Publisher's Synopsis
An egg has a hen's way to produce another egg. This essay has no intention of reducing all the facets of human knowledge to a metaphor of one very common item. Instead the egg is used as a focus because of its apparent simplicity, to elaborate from thereon towards the more complicated issue of offering a new synthesis for the fragmentized human knowledge and skills.Such framework can by definition not be reductionist in its concept since it has to offer an umbrella where all aspects of our understanding of the universe, humankind and religion can be assembled. The logarithmic growth of our knowledge has stimulated people to specialize in one particular field, thus causing a further growth of knowledge and compartmentalization. The current system encourages people to know everything about one thing and almost nothing about the rest. The so called ivory tower mentality among scientists is one manifestation of this attitude or, on a more mundane level, the refusal of a cameraman on a film set to replace the empty batteries of his camera because that job has to be done by an electrician. Both examples indicate the power of a socially induced conditioning against knowing or doing something that lies beyond one's very narrowly defined field of competence.Such an emphasis on specialization leaves people at loss once they have to function outside the carefully carved borders of the domain of their acquired skills. It also leaves them with a sense of bewilderment, since almost no one seems to bother anymore about offering a metaphysical frame that allows them to "think the world together". The scientist goes every Sunday with his family to a church where the pastor preaches gruntingly creationism and life after dead. For the rest of the week both of them live in their own bubble, ignoring the dichotomy between their knowledge and spirituality.This essay, far from being of an encyclopedic nature, goes back to the foundations of the three main facets of human abstract thinking: science, art and religion. Evolutions and new insights have emerged in all three of them. This essay wants to bring forward the core aspects that link them together and emphasize that those are stronger than the bifurcation points where they seem to clash. Let's not forget that Einstein has spent half of his life to contest the quantum theory because it apparently clashed with some theorems of his Relativity Theory. It took scientists almost a century to come up with a Grand Unifying Theory that reconciled both. It is my personal hope that this essay could lay out the basics for a new synthesis from where a new paradigm could take hold; a contemporary Philosopher's Egg.In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg - symbolized by the round cooking vessel - will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis.
