With the specter of the previous decades’ social chaos in the background, Hermetic ideas were increasingly attacked, astrology ceased to be favored by upper-class patronage or taught at the universities, and the science that developed within the Royal Society (founded 1660) upheld the mechanistic view of nature as a despiritualized world of hard matter. Major founding figures in the Royal Society such as Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren continued, at least in private, to consider astrology to be valid (believing, like Bacon, that astrology should be scientifically reformed rather than rejected), but the political climate was increasingly inhospitable; Boyle, for example, did not allow his defense of astrology to be published until after his death. This same context appears to have influenced Newton and his literary executors to suppress the esoteric, Hermetic background of Newton’s scientific ideas. See David Kubrin, “Newton’s Inside Out: Magic, Class Struggle, and the Rise of Mechanism in the West,” in The Analytic Spirit, edited by H. Woolf (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972); and P. M. Rattansi, “The Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society,” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 23 (1968): 129–143.
For two further analyses of the same intellectual revolution in terms of the epistemological conflict between two different perspectives toward gender (the Hermetic ideal of knowledge as an erotic union of masculine and feminine, reflecting a view of the universe as a cosmic marriage, versus the Baconian program of male dominance), see Evelyn Fox Keller, “Spirit and Reason in the Birth of Modern Science,” in Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 43–65; and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).
9. Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 328: “You wonder that there are so few followers of the Pythagorean opinion [that the Earth moves] while I am astonished that there have been any up to this day who have embraced and followed it. Nor can I ever sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen of those who have taken hold of this opinion and accepted it as true: they have, through sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience showed them to be the contrary. For the arguments against [the Earth’s rotation] we have examined are very plausible, as we have seen; and the fact that the Ptolemaics and the Aristotelians and all their disciples took them to be conclusive is indeed a strong argument of their effectiveness. But the experiences which overtly contradict the annual movement [of the Earth around the Sun] are indeed so much greater in their apparent force that, I repeat, there is no limit to my astonishment when I reflect that Aristarchus and Copernicus were able to make reason so conquer sense that, in defiance of the latter, the former became mistress of their belief.”
10. Kepler, Harmonies of the World, V: “Now, since the dawn eight months ago, since the broad daylight three months ago, and since a few days ago, when the full sun illuminated my wonderful speculations, nothing holds me back. I yield freely to the sacred frenzy; I dare frankly to confess that I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle for my God far from the bounds of Egypt. If you pardon me, I shall rejoice; if you reproach me, I shall endure. The die is cast, and I am writing the book—to be read either now or by posterity, it matters not. It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.”
11. Here was perhaps the most fundamental distinction between classical and modern science: While Aristotle had postulated four causes—material, efficient, formal, and final—modern science considered only the first two empirically justifiable. Thus Bacon praised Democritus for removing God and mind from the natural world, in contrast to Plato and Aristotle who repeatedly introduced final causes into scientific explanations. See also the more recent statement by the biologist Jacques Monod: “The cornerstone of scientific method is … the systematic denial that ‘true’ knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes—that is to say, of ‘purpose’ ” (Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (translated by A. Wainhouse) [New York: Random House, 1972], 21).
12. This was the celebrated reply of the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace to Napoleon, when questioned about the absence of God in his new theory of the solar system, which had perfected the Newtonian synthesis. Because of certain apparent irregularities in the planetary movements, Newton had believed that the solar system required occasional divine adjustments to maintain stability. Laplace’s reply reflected his success in demonstrating that every known secular variation (such as the changing speeds of Jupiter and Saturn) was cyclical, and that therefore the solar system was entirely stable on its own account without divine intervention.
13. The character and composition of the Church clergy in France also played a complex role in these developments. The clergy’s upper ranks were typically occupied by the aristocracy’s younger sons, who took the positions as sinecures, and whose style of life was generally indistinguishable from that of nonclerical aristocrats. Religious fervor at this level of the Church was infrequent, and was distrusted in others. The interests of the institutional Church seemed to lie less in the pastoral mission of religious salvation than in the enforcement of orthodoxy and the preservation of political advantage. Further complicating the issue was the growing embrace of Enlightenment rationalism by members of the aristocratic clergy itself, thus strengthening the secular forces from within the Church structure. See Jacques Barzun, “Society and Politics,” in The Columbia History of the World, edited by John A. Garraty and Peter Gay (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 694–700.
