Wilhelm Reich
Page 26
Thus far we have seen that orgone is, in Reich’s account: (1) a nonpolar movement of expansion and contraction, (2) a wavelike pulsation rather than an angular and rapid propagation from a source, (3) the foundation of electricity and magnetism, (4) the inner pulsation of all living and nonliving things, (5) manifest in a blue-green wavelength, (6) found throughout the cosmos, and (7) potentially curative in its powers (as will be concretized in the orgone accumulator and orgone blanket). In the bionic sphere some bions will contain more orgone and some less. Those bions with the least amount of orgonotic charge (which is analogous to but not the same as electrical charge) can form into T-bacilli, which can cause bionous decay in their surrounding environment, leading ultimately to cancer.
Further phenomenological refinements followed from these initial forays into orgonotic pulsations. After much observation of orogne and its variations, Reich discovered that orgone was manifest in three different color fields. The first was that of blue-gray vapors (which can be seen in an orgone chamber after about twenty minutes), the second was that of blue-violet dots, while the third was that of straight yellowish rays. Vapors were the more obvious field phenomena that fluctuated through the entire environment, while dots were more intense manifestations within a localized visual field, and yellow lines were clearly, like the dots, more condensed versions of the vapors. Whatever the reader makes of this “phenomenological” evidence for three visual manifestations of orgone, it is something that can be seen under appropriate conditions. Obviously the vapors, dots, and lines could be internal optical phenomena, a kind of flotsam and jetsam of the optical nerve. But I am willing to say that the evidence points in the other direction—namely, that there is something both internal and external that has the features of pulsation and coloration. 26 For example, sunglasses actually dim the appearances of these optical phenomena while the use of magnifying glasses enlarges them.
Moving on to the second essay/dialogue in the series, Reich pushed the orgone theory into richer generic terrain by talking more and more about its cosmic status. Certainly orgone interacted with electricity and magnetism and might even be correlated in some way with gravity, which, of course, entails mass. Was there a way of converting orgone theory into a theory of mass and gravitation? Could Reich reground Newton and Einstein in a larger orgonotic gravity theory? Here one has to be much more cautious. Gravity is still difficult to analyze and may consist of waves of a very special nature. But if orgone is wavelike in its own special way, then there may be at least some family resemblances between one way of understanding gravity and Reich’s understanding of orgone.
At the very least, if one follows Reich’s presuppositions, one concludes that orgone is the life energy in all organic forms. But Reich, as a radical naturalist, utterly rejected the notion that orgone was a force that came to nature from a point outside of nature; that is, orgone was not supernatural or in any way connected with a patriarchal conception of deity:
The specific biological energy does not exist “on the other side”; it is not metaphysical. It exists physically in the atmosphere and is demonstrable visually, thermically, and electroscopically. It functions biologically in the soil and in the living organism. There is a continual process of energy metabolism between the purely physical and the biological form of the orgone, significantly in the respiration of plants and animals.27
What I find especially interesting here is the immense problematic facing Reich, of both separating orgone from electromagnetic energy and working out the details of the ways in which orgone and electromagnetism must interact. My sense is that had he found himself working in a less hostile environment, one in which he could sit side by side with biologists and physicists on a daily basis, he and the team would have been able to work through this highly complex set of correlations. Yet again I will assert that in the future of even electromagnetic theory, some fundamental shifts may occur that will bring Reich’s perspective, however underdeveloped, into at least dialogue status. So we see here that Reich is struggling with the thermal, visual, and electrical correlations of orgone, thus invoking classical thermodynamics, optical theory, and electromagnetic theory.
In the third essay of the series, Reich distinguished between two basic types of material substance vis-à-vis their respective relationships to the attraction or reflection of orgone: “(0) Organic substances attract and absorb the orgone. Metallic substances reflect it.”28 This basic law of attraction and reflection became the theoretical foundation for the construction of orgone accumulators, in which organic and metallic materials would be layered inside a wooden shell or other nonmetallic material. For example, an accumulator, perhaps in the form of a human-size cabinet, would layer fiberglass with steel wool. This layering would guarantee that orgone would be gathered into a focus in the organic material, and then be reflected into the accumulator by the metallic material.29 It should be noted that Reich used the term organic to refer to all nonmetallic materials.
Reich made a large-order extrapolation in this third essay/dialogue in which he firmly stated that orgone was the ocean within which electromagnetic waves were propagated. Optical phenomena, as electromagnetic phenomena, followed this principle by necessity:
For the time being, it must be assumed that orgone is the medium in which the electromagnetic waves of light vibrate. This seems a justified hypothesis, not a “wild” one. The motion of radio waves is also to be ascribed to the orgone … That orgone is in motion is a definitely established fact. This motion is seen in the flickering in the sky and on objects. Certainly, orgone does not stay still like the water in a puddle. Furthermore, the motion seems to be of the nature of a rhythmic pulsation, again reminiscent of the wave. In the orgonoscope, we see moving light particles, and orgone heat is obviously produced by the mechanical retarding of this orgone motion. A good telescope clearly shows the wave-like motion in the orgone ocean at the magnification of as little as 60x.30
In the orgonoscope, the visual manifestations described above could be detected by the naked eye, while a telescope could open up the orgone ocean itself, both in galactic space and in deep space. The cosmology emerging here was one that affirmed the supremacy of life energy over the energies of death. The entire universe of space/time was envisioned as an emergent from the prephysical orgone ocean, the true waters of the deep from which creation emerged. Orgone represented the cosmic transition from firstness to thirdness. Reich further developed the evolutionary implications of this model in the 1950s.
