The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas

The Postmodern Mind, page 395

Each great epochal transformation in the history of the Western mind appears to have been initiated by a kind of archetypal sacrifice. As if to consecrate the birth of a fundamental new cultural vision, in each case a symbolically resonant trial and martyrdom of some sort was suffered by its central prophet: thus the trial and execution of Socrates at the birth of the classical Greek mind, the trial and crucifixion of Jesus at the birth of Christianity, and the trial and condemnation of Galileo at the birth of modern science. By all accounts the central prophet of the postmodern mind was Friedrich Nietzsche, with his radical perspectivism, his sovereign critical sensibility, and his powerful, poignantly ambivalent anticipation of the emerging nihilism in Western culture. And we see a curious, perhaps aptly postmodern analogy of this theme of archetypal sacrifice and martyrdom with the extraordinary inner trial and imprisonment-the intense intellectual ordeal, the extreme psychological isolation, and the eventually paralyzing madness-suffered at the birth of the postmodern by Nietzsche, who signed his last letters *The Crucified,* and who died at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Like Nietzsche, the postmodern intellectual situation is profoundly complex and ambiguous-perhaps this is its very essence. What is called postmodern various considerably according to context, but in its most general and widespread form, the postmodern mind may be viewed as an open-ended, indeterminate set of attitudes that has been shaped by a great diversity of intellectual and cultural currents; these range from pragmatism, existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis to feminism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and post empiricist philosophy of science, to cite only a few of the more prominent. Out of this maelstrom of highly developed and often divergent impulses and tendencies, a few widely shared working pr8inciples have emerged. There is an appreciation of the plasticity and constant change of reality and knowledge, a stress on the priority of concrete experience over fixed abstract principles, and a conviction that no single a priori thought system should govern belief or investigation. It is recognized that human knowledge is subjectively determined by a multitude of factors; that objective essences, or things-in-themselves, are neither accessible nor possible; and that the value of all truths and assumptions must be continually subjected to direct testing. The critical search for truth is constrained to be tolerant of ambiguity and pluralism, and its outcome will necessarily be knowledge that is relative and fallible rather than absolute or certain.

Hence the quest for knowledge must be endlessly self-revising. One must try the new, experiment and explore, test against subjective and objective consequences, learn from one*s mistakes, take nothing for granted, treat all as provisional, assume no absolutes. Reality is not a solid, self-contained given but a fluid, unfolding process, an *open universe,* continually affected and molded by one*s actions and beliefs. It is possibility rather than fact. One cannot regard reality as a removed spectator against a fixed object; rather, one is always and necessarily engaged in reality, thereby at once transforming it while being transformed oneself. Although intransigent or provoking in many respects, reality must in some sense be hewed out by means of the human mind and will, which themselves are already enmeshed in that which they seek to understand and affect. The human subject is an embodied agent, acting and judging in a context that can never be wholly objectified, with orientations and motivations that can never be fully grasped or controlled. The knowing subject is never disengaged from the body or from the world, which form the background and condition of every cognitive act.

The inherent human capacity for concept and symbol formation is recognized as a fundamental and necessary element in the human understanding, anticipation, and creation of reality. The mind is not the passive reflector of an external world and its intrinsic order, but is active and creative in the process of perception and cognition. Reality is in some sense constructed by the mind, not simply perceived by it, and many such constructions are possible, none necessarily sovereign. Although human knowledge may be bound to conform to certain innate subjective structures, there is a degree of indeterminacy in these that combined with the human will and imagination, permit an element of freedom in cognition. Implicit here is a relativized critical empiricism and a relativized critical rationalism-recognizing the indispensability both of concrete investigation and of rigorous argument, criticism, and theoretical formulation, yet also recognizing that neither procedure can claim any absolute foundation: There is no empirical *fact that is not already theory-laden, and there is no logical argument or formal principle that is priori certain. All human understanding is interpretation, and no interpretation is final.

The prevalence of the Kuhnian concept of *paradigms* in current discourse is highly characteristic of postmodern thought, reflecting a critical awareness has not only affected the postmodern approach to past cultural world views and the history of changing scientific theories, but has also influenced the postmodern self-understanding itself, encouraging a more sympathetic attitude toward repressed or unorthodox perspectives and a more self-critical view of currently established ones. Continuing advances in anthropology, sociology, history, and linguistics have underscored the relativity of human knowledge, bringing increased recognition of the *Eurocentric* character of Western thought, and of the cognitive bias produced by factors such as class, race, and ethnicity. Especially penetrating in recent years has been the analysis of gender as a crucial factor in determining, and limiting, what counts as truth. Various forms of psychological analysis, cultural a well as individual, have further unmasked the unconscious determinants of human experience and knowledge.

