Use The Appropriate Eye For Seeing
to Differentiate, Employ A Good Filter
Modernity differentiates what is Good (morals and religion) from what is Beautiful (art) from what is True (science). These distinctions were all fine and good until they went too far, until differentiation became disassociation. Differentiation is necessary for integration (a process described earlier in our discussion of transcendence) but disassociation can lead to the kind of repression that allowed the Church to prevent Galileo from discussing what he saw through his telescope.
Where there was once (before Modernity) considerations of quality and quantity, disassociation reduces this wholesome coupling to mere quantity.
How significant a thing or action may be is replaced with how costly or big a thing may be.
In both science and Modernism, moral considerations of better and worse are replaced with scientific considerations of bigger and smaller.
This replacement occurs in the ways we “see.”
For each of these ways to see we have, in effect, different eyes.
We use “the eye of the flesh” to see that which we can sense, hold, or feel; we use the “eye of the mind” for mental pictures (images that you see only in your mind); and we use the “eye of contemplation” when we ponder significance, moral meanings, and the relative “rightness” or “wrongness” of things, thoughts, or actions.
Modernity relies almost entirely on the “eye of the flesh,” which cannot see significance very well. Modernity mainly focuses on magnitude. This limited way of “seeing” works well for empirical science and industrial production but not at all for matters of “rightness” and “wrongness.”
To What Is, To What Could Be, And To What Ought To Be…
