The desire for “Enlightenment”
is a longing for a unified view,
in a world of fragmentists.
Modern science has been accused of knowing more and more about less and less, thus presenting a body of knowledge that is increasingly fragmented into isolated areas of specialization. The attack is misplaced in that it is the human mind that by nature operates in such a fashion and is responsible for the form in which men possess “knowledge.”
The unique talent of the mind is to conceive of tangible realities in an intangible context, and thus abstractly divide physical wholes into more mentally manageable parts. This ability to intellectually manipulate real objects has proven most efficient for man’s actual manipulation of his physical environment to better suit his survival needs and comfort, but it has left an impotently diagnosed deficiency in his knowledge of certain non-physical matters: matters such as the mind, and knowledge itself.
The desire to “Wake up”
is a craving for a unified knowledge of things,
in a world of fractionalists.
Men studying psychology do not really want to know the human mind, they want to know “psychology.” There is nothing wrong with this, and at some time they likely did have an interest in the questions of consciousness, but the ordinary minds of ordinary men simply do not want to know what’s really going on in life, (which is to say) they are not actually interested in understanding the nature of thought.
J.