The Enchanted Imagination: Part 3, The Transcendental to Empirical Shift

The shift away from ontology and teleology toward epistemology and causality was associated with another imaginative change that moved us from enchantment to disenchantment. Specifically, we turned our attention away from the transcendentals.

Ancient philosophy and religion was focused upon the contemplation of the transcendentals we call the True, the Beautiful and the Good. You'll recall your Plato here. 

Going back to the first post, contemplation about ontology wasn't just about the nature of being and existence. Ontological contemplation also concerned the reality of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, the reality of the transcendentals. More, ontological contemplation concerned how Being, Truth, Beauty and Goodness were One. And how that One--the Unity of Being, Truth, Beauty and Goodness--is what we call God. This is both Greek philosophy and Christian mystical theology.

The point of this series is to describe how our attention shifted in ways that facilitated modern disenchantment. What does the mind attend to? Contemplation of the transcendentals facilitates enchantment by directing our gaze beyond empirical reductionism and scientific materialism. An excellent discussion of this can be found in David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God. Or you could read Plato and the church fathers.

By contrast, if you turn your eyes away from the True, the Beautiful, and the Good you become trapped in an attentional framework where all becomes empirical and "factual." This attentional bias leads to disenchantment. 

Dostoevsky famously said, "Beauty will save the world." Beauty can do this because, as a transcendental, Beauty mystically pulls the factual mind into enchantment and the contemplation of God.

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