The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  14. Piaget has reported his findings in a large number of works. The latest study is The Grasp of Consciousness, trans. Susan Wedgwood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). To preclude any confusion in the following discussion and in Chapter 2, I should state that I am not an Aristotelian and am not suggesting a return to the Thomistic synthesis of the Middle Ages. Rather, my interest in Aristotle here and in Chapters 2 and 3 is related to the presence of participating consciousness in his work. There is obously more to Aristotle than this, including his laws of logic and noncontradiction which run directly counter to the notion of participation, and which constitute the basis of much contemporary scientific reasoning to this day.

  15. It should be clear that to enter the world of modern science is to enter a world of abstractions that violate everyday observations. From 1550 to 1700 Europe did enter wonderland, as surely as Alice did when she fell down the rabbit hole. But the fall, I would maintain, was not clean. Certainly the dominant culture of science and technology linked to the creation of material wealth is the other end of the drop, and students training for positions in that culture are quickly reeducated to the Newtonian/Cartesian/Galilean mode of perception; but privately, and emotionally, we still operate in the common-sense world of immediate experience -- a world in which objects naturally fall to the center of the earth, and all motion obviously requires a mover. We even retain traces of animism, over the years developing an almost personal relationship with a favorite chair or lamp, even though we "know" it is nothing but wood or metal.

  16. Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 198.

  17. Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, trans. Charles Laughton and ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1966, from the English edition of 1952), p. 63. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.

  18. Actually, one wonders. Rochefoueauld related an incident that occurred in the latter half of the eighteenth century, in which a Norfolk clergyman, being examined for his doctorate at Cambridge, was asked whether the sun went around the earth or the earth around the sun. "Not knowing what to say, and wanting to make some reply, he assumed an emphatic air and boldly exclaimed: 'Sometimes the one, sometimes the other.'" Amazingly enough, he was awarded the degree. See G.E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 137.

  19. The date of publication of the Principia is commonly given as 1687, but H.S. Thayer, in Newton's Philosophy of Nature (New York: Hafner, 1953), p. 9n, cites 1686 as the correct year of publication of the first edition,

  20. Quoted in Thayer, p. 54; reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

  21. Ibid., p. 45; reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

  22. Positivism probably received its earliest formulation in the work of Marin Mersenne (see below, Chapter 3). A fully modern statement of it is contained in Roger Cotes's Preface to the second edition of the Principia, reprinted in Thayer, pp. 116-34, esp. p. 126.

  23. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor Books, 1948; orig. publ. 1925), p. 55.

  24. N. O. Brown, Love's Body (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 139.

  25. Peter Berger, "Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis," Social Research 32 (Spring 1965), 32. The classic statement of the sociology of knowledge is Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harvest Books, reprint of 1936 edition).

  CHAPTER 2. Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

  1. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 72.

  2. Cf. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 117-18.

  3. I shall discuss the problem of the sociology of knowledge and radical relativism briefly at the conclusion of this chapter, and in detail in Chapter 5. As for the issue of causality, the reader should be aware that much of the literature in the history of science revolves around a debate over the role of "external" factors in the rise of modern science versus the role of "internal" factors (i.e., factors arising from social influence as opposed to those that are rooted in the material of scientific development itself). Not surprisingly, the debate has never been resolved, for it depends entirely on the artificial mind-body dichotomy of the modern era. As discussed in Chapter 3, this split was not experienced by pre-modern society. Once the dichotomy is recognized for what it is, the "externalist-internalist" argument evaporates.

  For some of the more classic essays on the subject, consult the following anthologies: Hugh E Kearney, ed., Origins of the Scientific Revolution (London: Longmans, Green, 1964); George Basalla, ed., The Rise of Modern Science (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1968); Leonard M. Marsak, ed., The Rise of Science in Relation to Society (New York: Macmillan, 1964).

  4. E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, 2d ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1932).

  5. John Donne, "An Anatomie of the World: The First Anniversary," in Donne, ed. Richard Wilbur (New York: Dell, 1962), pp. 112-13 (reprinted with the permission of Oxford University Press). Pascal is quoted in the original ("Les silences des espaces éternels m'effrayent") in W.P.D. Wightman, Science in a Renaissance Society (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1972), p. 174.