Reflecting and supporting all these developments is a radical perspectivism that lies at the very heart of the postmodern sensibility: a perspectivism rooted in the epistemologies developed by Hume, Kant, Hegel (in his historicism), and Nietzsche, and later articulated in pragmatism, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism. In this understanding, the world cannot be said to possess any features in principle prior to interpretation. The world does not exist as a thing-in-itself, independent of interpretation; rather, it comes into being only in and through interpretations. The subject of knowledge is already embedded in the object of knowledge: the human mind never stands outside the world, judging it from an external vantage point. Every object of knowledge is already part of a pre-interpreted context, and beyond that context are only other pre-interpreted contexts. All human knowledge is mediated by signs and symbols of uncertain provenance, constituted by historically and culturally variable predispositions, and influenced by often unconscious human interests. Hence the nature of truth and reality, in science no less than in philosophy, religion, or art, is radically ambiguous. The subject can never presume to transcend the manifold predispositions of his or her subjectivity. One can at best attempt a fusion of horizons, a never-complete rapprochement between subject and object. Less optimistically, one must recognize the insuperable solipsism of human awareness against the radical illegibility of the world.

The other side of the postmodern mind*s openness and indeterminacy is thus the lack of any firm ground for a world view. Both inner and outer realities have become unfathomably ramified, multidimensional, malleable, and unbounded-bringing a spur to courage and creativity, yet also a potentially debilitating anxiety in the face of unending relativism and existential finitude. The conflicts of subjective and objective testing, an acute awareness of the cultural parochialism and historical relativity of all knowledge, a pervasive sense of radical uncertainty and displacement, and a pluralism bordering on distressing incoherence all contribute to the postmodern condition. To even speak of subject and object as distinguishable entities is to presume more than can be known. With the ascendance of the postmodern mind, the human quest for meaning in the cosmos has devolved upon a hermeneutic enterprise that is disorientingly free-floating: The postmodern human exists in a universe whose significance is at once utterly open and without warrantable foundation.;

Of the many factors that have converged to produce this intellectual position, it has been the analysis of language that has brought forth the most radically skeptical epistemological currents in the postmodern mind, and it is these currents that have identified themselves most articulately and self-consciously as *postmodern.* Again, many sources contributed to this development-Nietzsche*s analysis of the problematic relation of language to reality; C.S. Pierce*s semiotics, positing that all human thought takes place in signs; Ferdinand de Saussure*s linguistics, positing the arbitrary relationship between word and object, sign and signified; Wittgenstein*s analysis of the linguistic structuring of human experience; Heidegger*s existentialist-linguistic critique of metaphysics; Edward Sapir and B. L. Whorf*s linguistic hypothesis that language shapes the perception of reality as much as reality shapes language; Michel Foucault*s genealogical investigations into the social construction of knowledge; and Jacques Derrida*s deconstructionism, challenging the attempt to establish a secure meaning in any text. The upshot of these several influences, particularly in the contemporary academic world, has been the dynamic dissemination of a view of human discourse and knowledge that radically relativises human claims to a sovereign or enduring truth, and that thereby supports an emphatic revision of the character and goals of intellectual analysis.

Basic to this perspective is the thesis that all human thought is ultimately generated and bound by idiosyncratic cultural-linguistic forms of life. Human knowledge is the historically contingent product of linguistic and social practices of particular local communities of interpreters, with no assured *ever-closer* relation to an independent historical reality. Because human experience is linguistically prestructured, yet the various structures of language possess no demonstrable connection with an independent reality, the human mind can never claim access to any reality other than that determined by its local form of life. Language is a *cage* (Wittgenstein). Moreover, linguistic meaning itself can be shown to be fundamentally unstable, because the contexts that determine meaning are never fixed, and beneath the surface of every apparently coherent text can be found a plurality of incompatible meanings. No interpretation of a text can claim decisive authority because that which is being interpreted inevitably contains hidden contradictions that under mind its coherence. Hence all meaning is ultimately undecidable, and there is no *true* meaning. No underlying primal reality can be said to provide the foundation for human attempts to represent truth. Texts refer only to other tests, in an infinite regress, with no secure basis in something external to language. One can never escape from *the play of signifiers.* The multiplicity of incommensurable human truths exposes and defeats the conventional assumption that the mind can progress ever forward to a nearer grasp of reality. Nothing certain can be said about the nature of truth, except perhaps that it is, as Richard Rorty put it, *What our peers will let us get away with saying.*

