—that is, important insights into the relative problem of how to integrate the four quadrants in the manifest realm, insights that any integral approach would want to include. From the Romantics we take the necessity to plug the rational ego into body, nature, and culture, and from the Idealists we take the necessity to do so, not by regressing merely to sensory body and nature, but by progressing to turquoise vision-logic. But, we add, please don't stop there....

     "Still, as for the great Idealists, my God what genius touched that spot of the world for a brief period of time....

     "Okay!" she smiled, again abruptly shifting gears. "Moving right along.... In the field of science, the secondary Cartesian split between the finite mind and finite body was claimed to be healed by two major schools, one of which addressed the Upper-Right quadrant (cognitive science) and one of which addressed the Lower-Right (systems science). In the Upper Right, it was simply claimed that the ego-mind is actually nothing but the brain. Since the brain is in the organic body, then the mind is just something the organism is doing, and that takes care of that. The 'I'-mind was reduced to the 'it'-brain, and since the it-brain and it-body are of the same substance, so to speak, then that takes care of that dualism!

     "This 'solution' to the secondary Cartesian dualism is so utterly stupid that I won't pursue it any more, other than to say that it is by far the most widely accepted 'solution' to the secondary problem." Powell looked up, grinned, and rolled her eyes.

     "The second scientific 'solution' was systems theory. You all realize that systems theory, as first codified by von Bertalanffy, was actually called 'system theory,' not 'systems theory'? But everybody calls it systems theory, so what the heck. Anyway, systems theory, in any of its numerous subsequent forms, identified the subject with the organism (UR) and the object with the environment (LR), and then claimed that in unifying the organism and the environment as a dynamic ecological whole, it had unified the subject and the object and thus solved the Cartesian dualism. Actually, of course, it solved neither the original Cartesian dualism (or the Shiva/Shakti split), nor the lesser, secondary Cartesian dualism (the relation of finite mind and finite body/nature), because all it did was reduce the I-subject-mind (UL) to the it-object-brain (UR) and call that overall it-organism 'the subject,' and since that objective organism (UR) is indeed ecologically one with the objective environment (LR), then that supposedly solves the problem, when all it really does is reduce all subjectivity to objectivity and all inter-subjectivity to inter-objectivity. This is still the major way that almost all schools of ecophilosophy use to claim that they have cured the Cartesian dualism, whereas, once again, they have not addressed the original or primary Cartesian dualism, although, like the other schools, they have offered important insights on lesser Cartesian problems, primarily the integrating of the Upper Right and Lower Right—or the objective organism and objective environment—via ecological mutual coevolution (none of which touches the Upper Left or Lower Left, not to mention the primary Cartesian dualism). Needless to say, these Web-of-Life schools claim to be all-inclusive.

     "Okay, we have seen that none of the major post-Cartesian movements actually addressed or cured the primary Cartesian dualism. But we saw that all of them made important contributions to redressing some of the problems of the secondary Cartesian dualisms, and I tried to outline many of those contributions. But I also hinted that the two major post-Cartesian schools that are still very influential in today's world—namely, Romantic postmodernism and scientific systems theory —both addressed some of the obvious aspects of secondary Cartesianism, but neither of them adequately addressed the more latent aspects of secondary Cartesianism. Let me quickly give a few examples of what I mean by that.

     "Recall that the primary Cartesian dualism (the Shiva/Shakti split) refers to the relation between the unmanifest, formless, pure Self or Witness and the manifest world of the four quadrants (whereas the secondary Cartesian dualism refers to the relation of the four quadrants themselves). Discovering that Witness is the first step in transcending the manifest world and the four quadrants altogether (only to fully embrace them in One Taste).

     "The secondary Cartesian dualism means that the infinite formless Self has dropped out of the equation, and we are now dealing merely with the relation of the finite self and the finite world (or the finite mind and finite body, or the relative subject and relative object, and so on). That is, we are looking at the relation—not of the Witness to the quadrants, but the relation of the quadrants to each other (since their Witness has been forgotten or ignored).

     "Is that clear? With the primary Cartesian dualism we are trying to solve the relation of Shiva to the four quadrants that are Shakti. Shakti, Prakriti, or the manifest world itself consists of the four quadrants: a finite self/subject (UL), a finite objective organism (UR), a finite culture (LL), and a finite environment (LR)—and Shiva impartially witnesses all of those whenever they arise. Thus, Shiva completely transcends Shakti in pure formless consciousness; a realization that then leads—or can lead—to the complete union or integration or 'not-two-ness' of Shiva and Shakti in eternal erotic embrace: the Witness of the four quadrants becomes one with the four quadrants in all domains, and Purusha and Prakriti light up the night with their erotic screams.

     "But with the secondary Cartesian dualism, Shiva has dropped out of the picture altogether. For whatever reasons, the infinite has been denied, ignored, repressed, or forgotten. In place of the infinite Self or Spirit, there is only the finite self of the Upper-Left quadrant, and therefore the question of the relation of the subject to the object—which is originally the relation of Shiva to Shakti—becomes merely the question of the relation of the finite self to the finite world (all of which occur within Shakti, who has now lost her beloved husband).

