Huston Smith - Beyond the Postmodern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization

BEYOND the POSTMODERN MIND

HUSTON SMITH

BEYOND the POSTMODERN MIND

The Place of Meaning
in a Global Civilization

Updated and Revised

Learn more about Huston Smith and his work at www.hustonsmith.net
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Copyright 1982, 1989, 2003 by Huston Smith

First Quest Edition 1984

Second Edition 1989

Third Edition 2003

Quest Books

The Theosophical Publishing House

PO Box 270

Wheaton, IL 60187-0270

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Huston.

Beyond the postmodern mind: the place of meaning in a global civilization / Huston Smith.3rd Quest ed.

p. cm.

Rev. ed. of: Beyond the post-modern mind. c1989.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-8356-0830-1

1. Philosophy, Modern20th century. 2. Postmodernism. I. Smith,

Huston. Beyond the post-modern mind. II. Title.

B804.S576 2003

190'.9'04dc21

2003041588

ISBN for electronic edition, e-pub format: 978-0-8356-2078-9

4 3 2 1 * 03 04 05 06 07 08

In memory of Serena Karlan, and for the future that Sierra and Isaiah Senyak and Antonio Banuelos token

Preface to the Third Edition

If, by some strange device, a man of our century could step backwards in time and mix with the people of a distant age, Gai Eaton wrote in The King of the Castle, he would have good cause to doubt either their sanity or his own (p. 7). The suns daily cycle, a ravens flight, mossy oaks, and water gushing from a glade would look familiar enough, but the meanings they carried for his new associates would be different. Each would think he knew what constitutes common sense and human normality, but their common sense would differ from his and their normality might seem to him abnormal. Questioning everything they took for granted and astonished that they did not see how much their conclusions were controlled by arbitrary assumptions, he would find everything he took for granted similarly called into question. His Why? would be met with their Why?, and he would have no answer.

The essays here assembled attempt a move like the one just envisioned: they invite us to step outside our current Western outlook to see it in perspective. The limitations of earlier outlooks are so obvious that we forget that ours, too, is built on premises history will smile on. Science and the historical record we now possess may seem to exempt us from the perspectival character of human vision, but we know, of course, that they do not. Like those who have lived before us, we too have fished certain objectives from the sea of human possibilities. These in turn have firmed up premises that support them, and from these premises an entire outlook has been spunsuch possibilities are what these essays try to show. To compare our worldview with others is not to set light against shadow. It is to compare twilight zones; different kinds of limitations, as though a man tunneling his way out of prison were to emerge within the perimeter, exchanging one cell for another. So it must always be, Eaton concludes, unless the prisoner learns that freedom lies in quite another direction, never through the tunnel of time (ibid.).

We shall encounter this other, atemporal and noncumulative dimension of knowledge in of this book. Here the point is that the stages peoples outlooks pass through on the temporal continuum have led the West to one that has come to be called Postmodern to distinguish it from the Modernity that began in the seventeenth century and ended around the middle of the last century. The Modern Mind took its cues from the new worldview that science introduced, but twenty-first-century science has abandoned not just that worldview, but worldviews generally. From Aristotle to Dante, the world was pictured as a series of concentric spheres. Newton replaced that with his clockwork universe, but quantum mechanics gives us, not a new picture of the world, but no picture at all. And philosophy has followed suit. Metaphysics died around the time that God died, Langdon Gilkey has observed, tying its death to the death of God movement that Nietzsche announced, but which took a half-century to come to public notice.

The essays in this book work toward bringing the world back into focus, and as the view that emerges resembles traditional ones more than it does either the Modern worldview or Postmodern lack thereof, the presumption that these latter have permanently retired the way people used to see things needs to be questioned at the outset. The ways in which Modernity and Postmodernity have assumed that their perspectives were less limited than previous ones turn out to be diametrically opposed to each other. Whereas the Modern Mind assumed that it knew more than its predecessors because the natural and historical sciences were flooding it with new knowledge about nature and history, the Postmodern Mind argues (paradoxically) that it knows more than others did because it has discovered how little the human mind can know. How well we now know how little we know. we shall find James Cutsinger noting in .

It is a good part of this books intent to question these dualand to repeat, contradictoryclaims to superiority. The Modern Minds mistake was to think that seeing further in a horizontal direction would compensate for loss of the vertical dimension. If we visualize a line that wanders upward and then downward again to silhouette the Himalayan range, it is as if Modernity grabbed hold of both ends of that line and stretched them apart. This collapsed the humps to a straight line along the base of the range, but Modernity reasoned that since that line could be indefinitely extended, it would enclose a volume greater than the one the line originally defined.

For the error of Postmodernism, we can visualize the same Himalayan range, but this time work with it differently. We are now inside a bungalow looking out on Mount Everests awesome presence. The air is cold outside, so our breath begins to fog the window. Ventilation is poor, causing the moisture on the pane to condense until at some point it becomes difficult to determine whether the shapes we see are mountains or frosted textures of our own breath as it congeals on the pane. Visitors arrive. Not having gazed through the window when it was clear, they do not know what lies beyond it, so they fix on the foreground, assuming unthinkingly that shapes they see are on the windowpane only. Put straightforwardly, the mistake of Postmodernism is to assume that human beings look out on the world through windows so befogged that it would be unwise to assume that what they see is in the world itself.