미국의 물리학자로 하버드와 MIT대 교수를 지낸 Alan Lightman가 쓴 The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science; Spiritual Materilaism: 영적 탐사에 있어서 과학을 배제할 필요는 없으며, 그 반대도 마찬가지다; 양자는 서로 상호보완적일 수 있다; the Great Chain of Connection, which he relates to another of his concepts, viz., “cosmic biocentrism.” Central to the notion is “the kinship of all living things in the universe.” e writes, “The golden ratio is built into us, just as it is built into seashells and aloe plants. Our aesthetic of beauty is literally an expression of our oneness with nature.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lightman
lan Paige Lightman (born November 28, 1948) is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur.[1][2] He has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently a professor of the practice of the humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Lightman was one of the first persons at MIT to hold a joint faculty position in both the sciences and the humanities.[3] His thinking and writing explore the intersection of the sciences and humanities, especially the multilogues among science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality.[4][5]
Lightman is the author of the international bestseller Einstein's Dreams.[3][6] and his novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award.[7] He is also the founder of Harpswell, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.[8]
Lightman hosts the public-television series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.[9]
He has received six honorary doctoral degrees.
https://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Brain-Spirituality-Age-Science/dp/0593317416
From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to the question, Can the scientifically inclined still hold space for spirituality?
“Lightman…belongs to a noble tradition of science writers, including Oliver Sacks and Lewis Thomas, who can poke endlessly into a subject and…stir up fresh embers of wonder.” —The Wall Street Journal
Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?
According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems?
Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”— the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution.
What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human.
...
In a nutshell, Lightman’s thesis is that humankind’s spirituality necessarily originates in the organic structures and chemistry of the brain, which is one and the same with the mind (consciousness) since the mind cannot exist without it. Furthermore, since humankind has evolved through the eons in symbiotic relationship with nature writ large – on the cosmic scale – the very structures of our brains and bodies, as well as our mind’s affinities and propensities, are determined by these evolved adaptive responses to environment. In this regard, he shows how the golden ratio (3:2 or 1.618 AKA “Phi”) provides a key to unlocking and understanding these connections; the golden ratio being ubiquitous to a pretty astonishing degree throughout the natural world, which is why the human brain – which evolved in that very context – responds so easily and pleasurably to it in art and design, i.e., aesthetically. And, there is much merging and blending of aesthetic experience with spiritual experience, which leads to his discussion of the human experience of “awe” and transcendence, which is the mystical experience. Lightman offers several personal experiences of transcendence and mystical union. This is one that he experienced while kayaking in a favorite cove in Maine:
“As I’ve come to understand, a common feature of all aspects of spirituality is a loss of self, a letting go, a willingness to embrace something outside of ourselves, a willingness to listen rather than talk, a recognition that we are small and the cosmos is large. For a moment, I stop paddling and listen. I think that I hear the soft beats of my heart. Or is it the soft clapping of waves on the shore?” (p.165)
This is what Lightman terms, the Great Chain of Connection, which he relates to another of his concepts, viz., “cosmic biocentrism.” Central to the notion is “the kinship of all living things in the universe.” He writes, “The golden ratio is built into us, just as it is built into seashells and aloe plants. Our aesthetic of beauty is literally an expression of our oneness with nature.” (p.153)
Lightman has substantiated his arguments with a well-documented, thorough historical examination of spiritual diversity and biological science, all leading to his thoughtful conclusions. His arguments are, in the opinion of this reader, sound and convincing. While being careful to express his sincere respect for the spiritual traditions and beliefs of others, his goal, it seems to me, is to shine a guiding light into a future where science does not challenge, let alone dismiss, spirituality, but instead points a way to a new and perhaps even deeper, more profound understanding of humankind’s consciousness as part and parcel of the cosmic order – a spirituality with the foundation built on and with all facets of human consciousness: science, mathematics, the arts, and the humanities. This is a new Renaissance Man, as it were, for the 21st Century and beyond.
Sidebar: There does seem to me to be a close affinity in Lightman's discussion of "lawful nature," with the ancient Greek notion of "logos" in its various iterations from Heraclitus to the Stoics, et al, but Lightman nowhere mentions it.
It is a book I can enthusiastically recommend to anyone intellectually open-minded enough to accept and consider a fresh perspective on a biocentric spirituality grounded in science and the human experience.
My only criticism is a complaint. Why is there no index?! The book is replete with names, dates, scientific studies, proprietary terms, and so on. There are 169 footnotes of text reference credits and another page and a half of illustration credits! How long would it take a junior editor, with the manuscript on a computer, to cobble together an index? How many pages would it add to the book? Fifteen? It would sure eliminate a lot of frustration for the reader trying to locate material.
