Modern Historical Consciousness
Its Cause and Cure

By Rawindra Swarup Prabhu

The following is a lecture delivered by His Holiness Ravindra Svarupa dasa during the Second European Communications Seminar at the German Nava-Jiyada-Nrsimha-Ksetra farm in January, 1992. In this talk, Ravindra Svarupa dasa endeavors to help devotees understand a certain mentality they encounter when dealing with modern intellectuals and academics, a mentality he calls "modern historical consciousness." He shows how this historical consciousness arose out of the breakdown of the world view that dominated Europe from the 2nd century AD until the 18th century. That world view has striking similarities to the Vedic world picture that ISKCON devotees have learned from the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition. Ravindra Svarupa dasa suggests that in preaching Krsna consciousness we are not introducing something new in Western thought; rather we are bringing back to Western thought something it has lost.

Part I: The Great Chain

Our subject is modern historical consciousness, its causes and cure. The mentality I call "historical consciousness" stands as one of the pillars of the modern outlook. Historical consciousness is the disposition to perceive every human and natural phenomenon as something given birth and form by the actions of historical forces; indeed, such phenomena are viewed as essentially temporal, as constituted by a process that is articulated in developmental and evolutionary terms. This sort of thinking is second nature to modern people. They seek to understand things in the world by delving in their pasts, by learning how they got that way over the course of time, how they grew and developed historically. The systematic application of such historical consciousness is the common ground of the three great patriarchs of the modern world, Darwin, Marx, and Freud, who propounded theories of historical development to explain the natural world, human society, and the individual human psyche respectively. While people may disagree about one such theory or another, they do not question the historical outlook itself, and are apt to assume that it is the natural and self-evident way of looking at humankind and the world. Yet as we shall see, historical consciousness has emerged only fairly recently in European history. In other words, historical consciousness is itself an historical phenomenon, as my subtitle ("Its Cause and Cure") suggests. "Cause" implies that it has a origin, and whatever has a beginning will also have an end, and indeed the word "cure" in my title suggests that it ought to have an end.

Thus, I shall be presenting an historical account of historical consciousness itself. It may be objected that in so doing I participate quite lavishly in historical consciousness myself, even as I advocate its demise. This is true; but it does not make my enterprise contradictory or hypocritical. As a modern thinker, my mind has been thoroughly steeped--even pickled--in "modern historical consciousness." I recognize that this inherited mentality is "un-Vedic." Having now engaged myself in the practices of Krishna consciousness, I could just wait for it to go away, along with other forms of acquired material conditioning. However, one discovers that when modern historical consciousness comes under the sustained scrutiny of its own gaze--when historical consciousness is examined historically--we discover some things about it that help us free ourselves from its grasp. Srila Prabhupada compares such a procedure to felling a tree with an ax whose handle is fashioned from the tree's own limb.

It is important to recognize that this particular way of viewing the world has a history. It began developing in Europe during the last half of the 18th century, reached full flower in the 19th century, and of course continues largely unabated today. Yet modern thinkers who see the historicity of everything tend to overlook the historicity of their own historical consciousness. They don't recognize it as contingent, relative, peculiar, and subject to destruction--even self-destruction--in the course of time.

Modern historical consciousness arose as the chief expression of a vast shift in consciousness that took place in Europe beginning in the 18th century and attaining full bloom in the 19th. To understand the particular form it took, we have to look first at the standard world view that had dominated European thought from the beginning of Christian times until about the 18th century. The central conception in this world view is summarized in the expression "the great chain of being." The history of this important idea was investigated by an American philosopher named Arthur O. Lovejoy. He published his work under the title The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1936; paperback reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960); the book originated as a series of lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1933. Lovejoy's impressive study established him as pioneer in the field called "history of ideas" and at the same time established history of ideas as a recognized academic discipline, an event that in itself was a benchmark in the advancement of modern historical consciousness.

Lovejoy traces the idea of the great chain of being back to its entrance into Western culture through Plato, especially in the famous fifth and sixth books of The Republic. The idea of the chain of being is connected intimately with the concept of what we will call here the Absolute Truth, that is, the self-existent ultimate source of all there is. This conception is clearly articulated, for example, in Plato's dialogue on cosmology named the Timaeus.

Although Plato suggests that direct spiritual experience lies at the foundation of his doctrine of the Absolute Truth, philosophically he arrives at his conception of the Absolute Truth through a sustained process of abstraction, rising gradually from the concrete individuals of sense experience, through the realm of the "forms" or "ideas," to the Absolute Truth itself.

Many people are vaguely acquainted with the Platonic idea that there's a higher unchanging realm, a realm of "ideas" or of ideal "forms"--the Greek word translated into English as "idea" or "form" is "eidon." When you mention "Platonic form" to an ISKCON devotee, he or she usually thinks you mean "rupa," thinking the "realm of ideal forms" to be something like Goloka Vrindavana, with its varieties of individuals--most of them bearing proper names-- in different sorts of spiritual forms or bodies. This comparison is quite erroneous. In Plato's realm of "forms" dwell no individuals but rather a collection of abstract essences, each of which corresponds to a class name. There are no animals, humans or cows, but there is a a single "form" for "animal," a "form" for "cow," a "form" for "human being," and so on. In other words, when you have the word "cow," there's some objective essence of "cowness" that corresponds to that word. All those individual entities denoted by the word "cow" must share something in common, an essence. In Plato's notion, this essence has an eternal existence independent from all particular cows. Cows may come and go, but "go-tva," cowness, the "form" of cow, remains. It is found with other such abstract essences in a higher realm of "ideas." The philosophical doctrine, by the way, that the essences or the referents of class names objectively exist outside the mind in some fashion or another is called "realism"; the opposite doctrine is "nominalism."

There is some truth to Plato's realism. As I have mentioned, the param padam, the transcendent realm of Vaikuntha, hardly resembles Plato's realm of the ideas. Yet the realm of the forms does seem to correspond closely to something the Vedic traditions regard as existent, and that is the Vedas themselves.

The Vedas are eternal, it is said, while the material world is temporary. How is that possible, it may be asked, when the Vedas contain the names of temporary entities in them, like "Indra," "Candra," and so on, all of whom are destroyed during the dissolution. The answer is that the names of the demigods, as well as other names like "tree", "cow" and so on in the Vedas, are names of types or rather archetypes, which are instantiated in concrete particulars whenever there is a creation. The Vedas, then, contain the blueprints and assembly instructions as well, for all the creation in the material world. Brahma, the created creator, becomes impregnated with the Vedas (veda-garbha), and so inspired, brings into manifestation the material world. Interestingly, the Timaeus of Plato also posits a creator god--called a demiurgos in Greek--who has a vision of the Absolute Truth and of the forms, and is thus able to instantiate those forms in pre-existing matter, thus imposing order on chaos. Of course, Lord Brahma, the creator deity, similarly has a direct vision of Vaikuntha according to the Bhagavatam, and of Goloka Vrindavana, according to the Brahma-samhita, but Plato gives no indication of any knowledge of a realm of transcendental varigatedness. The Absolute Truth is described in impersonal terms. The Platonic realm of ideal forms, which is subordinate to that Truth, does not therefore, as some devotees have claimed, correspond to the spiritual world. However, it does seem to correspond closely to the Vedas. It is also possible to find a correspondence between the Platonic forms and the creative potentiality latent in the brahmajyoti. We know from the Vedas that the brahmajyoti contains the bija, the seeds, for all the species in the world, and that Brahma creates by making the various seeds manifest. The bija seems to be like a Platonic form, at least as these forms are understood in later Neoplatonism, where they are thought to possess a creative potency.

