Martin LeFevre: The Enlightenment Was a Misnomer

If the events of recent years have demonstrated anything, it is that the Enlightenment ideals of reason and human rationality cannot hold sway over the chaos of belief and irrationality. But that always was a Hobson’s choice. There is another factor altogether for the human being.

Is it true, as Rebecca Newberger Goldstein states in an essay, “Against the tendency toward sectarian thinking we have no defense but the relentless application of reason?”

If so, then there is no hope for the human race. Why? Because faith and reason are actually two sides of the same coin. Reason is obviously preferable to unreason, but “the relentless application of reason” is a wholly inadequate response to the growing crisis facing humankind.

There is irony in the similarity between the religionist’s faith in belief and the secularist’s faith in reason. Of course no less a philosopher than Spinoza saw reason as “our only hope and redemption,” as Goldstein puts it in extolling Spinoza's “project of radical rationality.”

But that supposed philosophical bulwark, running from Spinoza through Locke and Jefferson, has been sundered. If reasonable people are not to be caught in the crossfire betweens belief and reason, between the order of thought and the chaos of thought, then we will have to respond with more than mere reason.

Part of the dilemma is that few thinking people make the distinction between belief and faith, and between belonging to a religion and being religious (‘spiritual’ is the vague and superficial catch-all term). They assume faith means belief without evidence, even belief in the face of opposing evidence.

But whereas beliefs, which are crystallized ideas, are always false, there is another meaning to the word faith, as there is to being religious. That is, an attitude and feeling, accompanied by and indeed driven by doubt, that there is more to life than the material dimension and the mind-as-thought.

To be sure, that attitude and orientation is getting harder to sustain, but it’s an essential aspect of the religious mind.

Organized religions represent the codification, and therefore the diminution and even destruction of the insight that inspired them. But there is no conflict between faith, in the deeper sense of the word, and reason. There is simply a natural tension between the scientific and religious minds, which can and must exist in the same person.

Faith with doubt, and reason with faith represent different perspectives and different emphases in the human brain and mind. In a healthy individual, they go together in a balanced way, though there is a natural tension between them.

As Einstein said, “science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.” He added, in a surprising statement, “I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest force behind scientific research.”

The scientific mind makes the observable intelligible; the religious mind makes the inexplicable observable.

Insight belongs exclusively to neither the scientific mind nor to the religious mind, yet it is essential to both. Science without insight becomes a lifeless enterprise of accumulating knowledge; religiosity without insight becomes an encrusted theology and sterile enterprise.

Both belief and reason are products of thought, but insight is not. Insight is always in the moment; beliefs and knowledge are rooted in the past. Therefore it’s the awakening of insight, not the application of reason, that is the way ahead for the individual and humankind.

Insight does not serve simply epistemological functions—it isn’t merely a handmaiden of knowledge. Rather, insight flows from and serves a higher purpose than the accumulation of knowledge.

Awakening the human brain’s capacity for insight to its fullest goes beyond creativity in all its forms. Creativity is a matter of having and applying insights. The state of insight however, unites the mind and heart in timeless seeing and liberation. Igniting insight within one allows one to be a participant in the ongoing actuality of cosmic creation.

Certainly the capacity to passively observe the mind into stillness, as well as the ability to use thought/reason with precision, are the marks of an intelligent life.

Does insight flow from the same ineffable source that gives rise to all energy and matter (and which continues to animate and configure the universe)? Does awakening insight fully in the brain illuminate, in silent understanding, the selfsame source of the universe to the human mind/heart?

The flash of insight is irreducibly holistic and non-verbal. But that pertains to insights, not insight per se. One can have an insight into anything, and some people, such as great scientists, artists, and inventors, frequently do. But the state of insight is an essentially silent and timeless awareness of the underlying actuality of life and the universe.

There is no supernatural realm that either supersedes or is separate from the natural world. The religious mind is in full accord with Einstein’s statement that “the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational.” And the religious mind does not in any way impede the primacy of reason and evidence to discover, formulate, and convey the workings and laws of the universe.

But the religious mind does see, and heed, the limits of reason, conceptualization, knowledge, and thought. It holds that only a silent mind can perceive and receive insight into the infinite, ineffable intelligence imbuing and underlying the cosmos.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

© Scoop Media