John William Corrington’s essay “Science, Symbol, and Meaning” (1983) is archived at Centenary College as “Houston Talk.” It was the opening address at the Second Annual Space Industrialization Conference of the National Space Society in Houston, Texas. It has been included in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on this image:

The subject of “Science, Symbol, and Meaning” is man’s exploration of outer space and the potential physical instantiation of certain theories about the structure of the cosmos. Corrington sets out to “reconstruct” Western culture, first by defining and describing it and then by diagnosing what he calls its “deformity,” which involves confusion regarding the differences between mythical and scientic modes of knowing.

This essay uses the subject of space exploration as a starting point for recommending remedies to this so-called deformity. Corrington purports to derive his thesis about time and cosmic order from Eric Voegelin, Martin Heidegger, and Giorgio de Santillana. He critiques the “illusion” that scientific thinking displaced mythopoetic thinking in the West because, he says, theological and symbolic thinking has been used to make sense of the data that has been objectively arrived at and disinterestedly gathered. This illusion will no longer stand, Corrington suggests, as the expanse of space becomes more intimately known to us and we begin to acknowledge the role that myth plays in ordering our experience within the observable cosmos.

Rationalism and empiricism are, Corrington suggests, themselves forms of myth about our ability to know the cosmos that we occupy.

Corrington emphasizes the limits of human knowledge and submits that modern science is, however useful, myth; science, he says, is not “co-extensive with the manifold of reality.” Science equips us with symbols that can be manipulated to structure and explain our thinking about the phenomenal universe.

The drive for the enterprise of space exploration, in his view, represents a repressed desire to know and order our experience; it is in this sense a structural element of our psyche, something that is not new to modernity but long felt and expressed. For this reason Corrington believes the “leap into space is the heritage and destiny of Western Man.” Corrington’s prescription, in light of his comments on space exploration, for  the “deformity” in Western thinking is as follows:

We must re-learn and carry to the heart the old verities that existed before the rise of metaphysics and science, the truths that were carried on and carried down through the mythological structure of the psyche: the unity of humanity and the cosmos, the illusory and ephemeral quality of the ego, the one law common to all that penetrates and encompasses the fine structure and the gross structure of reality.