By a process of abstraction, then, Plato arrives at the idea of a realm containing a multiplicity of ideal forms or separated, abstract essences. He carries his speculative ascent still further and concludes that all these forms must have a single, ultimate source, which is the Form of the forms themselves. Each individual cow, say, is a cow by virtue of its participating in the form of "cow." In the same way, each form is a form by virtue of its participating in the Form of forms. In this way the process of abstraction is carried one final step further to the Form of all the forms, the essence of all the essences. Plato called this the Form of the Good. In fact, three different names are given this ultimate source--the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. You may notice that this triple characterization corresponds fairly closely with the Vedic characterization of Brahman as sat (the Good), cit (the True), and ananda (the Beautiful.) The Form of the Good is thus extremely abstract. The source of everything, it can be defined only by negation; it is completely ineffable, or inexpressible in words. Thus we discover, at the apex of Plato's ontology--and at the root of much of subsequent European theological thought-- a fairly standard version of the well-known impersonal Absolute.

The Form of the Good is perfect, self-sufficient, self-contained, and needs nothing other than itself. Yet this self-sufficient Absolute boils over, as it were, effervesces, and out of the immutable One devolves the world of changing things. Here's a single entity, without name, form, diversity, multiplicity of any sort, and then out of it wells, in a falling away from perfection, a multiplicity--initially a multiplicity of abstract essences, the realm of the forms. Those forms then engender a further multiplicity and instantiate themselves into a gross material world of concrete individuals. Lovejoy points out that two contrary tendencies are fused in the Platonic idea of the Absolute. On the one side, there is an "other-worldliness" which produces the idea of a remote, detached, self-contained, self-sufficient Absolute in no need of any other creature, any other thing, indeed of any world at all. On the other side, there is the idea of an Absolute that needs to create, to express itself, to bubble over with joy or zest, to become many. In the Platonic scheme, the impersonal Absolute cannot of course at some point make a free decision to create; rather, the world flows from it out of its own necessity.

Lovejoy clearly detects a contradiction in Plato's articulation of the impersonal Absolute. In all consistency, there should be no creation at all. The fact is that creation, emanation, entails a personal Absolute, a being which completes itself, attains self-fulfillment, in relationships with others. So the linking of a world, a creation, with an impersonal absolute just won't do, as Sankaracarya realized. Sankara is more single-minded and consistent than Plato in following out the implications of the "other worldliness" that produces the conception of the impersonal Absolute. He holds that Brahman does not produce a world. It has no energies. It is one without a second. The world is false, an illusory superimposition on the Absolute, and not an emanation from it. But that's another story.

In Hellenistic times an influential Neoplatonic school of thought arose. In its hands the Platonic conception of the Absolute and its emanations underwent further development and dissemination. From there it entered decisively into mainstream Christian thought through two theologians. One is St. Augustine, who before his conversion was greatly influenced by the writing of Plotinus, the great pagan Neoplatonist. The other is a mystical theologian who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. This name originally appears in the Acts of the Apostle as that of the convert St. Paul made while preaching in Athens at the Hills of Mars, Areopagus. Sometime around the 6th century AD, a collection of four treatises of mystical theology, deeply Neoplatonic in character, surfaced in Europe under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. Christian authorities accepted them as the works of the direct disciple of St. Paul, and hence as highly authoritative. Not until the 17th century did scholars begin to look at them critically and agree that the language and the ideas indicate a much later date of origin. It's now thought that these writing were the product of a monk of the 5th century, probably from Syria. The author of these works is now referred to as "pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite."

These writings of pseudo-Dionysius had an immense prestige, and they are through-and-through Neoplatonic. They are notable for a radical theology of negation and for the elaborate articulation of the idea of hierarchy. The word "hierarchy" comes from two Greek words: "hieros," which means "holy," and "arche," which means "order." Hierarchy is "sacred" or "holy order." The structure of being is hierarchical, a divine order, with God as its origin and cause. From the Absolute the rest of reality proceeds in the form of ordered, graded steps falling away from the One, each step further from the origin bringing a unit decrease in being or power. At the top, is the One--the ultimate perfection, the most perfect being. Then you move down, through all gradations of being, to chaos at the bottom. A good theologian will conclude that the span from the bottom level to the beginning of the hierarchy is infinite.

According to The Heavenly Hierarchy of Dionysius, God was followed first of all by the angelic hierarchies. There are nine tiers of angels in descending rank: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. Medieval Christians took angels very seriously. Each rank of angels was thought to be responsible for running a corresponding level of the material cosmos further down. The cosmos is also hierarchical in structure, a descending series of spheres centered on the fixed earth. The outer edge was what Aristotle called the primum mobile, which imparted motion to the spheres below. The primum mobile is followed by the fixed stars, then Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. Dionysius also finds a correspondence between the angelic and celestial hierarchies, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy here on earth. In this way hierarchy is the principle of ordering reality. Everything has its proper place within the whole. Those entities higher up the ladder, closer to God, partake more of the divine nature--have more perfection--than those below.Yet everything is perfect in its own place.

During the Middle Ages and beyond, European thinkers worked out the implications of the idea of the great chain of being. One of the more consequental implications is the idea that there could be no gaps, no missing forms, in the hierarchical ladder of creation. This "principle of plenitude" as it was called, is implied by the idea that the production of the world out of the absolute proceeds by necessity and not by arbitrary, capricious decree. The One produces the forms of the material world of its own necessity. If that is so, then which particular forms does it produce? There can be only one answer: All possible forms. If some possible forms were absent, then there would have been a logically arbitrary, irrational act; but the Absolute is, above all things, logical and rational. Hence: the principle of plenitude. There are no gaps in creation. The creation displays all possible forms, organized in minute gradations.

