The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  This discussion brings us, finally, to Kant's 'Ding an sich,' the inaccessible material substrate that supposedly underlies all phenomenal appearances. As Norman O. Brown has correctly pointed out, the flaw in Kant's system, and in all reasoning of this kind, is the equation of the categories of thought (space, time, causation) with human rationality -- an equation that leads to the conviction that Mind and intellect are one and the same thing. Given the link between "us" and "nature" discussed above, the 'Ding an sich' turns out to be the unconscious mind.25 As Freud recognized, it is this mind that underlies all conscious awareness, and that pushes its way into consciousness when we manage to relax our ever vigilant repression. Once we recognize this situation, we must acknowledge that the question of the Ding an sich in nature is a red herring in exactly the same way as was the question "What was the alchemist actually doing?" That there is something material out there, existing independently of us, would be useless to deny; that we are in a systemic or ecological relationship with it, unknowingly permeate and alter it with our own unconscious, and thus find in it what lwe seek, should be equally useless to deny. The future of "nature" itself thus depends on the recognition of the relationship between our own conscious and unconscious minds, and on what we do with that recognition.26 In a post-Cartesian mode of thinking, "in here" and "out there" will cease to be separate categories and thus, as in an alchemical context, will cease to make sense. If we are in an ecological, systemic, permeable relationship with the "natural world," then we necessarily investigate "that world" when we explore what is in the "human unconscious," and vice versa.27 Kant's 'Ding an sich' is thus no longer unknowable. It is, however, never fully knowable, not immediately knowable, and it changes over time anyway. Note that this conceptual position does not reestablish naive animism and it does not, in some fashionable, anti-intellectual sense, close down the enterprise of science. Instead, it opens the possibility of a new science, a larger one, a vista that, like the contemporary picture of the universe, is at once bounded but infinite.28

  To summarize point (2), a systemic or ecological approach to nature would have as its premise the inclusion of the knower in the known. It would entail an official rejection of the present nonparticipating ideology, and an acceptance of the notion that we investigate not a collection of discrete entities confronting our minds (Minds), but the relationship between what has up to now been called "subject" and "object." One can draw an analogy between this notion and the field concept in electrodynamics, in which matter and force are seen as a system, and in which the energy resides in the field. A neo-holistic science would include ourselves in the force field. In its world view, the "energy" would reside in the relationship, or the formal (dynamic) ecology of the structure itself. The study of "nature" would thus be the study of "ourselves," and also the study of that force field. Stones do not fall to earth because of immanent purpose, and their rate of acceleration can certainly be measured by Galilean or Newtonian methods; but that behavior itself (i.e., our measurement of it) is conditioned by various forms of tacit knowing. The falling stone, the earth, the Mind that participates this event form a relationship, and this, not some "spirit" in the stone or some "rate of acceleration," would be the subject of scientific inquiry.

  Let us finally turn to point (3), the problem of radical relativism, which can be summarized as follows: the scientific method seems to discover laws and facts that are incontrovertible -- gravity, equations governing projectile motion, the elliptical orbits of the planets. However, a historical analysis reveals that the method, and thus the findings, constitute the ideological aspect of a social and economic process unique to early modern Europe. If, as Karl Mannheim held, all knowledge is "situation-bound," it becomes difficult for any conceptual system, science included, to argue that it possesses an epistemological superiority over any other such system. Thus I argued in Chapter 2 that we must try to see science as a thought system adequate to a certain historical epoch, and attempt to separate ourselves from the common impression that it is some sort of absolute, transcultural truth. The implication is that there is no fixed reality, no underlying truth, but only relative truth, knowledge adequate to the circumstances that generated it. We see, then, that an analysis of science itself, using the method of the historical or social sciences, puts the validity of the scientific enterprise on an insecure footing. To make matters worse, it even undermines the historical analysis that precipitated this conclusion.

  How can any conceptual system avoid such a paradoxical, and in fact self-destructive, result? It seems to me that in order to do so, a successful epistemology would have to be able to demonstrate the existence of an inherent truth or order in the conjunction between man and nature, and to survive the test of self-analysis. In other words, the application of its method to the method itself would not attenuate its validity.

