The Reenchantment of the World (28 page)

 

 

"In the last analysis," wrote E.A. Burtt in "The Metaphysical Foundations
of Modern Science," "it is the ultimate picture which an age forms of
the nature of its world that is its most fundamental possession. It is
the final controlling factor in all thinking whatever." In "Philosophy
in a New Key," Susanne Langer elaborates this theme by stating that
the crucial changes in philosophy are not changes in the answers to
traditional questions, but changes in the questions that are asked. "It
is the mode of handling problems, rather than what they are about, that
assigns them to an age." A new key in philosophy does not solve the old
questions; it
rejects
them. The generative ideas of the seventeenth
century, she says, notably the subject/object dichotomy of Descartes,
have served their term, and their paradoxes now clog our thinking. "If
we would have new knowledge," she concludes, "we must get us a whole
world of new questions."40

 

 

Langer has articulated the essence of our problem. We do not need
a new solution to the mind/body problem, or a new way of viewing the
subject/object relationship. We need to deny that such distinctions exist,
and once done, to formulate a new set of scientific questions based on a
new modality. When I studied physics in college, for example, a unit was
devoted to heat, then to light, then to electricity and magnetism, and
so on. The project involved in each unit, the "generative idea," was, in
effect, to ascertain the nature of light, heat, electromagnetism, etc. We
see in this curriculum the strong grip of the Cartesian paradigm. Fifty
years after the formulation of quantum mechanics, these subjects are
still taught as though there can be a knowledge of them independent
of a human observer. Again, I am not taking a Berkeleyian position:
whether these things exist independently of our observation of them
is not something I regard as a fruitful line of inquiry. What
is
at
issue is the notion that observation makes no difference for what we
learn about the thing being investigated. It is by now abundantly clear
that we are part of any experiment, that the act of investigation alters
the knowledge obtained, and that given this situation, any attempt to
know all of nature through a unit-by-unit analysis of its "components"
is very much a delusion. A question such as "What is light?" can have
only one answer in a post-Cartesian world: "That question has no meaning."

 

 

How should we study (i.e., participate) nature? What questions
should
we ask? The reader is aware that I am not a scientist and am probably
the wrong person to try to answer these questions. But having started
this discussion, I am obliged to make some attempt to finish it,
hoping to provide some valuable suggestions that others might develop
further. Since I have already dealt extensively with the study of light,
let me continue to organize the discussion around this problem. My choice,
of course, is not arbitrary, for Newton's study of the nature of light
became the atomistic paradigm, the model of how all phenomena should be
examined. I am thus attempting to grasp, by working with an archetypal
example, what a sensual or holistic science might become; what it would
mean to acknowledge participation by deliberately including the knower
in the known.41

 

 

We saw in Chapter 1 that Newton, in his prism experiments, was able
to show that a beam of white light was composed of seven monochromatic
rays, and that each color could be identified by a number, signifying
the degree of refrangibility. Today, the significant number is taken to
be wavelength or frequency, but the Newtonian definition of color as a
number is fully preserved. Red, for example, is the sensation caused by
such-and-such a wavelength of light in the eye of a standard observer.

 

 

The Newtonian theory of color received a serious jolt in the 1950s from
the work of Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera. Land was
able to demonstrate that colors were not simply a matter of wavelength,
but that their perception was largely dependent on the objects or images
that they represented; in short, on their context and its (human)
interpretation. A white vase bathed in blue light is seen as white
because the mind (Mind) accepts whatever the general illumination is, as
white. The same phenomenon can be seen in the case of yellow automobile
lights or candle flames, which are commonly perceived as white. Land
discovered that even two closely placed wavelengths of light, for
instance two different shades of red, can generate the full range of
color in the eye of the observer.

