Thus, both the heavenly and the earthly monarchies were simultaneously overthrown with the intention of creating a kind of secular Garden of Eden established by free-thinking men and women of all classes in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and universal humanism. We in the 21st Century are the children and beneficiaries of that Enlightenment period and we have reaped many benefits from that inheritance. The wealth and comfort of our society as well as our elected form of government derive directly from those free-thinking philosophers and scientists.
But there was also a down side to the reliance on reason. Descartes’ separation of mind from matter freed the mind to use rational thinking and experimentation to determine truth for oneself rather than being forced to accept the pronouncements of orthodoxy and tradition. And this led to an exuberant outburst of creativity and optimism, which produced extraordinary progress not only in philosophy, science and political theory, but also in fields as diverse as economics, psychology and the arts. However, what wasn’t so obvious, at least not at first, was that this liberating separation of self from world eventually became a gulf so wide that it isolated and reified the self while it simultaneously commoditized the world.
In fact, as both self and world became more materialistic objects of study than living expressions of Nature, not only did the gulf separate subject from object, it also separated subjects from each other. Individuality led to individualism rather than to the envisioned community of noble inquiring minds. Although reason at first excelled as the self’s tool for exploring the world in the service of creating and testing knowledge, it also eventually revealed its own limits. Already as early as 1686 in his “Discourse on Metaphysics”, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) pointed out those limits when he considered what in modern times would come to be known among neuro-scientists as “the hard problem”; namely, the unknown connection between a specific object in the physical world and the particular quality it produces in one’s experience. For example, the tomato I see and the quality of redness I experience when I see it. And if we cannot explain the relationship between the objective world and our subjective experience of it, then ultimately, we cannot really explain anything – at least not anything meaningful to us.