In the fourth and final essay/dialogue in this series, Reich brought in the sexual model of his earlier years and applied it again to the orgone theory. He also staked out his claims about the dependency of gravity on orgone. It should be noted that throughout these four essays, Reich reported on his laboratory and naturalistic experiments as evidence for his cosmological speculations. In each case he argued that he was compelled to draw the conclusions that he did, about the differences between orgone and other forms of energy, by the ways in which forms of attraction and reflection appeared in his experiments. One striking fact to emerge from his extensive experiments was that orgone phenomena were measurably suppressed when atmospheric conditions were above 50 percent relative humidity.
Sexual attraction stands forth as the major motor force not only for biological systems but for the universe itself. Reich’s position is similar to that of the physician Eryximachus in the Symposium who, when asked to define love, argued that the basic glue of the universe was eros, the energy that brought all things together, especially heaven and earth, the gods and the mortals.31 While Plato struggled to distance himself from the sexual forms of eros, however, Reich privileged the sexual form as foundational and normative for all other manifestations of eros as orgone:
Biologists are familiar with a fundamental natural phenomenon which, right through to and including the 20th century, remained commonplace yet at the same time uncomprehended and mysterious. I am referring to the overwhelming force of attraction e
xerted on each other by both sexes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms. This force leads to the sexual act and culminates in orgastic, plasmatic convulsion in animals. It is a life-sustaining force. This attraction is an orgone-physical function in the realm of the living.32
Hence from the cosmic to the local there is a movement of attraction that culminates in some kind of orgonotic expansion, felt by us in the orgasm as the muscular and characterological armor gives way to the primal convulsions of libido. Organisms can obviously attract or repel each other, but the reason for such differences at the deepest level lies in the orgone field that underlies the more obvious mechanisms of attraction or repulsion, such as physical features (in sexual selection processes). In the human order, transference and countertransference fields are actually orgonotic fields—that is, they are merely one of the ways in which orgone interacts in the flexible space between the conscious and the unconscious. To fall in love (to be in bioenergetic attraction) is to enter into this transference-and-countertransference momentum. Yet, as noted, neither form of projection represents, either alone or in conjunction, a sufficient condition for genuine love. They may be necessary conditions, but other conditions must also be met, such as an awareness of the full autonomy of the Other (Kant’s kingdom of ends) and the continual pursuit of self-transparency—the drive to make as many unconscious motives as possible manifest to the attending consciousness.
Back on the cosmic or at least planetary level, Reich argued that the magnetic field of Earth was a product of the underlying orgonotic field. The magnetic core of Earth was magnetized through orgone energy, and thus magnetism, like electrical radiation, was a product of the ground reality of orgone:
The earth is surrounded by an orgone energy field which apparently extends far beyond the atmosphere and out into space. The effect of the earth’s orgone field on the iron core of the earth must result in magnetization and the creation of two different magnetic poles, a north pole and a south pole of the earth. The earth’s field of attraction is orgonotic and not magnetic in nature. The magnetic north and south poles of the earth can thus be regarded as a polar functional effect of the orgonotic force field of the earth.33
Given what Reich said elsewhere in these articles, the north and south polarities of the magnetic field of Earth could themselves be not orgonotic but a “functional effect” of the orgone field. The orgone itself is not polarized, although it does exhibit antagonisms and tensional variations. Strict polarity takes place on the less primal level of electromagnetic phenomena.
What claims had Reich presented in these four brief essays? Clearly he was convinced that there was a conceptual and empirical divide between orgone and the other, better-known forces of nature. Yet he also carefully avoided slipping into panpsychism, the doctrine that all inorganic forms are really concrescences of mind or thought. He developed what might be called a functional evolutionary monism. The monism was functional in that it did not posit a primal substance as its principle of unity but instead argued that the world is one through a series of functional connections that did not have to be tied together through a system of internal relations. That is, there could be breaks and tears in nature, and nature was not a superorder or ultimate container. The evolutionary aspect of Reich’s monism was clear in his sensibility to the complexities of organic ramification and probing in potentially hostile environments. An organism would ramify its own potentials and send probes out into the world to see which would be replicable in the long run—that is, live long enough to assure that the organism as a whole could reproduce itself. By the late 1920s it was known that the universe was expanding and that the evolutionary principles of biology might be applicable to the universe itself. Of course, this latter application became more sharply focused in the 1970s with the issue of baby universes, in which any number of potential universes could emerge out of the sea of possibility (orgone?), only some of which would survive under the twin pressures of natural variation and natural selection. If a potential universe had too much mass, for example, it would collapse back in on itself. If another potential universe had too little mass, it would expand to the point where dense objects might not form at all. Had he lived long enough to be aware of these newer physical cosmologies, one suspects that Reich would have placed orgone at a “location” prior to the big bang, again, as a type of firstness.
