The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  11. See works such as The Century of Revolution, God's Englishman, and especially The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking, 1972).

  12. See, for example, the revelation recorded by the Ranter Abiezer Coppe, reprinted in Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Paladin, 1970; orig. publ. 1957), pp. 319-30. Cohn is horrified by such a text, but one's attitude clearly depends on whether one is inside or outside the experience.

  13. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 322.

  14. Cf. the concluding pages of Chapter 3. Note that I am using the term "middle class" here in the traditional Marxist sense, that is (in the English case), to refer to the economic and political interests that opposed the king, not in the modern sociological sense of group identification, socioeconomic stratification, and so on.

  15. Some of the radical leaders/occultists include William Lilly, John Everard, Lawrence Clarkson, Nicholas Culpepper, Gerard Winstanley, William Dell, John Webster, John Allin, and Thomas Tryon. Statements by clerics may be found in P.M. Rattansi, Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution, Ambix 11 (1963), 24-32.

  16. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, pp. 144, 238, 287.

  17. The quotes from Newton are cited in Kubrin, "Newton's Inside Out!" For alchemical language in Newton, see H. S. Thayer, ed., Newton's Philosophy of Nature (New York: Hafner, 1953), pp. 49, 84-91, 164-65.

  18. R. S. Westfall, "The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Career," in M. L. R. Bonelli and W. R. Shea, eds., Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), pp. 189-232.

  19. See Newton's Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended . . . (London, 1728), esp. pp. 332-46, and "A Dissertation upon the Sacred Cubit of the Jews," in John Greaves, Miscellaneous Works . . . (London, 1737), vol. 2.

  20. On this see also Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977).

  21. I. B. Cohen and Alexandre Koyré, "The Case of the Missing 'Tanquam': Leibniz, Newton, and Clarke," Isis 52 (1961), 555-67.

  22. For a contemporary view of the earth as alive see Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking, 1974).

  23. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964), esp. chap. 11.

  24. Quoted in Brown, Life Against Death, p. 108.

  25. The same hardening can be seen in paintings of a later president of the Royal Society, Humphry Davy, in Plates 11 and 12 of my Social Change and Scientific Organization (London and Ithaca, N.Y.: Heinemann Educational Books and Cornell University Press, 1978), and should be compared to Plates 24 and 25, which juxtapose portraits of the young and old Michael Faraday. As I discuss in that work, Faraday was a religious mystic and something of a closet Hermeticist, believing that matter was essentially spiritual in nature, The photograph of Faraday as an older man is remarkable for its childlike nature: the gentle expression and the bright, almost glowing eyes.

  26. Quoted in Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, p. 287.

  27. David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), p. 693.

  28. Milton Klonsky, William Blake: The Seer and His Visions (New York: Harmony Books, 1977), p. 62.

  29. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, p. 311.

  30. Ibid., p. 236.

  31. The following discussion is based (partly) on R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965; orig. publ. 1959), esp. pp. 140-41, 148, 151, 179, 198.

  CHAPTER 5. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

  1. The title of this chapter is taken from that of a book of the same name published by Immanuel Kant in 1783, two years after the first edition of his famous Critique of Pure Reason. I am not a Kantian and this chapter is not an attempt at Kantian analysis. Nevertheless, my own work does attempt to emulate Kant in the following ways, and hence I did not feel I could do better than to use a Kantian title most appropriate to my own goals:

  (a) Kant made an attempt to state what he believed were the central problems of philosophy during his own day, and to distill principres that he hoped would be valid for all human knowledge.

  (b) Kant realized that any future metaphysics must have a prolegomena, that is, some sort of preface setting out what the criteria of a new science might be.

  (c) Kant was perhaps the first Western philosopher in the modern period to recognize that the mind is not simply bombarded by sense impressions, but actually plays a role in shaping what it perceives.

  2. Quoted in N. O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970; orig. publ. 1959), p. 315.

  3. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, corrected ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

  4. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 294.

  5. It should be added that in these illustrations it probably is possible for an observer to see both images simultaneously if he or she is in a meditative or "alpha" brain-wave state. Under normal conditions, however, the brain selects one over the other.

  6. See Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 69-131, 249-61, and passim; see also pp. 49-65. The specific issue of language acquisition is discussed by Daniel Yankelovich and William Barrett (drawing on Noam Chomsky) in Ego and Instinct (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), pp. 388-92, and by Susanne Langer in Philosophy in a New Key, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 122-23, 122n.

