Now the crux of the matter is this: in terms of the dominant reality system, we are all ornithologists. We experience an agreed-upon set of alpha-thoughts, or what Talcott Parsons calls "glosses," instead of the actual events. In short, we continue the process of figuration which began in the learning stages, but it becomes automatic and conceptual rather than dynamic and concrete.
Peter Achinstein provides a good example of this phenomenon in his book "Concepts of Science." Let us say that you and I are sitting on the steps of an old farmhouse in the country one summer night, looking down the dusty road that leads to the house. As we sit there, we see a pair of headlights coming up the road. Having nothing more profound on my mind at the moment, I turn to you and say, "There's a car coming up the road." You are silent for a moment and then ask me, "How do you know its a car? After all, it could be two motorcycles riding side by side." I reflect on this, and then decide to modify my original statement. "You're right. Either there's a car coming up the road, or two motorcycles riding side by side at the same speed." "Hold on," you reply. "That's not necessarily the case either. It could be two large bunches of fireflies." At this point, I may wish to draw the line. We could, after all, do this all night. The point is that in our culture, two parallel lights moving at the same speed along a road at night invariably denote an automobile. We do not really experience (figurate) the lights in any detail; instead we figurate the concept "car." Only an infant (or a poet, or a painter) might figurate the experience in the rich possibility of its detail; only a student figurates X-ray images.10 Every culture, every subculture (ornithology, X-ray pathology) has a network of such alpha-thoughts, because if we had to figurate everything, we would never be able to construct a science, nor any model of reality. But such a network is a model, and we tend to forget that. In Alfred Korzybski's famous dictum (Science and Sanity, 1933), "the map is not the territory." After all, what if the lights were fireflies?11
This confusion of map with territory is what we have called nonparticipating consciousness. Alpha-thinking necessarily involves the absence of participation, for when we think about anything (except in the initial stages of learning) we are aware of our detachment from the thing thought about. "The history of alpha-thinking," writes Barfield, "accordingly includes the history of science, as the term has hitherto been understood, and reaches its culmination in a system of thought which only interests itself in phenomena to the extent that they can be grasped as independent of consciousness."
As we saw in Chapter 3, this distancing of mind from the object of perception was precisely the historical project of the Jews and the Greeks. The Scientific Revolution was the final step in the process, and henceforth all representations in the Western reality system became what Barfield calls "mechanomorphic." Construing reality mechanically is, however, a way of participating the world, but it is a very strange way, because our reality system officially denies that participation exists. What then happens? It ceases to be conscious because we no longer attend to it, writes Barfield, but it does not cease to exist. It does, however, cease to be what we have called original participation. Making an abstraction out of nature is a particular way of participating it. Just as the ex-lovers who refuse to have anything to do with one another really have a powerful type of relationship, so the insistence that subject and object are radically disparate is merely another way of relating the two. The problem, the strangeness, lies in the denial of participation's role, not only because the learning process itself necessarily involves mimesis, but because as long as there is a human mind, there will be tacit knowing and subliminal awareness.
It might be argued that African tribesmen (for example) are involved in alpha-thinking as much as we are. Once past his apprenticeship, the witch doctor spends much of his time identifying the various members of the spirit world according to a formula. Despite this, the "primitive" slides quite naturally between figuration and alpha-thinking, or in our terminology, between the unconscious and the conscious mind; and he probably spends most of his time experiencing, rather than abstracting. Even if he wished to shut the unconscious out, it would not be possible, because for him the spirits are real and (despite any ritualized system) frequently experienced on a visceral level. His experience of nature constantly creates joy, anxiety, or some intermediate bodily reaction; it is never a strictly cerebral process. He may often be frightened by his environment or by things in it, but he is never alienated by it. There are no Sartres or Kafkas in such cultures any more than there were in medieval Europe. The "primitive" is thus in touch with what Kant called the 'Ding an sich,' the thing in itself, in the same way as was the denizen of ancient Greece or (to a lesser extent) medieval Europe. We, on the other hand, by denying both the existence of spirits and the role of our own spirit in our figuration of reality, are out of touch with it. Yet it is the case, as Barfield notes; that in any culture "the phenomenal world arises from the relationship between a conscious and an unconscious and that evolution is the story of the changes that relationship has undergone and is undergoing." Denying that the unconscious plays a role in our conceptualization of reality may be a strange way of relating to it, but it is still a way of relating, and it does not erase tacit knowing. Modern textbooks still project the image of a formally applied "scientific method," a method in which any notion of participating consciousness would be tantamount to heresy. Yet the disparity between official image and actual practice is enormous; and as science has perhaps dimly realized, the excommunication of the heresy would bring down the rest of the church in its wake.
