Postmodern spirituality A dialogue in five parts Part V: Can Only A God Save Us? Postmodern Proto-Spirituality And The Current Global Turn To Religion Roland Benedikter integralworld.net
The space beyond that “heightened attention” or “increased aesthetic sensitivity” (Loytard) is seen, by most of the academic research and teaching professionals of today, not only as radically ambivalent - which it is, actually, as we know, by its very nature, because there is no simple “good” and “evil” in that space anymore. But it is seen by them also as profoundly dangerous, and, third, as useless for the further concrete emancipation of society. That is what most traditional universities try to teach us in the “spirit” of the first generation of postmodernity.
They lead young people to the borderline point of spatial self- and world-observation we described; but nobody teaches those people then how to go beyond and how to confront the realm beyond that point in an appropriate way. By “appropriate” I mean a way which could turn into something philosophically sustainable, into something that could truly balance subjectivity and spiritual objectivity as a rational system of practical experience and thinking. Nobody teaches you how to move in the realm beyond the borderline. We could call that the “blind spot” of postmodernity regarding empirical phaenomenological research.
Cf. Wendelin Kuepers: Phenomenology of Embodied Implicit and Narrative Knowing, In: Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 9, No 6, 113-133; Wendelin Kuepers: The Relevance of Advanced Phenomenology for Integral Research - or why Phenomenology is more and different than an “upper left” or “Zone1” Affair. In: Integral Review. An Integral, Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal for New Thought, Research and Practice, Issue 3, 2006, forthcoming)...
In some of the oldest Eastern traditions, many things are related to Tantra, or to a very strong physical human encounter. Or, if you put in Lyotard's terms, to a very physical “erotization of the will”. The origins of the Veda, the whole Indian culture show us that what origins in Tantra is a certain basic psycho-sexual experience that is part of a spiritual dimension. This psycho-sexual experience is related to pleasure and “more value of intensity”, too. But if you observe how helplessly we poor postmodern subjects, including me and maybe also you, try to experience pleasure, I sometimes doubt if our children will ever find something spiritual in our concept of “inner more value” or pleasure...
Postmodern pleasure seems to be more like an escape into an intensity that never gives you what it promises. And with that, we are closing the circle of our reflections. We are returning at the point were we started in the first dialogue. Remember? We talked of postmodern proto-spirituality as a kind of unfulfilled – and maybe structurally unfullfillable – desire which may be characteristic for our times...
You know, maybe we have to wait for some younger people, for some people of a possible “second generation” of postmodern philosophy, which may try to create systemically that integrative thinking we talked of as a core necessity for the coming years? And in fact, there seem to be some young academics which, step by step, increasingly seem to lose their fears to try it at least.
Cf., for example, Markus Molz, Hilde Weckmann, Wendelin Kuepers, Antonella Verdiani and others: Founding European Integral Academy. A Project Outline. Strasbourg 2006, still unpublished; cf. Mark Edwards, Graduate School of Management, University of Western Australia: On the interpretation of sacred writings from an integral theory perspective, forthcoming; and cf. the contributors in Roland Benedikter: Postmaterialism. A Book Series In 7 Volumes. Volume 1: Introduction Into Postmaterialist Thinking Of The Second Generation; Volume 2: Men In Post-Capitalist Culture; Volume 3: Labour; Volume 4: Nature; Volume 5: Capital; Volume 6: Globalization; Volume 7: Perspectives Of Postmaterialist Thinking Of The Second Generation. Vienna 2001-2005. www.passagen.at/autoren/benedikter.html .
Unfortunately, most of those young new thinkers remain single combatants against their times – like, for the rest, Nietzsche was a “combatant against its time” in his epoch (cf. Rudolf Steiner, who wrote the very first book about Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the fathers of Postmodernity: Rudolf Steiner: Friedrich Nietzsche – A Combatant Against His Times, 1895. In: Collected Works No. 5, Dornach 1999). For me, those young thinkers are the true followers of Nietzsche – because they are trying to go one step farther than postmodern Zeitgeist.