14. “Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God” (Logan Pearsall Smith).
15. Such a view was controverted by Christians who interpreted that command as signifying “stewardship” rather than exploitation, the latter seen as reflecting the alienation of the Fall.
Part VI. The Transformation of the Modern Era
1. On the basis of Kant’s second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, it has often been said that Kant called his insight a “Copernican revolution” (e.g., by Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, among many others). I. B. Cohen has pointed out (in Revolution in Science [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], 237–243) that Kant does not appear to have made that specific statement. On the other hand, Kant explicitly compared his new philosophical strategy to Copernicus’s astronomical theory, and although strictly speaking the term “Copernican revolution” may postdate both Copernicus and Kant, both the term and the comparison are accurate and illuminating.
2. “I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” (Richard Feynman).
3. Quoted in Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, rev. ed. (Wheaton, 111.: Quest, 1989), 8.
4. Kuhn’s ideas, first set forth in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), were in part the outgrowth of significant advances in the study of the history of science made a generation earlier, notably the work of Alexandre Koyré and A. O. Lovejoy. Also important were major developments within academic philosophy such as those associated with the later Wittgenstein, and with the progress of argument in the school of logical empiricism from Rudolf Carnap through W. V. O. Quine. The widely accepted conclusion of that argument essentially affirmed a relativized Kantian position: i.e., one cannot, in the last analysis, logically compute complex truths out of simple elements based in direct sensation, because all such simple sensory elements are ultimately defined by the ontology of a specific language, and there exist a multiplicity of languages, each with its own particular mode of construing reality, each o
ne selectively eliciting and identifying the objects it describes. The choice of which language to employ is finally dependent on one’s purposes, not on objective “facts,” which are themselves constituted by the same theoretical and linguistic systems through which those facts are judged. All “raw data” are already theory-laden. See W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 20–46.
5. The crucial word through which Hegel expressed his concept of dialectical integration was aufheben, meaning both “to cancel” and “to lift up.” In the moment of synthesis, the antithetical state is both preserved and transcended, negated and fulfilled.
6. Ronald Sukenick, “The Death of the Novel,” in The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (New York: Dial, 1969), 41. On a less futile note, perhaps the actor may be said to epitomize the postmodern artistic ethos, and to personify the postmodern identity generally, for his or her reality remains deliberately and irreducibly ambiguous. Irony pervades action; performance is all. The actor is never univocally committed to an exclusive meaning, to a literal reality. Everything is “as if.”
7. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 176.
8. Ihab Hassan, quoted in Albrecht Wellmer, “On the Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism,” Praxis International 4 (1985): 338. See also Richard J. Bernstein’s discussion of the same passage in his 1988 Presidential Address to the Metaphysical Society of America (“Metaphysics, Critique, Utopia,” Review of Metaphysics 42 [1988]: 259–260), where he characterizes the postmodern intellectual attitude as sometimes resembling Hegel’s description of a self-fulfilling abstract skepticism, “which only ever sees pure nothingness in its result … [and] cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss” (G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 51).
9. Arnold J. Toynbee, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. “time.”
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by W. Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), 181.
11. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 182.
12. Carl G. Jung, “The Undiscovered Self,” in Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung, vol. 10, translated by R. F. C. Hull, edited by H. Read et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pars. 585–586.
Part VII. Epilogue
1. John J. McDermott, “Revisioning Philosophy” conference, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, June 1987.
2. The double bind theory was an application of Bertrand Russell’s theory of logical types (from Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica) to a communications analysis of schizophrenia. See Gregory Bateson et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 201–227.
3. Ernest Gellner, The Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 206–207.
4. Vincent Brome, Jung: Man and Myth (New York: Atheneum, 1978), 14.
5. Jung, “Psychological Commentary on ‘The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation,’ ” in Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung, vol. 11, translated by R. F. C. Hull, edited by H. Read et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 759.
6. The most comprehensive presentations of Grof’s clinical evidence and its theoretical implications can be found in Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (New York: Viking, 1975) and LSD Psychotherapy (Pomona, Calif.: Hunter House, 1980). A more recent popular account is his Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).
