The Enchanted Imagination
Part 3, The Transcendental to Empirical Shift
The shift away from ontology and teleology toward epistemology and causality was associated with another imaginative change that moved us from enchantment to disenchantment. Specifically, we turned our attention away from the transcendentals.
Ancient philosophy and religion was focused upon the contemplation of the transcendentals we call the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. You'll recall your Plato here.
Going back to the first post, contemplation about ontology wasn't just about the nature of being and existence. Ontological contemplation also concerned the reality of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, the reality of the transcendentals. More, ontological contemplation concerned how Being, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness were One. And how that One--the Unity of Being, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness--is what we call God. This is both Greek philosophy and Christian mystical theology.
The point of this series is to describe how our attention shifted in ways that facilitated modern disenchantment. What does the mind attend to? Contemplation of the transcendentals facilitates enchantment by directing our gaze beyond empirical reductionism and scientific materialism. An excellent discussion of this can be found in David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God. Or you could read Plato and the church fathers.
By contrast, if you turn your eyes away from the True, the Beautiful, and the Good you become trapped in an attentional framework where all becomes empirical and "factual." This attentional bias leads to disenchantment.
Dostoevsky famously said, "Beauty will save the world." Beauty can do this because, as a transcendental, Beauty mystically pulls the factual mind into enchantment and the contemplation of God.
It's amazing how this thought about the transcendent seems to a "spirit" of our more recent times. Publications like this along with podcasts like The Symbolic World, The Lord of Spirits and others all emerging around same time just can't be coincidental. This has certainly prompted a mindset shift in myself and I have no doubt it's doing the same for others. Believers, non-believers and otherwise.... It certainly seems we are on the edge of something beautiful.
What is meant by empirical? Do you mean "sensible" reality, like a pre-modern/pre-Newtonian thinker might conceptualize it, i.e. reality given to the bodily senses? Or is it quantifiable reality, like a modern/post-Newtonian thinker might conceptualize it, i.e. abstract bodies of information representing very specific sets of phenomena abstracted from "sensible" reality expressed in some sort of mathematical, graphical, or geometrical figure?
The relationship set up between the transcendental and the empirical assumes (in obviously very generic terms) that pre-modern and modern thinkers conceptualize reality in the same way. The external world is the external world regardless how people think about it. The external world remains constant; how people think about it changes.
That's true, but only so far as it goes. Modern thinkers are very comfortable letting their minds wander back and forth across billions of years and across millions of light-years. The scope of the pre-modern imagination is much more human and therefore limited in its scope. Genesis 1 describes a natural world filled with familiar things. So does Aristotle's On the Heavens and History of Animals. The pre-modern imagination is present in the human body in ways the modern imagination no longer is.
Think about Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. When Kant comes to the end and asserts that the three transcendental ideas of the world as such (cosmological idea), the self as such (psychological idea), and God (theological idea) cannot be determined as objects under the a priori forms of space and time, it is conspicuous that the thinker who thinks about the world in and through these three ideas does not have a body. If the thinker did have body, these three ideas would be seen as abstract (which Kant recognizes they are), but they would also be seen as expressed through an embodied self (which Kant does not recognize).