The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  And threefold in soft Beulah's night

  And twofold always. May God us keep

  From Single vision & Newton's sleep! 27

  Plate 16. William Blake, Newton (1795). The Tate Gallery, London.

  Newton is pictured in Blake's painting sitting at the bottom of the Sea of Space and Time. The polyp near his left foot symbolizes, in Blake's mythology, "the cancer of state religion and power politics," while Newton stares at his diagram "with the catatonic fixity of 'single vision'. . . ." 28

  Blake's attack on the Newtonian world view raises a question that Hill has made the theme of The World Turned Upside Down: how can we be so sure that the way things are is right side up? Bourgeois society, he notes, was a powerful civilization, producing great intellects in the Newtonian and Lockean mold, But, he adds, it was

  the world in which poets went mad, in which Locke was afraid of music and poetry, and Newton had secret, irrational thoughts which he dared not publish. . . .

  Blake may have been right to see Locke and Newton as symbols of repression. Sir Isaac's twisted, buttoned-up personality may help us to grasp what was wrong with the society which deified him. . . . This society, which on the surface appeared so rational, so relaxed, might perhaps have been healthier if it had not been so tidy, if it had not pushed all its contradictions underground: out of sight, out of conscious mind. . . . What went on underground we can only guess. A few poets had romantic ideas out of tune with their world; but no one needed to take them too seriously. Self-censored meant self-verifying.29

  "Great though the achievements of the mechanical philosophy were," Hill writes at another point, "a dialectical element in scientific thinking, a recognition of the 'irrational' (in the sense of the mechanically inexplicable) was lost when it triumphed, and is having to be painfully recovered in our own century."30

  The emphasis here is on the word "painfully." In Chapter 3, I discussed the role of surrealist art in attempting to liberate the unconscious. But because the unconscious is so repressed, its great mouthpiece in postwar Europe and America has become not art, but madness. Without going into too much detail, it is necessary to point out that a major part of the psychotic experience is the return to the perception of the world in Hermetic terms. That madness is the best route to this perception I tend to doubt; but the fact that madness triggers the premodern epistemology of resemblance does suggest that the insane are onto something we have forgotten, and that (cf. Nietzsche, Laing, Novalis, Hölderlin, Reich . . .) our sanity is nothing but a collective madness.

  Although it would take extensive clinical studies of insanity to establish this argument, even a casual review of the case histories described by Laing in "The Divided Self" tends to substantiate it.31 In general, says Laing, having a disembodied self creates a sense of merger or confusion at the interface between inside and outside. As in soteriological alchemy or mystical experience, the subject/object distinction blurs; the body is not felt as being separate from other things or people. One of Laing's patients, for example, did not distinguish between rain on her cheek and tears. She also worried that she was destructive, in the sense that if she touched anything, she would literally damage it (antipathy theory). Schizophrenics occasionally demonstrate a belief that inanimate objects contain extraordinary powers, and Laing describes the case of a man who, while on a picnic, undressed and walked into a nearby river, declaring that he had never loved his wife and children, pouring water on himself repeatedly, and refusing to leave the river until he had been "cleansed." Here we have the original notion of baptism, the belief that water bears the impressed virtue of God (doctrine of signatures), and thus has healing powers. Another patient practiced various techniques to "recapture reality," such as repeating phrases she regarded as real over and over in the hope that their "realness" would rub off on her (sympathy theory, notion of 'mana'). Finally, as I indicated in Chapter 3, Laing's own method is alchemical in that it follows the notion of participating consciousness, or sympathy theory. All humanistic therapies, in fact, are rooted in original participation. The use of art, dance, psychodrama, meditation, body work, and the like ultimately boils down to a merger of subject and object, a return to poetic imagination or sensuous identification with the environment, In the last analysis, the good therapist is nothing more than the master alchemist to his or her patients, and effective therapy is essentially a return to the inherent, organic order that magic represented. The classification schemes of modern science, their Linnaean order and precision, purport to arise from the ego alone, to be fully rational-empirical. They thus represent a logical order that is imposed on nature and the human psyche. As a result, they violate something that magic, for all its technological limitations, had the instinctive wisdom to preserve.

  Madness is, in the end, a statement about logical categories, and its reversion to the structure of premodern thought represents a revolt against the reality principle that it sees as crushing the human spirit. The increasing incidence of madness in our time reflects the desperate need for the recovery of dialectical reason. Does alchemy, or technology, represent the altered state of consciousness? Is material production, or human self-realization, most consonant with true, human needs? Is subjugation of the earth, or harmony with it, the best way to proceed? I would submit that there is only one answer to these questions, and only one conclusion to our survey of the disenchantment of the world: in the seventeenth century, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. We discounted a whole landscape of inner reality because it did not fit in with the program of industrial or mercantile exploitation and the directives of organized religion. Today, the spiritual vacuum that results from our loss of dialectical reason is being filled by all kinds of dubious mystical and occult movements, a dangerous trend that has actually been encouraged by the ideal of the disembodied intellect and the classical scholarship that Blake rightly found revolting. Modern science and technology are based not only on a hostile attitude toward the environment, but on the repression of the body and the unconscious; and unless these can be recovered, unless participating consciousness can be restored in a way that is scientifically (or at least rationally) credible and not merely a relapse into naive animism, then what it means to be a human being will forever be lost.