Created reality thus exhibits a lavish profusion of forms organized into a unified, rational order of being, a single overarching hierarchy. The hierarchical order of the whole is in turned mirrored within each of its sub-divisions. Each category of beings neatly reflects the order of the whole. There are thus hierarchies nested within hierarchies. As God is supreme among all beings, so the king is supreme among men, and the lion among animals, the eagle among birds, the dolphin among aquatics, gold among minerals, ether among elements. Thus the magnificent, awesome order of creation, in which the same clear stamp of divine handiwork exhibits itself anywhere one can look, opens itself up to the contemplative mind, which received a great deal of satisfaction in meditating on the fullness, the rationality, the sublime harmony, the magnificence of this divine production.

Much of this hierarchical vision sounds familiar to us because it is indeed very similar to what we have learned from Vedic tradition.

This conception of a great chain of being decisively shaped the world view of European people all the way from around the second century AD up until the 18th century. Everybody believed it implicitly or explicitly. You may find a convenient capsule description of this world view in a small book entitled The Elizabethan World Picture, by the Cambridge don E.M.W. Tillyard (Vintage Books: New York, n.d.). This work has been used in English literature courses for a half a century to help modern people understand writers like Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and John Milton. However, the world picture described by Tillyard was not solely Elizabethan--as we have seen, it went back into the Middle Ages and late antiquity, and persisted onwards until the Enlightenment. Thus we should understand that the eventual collapse of this world picture, the destruction of the great chain of being--a destruction which was part and parcel of what Frederick Nietzsche described (after the fact) as the "murder of God"--was an immense and revolutionary change in consciousness. That change was so profound that modern Westerners now have to approach their own not-so-distant past as something completely foreign and strange. It is also interesting that the world view we devotees are learning from our Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, imported recently into the West from far-off, exotic, alien India, should so profoundly resemble the main features of a lost view that dominated the West for so long. As a result, much in Shakespeare's plays, say, would make immediate intuitive sense to a contemporary ISKCON devotee, schooled in Srimad Bhagavatam, whereas a contemporary modernist has to go through a special study in the history of ideas, an exercise in intellectual archeology, to reconstruct what Shakespeare is about. Shakespeare's world is much more our "Vaisnava" world than the world of modern Westerners.

One of the most elegant and concise descriptions of the great chain of being comes late, in the eighteenth century. We find these lines in Alexander Pope's poem called Essay on Man:

Vast chain of being! which from God began,

Natures aethereal, human, angel, man,

Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see [that is, microscopic],

No glass can reach, from Infinite to thee [that is, a human being],

From thee to nothing.

In our modern era of rapid turnover in ideas and ideologies, the sheer persistence of the idea of the great chain over the centuries may seem astonishing. For example, if we go back some thirteen centuries from Pope, we find this influential depiction of the concept written in the early fifth century by Macrobius--(who, in turn, is really only presenting a condensed version of Plotinus's doctrines):

Since, from the Supreme God Mind arises and from Mind, Soul [these are Neoplatonic ideas], and since this in turn creates all subsequent things and fills them all with life, and since the single radiance illuminates all and is reflected in each [the "single radiance" is the Original Being] as a single face might be reflected in many mirrors placed in a series; and since all things follow in continuous succession, degenerating in sequence to the very bottom of the series, the attentive observer will discover a connection of parts from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break. And this is Homer's golden chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth. [There's a story in Homer in which Jupiter lets down a golden chain--this is the origin of the the chain metaphor.]

Of course, the idea underwent a great deal of development and modification over the centuries. Thinkers worked out various implications of the idea (e.g., the principles of plenitude), and wrestled with some inherent contradictions. For example, Christian thinkers who tried to cement the Christian revelation of a personal creator onto this Neoplatonic concept of an impersonal emanation met with mixed success, as you can imagine. In orthodox Christian thought, creation has to be an act of free will, yet whenever theologians tried to think about creation, this idea of God inherited from Plato and Plotinus was always in their mind, a God whose creation was an emanation out of necessity. Lovejoy is quite good at exploring this conflict.

I want to mention now one difficulty with this notion of the great chain in its European context that Lovejoy does not deal with. Part of the idea of the chain from its Platonic and Neoplatonic origins was that even as the chain is a structure descending from God, it also serves at the same time as one going back to God, a ladder of ascent. It formed the path of the ascent of the soul to God. In the Christian context, this path of ascent could be followed only in contemplation, as the mind rose step by step to the summit. However, in the original Platonic and Neoplatonic context, the chain was not only a path for contemplation, but also it was the path of the ascent of the soul through the process of transmigration.

Christian thinkers retained the idea of the chain as a path leading up to God, but the Church rejected the allied doctrine of transmigration of the soul. One of the consequences of this rejection was eventually an increasing sense of stasis, of frustration. The possibility of evolving up the chain through one's improved karma is absent--you are stuck where you are. The hierarchies of human society are, after all, seamlessly part of the cosmic universal hierarchy. Gradually, then, the whole system began to seem enormously oppressive to many people. The idea of transmigration having been ruled out, individual progress within the world system was ruled out. The concept of the great chain naturally supported a thoroughgoing social and political conservatism; the perfection for each person consisted in conforming to the requirements of his own place, and not in striving to rise to another's (this idea is also found in Bhagavad-gita). Yet people still need some sort of hope for betterment, some prospect for progress. The loss of the notion of transmigration, once an integral part of the idea of the chain, turned the social conservatism of the hierarchy into oppression, and when common people in frustration sought to over throw kings and nobles in order to advance themselves, they brought down around them, as it were, the whole cosmos.

The chain collapsed. This event was part and parcel of the disappearance of the Absolute Truth, the God of Parminides, and Plato, and Plotinus, the root of existence as a coherent divinely ordered structure. On their deepest level, Shakespeare's great tragedies, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello are about this collapse. In them the protagonists face the uttermost dire consequences when people transgress the proper actions of their ordained place in the divine scheme. That is why Othello therefore says, of his chaste wife: "When I love thee not, chaos is come again." And the villain Iago expresses explicit disbelief in the idea that any of us have ordained natures or essences and proclaims that is it is only in our wills that we are what we are. Edmund the Bastard, the villain in King Lear, has a new vision of nature, a nature not of order and harmony but of strife and struggle, a nature whose gods will "now stand up for bastards!" Shakespeare's villains all speak modern philosophy.

The foundations were shaking in Shakespeare's time, and he felt it deeply; his heroes peered into the abyss.

Lovejoy tells us something quite interesting about the collapse. It had a structure. The result was not simply chaos. If the chain can be imagined as a rigid ladder, when it lost its transcendental mooring in the divine, it did not crumble into a disordered heap but rather fell over, as it were, onto its side. Retaining its sequential hierarchical structure, the chain became temporalized; its axis was no longer the vertical, ontological axis from chaos to God, but a horizontal, temporal axis from the primitive chaos of the past, to the present human development, to the future progression toward greater and greater perfection. This transposition of the axis of the chain of being to the temporal dimension is the origin of modern historical consciousness.