Here in a sense the Cartesian critical intellect has reached its furthest point of development, doubting all, applying a systematic skepticism to every possible meaning. With no divine foundation to certify the Word, language possesses no privileged connection to truth. The fate of human consciousness is ineluctably nomadic, a self-aware wandering through error. The history of human thought is a history of idiosyncratic metaphorical schemes, ambiguous interpretive vocabularies having no ground beyond what is already saturated by their own metaphorical and interpretive categories. Postmodern philosophers can compare and contrast, analyze and discuss the many sets of perspectives human beings have expressed, the diverse symbol systems, the various ways of making things hang together, but they cannot pretend to possess an extra historical Archimedean point from which to judge whether a given perspective validly represents the *Truth.* Since there are no indubitable foundations for human knowledge, the highest value for any perspective is its capacity to be temporarily useful or edifying, emancipatory or creative-though it is recognized that in the end these valuations are themselves not justifiable by anything beyond personal and cultural taste. For justification is itself only another social practice with no foundation beyond social practice.

The most prominent philosophical outcome of these several converging strands of postmodern thought has been a many-sided critical attack on the central Western philosophical tradition from Platonism onward. The whole project of that tradition to grasp and articulate a foundational Reality has been criticized as a futile exercise in linguistic game playing, a sustained but doomed effort to move beyond elaborate fictions of its own creation. More pointedly, such a project has been condemned as inherently alienating and oppressively hierarchical-an intellectually imperious procedure that has produced an existential and cultural impoverishment, and that has led ultimately to the technocratic domination of nature and the social-political domination of others. The Western mind*s overriding compulsion to impose some form of totalizing reason-theological, scientific, economic-on every aspect of life is accused of being not only self-deceptive but destructive.

Spurred by these and other, related factors, postmodern critical thought has encouraged a vigorous rejection of the entire Western intellectual *canon* as long defined and privileged by a more or less exclusively male, white, European elite. Received truths concerning *man,* *reason,* *civilization,* and *progress* are indicted as intellectually and morally bankrupt. Under the cloak of Western values, too many sins have been committed. Disenchanted eyes are now cast onto the West*s long history of ruthless expansionism and exploitation- the rapacity of its elites from ancient times to modern, its systematic thriving at the expense of others, its colonialism and imperialism, its slavery and genocide, its anti-Semitism, its oppression of women, people of color, minorities, homosexuals, the working classes, the poor, its destruction of indigenous societies throughout the world, its arrogant insensitivity to other cultural traditions and values, its cruel abuse of other forms of life, its blind ravaging of virtually the entire planet.

In this radically transformed cultural context, the contemporary academic world has increasingly concerned itself with the critical deconstruction of traditional assumptions through several overlapping modes of analysis-sociological and political, historical and psychological, linguistic and literary. Texts of every category are analyzed with an acute sensitivity to the rhetorical strategies and political functions they serve. The underlying intellectual ethos is one of disassembling established structures, deflating pretensions, exploding beliefs, unmasking appearances- a *hermeneutics of suspicion* in the spirit of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Postmodernism in this sense is *an antinomian movement that assumes a vast unmaking in the West mind...deconstruction, decentering, disappearance, dissemination, demystification, discontinuity, difference, dispersion, etc. Such terms...express an epistemological obsession with fragments or fractures, and a corresponding ideological commitment to minorities in politics, sex, and language. To think well, to feel well, to act well, to read well, according to the episteme of unmaking, is to refuse the tyranny of wholes; totalization in any human endeavor is potentially totalitarian.* The pretense of any form of omniscience-philosophical, religious, scientific-must be abandoned. Grand theories and universal overviews cannot be sustained without producing empirical falsification and intellectual authoritarianism. To assert general truths is to impose a spurious dogma on the chaos of phenomena. Respect for contingency and discontinuity limits knowledge to the local and specific. Any alleged comprehensive, coherent outlook is at best no more than a temporarily useful fiction masking chaos, at worst an oppressive fiction masking relationships of power, violence, and subordination.

