PART I
The Systemic Paradigm of the Mind

The Systemic Paradigm

Episteme and Paradigms

A paradigm expresses a generally accepted perspective of science at a given time, in other words, what is true and what is not. The episteme can be taken as a deeper level of cognition - a set of discursive rules that define what is knowable in a certain age (2). The epistemology of a particular period holds these rules as a set of invisible, axiomatic and mostly unconscious preconditions of thinking. The great changes in the history of ideas come whenever an episteme is challenged, breached and upgraded with another episteme. The epistemology of a period gives ground to the paradigm of knowledge of that period. In the history of humanity, whenever science made a breach in the paradigm, there was an according change in the episteme. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in his book “The Order of Things” described the changes of the episteme through the ages and the differences in their presuppositions of thinking.

The latest example of such an epistemological and paradigm shift happened in the previous century when the discoveries in quantum physics literally displaced the notion of the physical world from its foundations. The results of the subatomic research set the material world fluctuating without stable physical points, center or structure; it replaced all sound notions and objects with an infinity of interconnected patterns of probable connections. Parallel to the series of discoveries in the area of natural sciences, a leap in philosophy put into doubt the epistemological presuppositions of the last few centuries. Most generally, it came to abandonment of the Enlightenment’s confidence in achievement of objective knowledge through reliance upon reason, in pursuit of an ultimate reality and of a transcendental essence of things and beings. In philosophy, postmodernists typically express grave doubt about the possibility of universal objective truth and reject artificially imposed dichotomies. Foucault used historical investigations as a method of exposing how the structure of contemporary thought and subjective human experience is shaped, circumscribed and controlled by conventional social institutions and practices. The French post-structuralism bears the idea that all perceptions, concepts, and truth-claims are constructed in language, along with the corresponding subject-positions which are likewise nothing more than transient epiphenomena of this or that cultural discourse. Gilles Deleuze created an idiosyncratic approach to literature, psychology, politics and philosophy, in terms of mapping rhizomatic movements toward immanence, processes of territorialization and deterritorialization. A general effort can be noted in the philosophical vocabulary of the Postmodernists: to de-subjectify concepts, thinking and experiencing, to breach the Enlightenment epistemological construct of what the human being is.

The latest humanistic episteme, in which, as Foucault claims, we are still caught, translates the world in human-centered terms: it closes the experience of being human in an anthropo- or self-centered worldview. In other words, the non-human world is viewed through the prism of the humanistic episteme and the rational-mechanistic scientific paradigm: the individual is taken as a disconnected observer of an objective reality whose elements are measured by their value and utility to human subject only. The Postmodern makes an effort to release the objects of research from the shape imposed by the subject. Although from the very beginning this goal is admitted as impossible to achieve, the very process of desubjectification expands the definition of cognition, to a deeper understanding of life processes, where the reference of truthfulness and value move away from the anthropomorphic center and dissipate cross-discursively.

(2) Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge...” (p. 168). He defines the episteme as “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems.” (p. 191)

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