The man sits at the table, leans toward a friend in the opposite chair. One hand rests on his knee, the other lightly cradles his chin with its short scraggly beard. He wears a red jacket, dark pants, silver-buckled shoes, a white shirt with rued cus. While his friend reaches out with a smile, our man seems lost in some deep inner realm, as if brooding over the vast cosmos of earthly existence and what might come after. His face would be recognized by many in eighteenth-century Europe, from numerous portraits rendered on porcelain teacups, vases and pendants, busts, paintings. His name is Moses Mendelssohn.
This particular painting with the red jacket depicts a meeting between Mendelssohn and two other thinkers: the German writer and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the Swiss poet and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater. The latter once described Mendelssohn as “a companionable, brilliant soul, with piercing eyes, the body of an Aesop— a man of keen insight, exquisite taste and wide erudition . . . frank and open- hearted.”
Let’s describe the scene a bit more. Judging from Mendelssohn’s visage, he is about fifty years old, making the year about 1779. A chessboard rests on the table. Above it hangs a brass fixture, whose top section is a chandelier and lower part an oil lamp used for the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays. Mendelssohn is the most famous Jew of his generation. Although deeply religious, he has crossed the border from Jew to Gentile. Breaking from a prescribed life of studying the Talmud and Torah in Hebrew, Mendelssohn has mastered the German language, more adeptly than the Prussian king Frederick the Great, and writes his many philosophical works in that tongue. Against the back wall of the room is a shelf filled with books. A wood floor. A beamed ceiling. A richly embroidered green cloth on the table. A woman enters the room carrying a tray with teacups. This is Mendelssohn’s home, on 68 Spandau Street in Berlin. It is a prosperous house. After beginning life as the son of a poor Torah scribe and living for years as a lowly clerk in a silk factory, Mendelssohn has become part owner of the factory.
I start with Mendelssohn because no other philosopher or theologian in the history of recorded thought has argued so rationally for the existence of the soul, the prime example, after God, of the nonmaterial. Aristotle claimed that the soul could not exist without a body. Augustine attributed all aspects of the soul to the perfection of God, Augustine’s starting point in all things. Maimonides assumed the existence of the soul, which would become immortal for the virtuous (but not for the sinners). Mendelssohn made none of these assumptions. Coming of age after the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton, Mendelssohn started from scratch. He constructed logical arguments for the existence of the soul and its immortality. He thought like a scientist as well as a philosopher. In 1763, he won the prize oered by the Prussian Royal Academy of Science for an essay on the application of mathematical proofs to metaphysics, beating out such people as Immanuel Kant. In his salon, a portrait of Isaac Newton hung next to the portraits of the Greek philosophers.
Mendelssohn was a polymath. As a boy, he studied astronomy, mathematics, philosophy. He wrote poetry. He played the piano (studying with a student of J. S. Bach). At the age of sixteen, he began learning Latin, so that he could read Cicero and a Latin version of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Aaron Gumperz, the first Prussian Jew to become a medical doctor, taught Mendelssohn French and English. In his twenties, Mendelssohn joined the German writer and bookseller Christoph Friedrich Nicolai to publish the literary journals Bibliothek and Literaturbriefe. Not content with five languages under his belt, Mendelssohn then learned Greek, so that he could read Homer and Plato in the original.
In 1767, Mendelssohn wrote his masterwork, Phädon, or On the Immortality of the Soul, a reconception of Plato’s famous Phaedo. In doing so, Mendelssohn wanted to do for the modern European world what Plato had done for the ancient Greek world— describe the necessity and nature of the soul. “I . . . tried to adapt the metaphysical proofs to the taste of our time,” Mendelssohn modestly wrote in the preface to his book. But he did more than adapt. He presented new arguments. He reasoned that while the body and all experiences of the body are composed of parts, to arrive at meaning there must be a thinking thing outside of the parts to integrate and lead their individual sensations, just as a conductor is needed to lead a symphony orchestra.
