Philosophical Fragments of Your Ancient Name

Excerpt. (c) Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. "THE MODERN WORLD, our world of triumphant rationality, began on November 10, 1619, with a revelation and a nightmare. On that day, in a room in the small Bavarian village of Ulm, Rene Descartes, a Frenchman, twenty-three years old, crawled into a wall stove and, when he was well warmed, had a vision.It was not a vision of God, or of the Mother of God, or of celestial chariots, or of the New Jerusalem.It was a vision of the unification of all science.The vision was preceded by a state of intense concentration and agitation.Descartes' overheated mind caught fire and provided answers to tremendous problems that had been taxing him for weeks.He was possessed by a Genius, and the answers were revealed in a dazzling, unendurable light.Later, in a state of exhaustion, he went to bed and dreamed three dreams that had been predicted by this Genius.In the first dream he was revolved by a whirlwind and terrified by phantoms.He experienced a constant feeling of falling.He imagined he would be presented with a melon that came from a far-off land.The wind abated and he woke up.His second dream was one of thunderclaps and sparks flying around his room.In the third dream, all was quiet and contemplative.An anthology of poetry lay on the table.He opened it at random and read the verse of Ausonius,"Quod vitae sectabor iter" What path shall I take in life?].A stranger appeared and quoted him the verse "Est et non" Yes and no].Descartes wanted to show him where in the anthology it could be found, but the book disappeared and reappeared.He told the man he would show him a better verse beginning "Quod vitae sectabor iter."At this point the man, the book, and the whole dream dissolved." 2]"THE MODERN WORLD, our world of triumphant rationality" is then the child of a Vision and of visions within dreams.A Vision?A Genius Spirit?Such things have no objective foundation.At least according to modern sciences they don't.A Vision or a Spirit is not amenable to analytic proof or observation by scientific procedure and protocol;so they have no relevant existence.Were Rene Descartes 1596 - 1650]alive today his Vision would be labelled as a psychotic delusion.As a potential danger both to himself and to others he might be forced to undergo mandatory psychiatric intervention and treatment.He might be involuntarily subjected to a barrage of injections of anti-psychotics and thrown into detention in a locked isolation cell for observation.His behavior and thoughts might be monitored closely for the rest of his life.This is current mental health protocol in many developed countries for persons who suffer severe psychotic breaks.But Descartes' visions are only one of the most notable accounts in a long list of scientific discoveries which have had their origins in the deepest layers of the human mind.Inaccessible to the reach of modern sciences these layers are dismissed by Science as chimeras: childish illusions, fanciful tales unworthy of serious study.Descartes' Vision, which established modern rational Science has no basis of validity in the world of today's sciences.If a unique property of modern Science resides in its ability to prove its own findings wrong then it needs to be asked whether or not Science itself is provably wrong.Is modern post-Descartes Science based and built upon a false paradigm?A question seldom asked, it is one that we shall probe here.Science has been a process of divisive specializations, of fragmentations upon fragmentations.This is a process of chopping reality into smaller and smaller bits of information.It is therefore ironic in the extreme that Descartes' "vision of the unification of all science" has produced a set of procedures designed to fragment realities into tinier and tinier bits of information without any complementary methods for reintegrating and unifying th"