Part II: The Breaking of the Chain

Modern historical consciousness originates with the toppling of the Great Chain of Being. Although Lovejoy does not bring the reflections of Friedrich Nietzsche into his examination of that event, in my view the breaking down of the Chain should be recognized as part and parcel of the event that Nietzsche called “death of God”--and even “the murder of God.” Nietzsche understood the word “God” to mean precisely the concept of God we have been discussing, the philosophical concept expropriated by Christianity from Plato and Plotinus. This is God understood not simply as the controller but as the Absolute Truth, the anchor of the entire order of being, a God from whom and on whom depends the entire hierarchy of creation. The “death of God’ would natural include the destruction of the entire cosmic order.

Of course we can only reject the utterly absurd notion of the Absolute Truth “dying.” Yet Nietzsche’s proclamation is true if we recognize it as an acknowledgement of a momentous event in European cultural history. That event was not as recent as Nietzsche seems to have thought. Yet Nietzsche was right in seeing that people did not allow themselves to be fully conscious of what they had done--that is, murdered God; they still could not comprehend that the churches in which they dutifully worshiped were now God’s tombs. Nor did they have the courage to face the possibilities opened to them by their deicide. In short, they were unworthy of their crime (See Fröliche Wissenschaft, aphorism 125).

For Nietzsche, the death of God frees man, if he were strong enough to recognize and utilize his freedom, to create himself, to evolve by the power of his own will into something greater that himself: man can re-create himself, transcend himself, and in so doing become the Übermench, superman. This future, perfectional state, reached by a process of willful self-transformation, functions for Nietzsche as a secular replacement for the traditional transcendental God of European civilization.

I have tried to show that we can find anxiety about the collapse of the medieval world order as a major motif in Shakespeare. Lovejoy, focusing his discussion on direct, explicit philosophical reflections on the idea of the Chain of Being, is able to trace the the break down of the Chain back into the early part of the eighteenth century. There, he finds thinkers beginning to articulate revolutionary notions of perfection and of progress, notions commonly considered to belong exclusively to the nineteenth century. This idea of perfection, so revised, does not at all fit with the ideas previously associated with the Chain of Being.

The medieval notion of perfection entailed that any one occupant of a particular place in the Chain would achieve perfection by staying in his ordained place, perfectly fulfilling the requirements of his station.. The Chain, by exemplifying all possible degrees of being, was perfect and complete, and for one to think of improving oneself by going up the Chain, was to do violence to the whole. Moreover, the state of perfection denoted something so complete as to be incapable of improvement. Any alteration would be for the worse. Perfection thus entailed fixity and stasis. Here is Lovejoy (206):

The doctrine of the Chain of Being thus gave a metaphysical sanction to the injunction of the Anglican catechism: each should labor truly “to do his duty in that state of life”--whether in the cosmical or the social scale--”to which it shall please God to call him.” To seek to leave one’s place in society is also “to invert the law of Order.”

However, some thinkers begin to sound a new note. Lovejoy quotes the famous English essayist Addision, who in 1711 wrote: “There is not, in my opinion, a more pleasing and triumphant consideration in religion than this of perpetual progress which the soul makes toward the perfection of its nature, without ever arriving at a period in it” (247). Again, the philosopher Leibniz in 1718 expresses similar sentiments:

Our happiness will never consist, and ought not to consist, in a full enjoyment in which there is nothing more to desire, and which would make our minds dull, but in a perpetual progress to new pleasures and new perfections. (248)

In the new idea of perfection, Lovejoy sees a “new eschatology” associated with a “new conception of value.”

The Platonic identification of the consummate good with . . . cessation of desire--”he who possesses it has always the most perfect sufficiency and is never in need of anything else”--was giving place to its opposite: no finality, no ultimate perfection, no arrest of the outreach of the will. Such passages as those which I have quoted from Leibniz and Addison and Law were plainly foreshadowing of the Faust-ideal. Man is by nature insatiable, and it is the will of his Maker that he should be so . . . . The tendency to substitute the idea of a Streben nach dem Unendlichen, an interminable pursuit of an unattainable goal, for that of a final rest of the soul in the contemplation of Perfection . . .has usually been post-dated by historians. It was no invention of Goethe, nor of the German Romanticists . . . . (250)

In this way, the idea of perfection starts to include ideas of alteration, variation, growth, continual increase and improvement--not toward any ultimate terminus by as ends in themselves. The idea of perfection takes on temporal attributes.

When I read the passages collected by Lovejoy, I receive the strong impression that these eighteenth century thinkers--Leibniz especially--were hinting at transmigration of the soul. I have mentioned earlier the notion of transmigration was integral to the idea of the Chain of Being as originally propounded by Plato and Plotinus, but Christian orthodoxy eventually accepted the Chain shorn of the notion of transmigration. While the Chain for Platonic philosophy was a route for every soul back to God by gradual assent through transmigration, it became for the Christian thinker merely the ascensio mentis ad Deum per scalas creaturarum, the ascent of the mind to God in contemplation through the scale of the creatures. When the notion of the Chain as a path of real individual improvement reentered, it had the effect of temporalizing the whole Chain.

Here, Lovejoy summarizes his thesis:

One of the principal happenings in eighteenth-century thought was the temporalizing of the Chain of Being. The plenum formarum came to be conceived by some, not as the inventory but as the program of nature, which is being carried out gradually and exceedingly slowly in the cosmic history. While all the possibles demand realization, they are not accorded it all at once. Some have attained it in the past and have apparently since lost it; many are embodied in the kind of creatures which now exist; doubtless infinitely many more are destined to receive the gift of actual existence in the ages that are to come. It is only of the universe in its entire temporal span that the principle of plenitude holds good. (244)

It is important to note that even though the Chain toppled, it retained even in its fallen state its basic structure. The idea of the world as a Chain of Being, an ordered hierarchy of forms from low to high, simple to complex, primate to sophisticated, certainly did not disappear. Rather, the Chain itself, structure intact, rotated, as it were, on its axis, shifting one hundred and eight degrees, from vertical to horizontal.

Imaging an upright ladder. It is secured at the top. The resting place at the top crumbles. The ladder then falls over onto its side. In a similar way the Chain became temporalized. It no longer linked all creatures to their eternal source, yet even in its fallen state it retained its old structure of a ordered, ranked series of beings. Perfection is now posited as the direction of a temporal series, rather than the actual apex of a fix ontological hierarchy. The origin of the Chain becomes not the top but the bottom, something that is a bare minimum above nothing.

In Lovejoy’s judgment, “The static and permanently complete Chain of Being broke down largely from its own weight” (245). By this he means that when various implication of the idea of the Chain had been drawn out over centuries of thought, it amounted to an kind of enormous reductio ad absurdum argument. From the very beginning, the notion of the Chain, as articulated in European thought, was incoherent--an unworkable fusion of “other-worldliness” with “this-worldliness. The former tendency resulted in the conception of an impersonal Absolute--which, on strict logical grounds, could not be coupled to any creation whatsoever. Strictly speaking, the creation ought to have been devalorized to the point of nonexistence--as was done by Sankaracarya or by the presocratic philosopher Parminides. Yet the tendency of this-worldliness cemented a creation to the impersonal Absolute, holding that the Absolute overflowed into the production of a world both real and good.