Furthermore, this thinking thing beyond the body must be a whole. If it were composed of parts, then there would need to be another thing outside of it, which composed and integrated its parts, and so on, ad infinitum. “There is, therefore . . . at least one single substance, which is not extended, not compound, but is simple, has a power of intellect, and unites all our concepts, desires, and inclinations in itself. What hinders us from calling this substance our soul?” And, the Jewish scholar argued, the soul must be immortal, because nature always proceeds in gradual steps. Nothing in the natural world leaps from existence to nothingness.
https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EB%AA%A8%EC%A0%9C%EC%8A%A4_%EB%A9%98%EB%8D%B8%EC%8A%A4%EC%A1%B4
모세스 멘델스존(Moses Mendelssohn, 1729-1786)은 18세기 독일 계몽주의 철학자이다. 펠릭스 멘델스존과 파니 멘델스존의 할아버지이다.
파사우 출신의 유명한 탈무드 학자인 다비드 프랭켈(David Fränkel)의 제자가 되었다. 베를린으로 이주한 후 멘델스존은 비단공장의 회계원으로 일하면서 고전어, 문학 그리고 다양한 영역의 문헌을 연구하였다.
멘델스존은 독일어로 된 오순절과 성경의 다른 부분을 번역하였다. 그 번역은 유대인들이 그 언어를 더 빨리 배울 수 있도록 고안된 독일어로 되어 있었다. 그 시기의 독일 유대인들은 대부분 이디시어를 썼고 많은 이들이 히브리어(경전의 원어)로 글을 읽고 있었다. 멘델스존은 또한 1778년 베를린에서 유대인 소년들을 위한 최초의 현대 공립학교의 설립 배후에 있는 것으로 믿어지고 있다.
멘델스존은 또한 유대인들의 권리와 수용을 증진시킴으로써 전반적으로 유대인들의 상황을 개선하려고 노력했다. 그는 1781년 빌헬름 폰 돕(Christian Wilhelm von Dohm)에게 그의 저서 '유대인의 조건의 시민적 개선'을 발표하도록 하였다.
이러한 행동에 의해 야기된 관심은 멘델스존의 《예루살렘》 (1783)에 드러난다. 이 저서는 양심의 자유에 대한 탄원이다.
멘델스존에게 그의 이론은 유대교에 대한 강한 유대감을 나타냈다. 그러나 19세기 1부에서는 유대교의 독단과 전통에 대한 비판은 나이든 유대인의 생활 방식에 대한 확고한 유착과 관련이 있었다. 이성은 믿음, 역사적 의식은 삶에 적용되었다. 유대교의 현대 개혁은 이 개념과 어느 정도 결별했다.
모제스 멘델스존(Moses Mendelssohn.1729.9.6∼1786.1.4)
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독일 계몽시대의 철학자. 라이프니츠-볼프학파의 한 사람. 독일 동부 데사우의 유대인 집안에서 태어났다. 신의 존재와 영혼불멸을 증명하는 데 힘을 쏟았고, 이런 문제야말로 철학의 궁극적 과제라고 규정하였다.
베를린아카데미가 1763년에 형이상학적 진리의 판명성에 관한 논문을 모집했는데 그가 I. 칸트를 누르고 최고점을 땄다. 도덕철학 확립에 힘썼고 신앙자유를 주장하는 등 계몽시대의 대표자다운 활동상을 과시했으나, 볼프보다도 통속적이라는 평가가 있다. 유명한 음악가인 J.L.F. 멘델스존은 그의 손자이다.
독일계 유대인 철학자ㆍ비평가. 가난한 율법학자 메나헴 멘델 데사우의 아들로 태어났다. 유대인 사회에서는 모세 데사우라는 이름으로 통했지만, 글을 발표할 때에는 히브리어로 벤 멘델('멘델의 아들'이라는 뜻)에서 나온 멘델스존이라는 이름을 썼다. 히브리어 대신 독일어 멘델스존을 선택한 것은 그가 다른 유대인에게 요구했듯이 독일 문화를 받아들였음을 보여준다. 1743년 베를린으로 가서 영국의 철학자 존 로크와 독일의 사상가 고트프리트 빌헬름 폰 라이프니츠, 크리스티안 폰 볼프의 사상을 공부했다.
1750년 멘델스존은 비단 제조업자 이사크 베른하르트의 아이들을 가르치는 가정교사가 되었는데, 베른하르트는 1754년 멘델스존을 사업에 끌어들였다. 같은 해 독일의 일류 극작가 곳홀트 에프라임 레싱을 만났다. <유대인들>(1749)이라는 희곡에서 고결한 유대인 상을 그린 레싱은 멘델스존을 자신의 이상을 실현한 인물로 보게 되었다. 그 뒤 레싱은 <현자 나탄>(1779)이라는 희곡의 주인공을 묘사할 때, '독일의 소크라테스'라는 별명을 얻을 만큼 지혜로운 멘델스존을 모델로 삼았다. 라이프니츠를 찬양한 멘델스존의 첫 번째 저서 <철학적 담화>(1755)는 레싱의 도움에 힘입어 출간되었으며, 같은 해 감정의 정신적 의미를 강조한 <감정에 대한 편지>도 출판되었다.
