Reenchantment of the World

Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Intro: The Modern Landscape;

ch1 The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness;

ch2 Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe;

ch3 The Disenchantment of the World (1);

ch4 The Disenchantment of the World (2) (15-132).

Introduction: The Modern Landscape

You see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives - men who hate life though they fear death.

-William Morris, News from Nowhere (1891)

For several years now I have intended to write a semi popular book, dealing with certain contemporary problems, and based on my knowledge of the history of science. In an earlier work, a very technical monograph, I was able only to hint at some of the problems that characterize life in the Western industrial nations, problems that I find profoundly disturbing.! I began that study in the belief that the roots of our dilemma were social and economic in nature; by the time I had completed it, I was convinced that I had omitted a whole epistemological dimension. I began to feel, in other words, that something was wrong with our entire world view. Western life seems to be drifting toward increasing entropy, economic and technological chaos, ecological disaster, and ultimately, psychic dismemberment and disintegration; and I have come to doubt that sociology and economics can by themselves generate an adequate explanation for such a state of affairs.

The Reenchantment of the World

The present book, then, is an attempt to take my previous analysis one step further; to grasp the modern era, from the sixteenth century to the present, as a whole, and to come to terms with the metaphysical presuppositions that define this period. This is not to treat mind, or consciousness, as an independent entity, cut off from material life; I hardly believe such is the case. For purposes of discussion, however, it is often necessary to separate these two aspects of human experience; and although I shall make every effort to demonstrate their interpenetration, my primary focus in this book is the transformations of the human mind. This emphasis stems from my conviction that the fundamental issues confronted by any civilization in its history, or by any person in his or her life, are issues of meaning. And historically, our loss of meaning in an ultimate philosophical or religious sense - the split between fact and value which characterizes the modern age - is rooted in the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Why should this be so?

The view of nature which predominated in the West down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution was that of an enchanted world. Rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were all seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt at home in this environment. The cosmos, in short, was a place of belonging. A member of this cosmos was not an alienated observer of it but a direct participant in its drama. His personal destiny was bound up with its destiny, and this relationship gave meaning to his life. This type of consciousness - what I

shall refer to in this book as "participating consciousness" involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene. Alchemy, as it turns out, was the last great coherent expression of participating consciousness in the West.

The story of the modern epoch, at least on the level of mind, is one of progressive disenchantment. From the sixteenth century on, mind has been progressively expunged from the phenomenal world. At least in theory, the reference points for all scientific explanation are matter and motion - what historians of science refer to as the "mechanical philosophy." Developments that have thrown this world view into question - quantum mechanics, for example, or certain types of contemporary ecological research have not made any significant dent in the dominant mode of thinking. That mode can best be described as disenchantment, nonparticipation, for it insists on a rigid distinction between observer and observed.

Introduction: The Modern Landscape

Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather a separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and thus not really a part of the world around me. The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated "thing" in a world of other, equally meaningless things. This world is not of my own making; the cosmos cares nothing for me, and I do not really feel a sense of belonging to it. What I feel, in fact, is a sickness in the soul.

Translated into everyday life, what does this disenchantment mean? It means that the modern landscape has become a scenario of mass administration and blatant violence; a state of affairs now clearly perceived by the man in the street. The alienation and futility that characterized the perceptions of a handful of intellectuals at the beginning of the century have come to characterize the consciousness of the common man at its end. Jobs are stupefying, relationships vapid and transient, the arena of politics absurd. In the vacuum created by the collapse of traditional values, we have hysterical evangelical revivals, mass conversions to the Church of the Reverend Moon, and a general retreat into the oblivion provided by drugs, television, and tranquilizers. We also have a desperate search for therapy, by now a national obsession, as millions of Americans try to reconstruct their lives amidst a pervasive ,feeling of anomie and cultural disintegration. An age in which depression is a norm is a grim one indeed.

