![[Literae]](/images/literae.jpg)
poetry, prose, and other strings of words · 1993 - 2003
Apollo, Dionysus, or … ?
December 8, 1995
We see it in the lyrics of many of our popular musicians, in the lines of our modern poets, and on the faces in Time and other news media: the anguish of Picasso's Guernica is the anguish of the twentieth century European/American men and women. What went wrong? Why, when material means are better than ever, is everyone in despair about the state of things? Why is crime rampant? Why? Why? There are no easy answers, and obviously no easy solutions. However, Socrates, physician of the soul, would give this diagnosis of society's soul: it is not integrated. Does this mean that there are not enough blacks living in suburbia? Or that the Chinese are too concentrated in one area of town? No. This means that our society is crumbling because of an overabundance of one thing and lack of another; it is collapsing upon itself as a result of certain deficiencies and excesses. His solution: everyone should attempt to actualize and live the integrated life.
We are in trouble today because we have followed too closely to the rationalists, particularly Plato. It is on the basis of Plato's assumptions about the highest form, good, and his belief that it could only be reached through pure reason and suppression of the emotional aspect of humanity that mankind (that is, from now on, European or American Men) has striven to go forward spiritually. This has led to the obvious oppression of the expression of emotion and use of such as a tool for knowledge and understanding. When Descartes came along, he strengthened this concept (despite the fact that he tried to throw out the old philosophers' ways of thinking) in the Western mind and imbued us with the fallacious idea that complete reasoning could be completely detached from the subjective self. There is another symptom of our thought that derives from both Plato and Descartes: the tendency to classify everything as strictly dualistic. That is, the Western mind divides everything in to two clear cut sides, good and evil, light and dark.
It is obvious that a healthy society must be made up of healthy individuals. Everyday we are appalled by new statistics regarding different diseases, crime, drug abuse, dysfunctional families and much more. Psychologists are becoming ever more popular and words like Prozac and Ritalin have become household terms. These are indicators of sick individuals. It therefore follows that our society cannot be healthy; it is sick.
It stands to reason that, if we have been following a certain path and we are sick, then that sickness is a result of the path followed, namely rationalism. Therefore, it becomes incumbent on us to change our path. Aristotle, the Buddha, Jesus, Bahá'u'lláh, and Nietzsche all challenged us to find the right way to go about it. As the experiences of our lives have taught us, swinging from side to side in an attempt to find happiness has done no good. As science would show, the most stable state is a state of equilibrium: all things tend towards it. What is equilibrium but a balance of forces? Newton argued that, for a system to be in equilibrium with itself, there must be equal and opposite forces. If we are to believe in the validity of the sciences, then we must believe in the natural state of equilibrium. This is what integration is all about, the reaching for equilibrium. Thus did Heraclitus teach of the unity of opposites, Aristotle of the golden mean, and the Buddha of the eightfold path. By striving to achieve a balance in the self, an annihilation of the ego, and bridging the gaps between those things which seem to be so contradictory (such as science and religion), integration can be reached.
By integration it is meant the balance of all things. There is not a set equation for integrating the self, unlike with the mathematical definition. Integration clearly means that there is present both reason and emotion, subjectivity and objectivity. In fact, these things are essentially inseparable. Since there is nothing that can convince me that I can have an absolute certainty (for I believe none exists for us), then I must have subjective belief in my evaluation of all objective things. Therefore, all rationalism is possessed of some emotion, and, by attempting to suppress that emotion, those emotional effects which caused these philosophers to hold emotion in disdain are produced by the twisting of it. This produces a situation like unto Satan's in Milton's Paradise Lost, that is, Lucifer possessed both faculties, of reason and emotion, and by allowing his emotion to become twisted, his reasoning went astray. If Satan had only achieved a balance of one in the other, then he would have found himself in an ideal position. Thus, humans strive to go towards God, away from Satan, and are therefore required to have a balance of reason and emotion.
Aside from these arguments, it can clearly be shown that reason and emotion are not conflicting ways of knowing. They represent two paradigms of thought, but they are two different kinds of knowledge. They cannot be directly compared in order to judge which of the two is better; they can only be used, correctly, as an integrated whole. By living the integrated way, the rationalistic dualism, whereby reason and emotion are relegated to opposite playing fields, gives way to a more harmonious holism. This holism has everything as a gradient of another, just like with the color wheel. In this method do we come closer to Taoism.
Living the integrated life has the additional benefit of being a key to knowing the self, or soul. This then leads to the existentialist existence or actualization (cf. Live the Overman). It is only in this state of existing as a human being that one is able to reach his or her true entelechy and live a life of eudaimonia. All of these terms are interconnecting and rich with depth and meaning.
The necessity to combine everything into one is also shown by the new theories of chaos, in which everything must be viewed as a dynamic system. Not doing so, treating things separately and independently, results in static conclusions that are of limited value in the real world, as the conclusions do not stand to the reason of the mind.
Thus, for all these reasons and more, it becomes imperative to me that we should follow the path of unity, the path of synthesizing everything into an organic whole. Then, and only then, can we truly begin that which we have only glimpsed at in our race's past: the journey towards a greater knowledge and the achievement of the greater good for humanity. For, this can only be reached after society has healed itself and the individuals in that society have healed themselves. The essential goal then is unity…