  7. From page 101 of Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi, copyright © 1958, 1962; reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

  8. Ibid., pp. 60-70, 88-90, 123, 162.

  9. The following discussion is taken from Barfield, Saving the Appearances, pp. 24-25, 32n, 40, 43, 81, and passim. What Barfield calls "alpha-thinking" (see below) is not to be confused with the generation of alpha brain waves in altered states of consciousness (above, note 5). Barfield's "alpha-thinking" is actually a type of "beta-thinking," in the jargon of recent brain research.

  10. Retaining what has been called the "illusion of the first time" is quite difficult once you become skilled at an activity. It is this sense of wonder that adults most envy in very young children.

  11. Peter Achinstein, Concepts of Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 164. The above example is only touched on in this book. I had the good fortune to be a student of Professor Achinstein during my graduate years, and have elaborated the example given in his book into the much fuller version that he provided in the classroom.

  Alan Watts's favorite example of confusing map with territory was sitting down in a restaurant and eating the menu instead of the dinner, an act that he saw as a metaphor for modern society in general.

  12. The best one-volume discussion of the subject for the layman, and it is not easy going, is The Strange Story of the Quantum, by Banesh Hoffman, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959). I have also found Jeremy Bernstein's Einstein (London: Fontana, 1973), and Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), helpful in understanding the subject.

  When I state that the scientific establishment pretends that quantum mechanics does not exist, I mean this in the philosophical rather than the literal sense. Quantum mechanics is certainly recognized as a legitimate area of research, and a recent article in Scientific American by Bernard d'Espagnat ("The Quantum Theory and Reality," 241 [November 1979], 158-81), does not mince words as to how epistemologically radical the subject truly is. But virtually all scientists proceed with their work as though they were detached observers, and the traditional subject/object dichotomy is embedded in the curricula and textbooks of all high school and college science teaching.

  Some of the most advanced work using quantum mechanics to create a new scientific metaphysics is being done by David Finkelstein of Yeshiva University. See, for example, his articles on the "Space-Time Code" in Physical Review 184 (25 A
ugust 1969), 1261-70; and Physical Review D 5 (15 January 1972), 320-28, (15 June 1972), 2922-31, and 9 (15 April 1974), 2219-31. Finkelstein also has an interesting, paper on "Matter, Space and Logic" in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 5 (1969), 199-215.

  13. See Northrup's introduction in Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, pp. 6-10. The quotations from Heisenberg below are taken from this book, pp. 29, 41, 58. See also pp. 81, 130, 144.

  According to Norwood Russell Hanson; if one were to argue that the uncertainty relations do not mean the electrons actually lack a simultaneous position and momentum, one would be essentially arguing that electrons are in precisely defined states but that we cannot define them because of crude techniques of investigation. This valiant attempt to save classical notions of reality will not work. As Hanson points out, this position "seeks what no physical theory can hope for -- a knowledge of nature that transcends what our best hypotheses and experiments suggest." The close connection between epistemology and ontology becomes obvious here. If we cannot know an object in the classical Cartesian sense, how can we argue that it conforms to classical notions of reality? Arguing that it must conform to the usual subject/object relations turns the Cartesian paradigm into a faith, not a science; which is what it always was anyway.

  See N.R. Hanson, "Quantum Mechanics, Philosophical Implications of," in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encylopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 7:44.

  14. This attempt to find the ultimate material entity is still, foolishly, going on. Of the two hundred or so nuclear particles now recognized as existing, 90 percent of these have been discovered in the postwar era, suggesting that reality is more a function of the national budget than anything else. Since 1964, atomic physicists have posited the existence of "quarks" (a word taken from Finnegans Wake) to explain these particles, but their number has multiplied to the point that we may soon have a quark to explain each particle. Nor is this the end: to explain quarks, "hidden variables" have now been suggested. In fact, there is no end to this process. As Geoffrey Chew has pointed out, we detect particles because they interact with the observer, but in order to do so they must have some internal structure. This means that we can in principle never get to some object that has no internal structure, for a truly elementary particle could not be subject to any forces that would allow us to detect its existence (if we find it by its weight, for example, then it must contain something within it producing a gravitational field). On the Cartesian model we shall be chasing "hidden variables" to the end of time. The disarray in modern physics became embarrassingly clear at the 1978 meeting of the American Physical Society in San Francisco, at which an appeal was made for a new Einstein to sort things out. The cul-de-sac of Cartesianism came out in a remark made by one Berkeley physicist, that although no one knew what the proliferation of particles meant, at least we could measure them with great precision (!). On a more intelligent level, Werner Heisenberg called for an end to the concept of the elementary particle in 1975. William Irwin Thompson's remark that an "elementary particle is what happens when you build an accelerator" is not without relevance here.

