The Reenchantment of the World (27 page)

 

 

I do not mean to imply that primary process is somehow "good" and
ego-consciousness correspondingly "bad," or that they are distinct,
unrelated entities. Such an implication does, unhappily, lurk in Reich's
writings. He did seem to believe, like Rousseau, that natural man was
hidden under social man. The problem is that although primary process is
the substrate, the ground of being, it seems clear enough that once the
ego is triggered, it is, like a tree, as real as the soil from which it
sprang. As in the case of language, learned and instinctual aspects here
form a complicated and interrelated pattern. Reich's position must thus be
modified to square with the theory of developmentals, which rightly argues
against arbitrary distinctions between the instinctual and the acquired.

 

 

According to Yankelovich and Barrett, a great number of ethologists have
concluded that although certain types of behavior -- breathing, sucking,
eating, sexual activity -- develop independently of any culture, there is
no behavior that does not display some aspects of learning. Even cells
do not develop independently, but go through chains of environmental
reactions with neighboring cells. No single instance of behavior has
allowed a scientist to say, "this is pure instinct," without another
researcher being able to demonstrate traces of learning in that same
case. Since we have no infallible rules for distinguishing between
innate and acquired, the best way to view the developmentals, say the
authors, is as entities (or processes) in which experience and instinct
are "regarded as inseparable aspects of a single unified event."34
Although primary process is, as the phrase indicates, primary, we are
forced to conclude that
both mimesis (identification) and analysis
(discrimination) are present within the physiological response system
of the human organism
. Since this conclusion holds even if one element,
or process, is more fundamental than another, my critique of the ego has
not been directed against the ego per se, but against the particularly
virulent form that has, since 1600, insisted on a rigid mind/body,
subject/object dichotomy. Prior to the Renaissance, the ego coexisted
with participation more than it sought to deny it, and this attitude
is what made it a viable structure for so many centuries. In denying
participation, however, the ego denies its own source, for as both Reich
and Freud (for most of his life) contended, the ego has no separate energy
reserves of its own. The unconscious is the ground of its being. Like
the nucleus of a cell, the ego is a contractile point within the Mind,
and the Mind is the sum of knowledge gained by
all
of the body, all of
the senses. In recognizing this position of the brain within the Mind,
one biomedical engineer has suggested that the brain is not the source
of thought but a thought amplifier; that knowledge originates not in the
brain but in the body, and that the brain simply magnifies and organizes
it. This thesis does not mean that the brain's processing function is
somehow alien to the human physiological response system, any more than
the nucleus can be regarded as an alien element in a cell.35 Hence,
the issue is not whether
mimesis
is good and analysis had, but how
and to what extent a given culture triggers the latter, that is, what
it produces as the ecology of its typical personality. The culture of
archaic man, through social attitudes, body contact, spontaneous feeding,
and so on, hardly triggered the ego at all,
if
at all; "advanced"
industrial societies seem to trigger nothing else. It may be the case,
as Foucault suggests, that we shall reverse that trend and eventually
return to a completely mimetic state; but it is not my contention (as it
may have been Reich's) that such a consciousness would be the best that
the human race could have, and, in any event, it is hardly an option
we can act on. The ego, far more than modern science, is a part of our
cultural baggage, so much so that to talk of deliberately "eradicating"
it does not make much sense. At present, our only visible option is to
modify it, and so go beyond it.

 

 

We are now in a position to give Polanyi's analysis of knowledge a
biological underpinning. Given Reich's clinical identification of the body
with the unconscious, our discussion of participation, figuration, and
Polanyi's "tacit knowing" takes on a whole new dimension. Although Polanyi
argued, in "Personal Knowledge," that such knowing was physiological, he
was never able to prove his point, to establish that connection. Reich
supplies that missing link. For if the body and the unconscious are
the same thing, the permeation of nature by the latter explains why
participation still exists, why sensual knowledge is a part of all
cognition, and why the admission of this situation is not a return to
primitive animism. It also explains why "objective" knowledge does not
exist, and why all true knowledge (as Polanyi argued) constitutes a
commitment. Taken together, Reich and Polanyi point the way out of the
Cartesian paradigm, and into Ferenczi's "erotic sense of reality."

 

 

Let me try to state this another way, before elaborating the
argument. That non-discursive knowledge has cognitive content may be a
little-known fact in our culture, but it is hardly an unknown fact. Should
the reader pick up Reich's "Character Analysis," Albert Scheflen's "How
Behavior Means," Rudolf Arnheim's "Visual Thinking," Susanne Langer's
"Feeling and Form," Andrew Greeley's "Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing," or any
of Freud's or Jung's works on dream symbolism, he or she will discover,
in essence, a common theme. Nor do these few works, selected more or
less at random, exhaust the topic. Since the late nineteenth century,
a significant number of Western intellectuals have come to grips with
the limitations of verbal-rational knowledge and have devoted their lives
to demonstrating the different cognitive schema present in art, dreams,
the body, fantasy, and illusion. What they have
not
succeeded in doing
is showing the relationship between these two forms of knowledge. As
a result, they have unwittingly exacerbated the "two cultures" split,
a trend that is currently being reinforced with the popular dichotomy
between "right-brained" and "left-brained" thinking.36 If we are ever
to break free of the Cartesian paradigm, we must do more than simply
delineate the contours of nondiscursive knowing; we must show how the
two forms of knowledge relate to one another. As long as they remain
two cultures, or two brains, the dominant culture or brain can continue
to take itself seriously while sanctimoniously paying lip service
to the other. Reich's work, as well as that of Polanyi and Barfield,
takes the first step toward a synthesis, for it demonstrates that the
Cartesian paradigm is actually a fraud: there is no such thing as purely
discursive knowing, and the sickness of our time is not the absence of
participation but the stubborn denial that it exists -- the denial of
the body and its role in our cognition of reality.

 

 

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?