We have seen one of his most advanced discussions of orgone and its properties. But what of his more directly poetic vision, as it moved toward a religious cosmology in which universality and orgastic ecstasy were expressed in human orders? Did Reich have a religious vision in spite of his intense dislike for what he called “religious metaphysics,” which he associated with the emotional plague? I have asserted throughout that he did have a kind of universalistic ecstatic naturalist religion and that it was the almost inevitable product of his views on sexuality. My argument goes like this: (1) Reich asserted that the sexual libido (the id) was the ground principle of human life; (2) he further asserted that the libido existed in a polarity between anxiety and pleasure; (3) from this notion he deduced that healthy sexual energy entailed the movement of the entire organism toward pleasure via orgastic release (coitus), (4) but that coitus could be successful only if the entire energy field of the psyche/soma was attuned to its social and material environments, environments themselves in need of reconstruction, (5) from which it followed that a connection with the larger environment enhanced the life of sexuality, and that (6) the larger the environment with which the connection is maintained, the larger the pleasure; from which it follows that (7) a sexual connection with the cosmos and its orgonotic fields is the deepest guarantee of the pleasure premium. My own twist on this argument is that hypothesis (7) is a fully religious hypothesis insofar as it brings in the entire realm of an ecstatically self-transforming nature (nature naturing). Reich’s radical naturalism completely did away with the three Western monotheisms, with their patriarchal supernaturalism. In their stead he offered a new universal (nontribal) religion that was available to anyone (since there were no creeds) and that connected each psyche to the orgonotic pulsations that would help produce full sexual fulfillment.
The two source texts for the new ecstatic naturalist religion are Ether, God and Devil and Cosmic Superimposition. Together these texts present the fuller cosmic background that supports his new “religion.” In the former book of 1949, Reich set up his contrast between orgonomic functionalism and what he now called “mechanistic-mystical patriarchal” thinking. Like many philosophers, he started to unfold and validate his new metaphysics by grounding it in a new epistemology. His epistemology was existential in that it stressed the role of the entire human lifeworld as the opener of knowing, rather than analytic, which would stress the role of more circumscribed knowledge claims. Existential epistemology wants to know what kind of human psyche or lifeworld is at play whenever there is a self/world correlation. Thus, each type of person will have a person-specific way of rendering the world intelligible. Analytic epistemology, in contrast, wants to know whether claim X has any war-rantability as it can be established through accepted forms of validation. Obviously, the existential form is the more encompassing and has a more radical approach to our being-in-the-world and to the world in which our being-in is located.
Those who have read this far will not be surprised by the fascinating and evocative way in which Reich exhibited his existential epistemology. Put simply, the genitally potent person will have a different way of knowing, and hence a different metaphysics, from the neurotic and armored person. Again, I must stress that the term metaphysics, as I am using it here, has nothing to do with supernaturalist claims (or the “mechanistic-mystical”) but really denotes the philosophical activity of probing into the grounding categories of the world. Hence there is no such thing as being “beyond metaphysics” (in the postmodern sense) or being antimetaphys-ical (as in certain analytic traditions). One either has a fruitful and generic metaphysics or a deadening and trib
al one. Reich’s is better than most, and his existential epistemology provides a good means of access to it:
Orgonomic funtionalism represents the way of thinking of the individual who is unarmored and therefore in contact with nature inside and outside himself. The living human animal acts like any other animal, i.e., functionally; armored man acts mechanistically and mystically. Orgonomic functionalism is the vital expression of the unarmored human animal, his tool for comprehending nature. This method of thinking and working becomes a dynamically progressive force of social development only by observing, criticizing, and changing mechanistic-mystical civilization from the standpoint of the natural laws of life, and not from the narrow perspective of state, church, economy, culture, etc.34
One could also call Reich’s approach here a psychoanalytic epistemology insofar as he wanted to show how a healthy unarmored person would, by definition, be open to the “natural laws of life” that the neurotic/armored person simply could not see. As per my discussion in the Preface, Reich realized that no “metaphysics” could emerge without a depth correlation with psychoanalysis; that is, the metaphysician (an agent who lives in each of us) cannot do his or her job properly unless the grounding work on the libido has been done. An armored person will see only as much of the world and its laws as the armoring allows. He or she must look out toward the world through darkened and opaque lenses that distort light waves in a variety of ways that are, unfortunately, unknown to that person. An unarmored person, by contrast, looks out into the world through lenses that are reasonably free from foreign bodies. We can put Reich’s conclusion simply: the more genital potency a person has, the more of nature and its laws he or she will see. There is a tight fit between the healthy self and the orgonotic universe, a true micro-to-macrocosm structure.