Often in the history of Christian thought it seems that one encounters a sort of schizophrenia. God as the object of worship was not the same as God the object of thought. Although Christian orthodoxy held that god to be personal, yet Christian speculation tended to slide into a theology of negation and promulgate impersonal ideas. This happened in speculations about creation. Creation was seen as the impersonal working out of a rigid, program, mechanically driven by logical necessity. All possible forms had to be realized in material production. God had no choice in this matter. There could be no willful, or logically arbitrary, preferences. Such free choices are characteristics of persons, and perfectly within the rights of the Supreme Person, but in this matter, thinking was driven by impersonal philosophy. With a theistic revelation, there was no need to adhere to such an impersonal creation--adhere to a “rationality” that, when carried through with rigid and undeviating obsessivness, became a kind of insanity.

This then was the conception: Since creation was the working out of a rational necessity, in creating the world God was bound to produce at one time all possible forms. This is the “principle of plenitude.” Creation had to be a seamless continuum from top to bottom, with not the slight jump or gap anywhere. Furthermore, since God is good, this creation itself had to be “the best of all possible worlds.” Therefore, all the particular deficiencies or evils which we see must be necessary to the goodness of the whole. To justify as good all degrees of being, all kinds of deficiencies, depravations, depravities, and apparent distortions, became the now infamous project of eighteenth century theodicy. By the eighteenth century, the overwhelm empirical absences of the required intermediate forms of species--and the theory demanded that here be huge numbers of them differing from each other in the smallest possible degree--had began to seem a serious problem. More and more it was becoming recognized that the fossil record gave evidence of apparently extinct species. In short, the world increasing began to seem neither so “rational” nor so “good” as the theory demanded.

These are the factors Lovejoy considers, and I have suggested other factors he does not touch on. In any case, the point I want focus on here is Lovejoy’s observation that breaking down of the Chain of Being was not a collapse into chaos. On the contrary, it was a rather stately, structured event, in which the Chain remained basically intact as a graded hierarchy of beings, but simply shifted into a temporal dimension. It became “not the inventory but the program of Nature.”

In this temporalized version of the Chain of Being, we recognize, of course, the framework of the Darwinian theory of evolution. It is important to note, that this toppling of the Chain, this temporalization, preceded the Darwinian theory of evolution by over a century. (Origin of the Species was published in 1859). In other words, many people had already accepted the theoretical framework for the Darwinian theory of evolution long before the theory itself was produced. The Darwinian theory is an articulation of the concept of the temporalized Chain into the area of biology and anthropology, giving a “scientific” justification for what was already “known” true. It answered a felt need, an a priori demand. People had already started to think and feel in evolutionary, developmental terms. They viewed the world though the lens of a new paradigm, through a new set of categorical spectacles. In Krishna conscious terms, there had been a shift in their intelligence, and consequently they felt and perceived the world in a whole new way. Darwin and others just knew that nature had to answer the new sort of interrogatories they put to her. As indeed she did: the theory of evolution concretely filled in the framework that had already come to determine their mind-set.

This can be strikingly illustrated by looking at the early work of the German philosopher F.W. J. Shelling. Here we find the doctrine of evolution as part and parcel of a theology of an Absolute that itself develops and evolves in time. In 1810, a friend and disciple of Shelling named Oken wrote this:

The philosophy of Nature is the science of the eternal transformation of God into the world. It has the task of showing the phases of the world’s evolution from the primal nothingness: how the heavenly bodies and the elements arose, how these advanced to higher forms, how finally organisms appeared and in man attained to reason. These phases constitute the history of the generation of the universe . . . . (320)

In the beginning, God is a nullity, but the evolution of the universe is the same as the evolution of God, the gradual realization (Realwerden) or self-realization of God that is achieved through conflict and struggle in time and history. The full achievement of God’s self-realization is finally achieved--guess where?

Man is the creation in which God fully becomes an object to himself. Man is God represented by God. God is a man representing God in self-consciousness. . . . Man is God wholly manifested, der ganz erschienene Gott. (321)

Here is Shelling himself (in 1812), explicating the same evolutionary theology:

I posit God as the first and the last, and the Alpha and the Omega; but as Alpha he is not what he is as Omega, and in so far as he is only the one--God ‘in an eminent sense’--he can not be the other God, in the same sense, or, in strictness, be called God. For in that case, let it be expressly said, the unevolved (unentfaltete) God, Deus implicitus, would already be what, as Omega, the Deus explicitus is. (323)

Interestingly, even at this early date, Shelling justifies his evolutionary theology with an appeal to our first-hand experience of “nature itself, [which] as all know who have the requisite acquaintance with the subject, has gradually risen from the production of more meager and inchoate creatures to the production of more perfect and more finely formed ones” (323).

It is also interesting to note how Shelling sees the necessity of revising even the principles of logic in order to make them compatible with evolutionary ideas:

Always and necessarily that from which development proceeds (der Entwicklungsgrund) is lower than that which is developed; the former raises the latter above itself and subjects itself to it, inasmuch as it serves as the matter, the organ, the condition, for the other’s development (325).

In this way, the cosmos necessarily develops from nothing, and proceeds always from less to more. For you can indeed give, after all, what you have not got.

All this amounts to a huge shift in human consciousness which expressed itself in the temporalizing of The Chain of Being. The shift gradually produced that characteristic mentality called “the romantic temperament,” a ceaseless, restless yearning for an ever elusive goal, a sense of life as driven endless quest, an appetite for experience that would always want more and more, that would never say “Stop! I’m satisfied.”

Having discovered the Upanishads, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer published a study in 1818 (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) in which he enthusiastically embraced the concept of a single undifferentiated reality lying behind all appearances. But in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the Upanidshadic Brahman becomes recast as “the Will” (der Wille). The unified substrate of all appearance is not luminous, peaceful consciousness but rather blind, voracious, unslackable appitite. Everywhere in nineteenth century Europe we encounter a sense of vast energies released and on the move, of an unstoppable engine of progress roaring along. Nature progresses, Humanity progresses. God progresses.

In the nineteenth century, European civilization became captivated by the idea of progress. The steady production of technical discoveries that, organized by laissez-faire capitalism, produced the industrial revolution, was all the proof most people needed.. When the Darwinian theory of evolution was propounded, it gave further reinforcement to the gospel of progress. Moreover, in its original context, the Darwinian theory, which saw struggle and competition as the mechanism of progress, was immediately applied to progress in human society. Social Darwinism, as it was called, was a ruthless justification for the worst abuses of wealth and power--for exploitation of labor at home, for colonialism abroad.

