Evolution to Mystical Objectivity of Modern Science

By Donald B. Pribor.

Published by Journal of the World Universities Forum

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Article: Electronic	$US5.00

The ideal of individualism is a core value of Western culture. A society’s world view specifies personas that regulate how citizens interact thus bringing about social stability but opposing individualism. Enlightenment is the emergence of a world view that guides creating self-identities that also produce a new kind and level of social cohesion. The history of Western culture is a sequence of four enlightenments each differentiating a new world view leading to a greater degree of individualism that also promotes social cohesion. The third, modern science enlightenment, which followed the Greek and Medieval enlightenments, produced the mystical objectivity vision that reality is unknowable, but one can construct valid, interpretations of it. This vision, while generating constitutional, liberal democracies, degenerated to rational positivism and radical, laissez-faire individualism. The differentiation of the fourth enlightenment, which began around 1885 with avant garde modernism, accepted but subordinated positivism to subjective constructivism. After the 1960s countercultural revolution, it produced postmodernism that generated radical, ego constructivism that, if pervasive, would destroy any society. Back lash to this radicalism produced government gridlock and cultural wars. The election in 2008 of Barack Obama to be the U.S. president will bring an extensive political realignment. In creative dialogue with Americans, especially Millennials, President Obama will symbolize the maturation of the fourth enlightenment.

Keywords:	Barack Obama, 2008 Presidential Election, Millennials, Narrative Constructivism, Creative Dialogue, Mystical Perspective, Scientific Constructivism, Positivism, Scientific Enlightenment Transdisciplinarity, Manichaeanism

Journal of the World Universities Forum, Volume 1, Issue 4, pp.35-46. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 617.214KB).

Dr. Donald B. Pribor

Teacher and Professor of Biology, Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA

As a result of a dream during the spring semester of my freshman year in college, I felt called to prepare to create a way to transcend the radical opposition between Thomistic philosophy-theology and modern science. To this end I earned a B.S. degree in philosophy, a Ph.D. degree in cell biology with a first minor in the theory of real numbers applied to probability and a second minor in physics, and tenure plus full professor of biology at the University of Toledo. Beginning in the spring of 1969 I began receiving spiritual insights that included the idea that Thomistic philosophy was not relevant to modern American society and a preliminary vision that in some manner would integrate science with all other disciplines and with spirituality that included Western and Eastern mysticism. Beginning in 1978 I designed and taught three different interdisciplinary courses per year for non-science majors. Teaching and writing textbooks for these general education courses allowed me to try out new ideas and receive feedback from my classes. As a result, I have constructed a transdisciplinary perspective that has evolved to my current vision that may be called narrative, constructivism creativity generated by and representing universal evolution.

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