The Reenchantment of the World (3 page)

all
of us, not merely
"intellectuals"). together, and when these systems start to crumble,
so do the individuals who live by them. The last sudden upsurge in
depression and psychosis (or "melancholia," as these states of mind
were then called) occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
during which time it became increasingly difficult to maintain notions
of salvation and God's interest in human affairs. The situation was
ultimately stabilized by the emergence of the new mental framework of
capitalism, and the new definition of reality based on the scientific
mode of experiment, quantification, and technical mastery. The problem
is that this whole constellation of factors -- technological manipulation
of the environment, capital accumulation based on it, notions of secular
salvation that fueled it and were fueled by it -- has apparently run
its course. In particular, the modern scientific paradigm has become
as difficult to maintain in the late twentieth century as was the
religious paradigm in the seventeenth. The collapse of capitalism, the
general dysfunction of institutions, the revulsion against ecological
spoliation, the increasing inability of the scientific world view to
explain the things that really matter, the loss of interest in work, and
the statistical rise in depression, anxiety, and outright psychosis are
all of a piece. As in the seventeenth century, we are again destabilized,
cast adrift, floating. We have, as Dante wrote in the "Divine Comedy,"
awoken to find ourselves in a dark woods.

 

 

What will serve to stabilize things today is fairly obscure; but it is a
major premise of this book that because disenchantment is intrinsic to the
scientific world view, the modern epoch contained, from its inception, an
inherent instability that severely limited its ability to sustain itself
for more than a few centuries. For more than 99 percent of human history,
the world was enchanted and man saw himself as an integral part of it. The
complete reversal of this perception in a mere four hundred years or so
has destroyed the continuity of the human experience and the integrity
of the human psyche. It has very nearly wrecked the planet as well. The
only hope, or so it seems to me, lies in a reenchantment of the world.

 

 

Here, then, is the crux of the modern dilemma. We cannot go back
to alchemy or animism -- at least that does not seem likely; but the
alternative is the grim, scientistic, totally controlled world of nuclear
reactors, microprocessors, and genetic engineering -- a world that is
virtually upon us already.
Some
type of holistic, or participating,
consciousness and a corresponding sociopolitical formation have to emerge
if we are to survive as a species. At this point, as I have said, it is
not at all evident what this change will involve; but the implication
is that a way of life is slowly coming into being which will be vastly
different from the epoch that has so deeply colored, in fact created,
the details of our lives. Robert Heilbroner has suggested that a time
might come, perhaps two hundred years hence, when people will visit the
Houston computer center or Wall Street as curious relics of a vanished
civilization, but this will necessarily involve a dramatically altered
perception of reality.13 Just as we recognize in a medieval tapestry
or alchemical text a world vastly different from our own, so may those
people who visit Houston or the tip of Manhattan two centuries from now
find our own mental outlook, from the assumptions of nineteenth-century
physics to the practice of behavior modification, quite baroque, if not
downright incomprehensible.

 

 

Willis Harman has called our outlook the "industrial-era paradigm"14 but
the Industrial Revolution did not begin its "take-off" until the second
half of the eighteenth century, whereas the modern paradigm is ultimately
the child of the Scientific Revolution. For lack of a better term, then,
I shall refer to our world view as the "Cartesian paradigm," after the
great methodological spokesman of modern science, René Descartes. I do
not wish to suggest that Descartes is the lone architect of our current
outlook, but only that modern definitions of reality can be identified
with specific planks in his scientific program. To understand the nature
and origins of the Cartesian paradigm, then, will be our first task. We
shall then be in a position to analyze more closely the nature of the
enchanted world view, the historical forces that led to its collapse,
and finally the possibilities that exist for a modern and credible form
of reenchantment, a cosmos once more our own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1
The Birth of Modern
Scientific Consciousness

 

 

 

 

[My discoveries] have satisfied me that it is possible to reach
knowledge that will be of much utility in this life; and that instead
of the speculative philosophy now taught in the schools we can flnd
a practical one, by which, knowing the nature and behavior of fire,
water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which
surround us, as well as we now understand the different skills of
our workers, we can employ these entities for all the purposes for
which they are suited, and so make ourselves masters and possessors
of nature.

 

 

-- René Descartes,
Discourse on Method
(1637)

 

 

 

 

Two archetypes pervade Western thinking on the subject of how reality
is best apprehended, archetypes that I have their ultimate origin in
Plato and Aristotle. For Plato sense data were at best a distraction
from knowledge, which was the province of unaided reason. For Aristotle,
knowledge consisted in generalizations, but these were derived in the
first instance from information gathered from the outside world. These two
models of human thinking, termed rationalism and empiricism respectively,
formed the major, intellectual legacy of the West down to Descartes and
Bacon, who represented, in the seventeenth Century, the twin poles of
epistemology. Yet just as Descartes and Bacon have more in common than
apart, so too do Plato and Aristotle. Plato's qualitative organic cosmos,
described in the "Timaeus," is Aristotle's world as well; and both were
seeking the underlying "forms" of the phenomena observed, which were
always expressed in teleological terms. Aristotle would not agree with
Plato that the "form" of a thing existed in some innate heaven, but
nevertheless the reality of, let us say, a discus used at the Olympic
games was its Circularity, its Heaviness (inherent tendency to fall to
the center of the earth), and so on. This metaphysic was preserved through
the Middle Ages, an age noted (from our point of view) for its extensive
symbolism. Things were never "just what they were," but always embodied
a nonmaterial principle that was seen as the essence of their reality.