Now I want to turn to the question which I believe Lovejoy really doesn't answer very well: Why did this collapse take place, this turning on its axis of this Chain of Being? When we look at the entire scope of the alteration, the immense shift in consciousness involved, we see that Lovejoy doesn’t do it justice. The collapse of the Chain seems itself a symptom of a more comprehensive transformation. Why did that transformation happen?

I have given then question a good deal of thought, and it will require more research from a Krsna conscious point of view to consider all the aspects of the issue. Yet it seems to me that one can basically describe it as a change--a shift of consciousness--from the mode of goodness to the mode of passion. Certainly, this notion of an endless restless striving, this ever onward seeking, this never being satisfied--the “Faust-ideal” in short--is a text-book description of the mode of passion. (“born of unlimited desires and longings”). And all the activities associated with the modern idea of “progress” exemplify the mode of passion in action. Nor could you ask for any indication more stark and explicit than Schopenhauer’s metaphysical substitution of Will for Brahman.

In Bhagavad-gita (14. 7 purport), Prabhupada remarks that “Modern civilization is considered to be advanced in the standard of the mode of passion. Formerly, the advanced condition was considered to be in the mode of goodness.”. However, in the Renaissance the shift began, and by the eighteenth century, revolutionary are explicitly trying to destroy the old traditions, and we have philosophers like Diderot declaring that mankind will never be free until the last king is strangled by the entrails of the last priest.

Here we can understand this great historical shift in terms of something we can understand-- the modes of material nature. We ourselves are trying to create--or rather re-create--a culture in which goodness is reestablished as the standard of advancement. The Bhagavad-gita teaches that knowledge depends upon goodness. The mode of goodness is the existential condition for the development of knowledge. What is that knowledge? It is knowledge of the Absolute Truth. The Absolute Truth is the ultimate source of all emanations. Much of the medieval world-picture, with its transcendent eternal source that is perfect and complete, with its production of a structured world of iterations of hierarchies, with its systems of correspondences, with its notion of perfection as the fulfillment of one’s own--well--dharma, seems familiar to ISKCON devotees because what devotees are getting from our tradition, even, even though it seems an exotic import from far-off mysterious India, is in fact astonishing close to the world-picture of in medieval times. Our ways of thinking and acting are near kin to what was the European standard until a few hundred years ago. Thus, Srila Prabhupada may then be said to be restoring to us as Europeans our own lost cultural heritage. Restoring it, I should add, in a form free from defects in thought and action that lead to its abrogation a few hundred years ago. In the future, we may look back at “modernity” as merely a nasty interruption in the true advance of Western civilization.

A few hundred years ago a disaster took place, and now knowledge is in the mode of passion. A certain picture forms the mental backdrop for all our actions. You start with nothing, or something near to it, a point infinitesimal in size and infinite in mass and somehow, for some reason that nobody can figure out, that point “explodes” begin to expand (space expanding with it) and to cool down. Entities began to precipitate out of the cooling primordial plasma: a whole zoo of subatomic particles, which eventually come together as atoms, and the atoms, as molecules. The molecules become longer and more elaborate, especially those containing carbon atoms, and then those molecules began to form more complicated structures, and lo and behold! life appears. Simpler forms lead to more complex ones: one-celled followed by multi-celled; more and more sophisticated form of plants, insects, animals, vertebrates, hominoids, humans, and finally, Scientists. Thus we have molecular evolution, chemical evolution, biological evolution, human evolution--all fitting into one big scheme. Some such picture is today said to be the outcome of long, painstaking empirical scientific investigation. Yet it is, after all, still a temporalized version of the old Chain of Being. Such productions have a venerable history. It is well to remember that in 1755--when the French and British were fighting each other in wilderness of North America--the philosopher Immanuel Kant published a theory of pre-organic cosmic evolution. And, as we have seen, Schelling outline the entire picture, complete with philosophical and logical justification, in the year Napoleon invaded Russia.

When I attempt to understand the transformation in consciousness--of which the temporalization of the Chain of Being is a major component--in the most general possible terms, I see it as the birth of “historical consciousness.” It is the characteristic of historical consciousness to understand everything genetically, in terms of, development, progression evolution. When you attempt to understand something in the world, you automatically ask how did it come to be that way, how did it evolve or develop from simpler, more primitive units. This is historical consciousness.

In the field of linguistics, there is a technical term for this sort of historical view: “diachronic.” It means the study of a language as an historical entity, with reference to how it evolves and changes through time. The oppose way is called "synchronic." A synchronic approach to language studies it descriptively, not historically, without reference to what may have gone before or after. .You might say that the one view of creation is synchronic--everything is present simultaneously in all fullness, having come from God. The other is diachronic: the creation grows, develops, and changes over time. Historical consciousness is the most comprehensive form of the diachronic vision.

I learned the terms “synchronic” and “diachronic” in a university Sanskrit course. The way we devotees approach Sanskrit--the traditional way--is synchronic, while academicians employ the diachronic. Tradition says that Sanskrit is a perfected language spoken by the devatas; the academicians see its as a mundane historical creation, a language that evolved from more humble origins. This attitude toward Sanskrit was developed in the nineteenth century by German scholars who devised the historical science then called “Indo-European philology.” (Today the word “philology” has been replaced by “linguistics.”) In 1786 the English scholar Earnest Jones had noted affinities among Sanskrit, Persian, Greek and Latin. Inspired by evolutionary ideas, German scholars applied them to the history of languages and traced branching paths of evolutionary a vast family of languages that includes Sanskrit ,Persian, Latin, Italian, ancient and modern Greek, , Gaelic, Swedish French, German, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Armenian, and so on. The result is considered one of the most well-established of scholarly achievements.

Prabhupada has taught us that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, but the philologists place Sanskrit as one among a group of ancient languages which evolved from an original, parent language which they called Proto-Indo-European, the Indo-European Ursprache. If you look up the derivation of a modern English word you'll see sometimes that the English word is traced back--let us say--to a French word, then a Old French word, then Latin, then Sanskrit word, and finally a Proto-Indo-European word. That word will have an asterisk before it. This sign means that the word is imaginary, or hypothetical. There is no attestation for it, no written appearance of the word. It has been imaginatively constructed--they would say reconstructed--as has indeed the entire Proto-Indo-European language.

