The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  What, then, is that role? What might a Reichian interpretation of Polanyi look like, modified by the theory of developmentals? Polanyi argued, first, that attributing truth to any methodology, scientific or otherwise, is a non-rational commitment, an act of faith, an affective statement. Second, he demonstrated that most of the knowing that we do is actually unconscious, or what he calls "tacit." The learning takes place by doing, in bicycle riding, language acquisition, or X-ray pathology. Our awareness of the underlying rules is subliminal, picked up by osmosis. There is nothing that is initially cognitive or analytical about the learning process, despite what we like to think. From a Reichian standpoint, the crucial issue is that commitment, and noncognitive comprehension of reality, are mimetic; they come about through identification, or collapse of subject/object distinction. Polanyi's paradigm case, the example of X-ray pathology, demonstrated this point quite dramatically. The X rays began to take on meaning as the student forgot his self and instead submerged his whole being in the experience.

  What Reich would argue here, of course, is that participated knowledge is sensual. It is the body that is making the commitment in this study of X rays, that is absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells, and that has already incorporated the rules of the culture at large and is now doing the same with the subculture of X-ray pathology. We are literally back to the preconscious infant who knows the world by putting it in its mouth. Reality that is not "tasted" does not remain real to us. In order to make a thing real, we must go out to it with our bodies and absorb it with our bodies, for (as Hobbes once wrote) "there is no conception in man's mind, which hath not first been begotten upon the organs of Sense." It is only after this occurs, as I stated in Chapter 5, that rationality begins its work of reflecting on the information and establishing the categories of thought. It is at dusk, wrote Hegel, that the Owl of Minerva begins its flight, and that is why, except in the case of a scientific revolution, we wind up verifying the paradigm, finding out what we somehow knew all along.

  The case of scientific revolution, where (as T.S. Kuhn argued) anomalies pile up so as to generate a crisis, is also more comprehensible on a Reichian interpretation than on a strictly intellectual one. If anomalies were nothing more than logical or empirical contradictions, we would never feel threatened by them. But when our world view is thrown into doubt, we feel anxiety, and anxiety is a visceral reaction. As Peter Marris shows in his book "Loss and Change," all real loss involves grief and mourning, and the loss of a paradigm is often an emotional catastrophe. Marris, like Reich, supplies the visceral understanding lacking in Polanyi. Knowledge is learned, and generated, first and foremost by the body, and it is the body that suffers when serious changes are required.37

  In Reichian terms, Polanyi's tacit knowing can be reformulated as follows. The 'Ding an sich' in nature is the 'Ding an sich' in ourselves, namely our bodies, or unconscious minds, which can never be fully known. As long as we continue to have bodies, there will be tacit knowing. Such knowing permeates nature and our cognition of it; the primary unitary reality of preconscious infancy is never abandoned, and represents the inherent order in the conjunction of man and nature. The knower is thus fully included in the known. When we get to the smallest particles in the universe, we discover our own minds in them, or behind them.

  Furthermore, as we become adults, our bodies become more than just primary process. The unconscious is not a static, unchanging "thing." The cultural paradigm of the age is fed into our tacit knowing and then shapes our conscious knowing. The gradual decision to view projectile motion as parabolic, for example, came many decades after cannon and long-range firing had become fixtures of the environment, along with the increasingly utilitarian climate generated by the advent of bookkeeping, surveying, and engineering. Galileo learned about projectiles in the same way Polanyi's medical student learned about X-ray pathology, but his unconscious already carried the gestalt of a new age that had been building for nearly three centuries. We recognize, then, that there exists a close relationship between the cultural and the biological. Learning to figurate reality according to the rules of a culture would seem to be a heavily biological process, for the world view apparently gets buried in the tissues of the body along with the primary unitary reality. Indeed, this close relationship between the cultural and the biological may be part of the reason that the shape of the human body has changed over the centuries. A different consciousness must mean a different body, or as Reich would have (more accurately) put it, a different consciousness is a different body.38

