Beyond the Post-Modern Mind
Huston Smith, Suhail Academy: Lahore, 2001, ISBN: 969-519-038-3, pp.296, price 380PKR

by Uzma Riyaz*
 
For an American academic and intellectual, Huston Smith’s perception of post-modern human condition in the West is radically atypical and poses a categorical challenge to the contemporary Western intellectual thought. Formerly Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Smith is a proponent of the perennialist school and his outlook seems to be the painstakingly acquired wisdom of a man who even after having been educated conventionally, at universities that cater to mainstream Western thought, has come out unscathed from the cognitive and existential muddle of the Western society – a society that has lost its religio-spiritual bearings and now finds itself helplessly adrift on the sea of nihilistic uncertainty.

In Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, a collection of essays penned across a span of three decades, Huston Smith considers the entirety of modern and post-modern Western discourse as essentially having been shaped by logical empiricist epistemology as opposed to the rationalist (in the Kantian sense) epistemological framework. He traces this epistemological stance of the Western discourse back to the seventeenth century Europe when the West became increasingly enamoured with science and the progress it brought in its wake. As the inventions of science enhanced comfort and efficiency in the life of mankind, the Western mind came to believe with the passage of time that the knowledge that science is constituted of must necessarily be of the loftiest kind and hence the ways of gaining this knowledge have to be the standard modes of knowledge acquisition in any domain. Hence its confidence in the empiricist epistemology, it being the only mode employed by science to unveil and interpret the workings of nature in order to improve the human condition – albeit its material or corporeal dimension only.

According to Smith, the epistemological matrix of modern science is constituted of four basic and necessary features without which no knowledge can be called scientific: objectivity, prediction, control and numbers. All of science is knowledge considered to be objective, having been verified through public consensus or intersubjective agreement. (In this is clearly discernible, notices Smith, the logical positivists’ insistence on the empirical approach and verification principle, and their rejection of abstractions and theories not validated by repeated and shared experience.) Another of the essential and intrinsic features of science is its ability to make predictions with a view to enhancement and well-being of mankind, and yet another one is its capacity to enable mankind to exert control over its environment or context. The latter constitutes the one goal of knowledge production in the contemporary Western milieu that was never before mankind’s objective in its endeavour for truth-seeking throughout history but is presently ubiquitous to the extent that it seems to be something only natural and beyond question. Finally science deals with only those constructs of knowledge that depend on numbers (or quantification), “number being...the language of science”.

It is this epistemology that has engendered and structured the worldview that pivots the Western society today. And this Weltanschauung – a specific way of looking at the world – has obviously and inevitably given rise to a culture that values and privileges the quantitative over the qualitative. The quantitative is what the modern Western mindset (acronymed MWM by Smith) is predominantly concerned with. What is qualitative is unmeasurable and lies outside the purview of the empiricist epistemological model of knowledge acquisition. Hence, claims Smith, all that is qualitative in human existence has been shoved into the margins in the current Western discourse which is underpinned by naturalism – the scientistic stance that anything devoid of a physical/material dimension cannot be considered to exist and that which does exist is primarily to be defined by its materiality.

This explains why the contemporary Western intellectual thought is essentially oriented away from all that can be categorized as spiritual and metaphysical and why its most significant minds adamantly refuse to accept the notion of a limitless transcendent reality – a reality independent of spatio-temporal bounds.

In Part One of the book, Smith includes a discussion on the destruction of metaphysics in the Western intellectual tradition. He selects for this discussion six philosophers whose work primarily focused on a search for a metaphysical component in human knowledge and who ultimately rejected the availability of any such knowledge to the human intellect. Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida all announced the modes of knowledge production available to human cognition to be inadequate for the identification and verification of an absolute, supratemporal reality that exceeds the material/physical world. Albeit this discussion of each of the six thinkers’ individual philosophical standpoints vis-à-vis epistemological and ontological strains in Western discourse leaves the general reader who is not formally acquainted with the discipline of philosophy with a desire for a relatively more detailed and comprehensive sketch of these philosophers’ work.

