Overcoming Solidity

The intent of my book is to “put under a microscope” our very understandable responses to the wide-spread apprehension of an imminent world crisis. Although this feeling finds many expressions today, within many disciplines, I focus here on the philosophical/psychological stream of thought that speaks to a gulf between consciousness and world and the problem of overcoming that gulf—a response I describe as overcoming solidity. The presence of the gulf seems to invoke an impulse to overcome it, to return to earlier times when our relationship to nature was more participatory, more alive, more of an I-Thou relationship. There is a pervasive belief among proponents of this response that such a “re-enchantment” of nature will restore the lost connection, thereby reducing the exploitation and destruction of the natural world, along with the human species. Part of my purpose here is to demonstrate the impossibility and therefore futility of any such attempt. We must, I claim, accept the irreversibility of history but, alternatively, we do not have to accept the positivist prejudice that asserts the absolute nature of our current consciousness-world constitution. I approach this issue from within the wisdom stream of philosophical/psychological thought that privileges the soul as a historical process in which revolutionary changes in the soul-world constitution occur. I (along with others) call this process the evolution of consciousness or, more accurately, the evolution of the consciousness-world constitution. I am claiming that the question of overcoming solidity only makes sense when explored from within this wisdom stream and even then, it is a complex and difficult issue to comprehend. The only way I could do any justice to the topic is to draw from many different sources, including my own experiences. In the course of my research, I discovered that I could make an important distinction between the possibility of individual experience in overcoming solidity, while remaining within our current status of soul-world (separated self-consciousness and world of solid things) and the possibility of the soul-world constitution undergoing another self-transformation, thereby overcoming its own present status. I also try to point to hints of what such a self-transformation would look like, and here we run into great problems because now we are talking about the unknown future as it is forming. Such a process inevitably involves language as a vehicle of expression of the new status of soul-world and I explore this process in depth in my book: Manifesting Possible Futures. However, in this book I simply offer possible examples of the emergence of this possible future by reference to the “twice-born”, Dionysos, appearing, not as the living truth of the ebullience and exuberance of living natural nature, but as the very syntax of a new dawning consciousness. From this tentative hypothesis I introduce the work, or artistic productions, including my own, of some individual human voices that seem to show the “presence” of the soul’s transformation into its new status of “being”, i.e., the “new nature”.