Properly speaking, therefore, there is no *postmodern world,* nor the possibility of one. The postmodern paradigm is by its nature fundamentally subversive of all paradigms, for at its core is the awareness of reality as being at once multiple, local and temporal, and without demonstrable foundation. The situation recognized by John Dewey at the start of the century, that *despair of any integrated outlook and attitude [is] the chief intellectual characteristic of the present age, * has been enshrined as the essence of the postmodern vision, as in Jean-Francois Lyotard*s definition of postmodern as *incredulity toward meta-narratives.*

Here, paradoxically, we can recognize something of the old confidence of the modern mind in the superiority of its own perspective. Only whereas the modern mind*s conviction of superiority derived from its awareness of possessing in an absolute sense more knowledge than its awareness of possessing in an absolute sense more knowledge than its predecessors, the postmodern mind*s sense of superiority derives from its special awareness of how little knowledge can be claimed by any mind, itself included. Yet precisely by virtue of that self-relativizing critical awareness, it is recognized that a quasi-nihilist rejection of any and all forms of *totalization* and *meta-narrative*-of any aspiration toward intellectual unity, wholeness, or comprehensive coherence-is itself a position not beyond questioning, and cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself. Such a position presupposes a meta-narrative of its own, one perhaps more subtle than others, but in the end no less subject to deconstructive criticism. On its own terms, the assertion of the historical relativity and culturalinguistic bondage of all truth and knowledge must itself be regarded as reflecting but one more local and temporal perspective having no necessarily universal, extra historical value. Everything could change tomorrow. Implicitly, the one postmodern absolute is critical consciousness, which, by deconstructing all, seems compelled by its own logic to do so to itself as well. This is the unstable paradox that permeates the postmodern mind.

But if the postmodern mind has sometimes been prone to a dogmatic relativism and a compulsively fragmenting skepticism, and if the cultural ethos that has accompanied it has sometimes deteriorated into cynical detachment and spiritless pastiche, it is evident that the most significant characteristics of the lager postmodern intellectual situation-its pluralism, complexity, and ambiguity-are precisely the characteristics necessary for the potential emergence of a fundamentally new form of intellectual vision, one that might both preserve and transcend the current state of extraordinary differentiation. In the politics of the contemporary Weltanschauung, no perspective-religious, scientific, or philosophical-has the upper her hand, yet that situation has encouraged an almost unprecedented intellectual flexibility and cross-fertilization, reflected in the widespread call for, and practice of, open *conversation* between different understandings, different vocabularies, different cultural paradigms.

Looked at as a whole, the extreme fluidity and multiplicity of the contemporary intellectual scene can scarcely be exaggerated. Not only is the postmodern mind itself a maelstrom of unresolved diversity, but virtually every important element of the Western intellectual past is now present and active in one form or another, contributing to the vitality and confusion of the contemporary Zeitgeist. With so many previously established assumptions having been called into question, there remain few, if any, a priori strictures on the possible, and many perspectives from the past have reemerged with new relevance. Hence any generalizations about the postmodern mind have to be qualified by a recognition of the continuing presence of recent resurgence of most of its major predecessors, the topics of all the previous chapters of this book. Various still-vital forms of the modern sensibility, of the scientific mind, of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, of Renaissance syncretism, of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism-all of these, at various stages of development and ecumenical interpenetration, continue today to be influential factors. Even elements of the Western cultural tradition going back to the Hellenistic era and classical Greece-Platonic and Presocratic philosophy, Hermeticism, mythology, the mystery religions-have been reemerging to play new roles in the current intellectual scene. Moreover, these in turn have been joined, and affected, by a multitude of cultural perspectives from outside the West, such as the Buddhist and Hindu mystical traditions; by underground cultural streams from within the West itself, such as Gnosticism and the major esoteric traditions; and by indigenous and archaic perspectives antedating Western civilization altogether, such as Neolithic European and Native American spiritual traditions-all gather now on the intellectual stage as if for some kind of climactic synthesis.

