I am afraid the society and the church are mired in Enlightenment epistemology taken as a way of knowing. It was Kant who gave the slogan of Enlightenment, “aude saprere” – dare to think. But Enlightenment thought presented a way only for objective thought about the world and its matters. It paved the way for Newton. Human consciousness, with its critical consciousness, was considered subjective and not scientific. It was an act of objectifying though without the subject, it was alienation of the subject. This type of thought dominated, and it was a dominating thought of subjugation and colonisation. But “Dialectic Of Enlightenment” of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno says: “The tireless self-destruction of enlightenment hypocritically celebrated by implacable fascists and implemented by pliable experts in humanity compels thought to forbid itself its last remaining innocence regarding the habits and tendencies of the Zeitgeist.” There are two main reasons in the background of this destruction of rationality. First of them is the destruction of the individual, because of the understanding of the role of reason in the Enlightenment. Individuals cannot define their existence beyond the determined roles of society any more. The second reason is a certain distinction made between human beings and nature. The epistemology of the Enlightenment makes nature an object of knowledge and views the world as a summation of facts. This understanding makes subjects passive in providing the objectivity of knowledge. Accordingly, the subject is alienated from his or her knowledge. The affirmative reference is to science and technology and everyday phenomena but also of the conceptual language of opposition. If enlightenment does assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate. The Second World War with Nazism and communist barbarity engulfed the world endangering the very existence of man. Morality and all value systems evaporated away. God was not objective and is dead. Morality is subjective and was a subject of the minds without reface to social life. Reason was reduced to mathematical computing. All art and literature was dumped to the subjective and irrelevant. Critical thinking provides possibility for the human autonomy.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the epistemology that is practised in India even in matters of the church. It is a warring way of knowing. Such dominating attitude has become quite evident. We cannot be truthful to ourselves and at the same time dominate the world and continue a process of subjugation. Husserl concludes his Cartesian Meditations thus: “The Delphic motto, “Know thyself!” has gained a new signification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I must lose the world by epoche, in order to regain it by a universal self-examination.” Says Augustine, “Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.” This is the only way of knowing oneself, God and the humans around. Language is the translation of interiority. The unity of the self is thus held together by an interior word, an intimate word. The intimate word is a primal word spoken to myself, from within myself. It is my self-identifying word, “before any sound, before any thought of sound. The intimate word is manifest, moreover, as a form of self-awareness that is distinct from introspection or searching for myself, signalling a sharp departure from the metaphysics of representation, for “it is one thing not to know oneself, another not to think about oneself.”
The contemplative self is able to say with Augustine: “From myself indeed I understand how wonderful and incomprehensible is your knowledge with which you have made me, seeing that I am not even able to comprehend myself whom you have made; and yet a fire burns up in my meditation (Ps 39:3), causing me to seek your face always.” There is no other path to know the other but only in me as I know myself.” The active life of faith expressed in the Pauline statement “with an unveiled face” communicates a single but all-important theological truth: contemplation constitutes a “look” and event of beholding whereby the face sees past itself, outside itself, and looks to the Lord through a mirror, which is the world itself. Experience of God is not to be sought solely in the cloister or in extraordinary graces; it is also freely offered in the ordinary events of our daily lives. V. Hugo writes: “There are still men on earth who know how to open and shut the surprise boxes of paradox with joy… Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread.”