  The remainder of this book will be devoted to an exploration of such options.

  5 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1)

  Perhaps we need to be much more radical in the explanatory hypotheses considered than we have allowed ourselves to be heretofore. Possibly the world of external facts is much more fertile and plastic than we have ventured to suppose; it may be that all these cosmologies and many more analyses and classifications are genuine ways of arranging what nature offers to our understanding, and that the main condition determining our selection between them is something in us rather than something in the external world. --E. A. Burtt, "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science"

  In previous chapters we have discussed the modern scientific outlook, demonstrated its relationship to certain social and economic developments, and examined the psychological landscape that it destroyed. This analysis suggests that the Western world paid a high price for the triumphs of the Cartesian paradigm and that there are severe limits to it in terms of human desirability. Indeed, even its objective accuracy can be debated for, as we have seen, its triumph over the metaphysics of participating consciousness was not a scientific but a political process; participating consciousness was rejected, not refuted. As a result, we are forced to consider the possibility that modern science may not be epistemologically superior to the occult world view, and that a metaphysics of participation may actually be more accurate than the metaphysics of Cartesianism. A number of scientific thinkers, including Alfred North Whitehead, have argued this thesis in one form or another and, as early as 1923, the psychologist Sándor Ferenczi called for the "re-establishment of an animism no longer anthropomorphic."2 Yet our culture hangs on to mechanism, and to all of the problems and e
rrors it involves, because there is no returning to Hermeticism and -- apparently -- no going on to something else.

  I have promised to devote the second half of this book to "something else," and in subsequent chapters I shall enlarge on what might serve as a post-Cartesian world view. Before contemplating an alternative, however, it is necessary to elaborate on a key weakness in the epistemology of modern science -- the fact that it contains participating consciousness even while denying it. It is this denial that has created the characteristic paradoxes of scientific thought, notably its radical relativism, and which has also made it impossible for orthodox scientific thinking to evolve in new directions, such as those suggested by quantum mechanics. I maintain that an understanding of the stubborn persistence of participating consciousness can help us to solve the problem of radical relativism and also suggest some theoretical underpinnings for a post-Cartesian science. The arguments I am going to advance, then, are as follows:

  (1) Although the denial of participation lies at the heart of modern science, the Cartesian paradigm as followed in actual practice is riddied with participating consciousness.

  (2) The deliberate inclusion of participation in our present epistemology would create a new epistemology, the outlines of which are just now becoming visible.

  (3) The problem of radical relativism disappears once participation is acknowledged as a component of all perception, cognition, and knowledge of the world.

  Fortunately for this discussion, point (1) is the central focus of two recent and brilliant critiques of modern science: Michael Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge," and Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearances."3 Polanyi's major thesis is that in attributing truth to any methodology we make a nonrational commitment; in effect, we perform an act of faith. He demonstrates that the coherence possessed by any thought system is not a criterion of truth, but "only a criterion of stability. It may [he continues] equally stabilize an erroneous or a true view of the universe. The attribution of truth to any particular stable alternative is a fiduciary act which cannot be analysed in non-commital terms."4 The faith involved, according to Polanyi, arises from a network of unconscious bits of information taken in from the environment which form the basis of what he calls "tacit knowing." What exactly does this concept mean?

  We already have alluded to the notion of a gestalt perception of reality, of finding in nature what you seek. Philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson used the illustrations given in Figures 10 and 11 to make this point:5

  In Figure 10, do you see a bear climbing up the other side of a tree, or a tree trunk with burls on it? Do you see a flock of birds in Figure 11, or a herd of antelope? Would people who had never seen antelope, but only birds, be able to regard Figure 11 as a picture of antelope? Polanyi's general point is that at a very early age we learn, or are trained, to put reality together in certain ways ("figurate" it, in Barfield's terminology), and that the indoctrination is not merely cultural but also biological. Thus on a conscious level we largely spend our lives finding out what we already know on an unconscious level. Alternative realities are screened out by a process that the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan used to call "selective inattention," and which has since been relabeled "cognitive dissonance." Thus "antelope" people would presumably find "bird" people incomprehensible. Any articulated world view, in fact, is the result of unconscious factors that have been culturally filtered and influenced, and is thus to some extent radically disparate from any other world view.