 

 

Despite the diametrically opposed points of view represented by Bacon's
"New Organon" and Descartes' "Discourse on Method," they possess a
commonality that marks them off quite sharply from both the world of the
Greeks and that of the Middle Ages. The fundamental discovery of the
Scientific Revolution -- a discovery epitomized by the work of Newton
and Galileo -- was that there was no real clash between rationalism and
empiricism. The former says that the laws of thought conform to the laws
of things; the latter says, always check your thoughts against the data
so that you know what thoughts to think. This dynamic relationship between
rationalism and empiricism lay at the heart of the Scientific Revolution,
and was made possible by the translation of each approach into a concrete
tool. Descartes showed that mathematics was the epitome of pure reason,
the most trustworthy knowledge available. Bacon pointed out that one
had to question nature directly by putting it in a position in which
it was forced to yield up its answers. 'Natura vexata,' he called it,
"nature annoyed": arrange a situation where yes or no must be given in
response. Galileo's work illustrates the union of these two tools. For
example, roll a ball down an inclined plane and measure distance versus
time. Then you will know, precisely, how falling objects behave.

 

 

Note that I said
how
they behave, not why. The marriage of reason and
empiricism, of mathematics and experiment, expressed this significant
shift in perspective. So long as men were content to ask why objects
fell, why phenomena occurred, the question of how they fell or occurred
was irrelevant. These two questions are not mutually exclusive, at least
not in theory; but in historical terms they have proven to be so. "How"
became increasingly important, why" increasingly irrelevant. In the
twentieth century, as we shall see, "how" has become our "why."

 

 

Viewed from this vantage point, both the "New Organon" and the "Discourse"
make for fascinating reading, for we recognize that each author is
grappling with an epistemology that has become part ot the air we now
breathe. Bacon and Descartes interlock in other ways as well. Bacon is
convinced that knowledge is power and truth utility; Descartes sees
certainty as equivalent to measurement, and wants science to become
a "universal mathematics." Bacon's goal, of course, was realized by
Descartes' means: precise measurement not only validates or falsities
hypotheses, it also enables the construction of bridges and roads. Hence
another crucial seventeenth-century departure from the Greeks: the
conviction that the world lies before us to be acted upon, not merely
contemplated. Greek thought is static, modern science dynamic. Modern
man is Faustian man, an appellation that goes back, even before Goethe,
to Christopher Marlowe. Dr. Faustus, sitting in his study ca. 1590, is
bored with the works of Aristotle which are spread out before him. "Is to
dispute well logic's chiefest end?" he asks himself aloud. "Affords this
art no greater miracle? / Then read no more. . . . "1 In the sixteenth
century Europe discovered, or rather decided, that to do is the issue,
not to be.

 

 

One thing that is conspicuous about the literature of the Scientific
Revolution is that its ideologues were self-conscious about their
role. Both Bacon and Descartes were aware of the methodological changes
taking place, and of the direction in which things would inevitably
move. They saw themselves as leading the way, even possibly tipping the
balance. Both made it clear that Aristotelianism had had its day. The
very title of Bacon's work, "New Organon," the new instrument, was an
attack on Aristotle, whose logic had been, in the Middle Ages, collected
under the title "Organon." Aristotelian logic, specifically the syllogism,
had been the basic instrument for apprehending reality, and it was this
situation that prompted the complaint of Bacon and Dr. Faustus. Bacon
writes that this logic is "no match for the subtlety of nature"; "it gains
assent to the proposition, but does not take hold of the thing." Thus
it "is idle," he exclaims, "to expect any great advancement in science
from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must
begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve forever
in a circle with mean and contemptible progress."2 Escaping from this
circularity involved, as far as Bacon was concerned, a violent shift
in perspective, which would lead from the unchecked use of words and
reason to the hard data accumulated through the experimental testing of
nature. Yet Bacon himself never performed a single experiment, and the
method he proposed for ascertaining the truth -- compiling tables of data
and making generalizations from them -- was certainly poorly defined. As
a result, historians have erroneously concluded that science grew up
"around" Bacon, not through him.3 Despite the popular conception of the
scientific method, most scientists know that truly creative research often
begins with wild speculation and flights of fancy that are then subjected
to the twin tests of measurement and experiment. Pure Baconianism --
expecting results to fall out of the data as if by sheer weight -- never
really works in practice. Yet this heavily empirical image of Bacon
is in fact a result of the nineteenth-century assault on speculation,
and the accompanying overemphasis on Bacon's data-collecting side. In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Baconianism was synonymous
with the identification of truth with utility, specifically industrial
utility. Breaking the Aristotelian-Scholastic circle meant, for Bacon,
stepping into the world of the mechanical arts, a step that was literally
incomprehensible prior to the mid-sixteenth century. Bacon leaves no
doubt that he regards technology as the source of a new epistemology.4
He tells us that scholarship, which is to say Scholasticism, has stood
still for centuries, while technology has made progress; surely it has
something to teach us.

 

 

The sciences [he writes] stand where they did and remain almost in
the same condition; receiving no noticeable increase. . . . Whereas
in the mechanical arts, which are founded on nature and the light
of experience, we see the contrary happen, for these . . . are
continually thriving and growing, as having in them a breath of life.5

 

 

Natural history, presently understood, says Bacon, is merely the
compilation of copious data: descriptions of plants, fossils, and the
like. Why should we value such a collection?

 

 

A natural history which is composed for its own sake is not like
one that is collected to supply the understanding with information
for the building up of philosophy. They differ in many ways, but
especially in this: that the former contains the variety of natural
species only, and not experiments of the mechanical arts. For even
as in the business of life a man's disposition and the secret
workings of his mind and affections are better discovered when
he is in trouble than at other times; so likewise the secrets of
nature reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art
[i.e., artisanry, technology] than when they go their own way. Good
hopes may therefore be conceived of natural philosophy, when natural
history, which is the basis and foundation of it, has been drawn up
on a better plan; but not till then.6