The cultural and intellectual role of religion has of course been drastically affected by the secularizing and pluralistic developments of the modern age, but while in most respects the influence of institutionalized religion has continued to decline, the religious sensibility itself seems to have been revitalized by the newly ambiguous intellectual circumstances of the postmodern era. Contemporary religion has been revitalized as well by its own plurality, finding new forms of expression and new sources of inspiration and illumination ranging from Eastern mysticism and psychedelic self-exploration to liberation theology and ecofeminist spirituality. Although the ascendance of secular individualism and the decline of traditional religious belief may have precipitated widespread spiritual anomie, it is evident that, for many, these same developments ultimately encouraged new forms of religious orientation and greater spiritual autonomy. In growing numbers, individuals have felt not only compelled but free to work out for themselves their relationship to the ultimate conditions of human existence, drawing on a far wider range of spiritual resources to do so. The postmodern collapse of meaning has thus been countered by an emerging awareness of the individual*s self-responsibility and capacity for creative innovation and self transformation in his or her existential and spiritual response to life. Following suggestions implicit in Nietzsche, the *death of God* has begun to be assimilated and reconceived as a positive religious development, as permitting the emergence of a more authentic experience of the numinous, a larger sense of deity. On the intellectual level, religion no longer tends to be understood reductively as a psychologically or culturally determined belief in nonexistent realities, or explained away as an accident of biology, but is recognized as a fundamental human activity in which every society and individual symbolically interprets and engages the ultimate nature of being.

Science too, while no longer enjoying the same degree of sovereignty it possessed during the modern era, continues to retain allegiance for the unrivaled pragmatic power of its conceptions and the penetrating rigor of its method. Because the earlier knowledge claims of modern science have been relativized by both philosophy of science and the concrete consequences of scientific and technological advance, that allegiance is no longer uncritical, yet in these new circumstances science itself has seemingly been freed up to explore new and less-constricted approaches to understanding the world. It is true that individuals who subscribe to an allegedly unified and self-evident *scientific world view* of the modern type are seen as having failed to engage the larger intellectual challenge of the age-thereby receiving the same judgment in the postmodern era that the ingenuous religious person received from science in the modern era. In virtually all contemporary disciplines, it is recognized that the prodigious complexity, subtlety, and multivalaence of reality far transcend the grasp of any one intellectual approach, and that only a committed openness to the interplay of many perspectives can meet the extraordinary challenges of the postmodern era. But contemporary science has itself become increasingly self-aware and self-critical, less prone to a naive scientism, more conscious of its epistemological and existential limitations. Nor is contemporary science singular, having given rise to a number of radically divergent interpretations of the world, many of which differ sharply from what was previously the conventional scientific vision.

Common to nature, an imperative driven by the growing recognition that modern science*s mechanistic and objectivist conception of nature was not only limited but fundamentally flawed. Major theoretical interventions such as Bateson*s *ecology of mind,* Bohm*s theory of the implicate order, Sheldrake*s theory of formative causation, McClintock*s theory of genetic transposition, Lovelock*s Gaia hypothesis, Prigogine*s theory of dissipative structures and order by fluctuation, Lorenz and Feigenbaum*s chaos theory, and Bell*s theorem of nonlocality have pointed to new possibilities for a less reductionist scientific world conception. Evelyn Fox Keller*s methodological recommendation that the scientist be capable of empathic identification with the object he or she seeks to understand reflects a similar reorientation of the scientific mind. Moreover, many of these developments within the scientific community have been strengthened and often stimulated by the reemergence of and Common to these new perspectives has been the imperative to rethink and reformulate the human relation widespread interest in various archaic and mystical conceptions of nature, the impressive sophistication of which is increasingly recognized.

A further crucial development encouraging these integrative tendencies in the postmodern intellectual milieu has been the epistemological rethinking of the nature of imagination, carried out on many fronts-philosophy of science, sociology, anthropology, religious studies-and spurred perhaps above all by the work of Jung and the epistemological insights of post-Jungian depth psychology. Imagination is no longer conceived as simplistically opposed to perception and reason; rather perception and reason are recognized as being always informed by the imagination. With this awareness of the fundamental mediating role of the imagination in human experience has also come an increased appreciation of the power and complexity of the unconscious, as well as new insight into the nature of archetypal pattern and meaning. The postmodern philosophers*s recognition of the inherently metaphorical nature of philosophical and scientific statements (Feyerabend, Barbour, Rorty) has been both affirmed and more precisely articulated with the postmodern psychologist*s insight into the archetypal categories of the unconscious that condition and structure human experience and cognition (Jung, Hillman). The long-standing philosophical problem of universals, which had been partly illuminated by Wittgenstein*s concept of *family resemblances*-his thesis that what appears to be a definite commonality shared by all instances covered by a single general word in fact often comprises a whole range of indefinite, overlapping similarities and relationships-has been given new intelligibility through depth psychology*s understanding of archetypes. In this conception, archetypes are recognized as enduring patterns of principles that are inherently ambiguous and multivalent, dynamic, malleable, and subject to diverse cultural and individual inflections, yet that possess a distinct underlying formal coherence and universality.

