We are still in the intellectual forcefield of the European Enlightenment, but as the years since the Eighteenth Century go by it has become apparent that a change is approaching – a change summarised as the post-materialist paradigm. Many intellectuals are now open to something more like the Buddhist notion of enlightenment. Lance’s lecture discusses the balance that is being precariously struck between these different mindsets.

These two modes of thinking are now showing signs of influencing each other mutually.  Post-materialist thought is, and always has been, very open to Enlightenment methods and ideas, but now ‘ordinary’ Enlightenment-materialist thought is having to come to terms with anomalies and with new evidence pointed out by its own gurus – ideas that put its structures into question. One can think of quantum mechanics for example and the new developments in consciousness studies.

Given this situation where we are between two forms of enlightenment, how should we think now?

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About the speaker:

Lance Butler taught literature and literary stylistics at the Universities of Stirling in Scotland and Pau in France between 1972 and 2016. He is the author of Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being, Victorian Doubt and Registering the Difference, a study of the linguistic concept of register. His new book of essays, Two Enlightenments, comes out around the time of this lecture. Lance is currently Chairman of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre in Edinburgh, a mind-body-spirit institution set up to further the same aims as the SMN.

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