When I took a Sanskrit course at the University of Pennsylvania the graduate assistant in the class would like to give us the diachronic view of Sanskrit. I must say its a persuasive account. Panini’s classical Sanskrit grammar as some four of five thousands rules, but there are a number of them which have only one application. These are the anomalies or exceptions. Why should they be there. Well our grad assistant would account for the otherwise inexplicable anomaly by showing how the anomalous form in Sanskrit was standard in, say, Avestan, and then go on to show how both evolved out of earlier forms in Proto-Indo-Aryan which in turn which evolved out of Proto-Indo-European. Granting them their presuppositions, the entire structure seemed to make sense on its own terms, and to account for things which on the face of it seems otherwise inexplicable It tidied up a whole area of thought. Its was enormously clever. Yet I did not for a moment accept it as true. I recognized it as the product of modern historical consciousness, and I realized that the graduate assistant and I were simply inhabitants of two different cognitive universes. My coin of truth--a citation from sastra--had no value whatsoever in his kingdom.

Similarly, any modern academic scholar of religion is operating out of a similar evolutionary view of religion, the same diachronic mentality. For instance, I read and article about the worship of Jagannatha in Puri. At one point the author describes how some village or tribal people in Orissa worship wooden posts. Without bothering to make an argument, the author understands at once that the worship of the wooden Jagannatha image has evolved out of the primitive worship of wooden posts. It did not cross his mind to consider even the possibility that tribal people may have been imitating in their own way the elaborate worship of Jagannatha.

The academic study of religion (Religionswissenschaft), looks at every aspect of our tradition as a human product, the result of social, cultural, economic, psychological forces interacting in history. Scripture--sastra--is especially subject to the same considerations. It is a human construct that grew and developed over time, and critical analysis show how a text thought to be “revealed” entire and complete at one time and place, contains within the traces of the submerged histories of its parts.

This academic discipline is called textual criticism, and to a great degree it’s what the modern scholarly study of religion is about. In the nineteenth century, when it was established as a formal discipline it was called “higher criticism,” in contrast to basic textual analysis--dealing with thing like variant reading, scribal errors and the like--which was called “lower criticism.” But higher criticism attempts to understand the various social and historical circumstances in which a particular work came to be composed, and thus rediscover it original meaning.

Let us take the first five books of the Bible--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy-- traditionally attributed, of course, to a single author, Moses.

Yet a close critical inspection of the Genesis account of creation, for instance, shows that Genesis actually two creation stories, one after another (Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 and Genesis 2:4-25) Each has its own focus, and the two do not form a seamless, continuous narrative.. Now how did that happen? Where did these two different stories come from? As the result of this and many similar considerations, it is now held that the five books of Moses are the outcome of the work of a number of unknown writers and editors. The first, earliest writer is known as the “Yahwist writer”, or “J” for short, because he (or she) refers to God by the proper name “Yahweh." Scholars believed themselves to have detected a second old stratum of material, or “E,” composed by the “Elohist writer,” who preferred the plural name "Elohim," for God. Then, latter, a Compiler put J and E together and added other material.

This account is so well accepted that any Christian or Jew who rejects its invites the charge of “fundamentalist.” Of course, a similar sort of historical criticism is brought to bear on the Vedic texts. There’s much less consensus about dates, and even the agreed upon dates are uncomfortably lacking in foundation. Yet that doesn’t put a stop to the speculation.

Recently I ran across a new historical-critical study of the Bhagavad-gita that attempts (yet again!) to isolate the real and original part of the work, by freeing it from the later additions and accretions on the part of various interested parties. With an implicit polemical allusion to Srila Prabhupada’s title of his own presentation of the Bhagavad-gita, the author titled his work The Bhagavad Gita As It Was. The approach that views the Bhagavad-gita as some kind of eternal or timeless document, revealed one and for all, and capable of being transmitted with out change and alternation across all sorts of temporal and cultural divides--in short, our approach to the Bhagavad-gita--is regard by such professors as infuriatingly backwards and simpleminded. It also can anger them that such an unenlightened view of these texts is being so actively promulgated, thus countering their own efforts at education and enlightenment.

The evolutionary, historical perspective is the shared, unquestioning assumption of modern scholarship. God into a department of religious studies and say “I believe this text was revealed by God, and was transmitted intact. I believe that a tradition can preserve its original teaches intact in spite of all kinds of --nobody will believe you for a minute. Not just that: they will know you are not worth taking seriously. For the premise is that such things just doesn't happen, and the matter is not up for discussion. To suggest otherwise is not merely to make a wrong claim; it is to step outside of the very rules by which they operate.

You would be like the person who seems some people playing tennis. He notices they are having a hard time getting the ball across the net. So he says to them, "Look, just take the net down, it would be a whole lot easier." They would be incredulous. The game is played by certain rules.

In a similar way, it is the ground-rule--not the conclusion--of modern science that there is no God. A number of years ago I read an account of a conference of cosmologists dealing with the origin of the universe. One cosmologist presented a mathematical proof that if the initial conditions at the very origin were completely at random, then, within the requisite amount of time, there is no way order could have arisen simply by change. He proposed therefore at the very beginning there must have been some order. A vigorous debate ensued. The “stacked-deck theory” of the origin of the universe was opposed to “the shuffled-deck theory.” Apparently the “stacked deck” made people nervous. Initial order begged for an explanation. If the deck was stacked, how did it get stacked? Well, the traditional stacker of decks is God, and finally somebody actually brought up that name. “But,” my account tersely reported, “most scientists prefer not to take that cop-out route." This shows that it is the rule of the game of science to keep out God. It would be like removing the tennis net. If you bring in God, your not doing science any more, you’re play some other game.

When devotees run up against Indo-European philology, or textual criticism, or the historical study of religion, we are confronted not just with the supposed facts of this or that discipline. We are confronted with various outgrowths of historical consciousness.

Let us suppose now that in the course of things I come across a professor who invokes the authority of Indo-European philology, an incredibly formidable intellectual structure which makes sense in its own terms. How do I come to grips with this? Little use trying to argue with the professor. Citing scripture to show him wrong begs the question; I am simply making a move in a game he isn’t even playing. Even if I cannot change him, at least for my own sake, I should understand what is going on in our encounter. I can understand what he cannot--that this Indo-European philology is a product of knowledge in the mode of passion.

I should also be aware of the way the process of knowledge works. The theory of knowledge expounded by St. Augustine is fairly accurate. Augustine rejects the epistemological theory that in acquiring knowledge of the world the subject is completely passive and contributes nothing to the process. Augustine propounds the doctrine of the “primacy of the will in knowledge.” Augustine observes that what we know is what we are first of all interested in. Before there is knowledge there has to be interest. And this interest, this attraction, is a movement of the will. When interest is most fully developed, it is called love. In this was Augustine sought to explain why loving God was a perquisite for knowing Him, and conversely, how for those who by an act of will turned away from God, God becomes invisible--unrecognized, unacknowledged. So the movement of the soul toward or away from God, toward knowledge of God or lack of knowledge of God, is really owing to a prior disposition or direction of the will, which, Augustine says, is determined by grace

What Augustine identifies as an act of the “will” Krishna consciousness refers to as the determination of buddhi. The director of the buddhi is Supersoul.. "I am situated in everyone's heart [as the Supersoul]and from Me comes remembrance, knowledge, and forgetfulness, matah smrtir jñanam apohanam ca. Apohanam means literally "shoving aside." Shoving aside what? Shoving aside Krsna. Prabhupada explainesd this phenomenon by saying that if you want to forget Krsna He will give you the intelligence to forget, and if you want to remember Krishna, He will give you the intelligence to remember. Prabhupada asked once where do all these arguments come from that there is no God, or God is dead or the creation can arise by chance from nothing, and so on. These are clever arguments; people who are otherwise reasonably bright accept them. Where do these arguments come from? They come from Krishna, Srila Prabhupada said. Krishna Himself gives the intelligence they can forget Him.