  See Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975), pp. 273-74; "Scientist's Call for Another Einstein," San Francisco Chronicle, 24 January 1978; "Monitor," New Scientist, 24 July 1975, p. 196; and William Irwin Thompson, ~Notes on an Emerging Planet," in Michael Katz et al., eds., Earth's Answer (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 210.

  15. H. Forwald, Mind, Matter and Gravitation (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1969). Forwald, a retired engineer and inventor, performed these experiments over a period of two decades.

  16. For example, Capra, The Tao of Physics; Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975; orig. publ. 1966); Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (New York: William Morrow, 1979).

  17. E. H. Walker, "Consciousness in the Quantum Theory of Measurement," Journal for the Study of Consciousness 5 (1972), Part 1, no. 1, p. 46; Part 2, no. 2, p. 257; "The Nature of Consciousness," Mathematical Biosciences 7 (1970), 175.

  18. Yankelovich and Barrett, Ego and Instinct, p. 203.

  19. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1973; New York: Ballantine, 1972), p. 436 British edition, p. 461 American edition. The two modalities of human awareness are called "tonal" and "nagual" in some anthropological literature, and an excellent explication of their relationship may be found in the second half of Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974). As in the case of Bateson's work, Casteneda's provides a brilliant model of holistic knowing. Unlike Bateson's work, it stops at the point that the model is delineated.

  20. This recognition reflects perfectly the internal osmosis that goes on in holistic consciousness between the conscious and unconscious mind (nucleus and cell). In such consciousness the barrier between the two modalities disintegrates; they interpenetrate and become more like each other. This process is accompanied by an external alteration in which Self and Other are not seen as so sharply distinguished.

  21. Hanson, Quantum Mechanics, p. 46.

  22. Gregory Bateson, "Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 109n British edition, and p. 136n American editon.

  23. Quoted in Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 55.

  24. Peter Koestenbaum, Managing Anxiety (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 11-13.

  25. Brown, Life Against Death, pp. 94-5, 2734. Both Freud and Reich made this point as well, at least by way of analogy. Cf. Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Pocket Books, 1975; orig. German ed. 1942), pp. 33, 283.

  26. Barfield, Saving the Appearances, pp. 136, 144, 160.

  27. All terms that make this distinction between inner and outer, thus perpetuating mind/body, subject/object dualism, should be put in inverted commas. In this category I would include phrases such as "phenomena," "data," "the given," and so on. We need a new vocabulary that reinforces the ecological sense of reality.

  28. At the risk of belaboring a point, I am not suggesting, as Berkeley did, that events would not exist were we absent, but only that the nature of what is going on is in some way dependent upon our participation in the events. What occurs in our absence would thus be irrelevant.

  As for modern cosmology, the latest word, from the Lick Observatory of the University of California, is that the universe is actually collapsing. Or rather, it will apparently expand for another twenty billion years, and then collapse for the next thirty billion after that. Once again, the whole thing seems to resonate with the sociology of knowledge. As Europe began to expand its geographic and economic horizons, the universe went from completely closed to infinitely open. Now that the futures of science, technology, linear progress, and industrial society have all become rather questionable, the cosmos has curiously begun to contract! See "New Evidence Backs A Collapsing Universe," San Francisco Chronicle, 30 June 1978.

  29. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 288-94. An elaboration of the circularity of modern science can also be found in Max Marwick, "Is science a form of witchcraft?" New Scientist, 5 September 1974, pp. 578-81.

  30. The sociology of knowledge did exist prior to modern times, but not in a serious or systematic way. Protagoras states that "man is the measure of all things," but he is referring to what an individual believes, not a culture, and he makes no mention of social influences. Plato says at one point that the lower classes cannot know the truth because their work distorts their minds and bodies; but this statement is really a sociology of error rather than an examination of the social roots of an epistemology (although it must be admitted that the line between these two is not altogether clear). Though there is a subdued theme in Plato that social circumstances shape the subject of knowing, it is much overpowered by the notion of the immutability of the Forms, and it is not developed as an ongoing critique in any event. The sub
ject does not get any rigorous attention until the Enlightenment, and the sociology of knowledge does not constitute a serious discipline prior to Marx's classic formulation of the relationship between existence and consciousness. (On this point see Werner Stark, "Sociology of Knowledge," in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 7:475-78.)