An especially characteristic and challenging intellectual position that has emerged out of modern and postmodern developments is one which, recognizing both an essential autonomy in the human being and a radical plasticity in the nature of reality, begins with the assertion that reality itself tends to unfold in response to the particular symbolic framework and set of assumption that are employed by each individual and each society. The fund of data available to the human mind is of such intrinsic complexity and diversity that it provides plausible support for many different conceptions 9of the ultimate nature of reality. The human being must therefore choose among a multiplicity of potentially viable options, and whatever option is chosen will in turn affect both the nature of reality and the choosing subject. In this view, although there exist many defining structures in the world and in the mind that resist or compel defining structures in the world and in the mind that resist or compel human thought and activity in various ways, on a fundamental level the world tends to ratify, and open up according to, the character of the vision directed toward it. The world that the human being attempts to know and remake is in some sense projectively elicited by the frame of reference with which it is approached.

Such position emphasizes the immense responsibility inherent in the human situation, and the immense potential. Since evidence can be adduced and interpreted to corroborate a virtually limitless array of world views, the human challenge is to engage the world view or set of perspectives which brings forth the most valuable, life-enhancing consequences. The*human predicament* is here regarded as the human adventure: the challenge of being, in potentia, a radically self-defining entity-not in the context of the no-exit box of the secular existentialist, which unconsciously assumed specific a priori metaphysical limits, but in a universe that is genuinely open. Because the human understanding is not unequivocally compelled by the data to adopt one metaphysical position over another, an irreducible element of human choice supervenes. Hence there enter into the epistemological equation, in addition to intellectual rigor and social-cultural context, other, more open-ended factors such as will, imagination, faith, hope, and empathy. The more complexly conscious and ideologically unconstrained the individual or society, the more free is the choice of worlds, and the more profound their participation in creating reality. This affirmation of the human being*s self-defining autonomy and epistemological freedom has a historical background going back at least to the Renaissance and Pico*s Oratio, appearing in different forms in the ideas of Emerson and Nietzsche, William James and Rudolf Steiner, among others, but has been given new support and further dimensions by a wide range of contemporary intellectual developments, from philosophy of science to sociology of religion.

More generally, whether in philosophy, religion, or science, the univocal literalism that tended to characterize the modern mind has been increasingly criticized and rejected, and in its place has arisen a great appreciation of the multidimensional nature of reality, the many-sidedness of the human spirit, and the multivalent, symbolically mediated nature of human knowledge and experience. With the appreciation has also come a growing sense that the postmodern dissolving of old assumptions and categories could permit the emergence of entirely new prospects for conceptual and existential reintegration, with the possibility of richer interpretive vocabularies, more profound narrative coherencies. Under the combined impact of the remarkable changes and self-revisions that have taken place in virtually every contemporary intellectual discipline, the fundamental modern schism between science and religion has been increasingly undermined. In the wake of such developments, the original project of Romanticism-the reconciliation of subject and object, human and nature, spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, intellect and soul-has reemerged with new vigor.

Two antithetical impulses can thus be discerned in the contemporary intellectual situation, one pressing for a radical deconstruction and unmasking-of knowledge, beliefs, world views-and the other for a radical integration and reconciliation. In obvious ways the two impulses work against each other, yet more subtly they can also be seen as working together as polarized, but complementary, tendencies. Nowhere is this dynamic tension and interplay between the deconstructive and the integrative more dramatically in evidence than in the rapidly expanding body of work produced by women informed by feminism. Carolyn Merchant, Evelyn Fox Keller, and other historians of science have analyzed the influence exerted on the modern scientific understanding by gender-biased strategies and metaphors supporting a patriarchal conception of nature-as a mindless, passive feminine object, to be penetrated, controlled, dominated, and exploited. Paula Treichler, Francine Wattman Frank, Susan Wolfe, and other linguists have meticulously explored the complex relations between language, sex, and society, illuminating the multiplicity of ways women have been excluded or depreciated through the implicit codings of linguistic conventions. New and powerful insights have emerged from the work of Rosemary Ruether, Mary Daly, Beatrice Bruteau, Joan Chamberlain Engelsman, and Elaine Pagels in religious studies; of Marija Gimbutas in archaeology; of Carol Gilligan in moral and developmental psychology; of Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow in psychoanalysis; of Stephanie de Voogd and Barbara Eckman in epistemology; of a host of feminist scholars in history, anthropology, sociology, jurisprudence, economics, ecology, ethics, aesthetics, literary theory, cultural criticism.

