Reading the Dream

A Post-Secular History of Enmindment

Peter Dale Scott

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2024
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538181539
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Reading the Dream the poet and scholar Peter Dale Scott has composed a poem in prose for our time. This is a work of art emerging from a passionate social vision. Scott examines our present state of post-secularity through the imagination of the past. Using devices such as the rational and nonrational, or the yin and the yang, Scott focuses not just on the reasoned current of written history but also on myths, beliefs, and even dreams. The author searches for moreness throughout the culture of the past. He reawakens the ultimate human quest for transcendence of ourselves to repair a political order in ruins.

This book seeks to transcend the slow breakdown of our current global political order by returning to its generative cultural roots in enmindment (that is, both secular and spiritual enlightenment). It sees our emerging global culture as dialectical on interconnected levels: the tension between scientific (yang) analysis and non-rational (yin) hopes and dreams; the source of this tension in the bicameral human brain, in competing rural and urban ethical values, and in the master-servant relationship. Behind the screen-history of chaotic political violence, it revives a vision of cultural progress, in which the vertical imposition of political order from above is slowly supplanted by the emerging post-secular tolerance of cultural diversity, including both religion and science, from below.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Note about the Cover Image
• Acknowledgments, Leading to a Very Brief Note on Method
• Introduction
• Part One: Enlightenment
• Chapter One: The Sh’ma, the Three Refuges, and the Axial Moment
• Chapter Two: The Lord’s Prayer: A Second Pivotal Shift
• Chapter Three: Yang and Yin: Torah, Psalter, and Disruption
• Chapter Four: Yang and Yin in the Polis: The Pre-Socratics and Plato
• Chapter Five: Yang and Yin in Hellas: The Post-Socratic Philosophers
• Chapter Six: Yin and Yang in Alexandria: The Song of Songs
• Chapter Seven: Virgil as Prophet of the Second Pivotal Shift
• Part Two: Endarkenment
• Chapter Eight: Disruptive Shifts in the Evolution of Culture
• Chapter Nine: Earlier Dark (Yin) Ages, Disruptions, and Mnemohistory
• Chapter Ten: Benign Cultural Progress in the Third Pivotal Shift: The Dark Age
• Chapter Eleven: Secular and Spiritual Power
• Chapter Twelve: St. Martin and the Diminution of Social Violence
• Chapter Thirteen: Augustine as Prophet of the Third Pivotal Shift
• Chapter Fourteen: Bede, Alcuin, and the Waning of the Dark Age
• Chapter Fifteen: End of the Poem in Prose
• Appendix: A Personal Note after Finishing This Book
• Four Poems
• Notes
• About the Author