 

 

In trying to make sense of this clear-cut refutation of the classical
theory of light and color, Land was led to an explanation that echoed
the critique of Newton made by Goethe in his much-ridiculed book
"Farbenlehre" (On the Theory of Colors, 1810). "The answer," wrote Land,
"is that their work [i.e., the work of Newton and his followers] had very
little to do with color as we normally see it." (Goethe's phrase was:
"Derived phenomena should not be given first place.") In other words,
superimposed rays of monochromatic light are artificially isolated in
the laboratory, and although no one is denying their importance in (for
example) laser technology, they simply do not occur in nature. In his
own experiments, Land discovered that the characteristic arrangement of
colors was indeed a spectrum, but one that ranged from warm to cool --
something artists have known for centuries. "The important visual scale,"
he concluded, "is not the Newtonian spectrum. For all its beauty the
[Newtonian] spectrum is sunply the accidental consequence of arranging
stimuli in order of wavelength."

 

 

Of course, there is nothing accidental about this arrangement. The value
system of Newton's Europe deemed it sensible to identify colors with
numbers or to arrange them in order of wavelength. The perception of
colors in atomistic, quantifiable terms was made possible by Western
industrial culture and ultimately delivered back to this culture
technological devices, such as the sodium vapor lamp or the spectroscope,
that "verified" this perception in a beautifully circular way. More
significant here is the fact that Land's experiments demonstrate that the
Newtonian spectrum is
one way
of looking at light and color, but that
there is nothing holy about it. Furthermore, Land's conclusions reveal the
repression implicit in Newtonian science, even in this one special case,
for the talk of warm versus cool colors plunges us directly into affect,
and into human subjective interpretation. Degrees of refrangibility
are supposedly "out there," eternal, not requiring a human observer to
establish their validity. Hot and cold, however, are "in here" as well as
"out there"; they require a human
participant
, in particular, one with
a body and its accompanying emotions. Nor are degrees of refrangibility
very stimulating emotionally. The quantification of color represents
a dramatic narrowing of emotional response. The linguist Benjamin Lee
Whorf was fond of pointing out that eskimos have thirteen different words
for white, and certain African tribes up to ninety words for green. In
contrast, European languages collapse an entire range of emotion and
observation into three or four words: for example, green, blue-green,
aqua, turquoise. We begin to understand what Lao-tzu meant when he said,
"the five colors will blind a man's sight."

 

 

In any holistic experiment with light and color, then, the important
thing is that affect and analysis not be differentiated. If the experiment
does not include emotional/visceral responses, it is not scientific, and
therefore not meaningful. This approach does
not
rule out the Newtonian
color theory. The "validity" of the classical theory of color, however,
lies not in something inherent in nature, but in our appreciation and
enjoyment of it; and one can certainly enjoy lasers, spectroscopes,
and games with prisms. But if this theory is going to exhaust the
investigation of the subject, then it is unscientific by virtue of
omission. Land's work may thus be seen as the beginning of a paradigm for
the holistic investigation of light and color. In the same vein, research
on the psychology of color has demonstrated that a red rectangle does feel
warmer and larger than a blue one of equal size. Certain combinations of
colors make us feel sad, euphoric, dizzy, or claustrophobic. A number
of prisons in the United-States have recently installed a "pink room,"
incarceration in which for a mere fifteen minutes reduces the victim,
ŕ la "Clockwork Orange," to complete passivity.42 Phrases such as
"I feel blue" or "that makes me see red" are not just metaphors, and
an entire discipline, called "chromo-therapy" by its practitioners,
has grown up around the intuitive recognition that certain colors have
healing properties. We also now know that a field of colors, called an
"aura," surrounds every living thing, and that children perceive it up
to a certain age. It is likely that auras are still commonly perceived
in nonindustrial cultures, and probable that the yellow halos painted
around the heads of various saints in medieval art were something actually
seen, not (according to a modern formulation) a metaphor for holiness
"tacked on" for religious effect.