  Finally, we can translate the discussion of Mind provided in Chapter 5 into visceral terms, for what I mean by "Mind" is the conjunction of the world and the body -- all of the body, brain and ego functions included. Once Mind so defined is recognized as the way we confront the world, we realize that we no longer "confront" it. Like the alchemist, we permeate it, for we recognize that we are continuous with it. Only a disembodied intellect can confront "matter," "data," or "phenomena" -- loaded terms that Western culture uses to maintain the subject/object distinction. With this latter paradigm discarded, we enter the world of sensual science, and leave Descartes behind once and for all. Whereas a medieval denial of participating consciousness would have amounted to a denial of ghosts and fairies, the Cartesian denial of it is quite simply a denial of the body, a denial that we even possess a body. But once the body is understood to be an instrument of knowledge, and its denial seen as constituting as much of an error as any of Bacon's famous "Idols," we have made sensual or affective science theoretically possible.39

  In Chapter 5, I suggested that the systemic view of nature did not close down the enterprise of science but in fact opened it up, creating a whole new set of issues for us to explore. It seems to me that the notion of Mind, or system, discussed in that chapter, and interpreted in terms of the present chapter, lays the groundwork for a nonanimistic, participated reality. We must pursue this notion further, however, asking several questions that will help us to grasp it in greater detail. What, for example, would a holistic experiment consist of? What types of answers might a holistic science provide?

  "In the last analysis," wrote E.A. Burtt in "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science," "it is the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of its world that is its most fundamental possession. It is the final controlling factor in all thinking whatever." In "Philosophy in a New Key," Susanne Langer elaborates this theme by stating that the crucial changes in philosophy are not changes in the answers to traditional questions, but changes in the questions that are asked. "It is the mode of handling problems, rather than what they are about, that assigns them to an age." A new key in philosophy does not solve the old questions; it rejects them. The generative ideas of the seventeenth century, she says, notably the subject/object dichotomy of Descartes, have served their term, and their paradoxes now clog our thinking. "If we would have new knowledge," she concludes, "we must get us a whole world of new questions."40

  Langer has articulated the essence of our problem. We do not need a new solution to the mind/body problem, or a new way of viewing the subject/object relationship. We need to deny that such distinctions exist, and once done, to formulate a new set of scientific questions based on a new modality. When I studied physics in college, for example, a unit was devoted to heat, then to light, then to electricity and magnetism, and so on. The project involved in each unit, the "generative idea," was, in effect, to ascertain the nature of light, heat, electromagnetism, etc. We see in this curriculum the strong grip of the Cartesian paradigm. Fifty years after the formulation of quantum mechanics, these subjects are still taught as though there can be a knowledge of them independent of a human observer. Again, I am not taking a Berkeleyian position: whether these things exist independently of our observation of them is not something I regard as a fruitful line of inquiry. What is at issue is the notion that observation makes no difference for what we learn about the thing being investigated. It is by now abundantly clear
that we are part of any experiment, that the act of investigation alters the knowledge obtained, and that given this situation, any attempt to know all of nature through a unit-by-unit analysis of its "components" is very much a delusion. A question such as "What is light?" can have only one answer in a post-Cartesian world: "That question has no meaning."

  How should we study (i.e., participate) nature? What questions should we ask? The reader is aware that I am not a scientist and am probably the wrong person to try to answer these questions. But having started this discussion, I am obliged to make some attempt to finish it, hoping to provide some valuable suggestions that others might develop further. Since I have already dealt extensively with the study of light, let me continue to organize the discussion around this problem. My choice, of course, is not arbitrary, for Newton's study of the nature of light became the atomistic paradigm, the model of how all phenomena should be examined. I am thus attempting to grasp, by working with an archetypal example, what a sensual or holistic science might become; what it would mean to acknowledge participation by deliberately including the knower in the known.41

  We saw in Chapter 1 that Newton, in his prism experiments, was able to show that a beam of white light was composed of seven monochromatic rays, and that each color could be identified by a number, signifying the degree of refrangibility. Today, the significant number is taken to be wavelength or frequency, but the Newtonian definition of color as a number is fully preserved. Red, for example, is the sensation caused by such-and-such a wavelength of light in the eye of a standard observer.