It is buddhi which determines the mind-set, the paradigm which determines the most fundamental categories by which we view the world, which determines what we acknowledge and cannot acknowledge, recognize and cannot recognize. Sometimes in history there are great collective shifts in intelligence, a cultural reorientation on the platform of buddhi. I see the rise of historical consciousness, signaled by the temporalization of the Chain of Being, as one of them. If you make yourselves aware of it, you’ll see just how instinctive and pervasive this historical way of looking at things is. If you want to know why a person is the way he is, what do you look at? You look at his childhood--his development. Historical consciousness is the instinctive habit of the modern mind.^* Where does it come from? As we have seen, it began to arise in the eighteenth century. It’s hard to pin down a cause. You can’t say this consciousness is a result of the facts of biological, sociological, or psychological development discovered by Darwin, Marx, and Freud: rather, this consciousness produced those “facts.” So where then did it come from?

If we are to succeed in the mission Srila Prabhupada gave us, it will be our task, somehow or another, to take the temporalized Chain of Being and set it upright again. How will we accomplish that? I do not now know anyone in our movement who can deconstruct Indo-European philology, for example. Yet I am convinced that if there is a Krishna conscious intellectual who can look at all the relevant historical data--including that which Indo-European philosophy has had to overlook--that person will be able to see formerly invisible things.

Another important study in the history of ideas is by Thomas Kuhn, called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn shows that scientific progress is not a linear advanced composed of the accumulation of data and adding of a series of congruent theories on top of each other. Rather, there are period of change so sweeping and total--and so destructive of what went before--that they deserve the name revolutions, and Kuhn studies the way these revolutions take place. For instance, there was a time in which chemistry posited the existence of a theoretical substance called phlogeston to explain combustion and other phenomena.. The replacement of the phlogeston theory with the atomic theory constituted a revolution, or a paradigm shift. A paradigm is a fundamental framework for looking at things; it establishes not only the theoretical terms for explanation, but also an orientation which determines what avenues are worth exploring, what problems are worthwhile addressing. A paradigm shift in science even changes what kinds of equipment you use, what a laboratory or observatory looks like. The proponents of conflicting paradigms, Kuhn says, in a significant sense live in different universes. When a paradigm is well established, and routine work goes on within its parameters we have “normal science.” But then there is the encounter with anomalous data or results which do not fit the established paradigm. The paradigm has endured because it has explained a lot of thing and pointed the way for further research; it has brought intelligible order into the world and promises to keep on doing so. In that case, a few anomalies encountered here and there doesn’t bother anyone too much. You put it aside to deal with later, you forget about it. But if gradually the anomalies accumulate so much that they can no longer be ignored, science enters a period of crisis. At that point, someone may come up with a radically different way of doing science, something that, theoretically speaking, starts afresh. It accounts for the anomalous material, and sets research off in an entirely new direction. Quite often the new paradigm is provided by an outsider, someone free from the mindset of normal science. For example, the atomic theory was proposed by John Dalton who was not a chemist but a meteorologist.

Modern historical consciousness is a name for a very wide-spread and deeply rooted paradigm. Lovejoy’s description of the temporalization of the Chain of Being has the characteristics of one of Kuhn’s paradigm shifts.

Our job is to effect another such shift. I am very encouraged by the work done by Sadaputa Prabhu and Drutakarma Prabhu, published in Forbidden Archeology. They have gone back to the original reports of excavations, and looked at the way anomalies in the evidence for human evolution have been dealt with. The anomaly collection is surprisingly large. It is clear that there has been a double-standard of rigor for accepting data: what appears to agree with theory is easily accepted, and what appears to conflict is subject to much more intense level of doubt. If the same standards of unambiguity were applied to all the data, there would be little evidence for anything at all. The formidable defense mechanism of modern science to keep anomalies from interfering with their evolutionary paradigm shows that the states are very high. The whole of modern life may rest upon it.

From the very beginning, Prabhupada indicated that evolution is the weakest point in the edifice of modern consciousness. If that theory goes, then it would seem that the whole mind of modern humanity is up for grabs. The evolutionary paradigm puts a frame around people’s lives; it tells them “this is who I am and this is how the world came into being, and this is how I got here." If the theory of evolution is abandoned discredited, people are going to say, "Here I am, here you are, here's this world around us--and I have no idea of how I or you or this civilization or this world got here.” Then anything is possible. I think it's simply a matter of time before this happens.

Once you start looking at things through a new paradigm, looking at the facts, you'll start to see things you were unable to see before. One has to do some serious excavation to get down to the root evidence, because, even what gets acknowledged recognized as a fact, even the very criteria of what constitutes a fact, is often determined by a paradigm. A new paradigm lights up a whole new world. Knowledge is not a simple thing--it depends on what you want, on what you love, on what your hopes and fears are. You must learn to love the right things, to hope and fear the right things in order to know. Knowledge depends upon goodness..

We know through sabda, through proper hearing, that the theory of evolution is wrong. The paradigm given to us by sabda, delivered by the mercy of Krishna and guru, has much affinity to that of the Great Chain of Being, but the Vedic version is much improved over the earlier European account. Now we want to help bring about a total revolution in human consciousness. If we don't do that, Krsna consciousness will not survive. Krishna consciousness is so incompatible with the modern temperament that if we don't eradicate it, it will eradicate Krishna consciousness. That's my conviction, and I think Krishna will give us the tools and show us the way, on the condition that our faith is unflinching.. I haven’t the slightest doubt, for example, that if the formidable edifice of Indo-European philology is subjected to the same sort of scrutiny Sadaputa and Drutrakarma and giving human evolution, it will prove to be equally full of anomalies and double-standards. Kuhn notes, by the way, that in science, at least, an old paradigm is left behind only when there is a new, more satisfactory one to replace it. We also have to provide that as well.

To sum it up: The cure for modern historical consciousness is Krsna consciousness. If people actually take to the process of Krsna consciousness, and a trusted brahminical class in the mode of goodness develops to guide society, then another sort of science will be established--we should say reestablished--that will defeat this “knowledge” in the mode of passion and ignorance

That is our mission.