Considered as a whole, the feminist perspective and impulse has brought forth perhaps the most vigorous, subtle, and radically critical analysis of conventional intellectual and cultural assumptions in al of contemporary scholarship. No academic discipline or area of human experience has been left untouched by the feminist reexamination of how meanings are created and preserved, how evidence is selectively interpreted and theory molded with mutually reinforcing circularity, how particular rhetorical strategies and behavioral styles have sustained male hegemony, how women*s voices remained unheard through centuries of social and intellectual male dominance, how deeply problematic consequences have ensued from masculine assumptions about reality, knowledge, nature, society, the divine. Such analyses in turn have helped illuminate parallel patterns and structures of domination that have marked the experience of other oppressed peoples and forms of life. Given the context in which it has arisen, the feminist intellectual impulse has been compelled to assert itself with a forceful critical spirit that has often been oppositional and polarizing in character; yet precisely as a result of that critique, long-established categories that had sustained traditional oppositions and dualities-between male and female, subject and object, human and nature, body and spirit, self and other-have been deconstructed and reconceived, permitting the contemporary mind to consider less-dichotomized alternative perspectives that could not have been envisioned within previous interpretive frameworks. In certain respects the implications, both intellectual and social, of feminist analyses are so fundamental that their significance is only beginning to be realized by the contemporary mind.

And so on many fronts, the postmodern mind*s insistence on the pluralism of truth and its overcoming of past structures and foundations have begun to open up a wide range of unforeseen possibilities for approaching the intellectual and spiritual problems that have long exercised and confounded the modern mind. The postmodern era is an era without consensus on the nature of reality, but it is blessed with an unprecedented wealth of perspectives with which to engage the great issues that confront it.

Still, the contemporary intellectual milieu is riddled with tension, irresolution, and perplexity. The practical benefits of its pluralism are repeatedly undercut by stubborn conceptual disjunctions. Despite frequent congruence of purpose, there is little effective cohesion, no apparent means by which a shared cultural vision could emerge, no unifying perspective cogent or comprehensive enough to satisfy the burgeoning diversity of intellectual needs and aspirations. *In the twentieth century nothing is in agreement with anything else* (Gertrude Stein). A chaos of valuable but seemingly incompatible interpretations prevails, with no resolution in sight. Certainly such a context provides less hindrance to the free play of intellectual creativity than would the existence of a monolithic cultural paradigm. Yet fragmentation and incoherence are not without their own inhibiting consequences. The culture suffers both psychologically and pragmatically from the philosophical anomie that pervades it. In the absence of any viable, embracing cultural vision, old assumptions remain blunderingly in force, providing an increasingly unworkable and dangerous blueprint for human thought and activity.

Faced with such a differentiated and problematic intellectual situation, thoughtful individuals engage the task of evolving a flexible set of premises and perspectives that would not reduce or suppress the complexity and multiplicity of human realities, yet could also serve to mediate, integrate, and clarify. The dialectical challenge felt by many is to evolve a cultural vision possessed of a certain intrinsic profundity or universality that, while not opposing any a priori limits on the possible range of legitimate interpretations, would yet somehow bring an authentic and fruitful coherence out of the present fragmentation, and also provide a sustaining fertile ground for the generation of unanticipated new perspectives and possibilities in the future. Given the nature of the present situation, however, such an intellectual task appears surpassingly formidable-not unlike having to string the great Odyssean bow of opposites, and then send an arrow through a seemingly impossible multiplicity of targets.

The intellectual question that looms over our time is whether the current state of profound metaphysical and epistemological irresolution is something that will continue indefinitely, taking perhaps more viable, or more radically disorienting, forms as the years and decades pass; whether it is in fact the entropic prelude to some kind of apocalyptic denouement of history; or whether it represents an epochal transition to another era altogether, brining a new form of civilization and a new world view with principles and ideals fundamentally different from those that have impelled the modern world through its dramatic trajectory.