  6. As might be expected, the literature on feudalism, the Commercial Revolution, and the transition to capitalism is so vast as to defy any attempt at bibliography. For descriptions of these processes I have used the following works: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 2, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Pierre Jeannin, Merchants of the 16th Century, trans. Paul Fittingoff (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1975); and J. U. Nef, Industry and Government in France and England, 1540-1640 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1940).

  7. Alfred von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963; orig. German edition 1932), pp. 14, 21; these and subsequent excerpts reprinted with permission of the publisher. The transition from sacred to secular number (cabala to bookkeeping, for example) was part of this general process, and is discussed briefly in Chapter 3.

  8. Ibid., p. 40.

  9. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971; orig. French edition 1949), and von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance, p. 16.

  The reader should note that linear time was experientially alien, but not officially alien, to the medieval mind. Official Christian time of the Middle Ages was linear, in that it was believed that there was a particular point at which the world had been created and that it was now moving toward the Second Coming (which was, however, a re-creation). Similarly, each individual was moving from his own birth to his death and (ideally) salvation. To the extent that Christian culture adopted the framework of Jewish eschatology, then, it did think in terms of linear time. However, Eliade and von Martin are not referring to biblical or official conceptions of time, but to time as it was experienced in the daily fare of life. What was felt was indeed cyclical: the sun rises and sets, seasons follow each other year in and out, planting is followed by harvest, and even church holidays can be counted on to recur faithfully each year. There are probably several strands of thinking about time in the Middle Ages, but I believe Eliade and von Martin have captured the dominant mode of consciousness.

  10. Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 125.

  11. For literature on the scholar and the craftsman, see note 3 to this chapter. Especially relevant are the articles by A.R. Hall and E. Zilsel in Kearney, Origins of the Scientific Revolution, pp. 67-99, and Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970).

  The discussion below generally applies to the middle-class artisan, or master craftsman, rather than the lowest level of artisan. The former, like the military engineer, had some nonvocational education, while the latter usually did not. By 1600, there were already class divisions between apprentices, journeymen, and master craftsmen.

  12. A phrase that was becoming popular in the late sixteenth century. William Gilbert paraphrased it in the Preface to his book De Magnete (On the Magnet) of 1600.

  13. Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts, pp. 30-31.

  14. Ibid., p. 42.

  15. Ibid., p. 112. The sketch of Galileo, Tartaglia, and the scholar-craftsman merger given below is based on the following sources: Ludovico Geymonat, Galileo Galilei, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965); Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio (New York: Macmillan, 1914); Gerald Holton and Duane Roller, Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1958); Stillman Drake and James MacLachlan, "Galileo's Discovery of the Parabolic Trajectory," Scientific American 232 (March 1975), 102-10; Edgar Zilsel, "The Sociological Roots of Science," in Kearney, Origins of the Scientific Revolution, pp. 86-99; Stillman Drake and I.E. Drabkin, trans. and eds., Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); A.R. Hall, Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); Stillman Drake, "Galileo and the First Mechanical Computing Device," Scientific American 234 (April 1976), 104-13.

  16. Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 1, reprinted with permission of Dover Publications, Inc.

  17. This was Imre Lakatos' evaluation of T.S. Kuhn's view of scientific revolutions. See Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 178.

  CHAPTER 3. The Disenchantment of the World (1)

  1. A number of scholars, including T.S. Kuhn, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and members of the Frankfurt School (see the Introduction, note 6) have recognized the fallacy of this progress theory of intellectual history, but the epistemological framework(s) that they represent has hardly made a dent in most thinking on the subject. The "asymptotic" view of scientific knowledge is still the common one, and it permeates the media, the universities, and all other institutions o[ Western culture. This view was perhaps apotheosized by C.P. Snow in his novel, The Search (New York: Scribners, 1958).

  2. The study of nonrabbinical Judaism has been the work of Gershom Scholem (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism). The gnosticism of Judaism in antiquity has been explored by Erwin Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, vols. 7-8, Pagan Symbols in Judaism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), and by Michael E. Stone, "Judaism at the Time of Christ," Scientific American 228 (January 1973), 80-87.

  3. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), esp. chap. 16.

  4. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), bk. 1, chap. 3, and bk. 2, chap. 5; and Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), esp. pp. 84, 107-8. Bennett Simon has an excellent discussion of the Homeric and post-Homeric mentalities in his book Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978).