The dimensions of this paradox are thrown into sharp relief when we reflect on the unexpected resurfacing of participating consciousness in modern physics in the 1920s. I am referring to the emergence of quantum mechanics, whose theoretical basis involves a full-scale break with the epistemology of Western science. Since the appearance of quantum mechanics is analogous to Ptolemaic astronomy suddenly finding Copernicus in its camp, we should not be surprised that the scientific establishment has managed to ignore the embarrassing intruder for more than five decades. There is, nevertheless, a voluminous literature on the subject, much too extensive to discuss at length here. Instead, I wish to summarize briefly the philosophical implications that can and have been drawn from this branch of physics.12
Two concepts are absolutely essential to the epistemology of classical (including Einsteinian) physics. The first is the notion that all reality is ultimately describable in terms of matter and motion; that the position of material particles, and their momentum (mass times velocity), is the basic reality of the phenomenal world. The second point is that ours is a nonparticipating consciousness: the phenomena of the world remain the same whether or not we are present to observe them; our minds in no way alter that bedrock reality. The first of these concepts is the basis of strict causality, or determinism, and it was perhaps best expressed by the French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace in 1812. Our physics is such, he said, that if it were possible to know the position and momentum of all the particles in the universe at any one time, we could then calculate their position and momentum at any other time, past or future. The second concept, the conviction that the experimenter is not part of his experiment, affirms the materialism of the first point, and also guarantees that experiments are formally replicable. If, for example, a scientist claimed that by simply concentrating on cubes (e.g., dice) that have been mechanically dropped down a chute, he could influence their spatial pattern, and if his claim turned out to be valid, he would not only have disproved the content of this aspect of physics, he would have destroyed the theoretical basis of physics itself. Not only would consciousness become part of the world "out there," returning our science to some sort of alchemical status, but the premise of predictability would be (at least theoretically) invalidated.
The major philosophical implication of quantum mechanics is that there is no such thing as an independent observer. One of its founders, Werner Heisenberg, summarized this point in popul
ar form in 1927 when he formulated his Uncertainty Principle. Imagine, he said, a microscope powerful enough to observe an atomic particle, such as an electron. We shine light down the instrument to enable observation, only to discover that the light possesses enough energy to knock the electron out of position. We can never see that particular electron, for the experiment itself alters its own results. Our consciousness, our behavior, becomes part of the experiment, and there is no clear boundary here between subject and object. We are sensuous participants in the very world we seek to describe.
In more technical terms, Heisenberg had discovered that position and momentum are complementary entities. One can determine the exact position of a particle only if one abandons the attempt to know anything about its motion (velocity), and vice versa. This discovery means that the Laplacian program is a delusion. Atomic or subatomic particles cannot be located precisely in space and time; and in an epistemology that equates the real with the material, the definition of the word "real" is suddenly open to question. Note that the Uncertainty Principle does not refer to a margin of error, which is present in every scientific experiment, and which reflects the accuracy of the verification of the prediction made. Instead, Heisenberg is talking about a probability that enters into the very definition of the state of the physical system. He says, in effect, that consciousness is part of the measurement and therefore reality (as it has been defined in the West for nearly four hundred years) is inherently blurry, or indeterminate.13 The "change in the concept of reality manifesting itself in quantum theory," wrote Heisenberg in 1958, "is not simply a continuation of the past; it seems to be a real break in the structure of modern science." The so-called probability wave of quantum mechanics, he continued, "was a quantitative version of the old concept of 'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality." The break, of course, lies in the subject/object distinction itself; the "strange kind of physical reality" is consciousness, which we now see has material consequences. "What we observe," said Heisenberg, "is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning." This was precisely Polanyi's point about tacit knowing. The great irony of quantum mechanics is that in the classic fashion of 'yin' finally turning into 'yang,' the Cartesian attempt to find the ultimate material entity, thereby "explaining" reality and ruling out subjectivity once and for all, resulted in discoveries that mocked Cartesian assumptions and established subjectivity as the cornerstone of "objective" knowledge.14
The enormous resistance of scientists to the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics is fully understandable, for once these implications are fully accepted, it becomes unclear just what is involved in "doing science." Either we are back to Aristotle's 'potentia' (or the alchemical alembic), or we sit in a crowded stadium watching spoon-bending demonstrations by charlatans (but are they? That's the point!). Apparently, falling cubes can be influenced by mental concentration, and there is no way such information can be accommodated within the Cartesian paradigm.15 Alternatively, quantum mechanics points to Buddhism and mysticism in its general scheme of the world, something first noted by Joseph Needham in "Science and Civilization in China," and since elaborated upon by a number of writers.16 The animism implicit in quantum mechanics has been explored mathematically by the physicist Evan Harris Walker, who argues that every particle in the universe possesses consciousness.17 At the very least, we are forced to conclude that the "world" is not independent of "us." It is not composed of building blocks of matter, and indeed, exactly what matter is has become highly problematical. Everything, it seems, is related to everything else. The "lesson of modern physics is that the subject (perceiving apparatus) and object (the reality measured) form one seamless whole."18 'Panta rhei,' said Heraclitus; everything flows, only process is real.