For Smith, science has thus irrevocably destroyed belief in the possibility of human intellect achieving the consciousness of a suprahuman infinite reality: “Until modern science placed it on the defensive and skewed its course, metaphysics was seldom unaware of Being’s ineffable source.” Though Smith’s book is for the most part a diagnosis as well as analysis of the malady that so pervasively afflicts the Western postmodern sensibility, in Part Two of the book he ventures a step further and posits an alternative belief system. He confidently asserts that the transcendental and suprasensible is knowable for the human intellect. It is only that the post-modern mind will have to step outside the epistemological matrix of contemporary Western discourse. For the obvious reason that something that cannot be reduced to measurability eludes this restrictive paradigm that inherently commands access only to the quantitative; the qualitative forever remains beyond its grasp.

Part Two of the book is constituted of only one chapter where Smith, beginning with a brief retrospective account of his travels in the East during which he received exposure to various Oriental religions and belief systems, undertakes an exposition of philosophia perennis and its principle features. He offers an unqualified endorsement of perennialism and what he terms “primordial metaphysics”. The perennial philosophy affirms a transcendent reality, beyond and above all relativistic interpretations, that is universally knowable and constitutes the summum bonum of human existence. Moreover, according to this philosophy, all the traditional religions recognize a Single Truth and it is this that constitutes the foundational edifice of all the theological doctrines in the world. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers puts it thus: “Despite the wide variety of philosophical thought, despite all the contradictions and mutually exclusive claims to truth, there is in all philosophy a One, which no man possesses but about which all serious efforts have at all times gravitated: the one eternal philosophy, the philosophia perennis.”

In Part Three, titled Looking Around: An Angle on Our Times, the author charts the cartography of the current Western intellectual and academic scene. In each essay in this section, he focuses on a particular domain or discipline and presents a cogent critique of its post-modernist strain and the resultant crisis in it – whether generally perceived to be a crisis or not. Higher education, humanities, philosophy, theology, and science, all have been awarded their due space by the author as he foregrounds and analyzes the dehumanizing and anti-essentialist proclivities that can be witnessed in each as a consequence of the influence it received from the post-modernist project.

One of these essays deals exclusively with the state the humanities have been reduced to. Smith explicates that the contemporary epistemology that validates only knowledge acquired through sense experience and rejects intuitively or rationally gained knowledge, ipso facto rules out all that is beyond any verification through proof. While the humanities precisely concern themselves with the qualitative and the un-measurable that does not yield to such verification. Yet when the humanities – in their desire to align themselves with extant epistemology – undertake “attempts to force the question of the world’s worth into the arena of proof”, they commit a fatal error. For cognizance of what is noblest and most sublime about human existence is to be achieved through “a higher epistemic yield – call it insight, wisdom, understanding, or even intelligence if we use that word to include, as it did for the Scholastics, Plato’s ‘eye of the soul’ that can discern spiritual objects”.

Huston Smith is a philosopher par excellence. It is no wonder that his books boast a wide and chequered readership worldwide comprising individuals who follow an array of variegated belief systems. This could perhaps be taken to be reflective of mankind’s disillusionment with the worldview that constitutes the framework for life in the Western society as well as in all those socio-cultural contexts and milieus that have either consciously or unconsciously received an indelibly profound influence from the contemporary Western discourse.

Smith’s intransigent belief in the capacity of human intellect to apprehend transcendence and the highest truths inspires in the reader the optimism and faith that the world is in such dire need of today. He refuses to give in to the intellectual and existential dilemma that confronts his contemporaries in the West. Instead, he believes to be true what the poet William Blake puts thus in his poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” In the last section of his book, aptly titled The Way Out, Smith posits that each one of us innately possesses what he calls the sacred unconscious and when we establish a connection with this unconscious, we experience the wholeness that is indispensable to a fulfilling existence:
“An enlightened being, I am proposing, is one who is in touch with his deepest unconscious, an unconscious which...deserves to be considered sacred. Our century has acquainted us with regions of our minds that are hidden from us and the powerful ways they control our perceptions. My thesis is that underlying these proximate layers of our unconscious minds is a final substrate that opens mysteriously onto the world as it actually is. To have access to this final substrate is to be objective in the best sense of the word and to possess the virtues and benefits that go with this objectivity.”
*Reviewer: Lecturer, Department of Humanities, NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan. Email:uriyaz@neduet.edu.pk