The Reenchantment of the World (20 page)

 

 

In Figure 10, do you see a bear climbing up the other side of a tree, or
a tree trunk with burls on it? Do you see a flock of birds in Figure 11,
or a herd of antelope? Would people who had never seen antelope, but only
birds, be able to regard Figure 11 as a picture of antelope? Polanyi's
general point is that at a very early age we learn, or are trained,
to put reality together in certain ways ("figurate" it, in Barfield's
terminology), and that the indoctrination is not merely cultural but also
biological. Thus on a conscious level we largely spend our lives finding
out what we already know on an unconscious level. Alternative realities
are screened out by a process that the American psychiatrist Harry Stack
Sullivan used to call "selective inattention," and which has since been
relabeled "cognitive dissonance." Thus "antelope" people would presumably
find "bird" people incomprehensible. Any articulated world view, in fact,
is the result of unconscious factors that have been culturally filtered
and influenced, and is thus to some extent radically disparate from any
other world view.

 

 

The question that concerns us here is how we are trained into a mode
of seeing. Polanyi points out that the scientist learns his craft in
the same way a child learns a language. Children are born polyglots:
they naturally have German gutterals, French nasaIs, Russian palatals,
and Chinese tonals. They cannot remain this way for long, however,
for to learn a particular language is simultaneously to unlearn the
sounds not common to that language. English, for example, does not have
the Russian palatal sound, and the English-speaking child ultimately
loses the ability to pronounce words in a genuinely Russian manner. The
awareness here is subsidiary, or even subliminal. As in bicyde riding,
so in speaking, we learn to do something without actually analyzing or
realizing what it is we are learning. Science has similarly an ineffable
basis; it too is picked up by osmosis.6

 

 

Polanyi's best example of this process, taken perhaps from his own
experience, is that of the study of X-ray pathology, and is worth quoting
in full.

 

 

Think [he writes] of a medical student attending a course in the
X-ray diagnosis of pulmonary diseases. He watches in a darkened room
shadowy traces on a fluorescent screen placed against a patients
chest, and hears the radiologist commenting to his assistants, in
technical language, on the significant features of these shadows. At
first the student is completely puzzled. For he can see in the
X-ray picture of a chest only the shadows of the heart and ribs,
with a few spidery blotches between them. The experts seem to be
romancing about figments of their imagination; he can see nothing
that they are talking about. Then as he goes on listening for a few
weeks, looking carefully at ever new pictures of different cases,
a tentative understanding will dawn on him; he will gradually
forget about the ribs and begin to see the lungs. And eventually,
if he perseveres intelligently, a rich panorama of significant
details will be revealed to him: of physiological variations and
pathological changes, of scars, of chronic infections and signs
of acute disease. He has entered a new world. He still sees only a
fraction of what the experts can see, but the pictures are definitely
making sense now and so do most of the comments made on them. He is
about to grasp what he is being taught; it has clicked.7

 

 

"He has entered a new world." Polanyi describes a process that is
not really rational but existential, a groping in the dark after the
fall through Alice's rabbit hole has occurred. There is no
logic
of
scientific discovery here, but rather an act of faith that the process
will lead to learning, and on the basis of the students commitment,
it does.

 

 

It is also important to note, in this example, that the actual learning
process violates the Platonic/Western model of knowledge, which insists
that knowledge is obtained in the act of distancing oneself from the
experience. Our hypothetical medical student knew absolutely nothing
when he stood outside the procedures. Only with his submergence in the
experience did the photographs begin to take on any meaning at all. As he
forgot about himself, as the independent "knower" dissolved into the X-ray
blotches, he found that they began to appear meaningful. The crux of such
learning is the Greek concept of 'mimesis,' of visceral/poetic/erotic
identification. Even from Polanyi's verbal description, we can almost
touch the willowy blotches on the warm negative, smell the photographic
developer in the nearby darkroom. This knowledge was clearly participated.

 

 

Rationality, as it turns out, begins to play a role only
after
the
knowledge has been obtained viscerally. Once the terrain is familiar,
we reflect on how we got the facts and establish the methodological
categories. But these categories emerge from a tacit network, a process
of gradual comprehension so basic that they are not recognized as
"categories." As Marshall McLuhan once remarked, water is the last thing
a fish would identify as part of its environment, if it could talk. In
fact, the categories start to blur with the learning process itself;
they become "Reality," and the fact that the existence of other realities
may be as possible as the existence of other languages usually escapes
our notice. The reality system of any society is thus generated by an
unconscious biological and social process in which the learners in that
society are immersed. These circumstances, says Polanyi, demonstrate
"the pervasive participation of the knowing person in the act of knowing
by virtue of an art which is essentially inarticulate." I can speak of
this knowledge, but I cannot do so adequately.8

 

 

For Polanyi, then, a phrase such as "impersonal" or "objective knowledge"
is a contradiction in terms. He argues that all knowing takes place in
terms of meaning, and thus that the knower is implicated in the known. To
this I would add that what constitutes knowledge is therefore merely the
findings of an agreed-upon methodology, and the facts that science finds
are merely that -- facts that
science
finds; they possess no meaning
in and of themselves. Science is generated from the tacit knowing and
subsidiary awareness peculiar to Western culture, and it proceeds to
construct the world in those particular terms. If it is true that we
create our reality, it is nevertheless a creation that proceeds in
accordance with very definite rules -- rules that are largely hidden
from conscious view.

 

 

Participating consciousness is even more pervasive than Polanyi's example
of the X-ray student would suggest. To see this, let us follow Barfield
and define 'figuration' as representation, that is, the act by which we
transform sensations into mental pictures.9 The process of thinking
about these "things," these images, and their relationships with each
other (a process commonly called conceptualization) can be defined as
'alpha-thinking.' In the process of learning, figuration gradually becomes
alpha-thinking in other words, our concepts are really habits. Our X-ray
student at first formed mental pictures of the blotches or shadows
on the screen, then learned to identify cancer and tuberculosis. His
instructors, however, immediately and unthinkingly saw cancer and TB
without experiencing the blotches in the same way he did. Similarly,
when I hear a bird singing, I form some sort of mental image of the
sound and try to sort it out. My friend, a professional ornithologist,
goes through no such process. He hardly even hears the notes. What
comes to his mind, quite automatically, is "thrush." Thus, at least in
his professional capacity, he is doing alpha-thinking all the time. He
is beyond figuration, whereas I am still struggling with it. It would
be more correct to say that he figurates in terms of concepts rather
than sensations and primary data. He does, then, participate the world
(or at least the bird world), but for the most part as a collection
of abstractions.

 

 

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