Start with the dream -- or the dreamer, whom we can decompose, so to speak, into dream-maker and dream protagonist. The first, the dream-maker, isn't you, notice -- you, as such, have no say in what the dream is made of or where it goes. You are simply a speaker and actor, like any other figure in a narrative, and though you're the central character, you're as much at the mercy of the story as any other character. The dream is a narrative, in the sense of having characters and situations and a sequence of events, but it's a crude narrative, lacking the usual structure or arc -- dreams, for example, have no ending, they're just interrupted when consciousness proper -- your self -- returns.
Often, though, that return isn't abrupt. In the quiet of a morning, the dream can ebb, and there's an interval when you can drift back into it for a moment, until finally it dissolves under the wash of present sensations. And that interval is not that different from other intervals in waking life, when we're caught up in a day-dream or a reverie, or even when we unconsciously rehearse or re-enact some scene. Perhaps, then, the dream as such is just the ordinary operation of our imagination -- our "stream of consciousness", as it's come to be called -- in the absence of sensory distractions. In our waking lives, of course, sensory phenomena are not distractions, but what we need and use in carrying out practical tasks -- thus the distinction of dream from reality.
Now consider culture, and the individual as the smallest unit of culture. If we say that individuals communicating with one another over time constitute a particular culture, then in that sense "culture" takes on a fractal nature: two people in a conversation make a transient micro-culture; a family has its own culture, that changes over time as its members age; a workplace has a culture, as does an organization or an institution; and on the largest scale of course, there are national cultures, linguistic cultures, religious cultures, and so on.
Is there a division within culture, then, on whatever scale, that's comparable to the division within the individual of imagination and practice, or activity focused on practical ends? It seems so. It's easy to see imagination, for example, as the primary component in the various forms of art, play, celebration, entertainment, and so on. And similarly, practice would be the primary component in economic activity of any sort, as would governance, technical invention, and, arguably, science. It's true, of course, that imagination and practice mix in varying degrees in both an individual's waking life and in cultural social behavior. But their distinction helps explain the nature of various kinds of behavior and structure, on both individual and cultural levels.
In all this, however, science constitutes a special case. With its systemic focus on observation and experiment, it's clearly in the category of the practical, but it also relies heavily on the imaginative construction of concepts and theories (as Einstein, for example, both recognized and illustrated). This systematized fusion produced a cultural revolution, first in the West, where it began, and now throughout the world, that has had an enormous effect in improving not just practical knowledge, but also, as a consequence, material wealth and human well-being. But it's also had a momentous effect in the breaking of a capstone that has characterized all previous cultures -- namely, religion. The latter persists, of course, but largely in the interstices of a secular culture. And where the religious fusion of imagination and practice, in the various forms of myth and ritual, was able to provide answers to questions of purpose, value, and meaning, science, with its purely empirical focus, is not. Hence, some of the discontents of the modern world.
Jun 29/20
No comments:
Post a Comment