Quantum mechanics thus affords us a glimpse of a new participating consciousness, one that is not a simple reversion to naive animism. As we consider the implications of quantum mechanics, it becomes quite clear that the most significant alteration of our scientific world view would stem from the deliberate inclusion in our scientific thinking of the awareness that we participate reality. Historically, we have been limited to a choice of two possibilities. One either asserted the existence of a disembodied intellect, as we have done since 1600 A.D.; or one argued (contrary to what we manifestly perceive with our present consciousness) that stones, houses, furniture, clouds, this book and the ink in it are alive, possess an indwelling spirit -- as men and women did believe prior to the Scientific Revolution. From what has been said above it should be clear that no matter how long the dominant culture continues to hold on to the first choice, that choice has no philosophical future. Both the discoveries of quantum mechanics and the Polanyi/Barfield analysis demonstrate that the totality of human consciousness, including tacit knowing and the information stored in the unconscious, is a significant factor in our perception and construction of reality. Like our X-ray student or ornithologist, we participate that reality subliminally in the learning process, and it later hardens into formulas that we then figurate as abstract entities. There is no need to make an external mystery out of this process, but it is an internal mystery, at least at this point in our understanding of the workings of the human mind. We have only the vaguest notion of how the conscious/unconscious interface operates, or how it brings us to conclusions about "reality." But since this thing, this alleged neuronal behavior pattern, operates partly in nonempirical ways (e.g., dreams, body knowledge), we are forced to conclude that the empirical/rational/mechanical view of nature, by denying nonempirical reality even while it depends on it, limits itself to descriptions of alpha-thoughts and conscious constructs. Such a view is thus both self-contradictory and erroneous. It must be supplemented so as to include our unconscious, to include nonempirical reality and the type of dialectical reasoning discussed in Chapter 3. But "supplemented" suggests the unintegrated addition of a lesser item and is thus a potentially misleading word. Perhaps the relationship I am suggesting can best be expressed by the metaphor of a nucleus embedded in a cell. The ego is embedded in a larger consciousness in which we partialpate, and acts as the organizer of life, and as in the cell, the proper relationship between the two modalities is osmotic. Modern science, on the other hand, identifies ego-knowledge with the whole of knowing; it tries to make that osmotic membrane rigid and impermeable. As a result, this type of consciousness begins to suffocate and die.
As it turns out, a number of thinkers are beginning to argue that the intellect, or conscious mind, is a subsystem of a larger system that we might call Mind with a capital M. This Mind is in fact the "strange kind of physical reality" of which Heisenberg spoke (above), suspended between possibility and reality. As Gregory Bateson has put it:
The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by "God," but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.19
There is no "transcendance" in this conceptual schema; there is no "God" present in the usual sense of the term. It is not 'mana' that alters (or permeates) matter, but the human unconscious, or more comprehensively, Mind. There are no spirits out there within the rocks or trees, but neither is my relationship to those "objects" one of a disembodied intellect confronting inert items. My relationship to those "objects" is systemic, ecological in the broadeat sense. The reality lies in my relationship with them. Just as two lovers create a relationship that is itself a particular entity (process), so does my working at the typewriter in front of me constitute an entity (process) that is larger than either Berman or Olympia Portable. My typewriter is not alive, there is no original participation here, but I am engaged with
it in a process -- writing this book, in fact -- which is its own reality, and which is larger than either myself or the typewriter. The machine and I form a system so long as I engage its use or attend to its existence. As a result, the common perception of my skin as a sharp boundary between myself and the rest of the world begins to weaken, but without my becoming a schizophrenic or a preconscious infant.20 A science that attends to such relationships rather than to so-called discrete entities would be a science of what has been called "participant observation," and it is this type of holistic thinking which might hold the key to future human evolution. This approach might qualify, in Ferenczi's words, as an "animism no longer anthropomorphic."
It should be clear that there is an enormous similarity between what Bateson is suggesting and the view of nature which emerges from quantum mechanics. Both state that it is inherent in the configuration of the relationship between ourselves and nature (to use the misleading language of Cartesian dichotomy) that we can never get more than a partial description of reality, or even of our own minds. Quantum mechanics implies that nature is fundamentally indeterministic, that elementary particles are ontologically always in partially defined states.21 From this point of view, a direct correlation can be drawn between the mind/body dichotomy and the Freudian program of attempting to render the unconscious conscious. Bateson underlies the impossibility of what Freud wanted to do when he compares it to the attempt to construct "a television set which would report upon its screen all the workings of its component parts, including especially those parts concerned in this reporting."22 It turns out that the subject/object distinction of modern science, the mind/body dichotomy of Descartes, and the conscious/unconscious distinction made by Freud, are all aspects of the same paradigm; they all involve the attempt to know what cannot, in principle, be known. The subject/object merger intrinsic to quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is part of a very different paradigm that involves a new mind/body, conscious/unconscious relationship. This mental framework, as both Bateson and Wilhelm Reich realized without making explicit, is similar to that of quantum mechanics in that it conceives of the relationship between the mind and the body as a field, alternately diaphanous and solid. In Wolfgang Pauli's terms, it "would be the more satisfactory solution if mind and body could be interpreted as complementary aspects of the same reality.23 "There is no specific border in which mind becomes matter," writes philosopher Peter Koestenbaum; the "area of connection is more like a gradually thickening fog." There is no object existing by itself; every object has a stream of consciousness, or what we have called Mind; attached to it.24
The Reenchantment of the World Page 15