멘델스존은 베를린 유대인들에게 돈을 받고 프로이센의 프리드리히 대왕이 7년전쟁(1756~63) 동안 프로이센을 강대국으로 만든 것을 축하하는 아부 편지를 썼지만, 음악과 예술의 후원자인 프리드리히 대왕은 멘델스존이 자기의 시(詩)를 비판한 데 화가 나서 유대인에게 적대적인 태도를 취했다.
그러나 멘델스존이 1763년 프로이센 학술 아카데미가 주최한 문학 경연에서 상을 받자 프리드리히 대왕은 태도를 바꾸어 유대인들이 관례적으로 당해온 법적 무자격 상태에서 멘델스존을 면제해주었다. 멘델스존이 상을 받은 논문은 형이상학 명제의 논증 가능성을 수학 명제의 논증 가능성과 비교한 것으로 그의 본명으로 나온 첫 번째 글이었다(1764). 가장 유명한 저서 <파이돈: 영혼 불멸에 관하여>(1767)는 그 당시 유행하던 유물론에 맞서 영혼의 불멸을 옹호한 글로서, 이 책의 제목은 플라톤의 <파이돈>에 대한 존경심을 보여준다.
1771년 멘델스존은 스위스의 신학자 J. C. 라바터와 그리스도교에 대해 격렬한 논쟁을 벌인 결과 신경쇠약에 걸리고 말았다. 라바터는 2년 전 동료인 스위스 신학자 샤를 보네의 저서를 직접 번역하여 멘델스존에게 보내면서, 그리스도교에 대한 보네의 논증을 반박할 수 없다면 그리스도교로 개종하라고 도전했다. 멘델스존은 종교논쟁을 싫어했지만, 자신의 유대교를 재확증해야 한다고 생각했다.
극도로 날카로워진 신경은 1774년 <시편>을 번역하기 시작한 뒤에야 풀렸다. 이어서 그는 유대인의 종교전통과 독일문화의 연결을 돕기 위한 계획을 세워 <구약성서>의 첫 5권인 '모세오경'의 역서를 독일어로 쓰고 히브리어로 인쇄했다(1780~83). 이 무렵 그는 파문(破門) 교리를 둘러싼 새로운 논쟁에 휘말렸다. 이 갈등은 그의 친구이자 그리스도교도인 빌헬름 폰 돔이 알자스의 유대인을 위해 탄원서를 써주기로 동의한 데서 비롯했다.
알자스 유대인은 원래 멘델스존이 그들의 해방을 위해 직접 개입하기를 바랐다. 돔은 <유대인의 시민권 향상에 관하여>(1781)에서 유대인의 해방을 탄원하면서도, 교인을 파문할 수 있는 유대 교회의 권리를 정부가 지지해야 한다는 역설적인 말을 덧붙였다. 그 결과 돔의 책에 대한 반발이 일어났고, 멘델스존은 이 반발에 맞서 싸우기 위하여 마나세 벤 이스라엘이 쓴 <유대인을 위한 변호>의 독일어 번역판 서문(1782)에서 파문을 비판했다.
익명의 작가가 모세 율법의 핵심을 파괴했다고 그를 고발하자, 멘델스존은 <예루살렘: 종교권력과 유대교에 관하여>(1783)라는 책으로 응수했다. 이 책에서 정부는 국민의 행동을 통제하기 위해서만 힘을 사용할 수 있을 뿐, 교회와 정부는 사상을 침범할 수 없다고 주장했다. 마지막 논쟁은 레싱이 스피노자의 범신론(汎神論)을 지지했다는 주장을 둘러싸고 일어났다.
이 논쟁에서 멘델스존은 레싱을 옹호했지만 마지막 저서 <아침>(1785)에서는 라이프니츠의 일신론(一神論)을 지지했다. 7권으로 된 그의 전집은 1843~45년 출판되었다. 그의 아들 아브라함은 작곡가 펠릭스 멘델스존의 아버지이다.
【저서】<철학적 담화>(1755) <감각에 관하여>(1755) <파이돈-영혼의 불멸에 관하여>(1767) <예루살렘: 종교권력과 유대교에 관하여>(1783) <아침>(1785)
[출처] 독일 철학자 모제스 멘델스존(Moses Mendelssohn)|작성자 틀
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