  The question that concerns us here is how we are trained into a mode of seeing. Polanyi points out that the scientist learns his craft in the same way a child learns a language. Children are born polyglots: they naturally have German gutterals, French nasaIs, Russian palatals, and Chinese tonals. They cannot remain this way for long, however, for to learn a particular language is simultaneously to unlearn the sounds not common to that language. English, for example, does not have the Russian palatal sound, and the English-speaking child ultimately loses the ability to pronounce words in a genuinely Russian manner. The awareness here is subsidiary, or even subliminal. As in bicyde riding, so in speaking, we learn to do something without actually analyzing or realizing what it is we are learning. Science has similarly an ineffable basis; it too is picked up by osmosis.6

  Polanyi's best example of this process, taken perhaps from his own experience, is that of the study of X-ray pathology, and is worth quoting in full.

  Think [he writes] of a medical student attending a course in the X-ray diagnosis of pulmonary diseases. He watches in a darkened room shadowy traces on a fluorescent screen placed against a patients chest, and hears the radiologist commenting to his assistants, in technical language, on the significant features of these shadows. At first the student is completely puzzled. For he can see in the X-ray picture of a chest only the shadows of the heart and ribs, with a few spidery blotches between them. The experts seem to be romancing about figments of their imagination; he can see nothing that they are talking about. Then as he goes on listening for a few weeks, looking carefully at ever new pictures of different cases, a tentative understanding will dawn on him; he will gradually forget about the ribs and begin to see the lungs. And eventually, if he perseveres intelligently, a rich panorama of significant details will be revealed to him: of physiological variations and pathological changes, of scars, of chronic infections and signs of acute disease. He has entered a new world. He still sees only a fraction of what the experts can see, but the pictures are definitely making sense now and so do most of the comments made on them. He is about to grasp what he is being taught; it has clicked.7

  "He has entered a new world." Polanyi describes a process that is not really rational but existential, a groping in the dark after the fall through Alice's rabbit hole has occurred. There is no logic of scientific discovery here, but rather an act of faith that the process will lead to learning, and on the basis of the students commitment, it does.

  It is also important to note, in this example, that the actual learning process violates the Platonic/Western model of knowledge, which insists that knowledge is obtained in the act of distancing oneself from the experience. Our hypothetical medical student knew absolutely nothing when he stood outside the procedures. Only with his submergence in the experience did the photographs begin to take on any meaning at all. As he forgot about himself, as the independent "knower" dissolved into the X-ray blotches, he found that they began to appear meaningful. The crux of such learning is the Greek concept of 'mimesis,' of visceral/poetic/erotic identification. Even from Polanyi's verbal description, we can almost touch the willowy blotches on the warm negative, smell the photographic developer in the nearby darkroom. This knowledge was clearly participated.

  Rationality, as it turns out, begins to play a role only after the knowledge has been obtained viscerally. Once the terrain is familiar, we reflect on how we got the facts and establish the methodological categories. But these categories emerge from a tacit network, a process of gradual comprehension so basic that they are not recognized as "categories." As Marshall McLuhan once remarked, water is the last thing a fish would identify as part of its environment, if it could talk. In fact, the categories start to blur with the learning process itself; they become "Reality," and the fact that the existence of other realities may be as possible as the existence of other languages usually escapes our notice. The reality system of any society is thus generated by an unconscious biological and social process in which the learners in that society are immersed. These circumstances, says Polanyi, demonstrate "the pervasive participation of the knowing person in the act of knowing by virtue of an art which is essentially inarticulate." I can speak of this knowledge, but I cannot do so adequately.8

  For Polanyi, then, a phrase such as "impersonal" or "objective knowledge" is a contradiction in terms. He argues that all knowing takes place in terms of meaning, and thus that the knower is implicated in the known. To this I would add that what constitutes knowledge is therefore merely the fin
dings of an agreed-upon methodology, and the facts that science finds are merely that -- facts that science finds; they possess no meaning in and of themselves. Science is generated from the tacit knowing and subsidiary awareness peculiar to Western culture, and it proceeds to construct the world in those particular terms. If it is true that we create our reality, it is nevertheless a creation that proceeds in accordance with very definite rules -- rules that are largely hidden from conscious view.

  Participating consciousness is even more pervasive than Polanyi's example of the X-ray student would suggest. To see this, let us follow Barfield and define 'figuration' as representation, that is, the act by which we transform sensations into mental pictures.9 The process of thinking about these "things," these images, and their relationships with each other (a process commonly called conceptualization) can be defined as 'alpha-thinking.' In the process of learning, figuration gradually becomes alpha-thinking in other words, our concepts are really habits. Our X-ray student at first formed mental pictures of the blotches or shadows on the screen, then learned to identify cancer and tuberculosis. His instructors, however, immediately and unthinkingly saw cancer and TB without experiencing the blotches in the same way he did. Similarly, when I hear a bird singing, I form some sort of mental image of the sound and try to sort it out. My friend, a professional ornithologist, goes through no such process. He hardly even hears the notes. What comes to his mind, quite automatically, is "thrush." Thus, at least in his professional capacity, he is doing alpha-thinking all the time. He is beyond figuration, whereas I am still struggling with it. It would be more correct to say that he figurates in terms of concepts rather than sensations and primary data. He does, then, participate the world (or at least the bird world), but for the most part as a collection of abstractions.