     "So, both the postmodernists and the systems theorists—and virtually every attempt in today's consciousness studies to heal the 'mind-body' problem—are dealing with the secondary Cartesian dualism, even as they loudly claim they have cured the primary dualism (whereas they apparently have not yet recognized it). And my point is that they actually haven't even handled the secondary Cartesian dualism very well. That is, none of those schools have managed to integrate the four quadrants adequately—that's what I mean by saying they addressed some of the more obvious issues of secondary Cartesianism but not the subtler, hidden, more obscure—and more important—aspects. So let's briefly look at that.

      "We've already seen that systems theory —and most forms of ecology and eco-philosophy—generally fall short in their holistic quest, and instead of truly integrating the manifest world, they merely reduce all I's and all We's to a web of dynamically interwoven Its—the Web of Life. We needn't revisit those inadequacies. The Web of Life is indeed there, but it covers only the Lower-Right quadrant, and if we absolutize that quadrant, it eviscerates the interior domains in their own terms, lying them out to dry in the blazing sun of the monological gaze.... (We'll return to that 'monological eyeball' in a moment.)

      "But it is the failures of postmodernism that are in some ways more disturbing than those of systems theory, because at its best, postmodernism was a demand that the Lower Left—the cultural contexts, backgrounds, and intersubjectivity inherent in the world—is an inseparable and constitutive ingredient of subjectivity itself (a move that, if carried out adequately, would indeed help heal the split of the proudly autonomous Enlightenment ego—that disembodied, disengaged, hovering homunculus in the Upper Left, cut off from the three other quadrants and the higher levels and the lower levels of its own quadrant: OUCH!).

      "But from that promising beginning—in the organically rich musings of Novalis, Herder, Schiller, Heidegger—the green postmodern promise soon degenerated into the MGM and boomeritis. Genealogical postmodernism— tracing the development of intersubjectivity over time (in different forms, from Hegel to Heidegger to Nietzsche)—gave way to merely pluralistic postmodernism—yes, because with radical pluralism, 'Nobody can tell me what to do!'—the motto of boomeritis. [On the two major forms of postmodernism—genealogical and pluralistic—see Sidebar A : "Who Ate Captain Cook? Integral Historiography in the Postmodern Age."]

      "As this pluralistic catastrophe unfolded—especially in the wake of the '68 philosophes—postmodernism itself began to shift from a gentle call to hermeneutically understand the sliding chains of signifieds in the Other—that is, a hermeneutic attempt to sympathetically resonate with, and understand, the interior meanings and intersubjective values of others—to a merely exterior pronouncement that there are nothing but sliding chains of signifiers—that is, there are no interior depths to be understood and cared for, there are only exterior surfaces beneath which one can never go: and one can never go beneath them because there is NO BENEATH and NO DEPTH anywhere in the Kosmos. Period.

      "And thus, as has often been noted, postmodernism went from a concern with the Lower Left, or genuine semantic intersubjectivity (or mutual exchange of interiors), to an almost exclusive obsession with the Lower Right, or heterogeneous syntactic systems of interobjectivity (composed merely of systems of exterior surfaces). For notorious example, interior semiotics and hermeneutics ("How can I understand you?") completely collapsed into Derrida's exterior grammatology and Lyotard's intractable heterogeneity ("We can never understand each other"—because there are "nothing but surfaces, surfaces, surfaces everywhere." Well, of course, how could we understand each other if we lack all interiors? Surfaces can't speak; shadows don't communicate with other shadows, do they?). Worst of all, this abandonment of the Lower Left meant that most postmodernists—and certainly those that carried the day—completely abandoned genealogical postmodernism for pluralistic postmodernism. And since genealogy is the only cure for pluralism—and pluralism is the home of boomeritis—then postmodernism and boomeritis became largely synonymous, and the mean green meme began its long reign of terror.

      "Even though the dominant postmodernists often slid into the Lower Right—where they usually hooked up with the other main theories lying around in the Lower Right (from systems theory to Neomarxism to ecology)—their goal was radically different. For example, whereas systems theory at its best is a second-tier science (that is, it uses yellow thinking but applied only to objective systems—i.e., it is yellow thinking restricted to a concern with the Lower-Right quadrant), postmodernism is a thoroughly green-meme movement. And therefore when postmodernism confined itself to surfaces, and shifted from the Lower Left to the Lower Right, its sole aim was deconstructive: to tear down the depths, crush the interiors, smash any value system it found. No systems scientists would ever claim that they were dealing merely with social constructions—they rightly insist on the relative objectivity of the systems they study. But pomo green aggressively attempted to deconstruct even that, leaving in its wake, as Habermas noted, nothing but their own power drives.

     "A sad affair, is it not? And the greatest irony of the great postmodern ironies is this: the famous Cartesian monological eyeball—despised by all post-Enlightenment movements—came in fact to dominate every major post-Enlightenment agenda . All of them—postmodernism, systems theory, virtually all ecology and ecological philosophies—succumbed to subtle reductionism, succumbed to the very flatland they vowed to fight. They ended up reducing all Left-Hand events to Right-Hand occasions, all depths to surfaces, all values to veneer, all interwoven I's and We's to holistic webs of interwoven Its. Truly, truly, a sad affair."