7. The clinical evidence from Grof’s research concerning the perinatal experience should not be misunderstood as suggesting the operation of a Freudian, linear-mechanistic kind of causality, in which the individual birth trauma is viewed as mechanically producing specific psychological and intellectual syndromes in the same, more or less “hydraulic” manner that a childhood Oedipal trauma was seen by traditional psychoanalysts as producing specific pathological symptoms. The evidence suggests, rather, what might be called an archetypal form of causation, in which the individual’s reliving of the birth process appears to mediate participation in a much larger, transpersonal, archetypal death-rebirth process, with the individual and collective levels of the psyche radically interpenetrating. The perinatal sequence does not seem to be ultimately grounded in or reducible to the individual’s original experience of biological birth; instead, biological birth itself appears to reflect a more encompassing archetypal reality which is directly accessed by those undergoing the perinatal process, either spontaneously (as in personal experiences of “the dark night of the soul”), in religious ritual, or in experiential psychotherapy. The birth experience is here viewed not as an ultimate root, a reductionist cause in a closed system, but as an amplifying pivot, an experiential transduction point between personal and transpersonal realities.
Grof’s evidence thus suggests a more complex understanding of causation than that offered by the conventional modern scientific conception of linear-mechanistic causality, and, in agreement with recent data and theories emerging from several other fields, points toward a conception that incorporates participatory, morphic, and teleological forms of causation—closer in character to classical Platonic and Aristotelian notions of archetypal, formal, and final causation, as well as to the later Jungian archetypal understanding. The organizing principles of this epistemology are symbolic, nonliteral, and radically multivalent in character, suggesting a nondualistic ontology that is metaphorically patterned “all the way down”—an understanding developed in recent decades by thinkers as diverse as Owen Barfield, Norman O. Brown, James Hillman, and Robert Bellah.
8. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 126.
9. Writers and editors today often comment on the difficulty they have in revising many sentences that were originally written with the traditional generic “man,” which they seek to replace with a term that is not gender-biased. Partly the difficulty is created by the fact that no other term simultaneously attempts to denote both the human species (i.e., all human beings) and a single generic human being. That is, the word “man” is uniquely capable of indicating a metaphorically singular and personal entity who is also intrinsically collective in character: “man” denotes a universal individual, an archetypal figure, as “human beings,” “humankind,” “people,” and “men and women” do not. But I believe that the deeper reason for the difficulty in revising such sentences is that the entire meaning of such a sentence as originally conceived was implicitly structured around this specific image of the masculine archetypal human. As a close reading of the many relevant texts—Greco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian, and modern scientific-humanistic—makes clear, both the syntactical structure and the essential meaning of the language that most major Western thinkers have used to represent the human condition and the human enterprise, including its drama, its pathos, and its hubris, are inextricably associated with the unconscious presence of this archetypal figure, “man.” At one level, the “man” of the Western intellectual tradition can be seen as simply a socially constructed “false universal,” the use of which both reflected and helped shape a male-dominated society. More profoundly, however, “man” has also represented a living archetype in which members of both sexes, willy-nilly, have participated. An entire civilization and world have been constellated by its active, creative, problematic presence. This book has indeed told the story of “Western man,” in all his tragic glory, blindness, and, I believe, growth toward self-transcendence.
At some point in the future, unthinking use of masculine generics will very likely disappear. If this book s
hould be read in that new context, the essential role played in the narrative by the particular construction of the human signified by the generic “man” will stand out all the more conspicuously, and the many ramifications of that historical usage—psychological, social, cultural, intellectual, spiritual, ecological, cosmological—will be commensurately more evident. When gender-biased language is no longer the established norm, the entire cultural world view will have moved into a new era. The old kinds of sentences and phrases, the character of the human self-image, the place of humanity in the cosmos and in nature, the very nature of the human drama, all will have been radically transformed. As the language goes, so goes the world view—and vice versa.
10. Two important complexities in this overarching dialectic may be mentioned here. First, as the narrative and various notes have suggested, the evolution of the Western mind can be seen as having been marked at every stage by a complex interplay of the masculine and feminine, with significant partial reunions with the feminine having occurred in coincidence with the great creative watersheds of Western culture from the birth of Greek civilization onward. Each synthesis and birth has constituted a stage in the much larger overarching dialectic between the masculine and feminine that I believe comprehends the history of the Western mind as a whole.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 64