 

 

All of this is by way of suggestion. I cannot formulate a new, fully
articulated paradigm, but I believe that the holistic exploration of such
inexhaustible subjects as color, heat, or electricity, will give us -- as
Susaune Langer urged -- a whole new world of questions. The key scientific
question must cease to be "What is light?," "What is electricity?," and
become instead, "What is the
human experience
of light?" "What is the
human experience
of electricity?" The point is not simplistically to
discard current knowledge of these subjects. Maxwell's equations and the
Newtonian spectrum are clearly part of the human experience. The point
is instead to recognize the error that arises when the human experience
is defined as that which occurs from the neck up -- the "Idol of the
Head," we might call it. It is the incompleteness of Cartesian science
which has made its interpretation of nature so inaccurate. "What is
the human experience of nature?" must become the rallying cry of a new
subject/object-ivity.43

 

 

The late twentieth century may be a difficult time to be alive, but it is
not without its exciting aspects. At the very point that the mechanical
philosophy has played all its cards, and at which the Cartesian paradigm,
in its attempt to know everything, has ironically exhausted the very
mode of knowing which it represents, the door to a whole new world
and way of life is slowly swinging ajar. What is dissolving is not
the ego itself, but the ego-rigidity of the modern era, the "masculine
civilization" identified by Ariès, or what the poet Robert Bly calls
"father consciousness." We are witnessing the modification of this entity
by a reemergent "mother consciousness," the mimetic/erotic view of nature
(see Plate 18). "I write of mother consciousness," states Bly in his
breathtaking essay, "I Came Out of the Mother Naked,"

 

 

using a great deal of father consciousness. But there is no
other possibility for a man. A man's father consciousness cannot
be eradicated. If he tries that, he will lose everything. All he
can hope to do is to join his father consciousness and his mother
consciousness so as to experience what is beyond the father veil.

 

 

Right now we long to say that father consciousness is bad, and mother
consciousness is good. But we know it is father consciousness saying
that; it insists on putting labels on things. They are both good. The
Greeks and the Jews were right to pull away from the Mother and drive
on into father consciousness; and their forward movement gave both
cultures a marvelous luminosity. But now the turn has come. . . . 44

 

 

 

 

Plate 18. Donald Brodeur, "Eros Regained" (1975). By permission of the artist.

 

 

 

It is noteworthy that Bly credits the nonparticipating consciousness of
the Greeks and the Jews as producing cultures of "marvelous luminosity,"
for in doing so he poses a caveat for all thorough-going Reichians. It
may well be that the culture of Europe from the Renaissance to the
present has been based on sensual repression; and Reich may well have
been right in believing (unlike Freud) that culture per se did not
have
to depend on repression; but whatever the energy that fueled it,
the brilliance of modern European culture is surely beyond doubt. The
whole of the Middle Ages did not produce a sculptor like Michelangelo,
a painter like Rembrandt, a writer like Shakespeare, or a scientist like
Galileo; and in terms of sheer volume of creativity, the comparison is
even more dramatic. Bly's crucial point, however, is that the "marvelous
luminosity" has reached its limits. It has become a hostile glare,
a scorching ball of fire that, as Dali tried to suggest, even melts
clocks in an arid desert landscape. Its most creative outposts are now
self-criticisms, analyses of the culture that double it back on itself;
quantum mechanics, surrealist art, the works of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot,
and Claude Lévi-Strauss. There is a chance, as Bly suggests, that a more
luminous culture "lies beyond the father veil," one that may warm and
nurture rather than burn and dessicate. Indeed, as an act of faith, I am
convinced of it. But for now, it is clear that the sharp subject/object
dualism of modern science, and the technological culture that religiously
adheres to it, are grounded in a developmental gone awry. Cartesian
dualism, and the science erected on its false premises, are by and large
the cognitive expression of a profound biopsychic disturbance. Carried to
their logical conclusion, they have finally come to represent the most
unecological and self-destructive culture and personality type that the
world has ever seen. The idea of mastery over, nature, and of economic
rationality, are but partial impulses in the human being which in modern
times have become organizers of the whole of human life.45 Regaining
our health, and developing a more accurate epistemology, is not a matter
of trying to destroy ego-consciousness, but rather, as Bly suggests, a
process that must involve a merger of mother and father consciousness,
or more precisely, of mimetic and cognitive knowing. It is for this
reason that I regard contemporary attempts to create a holistic science
as the great project, and the great drama, of the late twentieth century.