The Reenchantment of the World (22 page)

all
the workings of its component
parts, including especially those parts concerned in this reporting."22
It turns out that the subject/object distinction of modern science,
the mind/body dichotomy of Descartes, and the conscious/unconscious
distinction made by Freud, are all aspects of the same paradigm; they
all involve the attempt to know what cannot, in principle, be known. The
subject/object merger intrinsic to quantum mechanics, on the other hand,
is part of a very different paradigm that involves a new mind/body,
conscious/unconscious relationship. This mental framework, as both Bateson
and Wilhelm Reich realized without making explicit, is similar to that
of quantum mechanics in that it conceives of the relationship between
the mind and the body as a field, alternately diaphanous and solid. In
Wolfgang Pauli's terms, it "would be the more satisfactory solution if
mind and body could be interpreted as complementary aspects of the same
reality.23 "There is no specific border in which mind becomes matter,"
writes philosopher Peter Koestenbaum; the "area of connection is more
like a gradually thickening fog." There is no object existing by itself;
every object has a stream of consciousness, or what we have called Mind;
attached to it.24

 

 

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 if
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