  Viewing radical relativism as we have just done, we are confronted with a remarkable realization: it is a problem for modern scientific epistemology alone. Radical relativism was born with the scientific method; it does not exist in any nonscientific culture or context. There is no such thing as a teleological analysis of Aristotelianism, a Hermetic analysis of alchemy, a quantum-mechanical analysis of quantum mechanics, or an artistic analysis of art (artistic and literary criticism are a mode of scientific explication, not themselves art or fiction). An artistic analysis of art, for example, could only involve deliberate parody: Dada, Andy Warhol, the 'nouveau roman' or "anti-novel," and so on, but there are very sharp limits to these genres; they are really curiosities, and tend to have fairly short histories. Only modern science and its social and behavioral derivatives have this peculiar "creased" or "diptych" structure, whereby the discipline folds back on itself. One can put Freud on the analyst's couch, or discuss a mode of sociological analysis as being itself the product of certain social conditions, but one cannot possibly interpret the Aristotelian corpus as potentiality turning into actuality, or put the alchemist into his own alembic (he was ideally there already). This situation should not be confused with the "self-corrective" ability of modern science, which, as Polanyi demonstrates elsewhere in his book, does not really exist anyway.29 As Karl Mannheim valiantly tried not to see all his life, this "diptych" structure is not self-correction, but self-destruction. It leads to philosophical paradoxes that were certainly known in antiquity, but formulated in the spirit of riddies or "brainteasers. In modern times the sociology of knowledge, 'a fortiori' the paradoxes it leads to, puts science and its derivatives on a shaky foundation -- as Kurt Gödel, the discoverer of science's most famous paradox, found out. 30

  Why should this be the case? What does science lack that it falls prey to this problem? In a word, it lacks participation, or rather, the admission that it does involve participating consciousness. I know of no logical way to demonstrate that the denial of participation is the cause of radical relativism, and I am not advancing a causal argument of that sort; but they do seem to exhibit an observable pattern of interdependence. Modern science uniquely denies participation and uniquely has the problem of radical relativism, and it seems to me that it would be hard to have one without the other. Our earlier analysis suggests that participation is the "inherent truth or order in the conjunction between man and nature," and thus that the denial of participation must go hand in hand with convoluted thought patterns. As the case of quantum mechanics shows, modern epistemology is literally bursting at the seams from what it has tried to push out of conscious awareness. The attempt to equate conscious, empirical reality with the whole of reality is a futile task, for the unconscious will not be kept down. Once human subjectivity, tacit knowing, figuration, or whatever one wishes to call nonanimistic participation, is included in the thing known, the problem evaporates. Any system that acknowledges participating consciousness loses the "power" to analyze itself, because participation of whatever sort is the inclusion of the knower in the known. Effectively, then, the system already includes self-analysis as part of its method. Only i
f one shoves the self, the participant, out of the picture does one find oneself in the rather strange position of having that subjective entity, in schizophrenic fashion, float outside the creation and point out that the picture is seriously flawed.

  Science, wrote Nietzsche in "The Birth of Tragedy,"

  spurred on by its energetic notions, approaches irresistibly those outer limits where the optimism implicit in logic must collapse. . . . When the inquirer, having pushed to the circumference, realizes how logic in that place curls about itself and bites its own tail, he is struck with a new kind of perception: a tragic perception.31

  Or, as he says at another point in the same essay, "a culture built on scientific principles must perish once it admits illogic. . . . " Personally, I do not believe that a scientific culture such as ours, having run its course, analyzed itself, and discovered its limitations, has only tragedy or destruction to look forward to. Some collapse is inevitable, but this is not to say that destruction is necessarily the end point of it all. It is equally possible to face the error of nonparticipating consciousness squarely, and to begin the work of creating a new culture, one based on a new view of nature and a new scientific question. Nietzsche had the misfortune to draw his conclusions in an age when no respectable alternatives to scientific materialism were possible, and it is only under such conditions that tragedy or collapse is inevitable. We are not so delimited. The next step in the creation of a post-Cartesian paradigm, it would seem, is to place participating consciousness on a firm biological basis, that is, to demonstrate in physiological terms the existence of an "inherent truth or order in the conjunction between man and nature."

  We have seen that science alone claims to be value-free even while it adheres to "objectivity" as a value; that the attempted separation of fact and value which characterized the Cartesian epoch can never be a serious philosophical possibility. Yet up to this point, our discussion has itself been purely abstract, disembodied. If an inherent order exists, it must be affective, because man is an emotional as well as an ideational entity. All of this suggests that a correct world view would have to be, at root, visceral/mimetic/sensuous. After four centuries of repression, Eros is finally coming in again through the back door.