      "But what exactly is the monological eyeball?" a student asked. "It sounds like a Wes Craven horror film."

     "Well," Lesa smiled, "that was the motto of the postmodernists: subvert the monological eyeball, but they did so by inadvertently using more of it.

     "Here's the problem—and then we have to bring this discussion to a close, I'm afraid, or Margaret will yell at me. Remember that there are two major Cartesian dualisms: the original or primary Cartesian dualism (the relation of the infinite Self to the finite self and finite world, or the relation of the empty Witness to the four quadrants), and the secondary Cartesian dualisms (or the relation of the quadrants to each other). Accordingly, there are two types of monological gaze: infinite and finite. That is, the first type of monological gaze is that of the Witness: it is the supremely indifferent Mirror Mind of all that arises moment to moment; it is Shiva, it is Purusha, it is Consciousness without an object, it is the infinite empty causal realm—a realm that Descartes peak experienced. And that monological gaze is indeed set apart from absolutely all of manifestation, as both its Ground and its Witness—or the radically transcendental Self of all conditional reality.

     "But Descartes's blunder, we saw, was applying his intuition of the transcendental Self to his orange rational ego, and then he assumed that his rational ego was SET APART from the rest of the world—set apart from his vital body, from sensory nature, and from culture. In other words, he assumed that the Upper-Left quadrant was set apart from the other three quadrants . Therefore, all four quadrants now have intractable boundaries and dualisms separating them from each other. Those dualisms between the quadrants are the secondary Cartesian dualisms, which are assumed to be the original, the real, the primary Cartesian dualism, but are merely secondary offshoots ( very important in their own ways, but still not primary).

     "The point is that there are two monological gazes: the primary one (which is the radical impartiality of the Mirror Mind of all objects, the pure equanimity of the empty Witness, the supreme indifference of the transcendental Self), which is a 'half-way' home discovery of the utmost significance. But when that radical intuition is (mis)applied to the finite self or rational ego, then it degenerates into a rational ego that is imagined to be set apart from, and hovering over, body and nature and world. That monological gaze is the disaster of modernity, the downside of the Enlightenment, the nightmare of a rational light, much too bright, that was the Enlightenment in the West.

     "So let's call the monological gaze of the original Cartesian dualism—that of the empty Witness—let's call that 'translogical' instead of 'monological,' because strictly speaking the Witness is not monological versus dialogical, but rather witnesses them both with equanimity. The other monological gaze—which is the real problem, which would be the nasty Monological Eyeball of Wes Craven's horror film—the horror film starring both modernity and postmodernity—is what occurs when the infinite Self is forgotten and identified instead with the finite self. That finite self (situated behind your eyes, looking at the world 'out there'), then attempts to heal this horrifying fracture in any number of ways, none of which cure the original or primary Cartesian dualism, none of which escape flatland, and all of which claim to. We have outlined these various moves that struggle to overcome dualism, particularly in their two dominant forms still widely present today: systems theory, where the interior domains (of I and We) are reduced to a dynamically interwoven web of exterior Its—thus succumbing to flatland; and pluralistic postmodernism, where the Lower Left is approached with a relativistic pluralism that gives to each meme an equal weight of 'irreducible ultimates,' thus imposing a flatland pluralism on genealogical developments that would otherwise take us out of flatland and into waves of increasing care and consciousness.

     "Thus: (1) whether we claim that the Web of Life is the ultimate reality—and is even spirit itself (as does systems theory and the spiritual paradigms based on it), or (2) whether we claim that the exterior surfaces are nothing but chains of sliding signifiers, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing (as does postmodernism and most of its sanctioned offshoots, pluralism to deconstruction), or (3) whether we attempt to honor pluralistic intersubjectivity of the real Lower Left via a caring hermeneutic of the 'plurality of spiritual ultimates' (instead of tracing the actual genealogy of intersubjective waves and thus escaping the performative contradictions of boomeritis and a flatland pluralism devoid of depth): in all those cases we see the haunting legacy of the Monological Eyeball still devouring even those who have claimed to overcome it— none of them are strong enough to get you out from behind your eyes, are they ?

     "From systems theory to the Web-of-Life paradigms, from JTP's new birth in freedom to sliding chains of pluralism, from ecofeminism to deep ecology celebrating sensory ultimates, from deconstructive French dreams, perfuming the halls of academia, to contextualism being consumed by its own self-contradictory claims... the haunting legacy of a dissociation that has, rightly or wrongly, forever been linked with the name of René Descartes.

     "And so ends our tale of postmodern malaise. Irony of ironies of ironies: the dreaded monological gaze, the hallmark of flatland, the single biggest nightmare stemming from the Enlightenment, the nightmare that all have claimed to cure but none have really spotted: it all came from a peak experience of infinite radiant Purusha, misapplied to the finite self, where there it lived distorted in infamy, playing its game of hide and seek, and whispering gently to all who would listen: do you know Who I AM?"

Part I Part II Part III