  5. The following discussion of Greek consciousness is taken from E. A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Balknap Press, 1963), pp. 25-27, 45-47, 150-58, 190, 199-207, 219, 238-39, 261. John H. Finley, Jr., develops the same line of reasoning in his lovely essay, Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966). Cf. also Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece.

  6. Although his analysis of Greek intellectual history can be faulted at several points, Robert Pirsig, with no apparent awareness of Nietzsche's discovery of the reality of participating conscionsness, rediscovered it for himself in his autobiographical study of Greek philosophy and, like Nietzsche, went insane as a result (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [New York: William Morrow, 1974]). The identical theme is repeated in Doris Lessing's story of one Charles Watkins, a classics professor, in her brilliant novel Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (New York: Knopf, 1971), in which Watkins goes mad from his insight and is (like Pirsig) jolted back into nonparticipating consciousness by means of electroshock therapy.

  Plato's psychological ideal is perhaps best described in the Republic, Book IV, paragraphs 440-443; see especially 443e. This ideal is equivalent, for Plato, to that of the just man, and also (see paragraph 444) to the healthy one.

  7. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, pp. 79-80; Robert Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 138, 183.

  8. The discussion below follows that given by Michel Foucauit in The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973; orig. French edition 1966), chap. 2.

  9. The first book of Agrippa's work has been translated into English as The Philosophy of Natural Magic, ed. L.W. de Laurence (Mokelumne Hill, Calif.: Health Research, 1972 reprint of 1913 ed.). The following quotations can be found on pp. 65, 71, 73, 77, 114, 210. Reprinted by permission of Health Research, Box 70, Mokelumne Hill, California 95245).

  10. Cf. the similarity of the French words aimant (magnet) and amant(e) (lover).

  11. This theme is elaborated upon in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), and D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: The Warburg Institute, 1958).

  12. On much of the following see Foucault, The Order of Things, chap. 3. Part I of Don Quixote appeared in 1605.

  13. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, pp. 32n, 42. Much of the argument given below follows the analysis developed in this work.

  14. Stated in this way, the "common-sense" position that phenomena are wholly independent of consciousness and always have been appears to be so silly as to hardly warrant further comment. It is, however, the common-sense position, as well as the basic premise of all intellectual history or history of consciousness. Jaynes's study of human consciousness (see note 4 of this chapter) is so squarely based on this premise that he is ultimately forced to condemn every form of participating knowledge (poetry, music, art) as deluded and atavistic, and to champion the alienated intellect as the only reliable form of knowing (even though he comes to question that form, his own work included, by the end of the book). The Platonic ideal is thus taken to its ultimate psychotic conclusion. I should add that despite my criticism of this scientific ideal, I am in complete agreement with Barfield that a return to original participation is neither possible nor desirable at this point in human history.

  15. From his book De Vanitate, and quoted by Carl Jung in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (hereafter CW), trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961-79), vol. 14, p. 35. See also Wolf Dieter Müller-Jahncke, "The Attitude of Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) Towards Alchemy," Ambix 22 (1975), 134-50. In England especially, alchemy was often seen as a con game, and the alchemical quest as akin to gambling fever. Chaucer ridiculed it in the "Canon Yeoman's Tale" as a waste of time and money.

  16. Jung, CW12, pt. 2. See also the fine collection in S. K. De Rola, Alchemy: The Secret Art (New York: Avon Books, 1973).

  17. My desciption of Jung's work in this chapter is based on his CW, 12, 14, 15, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1965); Anthony Storr, Jung (London: Fontana, 1973); Harold Stone, Prologue to Dora M. Kalff, Sandplay (San Francisco: Browser Press, 1971); and B. J. T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 26-34.

  The word "gibberish," ironically enough, was first applied to the language of alchemy by out
siders, and was taken from Geber, the name of a thirteenth-century Italian or Catalan writer on the subject who in turn took his name from that of the eighth-century Arabian alchemist Jâbir ibn Hayyân.

  18. I am following the terminology used by N. O. Brown in Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970; orig. publ. 1959). For an interesting discussion of the language of dreams, see Ann Faraday, The Dream Game (New York: Perennial Library, 1976), pp. 54-57.