  The Newtonian theory of color received a serious jolt in the 1950s from the work of Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera. Land was able to demonstrate that colors were not simply a matter of wavelength, but that their perception was largely dependent on the objects or images that they represented; in short, on their context and its (human) interpretation. A white vase bathed in blue light is seen as white because the mind (Mind) accepts whatever the general illumination is, as white. The same phenomenon can be seen in the case of yellow automobile lights or candle flames, which are commonly perceived as white. Land discovered that even two closely placed wavelengths of light, for instance two different shades of red, can generate the full range of color in the eye of the observer.

  In trying to make sense of this clear-cut refutation of the classical theory of light and color, Land was led to an explanation that echoed the critique of Newton made by Goethe in his much-ridiculed book "Farbenlehre" (On the Theory of Colors, 1810). "The answer," wrote Land, "is that their work [i.e., the work of Newton and his followers] had very little to do with color as we normally see it." (Goethe's phrase was: "Derived phenomena should not be given first place.") In other words, superimposed rays of monochromatic light are artificially isolated in the laboratory, and although no one is denying their importance in (for example) laser technology, they simply do not occur in nature. In his own experiments, Land discovered that the characteristic arrangement of colors was indeed a spectrum, but one that ranged from warm to cool -- something artists have known for centuries. "The important visual scale," he concluded, "is not the Newtonian spectrum. For all its beauty the [Newtonian] spectrum is sunply the accidental consequence of arranging stimuli in order of wavelength."

  Of course, there is nothing accidental about this arrangement. The value system of Newton's Europe deemed it sensible to identify colors with numbers or to arrange them in order of wavelength. The perception of colors in atomistic, quantifiable terms was made possible by Western industrial culture and ultimately delivered back to this culture technological devices, such as the sodium vapor lamp or the spectroscope, that "verified" this perception in a beautifully circular way. More significant here is the fact that Land's experiments demonstrate that the Newtonian spectrum is one way of looking at light and color, but that there is nothing holy about it. Furthermore, Land's conclusions reveal the repression implicit in Newtonian science, even in this one special case, for the talk of warm versus cool colors plunges us directly into affect, and into human subjective interpretation. Degrees of refrangibility are supposedly "out there," eternal, not requiring a human observer to establish their validity. Hot and cold, however, are "in here" as well as "out there"; they require a human participant, in particular, one with a body and its accompanying emotions. Nor are degrees of refrangibility very stimulating emotionally. The quantification of color represents a dramatic narrowing of emotional response. The linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf was fond of pointing out that eskimos have thirteen different words for white, and certain African tribes up to ninety words for green. In contrast, European languages collapse an entire range of emotion and observation into three or four words: for example, green, blue-green, aqua, turquoise. We begin to understand what Lao-tzu meant when he said, "the five colors will blind a man's sight."

  In any holistic experiment with light and color, then, the important thing is that affect and analysis not be differentiated. If the experiment does not include emotional/visceral responses, it is not scientific, and therefore not meaningful. This approach does not rule out the Newtonian color theory. The "validity" of the classical theory of color, however, lies not in something inherent in nature, but in our appreciation and enjoyment of it; and one can certainly enjoy lasers, spectroscopes, and games with prisms. But if this theory is going to exhaust the investigation of the subject, then it is unscientific by virtue of omission. Land's work may thus be seen as the beginning of a paradigm for the holistic investigation of light and color. In the same vein, research on the psychology of color has demonstrated that a red rectangle does feel warmer and larger than a blue one of equal size. Certain combinations of colors make us feel sad, euphoric, dizzy, or claustrophobic. A number of prisons in the United-States have recently installed a "pink room," incarceration in which for a mere fifteen minutes reduces the victim, ŕ la "Clockwork Orange," to complete passivity.42 Phrases such as "I feel blue" or "that makes me see red" are not just metaphors, and an entire discipline, called "chromo-therapy" by its practitioners, has grown up around the intuitive recognition that certain colors have healing properties. We also now know that a field of colors, called an "aura," surrounds every living thing, and that children perceive it up to a certain age. It is likely that auras are still commonly perceived in nonindustrial cultures, and probable that the yellow halos painted around the heads of various saints in medieval art were something actually seen, not (according to a modern formulation) a metaphor for holiness "tacked on" for religious effect.

