11.30.08
Reinventing the sacred: secularism
More on Reinventing The Sacred
Modernity itself is an adventure in reinventing the sacred. Science has temporarily induced a kind of ‘seize the throne’ mentality in scientists who are attempting to ‘rule the universe’ to ‘rule culture’ armed with reductionist scientism. It might derail the modern initiative to ‘reinvent the sacred’.
The number of attempts to reinvent the sacred in the modern transition (as I call it in terms of the eonic effect) is large: the Protestant Reformation, Spinoza, Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and the German Classical philosophy spectrum leading to Marx/Engels, …. There are more.
In fact, the issue was implicit in a figure such as Hegel who saw the great generative significance of the Protestant Reformation, and aspired to its completion.
But the real and plainest reinvention of the sacred lies in the secular itself, which is far broader than the rise of science and thus we might dispense with the very term ‘sacred’ and see the reality behind the word as much in secularization, potentially, as in traditionalist posturings.
The key to that idea lies in Rousseau/Kant and the emerging modernist idea of freedom and its discourses and realizations. The clue here lies in Kant’s (and our) realization of the limits of metaphysics in three Idea, that of divinity, soul, and free will (armed with Upanishadic or Schopenhauerian thinking we can easily discover their cousin nature) and, in any case, all this shows that emergent freedoms, not the traditionalist retrogressions are the path to the sacred in our world, a term we should lay aside. The elimination of this factor in the modern transformation by scientism is a confusion of culture that needs redress. We have confused modernity with scientism, and the result is paradoxically spawning a resurgence of fundamentalism.
The sacred is thus implicit in the very evolution to modernity that we see so explosively triggered from the Protestant Reformation and the incipient Scientific Revolution in tandem.
Unfortunately we are being subjected to the totalitarian tactics of the metaphysical scientism of the technocrats, which may destroy the subtle balance achieved in the early modern.
This emergent character of modern freedom is one key to the eonic effect, whose analysis also shows the connection to evolution.