  6 Eros Regained

  The flute of interior time is played whether we hear it or not. What we mean by "love" is its sound coming in. When love hits the farthest edge of excess, it reaches a wisdom. And the fragrance of that knowledge! It penetrates our thick bodies, it goes through walls -- Its network of notes has a structure as if a million suns were arranged inside. This tune has truth in it. Where else have you heard a sound like this? -- Kabir, fifteenth century, version by Robert Bly

  Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. . . . Energy is Eternal Delight. -- William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1793)

  There is another world, but it is in this one. -- Paul Eluard

  There is, then, something missing from the analysis presented in the last chapter. Polanyi only hints at the importance of the body in the configuration of tacit knowing. He states that the latter is biological in nature, and that it has continuity with the knowledge possessed by children and animals. Yet this theme is never developed. Caught in the Cartesianism he rejects, Polanyi is not able to establish firmly the link between the visceral and the cerebral. To do that, one must be quite clear about rejecting the Cartesian paradigm while accepting the consequences that such a rejection entails. More significantly, one must be willing to live those consequences; and in a Cartesian culture, that is not an easy task.

  Until recently, only two major scientific figures had met this challenge, and it is perhaps not an accident that they were both psychiatrists, immersed in the problem of how various individuals negotiated the boundary between "in here" and "out there." We have discussed the first, Carl Jung, in some detail. As we saw, Jung broke with scientism, but doing so propelled him backward in time. In medieval and Renaissance alchemy he recognized a wholeness that permeated the psyche of the Middle Ages, and which was still present in human dream life. Clearly, dream analysis has a timeless importance, but any science constructed on Jungian premises would necessarily be a straightforward revival of the occult world view and thus a return to naive animism. Jung shows us the path to a non-Cartesian world view, but his premises cannot be the basis for a post-Cartesian paradigm, which this book seeks to define.

  The second major scientific figure who lived the consequences of rejecting Cartesiamsm was Wilhelm Reich, despite the unlikely claims and outright scientism of his later years, Reich's work is a major breakthrough in our knowledge of the mind/body relationship and an enormous contribution to any post-Cartesian epistemology. Since Reich, unlike Jung, was forward-looking (i.e., contemporary and politically progressive) rather than medieval in outlook, the social reaction to him could not be confined simply to branding him an obscurantist. That Reich is (to my knowledge) the only thinker to have had the distinction of seeing his works burned by the FBI suggests that he struck a fairly deep nerve and tends, in fact, to validate his own argument about the dialectical longing for, and hatred of, repressed instincts in Western industrial society. Reich attempted to reintroduce Dionysus to a culture gone berserk from Apollo, but the real importance of his work is that it points to the primacy of visceral understanding: the recognition that the intellect is grounded in affect, and the contention that instinctual repression is not merely unhealthy, but productive of a world view that is factually inaccurate. For our own purposes, Reich's work, specifically his understanding of the human unconscious, puts flesh and blood into the concept of tacit knowing, and in doing so, makes nonanimistic participation possible. With the scientific discovery that the body and the unconscious are one, and the concomitant recognition of a close relationship between the unconscious and tacit knowing, the subject/object distinction collapses, for body knowledge (sensual knowledge) then becomes a part of all cognition. The divorce between Logos and Eros may have been relatively brief, and these traditional partners in the search for truth may now be beginning to renegotiate their relationship.

  Reich's discovery has remarkable implications for the whole question of participating consciousness. Since the seventeenth century only scientific thought has been regarded as truly cognitive; other types of understanding are "merely" emotion. The identity of the sensual and the intellectual was, as I have shown, the crux of the mimetic tradition, and is perhaps best illustrated by the decidedly nonmetaphoncal use of the word "know" in the Bible: "And Abraham knew his wife Sarah." In the modern period, the relationship between science and other forms of knowledge or belief remains highly problematic. All serious philosophies that have made concessions to nondiscursive thought, notes Susanne Langer, have turned to mysticism or irrationalism, that is, "dispensed with thought altogether."1 If Eros can be revived at all, it has to be through the claim that Eros is a fully articulated way of knowing the world, the ignorance of which has been intellectually crippling. It is precisely this that Reich, and his followers, have claimed.

  In this chapter I hope first to demonstrate that the union of Eros and Logos is a scientific fact rooted in the experience of preconscious infancy, and thus that the holistic world view, or participating consciousness, has a physiological basis. Second, I wish to elaborate Reich's equation of the body with the unconscious and apply it to the concept of tacit knowing, thus making the point that the holistic experience of infancy continues to permeate adult cognition and understanding of the world. Taken together, these two points substantiate the analysis of Chapter 5 in a biological way; close the Cartesian paradigm down as a legitimate way of knowing reality; and open the door to an exploration of what might constitute a neo-holistic science.