Putting one's mental house in order

As anyone who has ever encountered mythology, say, in school, knows, it's impossible to keep all those gods and goddesses sorted out: who's responsible for what, who did what to whom, how does all of it fit together? This was the case two-and-a-half thousand years ago, as well, and the first people to try and do something about it were the Greeks. Thales, Pythagoras, Euclid, Democritus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many others set about putting our mental house in order. Fact, reason, logic, argument, demonstration, proof became the hallmarks of a clear mind and an acute understanding of the world around us. It was at this time, more or less, when the mutation to what Gebser calls the Mental structure of consciousness occurred.

For a millennium or more, humanity experienced, literally, heady times. Great systems of thought were attempted. Everything that could be measured was and things were described, categorized, classified, systematized, defined and ordered. The foundations of modern science were laid. With the fall of Rome, of course, we entered the Dark Ages; that is, a time during which we took a long break from all this, but we slowly but surely recovered. Around the first millennium AD, we really moved into high gear and in many ways made up for lost time. Universities and other institutions of higher learning were founded; study became more systematic, and thinking became more secular. And then a small shift occurred.

This is best experienced by looking a paintings and illustrations from the Middle Ages, for example, and comparing them to visual art produced around and after the Renaissance. What do we find? Perspective. Yes, the perceiving of something from a particular, identifiable vantage point, a point of view, if you will, and the rise of point-of-view thinking, which we all more or less take for granted these days, has brought about significant and far-reaching changes in our minds and how we understand the world.

In a manner of speaking, the world was mentally, conceptually divided into pieces. What was once a whole, which is how the Ancient Greeks saw the world, became a conglomerate of competing viewpoints. Where once reason dominated, rational argumentation dominated. We should recall that the very word "rational" is derived from the ratio, which is, among other things, a division problem.

Just why this is problematic will be the subject or my next post.

Reference
Gebser, J. (1986) The Ever-present Origin, Authorized translation by Noel Barstad with Algis Mikunas, Athens/OH, Ohio University Press [originally published 1949]. (EPO)