  All of this is by way of suggestion. I cannot formulate a new, fully articulated paradigm, but I believe that the holistic exploration of such inexhaustible subjects as color, heat, or electricity, will give us -- as Susaune Langer urged -- a whole new world of questions. The key scientific question must cease to be "What is light?," "What is electricity?," and become instead, "What is the human experience of light?" "What is the human experience of electricity?" The point is not simplistically to discard current knowledge of these subjects. Maxwell's equations and the Newtonian spectrum are clearly part of the human experience. The point is instead to recognize the error that arises when the human experience is defined as that which occurs from the neck up -- the "Idol of the Head," we might call it. It is the incompleteness of Cartesian science which has made its interpretation of nature so inaccurate. "What is the human experience of nature?" must become the rallying cry of a new subject/object-ivity.43

  The late twentieth century may be a difficult time to be alive, but it is not without its exciting aspects. At the very point that the mechanical philosophy has played all its cards, and at which the Cartesian paradigm, in its attempt to know everything, has ironically exhausted the very mode of knowing which it represents, the door to a whole new world and way of life is slowly swinging ajar. What is dissolving is not the ego itself, but the ego-rigidity of the modern era, the "masculine civilization" identified by Ariès, or what the poet Robert Bly calls "father consciousnes
s." We are witnessing the modification of this entity by a reemergent "mother consciousness," the mimetic/erotic view of nature (see Plate 18). "I write of mother consciousness," states Bly in his breathtaking essay, "I Came Out of the Mother Naked,"

  using a great deal of father consciousness. But there is no other possibility for a man. A man's father consciousness cannot be eradicated. If he tries that, he will lose everything. All he can hope to do is to join his father consciousness and his mother consciousness so as to experience what is beyond the father veil.

  Right now we long to say that father consciousness is bad, and mother consciousness is good. But we know it is father consciousness saying that; it insists on putting labels on things. They are both good. The Greeks and the Jews were right to pull away from the Mother and drive on into father consciousness; and their forward movement gave both cultures a marvelous luminosity. But now the turn has come. . . . 44

  Plate 18. Donald Brodeur, "Eros Regained" (1975). By permission of the artist.

  It is noteworthy that Bly credits the nonparticipating consciousness of the Greeks and the Jews as producing cultures of "marvelous luminosity," for in doing so he poses a caveat for all thorough-going Reichians. It may well be that the culture of Europe from the Renaissance to the present has been based on sensual repression; and Reich may well have been right in believing (unlike Freud) that culture per se did not have to depend on repression; but whatever the energy that fueled it, the brilliance of modern European culture is surely beyond doubt. The whole of the Middle Ages did not produce a sculptor like Michelangelo, a painter like Rembrandt, a writer like Shakespeare, or a scientist like Galileo; and in terms of sheer volume of creativity, the comparison is even more dramatic. Bly's crucial point, however, is that the "marvelous luminosity" has reached its limits. It has become a hostile glare, a scorching ball of fire that, as Dali tried to suggest, even melts clocks in an arid desert landscape. Its most creative outposts are now self-criticisms, analyses of the culture that double it back on itself; quantum mechanics, surrealist art, the works of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. There is a chance, as Bly suggests, that a more luminous culture "lies beyond the father veil," one that may warm and nurture rather than burn and dessicate. Indeed, as an act of faith, I am convinced of it. But for now, it is clear that the sharp subject/object dualism of modern science, and the technological culture that religiously adheres to it, are grounded in a developmental gone awry. Cartesian dualism, and the science erected on its false premises, are by and large the cognitive expression of a profound biopsychic disturbance. Carried to their logical conclusion, they have finally come to represent the most unecological and self-destructive culture and personality type that the world has ever seen. The idea of mastery over, nature, and of economic rationality, are but partial impulses in the human being which in modern times have become organizers of the whole of human life.45 Regaining our health, and developing a more accurate epistemology, is not a matter of trying to destroy ego-consciousness, but rather, as Bly suggests, a process that must involve a merger of mother and father consciousness, or more precisely, of mimetic and cognitive knowing. It is for this reason that I regard contemporary attempts to create a holistic science as the great project, and the great drama, of the late twentieth century.