Submitted by Arthur Pontynen, Oct 26, 2007 01:40

No doubt it is a healthy sign that Western (and American) culture is now reconsidering the spiritual realm.

But is it accurate to read into an essentially Positivist artist such as Seurat such spirituality? And even if we choose to shift Seurat from the empiricist to the mystic side of the Modernist coin, is that mysticism informed by anything approaching knowledge?

Since both empiricist and mystic deny the efficacy of reason in the pursuit of knowledge of reality, then is not knowledge reduced to mere facts and feelings? Has it not reduced spirituality to mere willful experience? Does that not leave us with a pseudo-spirituality devoid of the possibility of wisdom and thus ephemeral at best, totalitarian at worst?

This is evidenced by the types of spirituality that accompanied the 19th century Positivists. The rationally informed knowledge of Classical, Jewish and Christian modes was neglected; instead was the obscurantist spiritualism advocated by many including Swedenborg, Blavatsky, Steiner, and even Emerson.

Please consider that an obscurantist mysticism offers little reprise to the sterile Positivism that still plagues us. The perennial alternative is a spirituality that extends beyond Positivist facts and Emotivist feelings. A spirituality that seeks a glimpse of rational understanding of a purposeful world, of Being.

And is not that better alternative to Modernist-Postmodernist Positivism - with its obscure spiritualism - called Western Civilization?

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