Perhaps nothing is more symptomatic of this general malaise than the inability of the industrial economies to provide meaningful work. Some years ago, Herbert Marcuse described the blue and white-collar classes in America as "one-dimensional." "When technics becomes the universal form of material production," he wrote, "it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality - a 'world.'" One cannot speak of alienation as such, he went on, because there is no longer a self to be alienated. We have all been bought off, we all sold out to the System long ago and now identify with it completely. "People recognize themselves in their commodities," Marcuse concluded; they have become what they own. 3

Marcuse's is a plausible thesis. We all know the next-door neighbor who is out there every Sunday, lovingly washing his car

The Reenchantment of the World

with an ardor that is almost sexual. Yet the actual data on the day-to-day life of the middle and working classes tend to refute Marcuse's notion that for these people, self and commodities have merged, producing what he terms the "Happy Consciousness." To take only two examples, Studs Terkel's interviews with hundreds of Americans, drawn from all walks of life, revealed how hollow and meaningless they saw their own vocations. Dragging themselves to work, pushing themselves through the daily tedium of typing, filing, collecting insurance premiums, parking cars, interviewing welfare applicants, and largely fantasizing on the job these people, says Terkel, are no longer characters out of Charles Dickens, but out of Samuel Beckett. 4 The second study, by Sennett and Cobb, found that Marcuse's notion of the mindless consumer was totally in error. The worker is not buying goods because he identifies with the American Way of Life, but because he has enormous anxiety about his self, which he feels possessions might assuage. Consumerism is paradoxically seen as a way out of a system that has damaged him and that he secretly despises; it is a way of trying to keep free from the emotional grip of this system. 5

But keeping free from the System is not a viable option. As technological and bureaucratic modes of thought permeate the deepest recesses of our minds, the preservation of psychic space has become almost impossible. 6 "High-potential candidates" for management positions in American corporations customarily undergo a type of finishing-school education that teaches them how to communicate persuasively, facilitate social interaction, read body language, and so on. This mental framework is then imported into the sphere of personal and sexual relations. One thus learns, for example, how to discard friends who may prove to be career obstacles and to acquire new acquaintances who will assist in one's advancement. The employee's wife is also evaluated as an asset or liability in terms of her diplomatic skills. And for most males in the industrial nations, the sex act itself has literally become a project, a matter of carrying out the proper techniques so as to achieve the prescribed goal and thus win the desired approval. Pleasure and intimacy are seen almost as a hindrance to the act. But once the ethos of technique and management has permeated the spheres of sexuality and friendship, there is literally no place left to hide. The "widespread climate of anxiety and neurosis" in which we are immersed is thus inevitable. 7

Introduction: The Modern. Landscape

perception, real, action, meaningful

Figure 1. R. D. Laing's schematic drawing of healthy interaction (from Laing. The Divided Self, p. 81).

These details of the inner psychological landscape lay bare the workings of the System most completely. In a study that purported to be about schizophrenia, but that was for the most part a profile of the psychopathology of everyday life, R. D. Laing showed how the psyche splits, creating false selves, in an attempt to protect itself from all this manipulation. 8 If we were asked to characterize our usual relations with other persons, we might (as a first guess) describe them as pictured in Figure 1 (see above). Here we have self and other in direct interaction, engaging each other in an immediate way. As a result, perception is real, action is meaningful, and the self feels embodied, vital (enchanted). But as the discussion above clearly indicates, such direct interaction almost never takes place. We are "whole" to almost no one, least of all ourselves. Instead we move in a world of social roles, interaction rituals, and elaborate game-playing that forces us to try to protect the self by developing what Laing calls a "false-self system."

In Figure 2, the self has split in two, the "inner" self retreating from the interaction and leaving the body - now perceived as false, or dead (disenchanted) - to deal with the other in a way that is pure, theater, while the "inner" self looks on like a scientific observer. Perception is thus unreal, and action correspondingly futile. As Laing points out, we retreat into fantasies at work - and in "love" - and establish a false self (identified with the body and its mechanical actions) which performs the rituals necessary for us to succeed in our tasks.

The Reenchantment of the World

…

Figure 2. R. D. Laing's schematic drawing of schizoid interaction (from The Divided

Self, p. 81).

This process begins sometime during the third year of life, is reinforced in kindergarten and grammar school, continues on into the dreary reality of high school, and finally becomes the daily fare of working life. 9 Everyone, says Laing - executives, physicians, waiters, or whatever - playacts, manipulates, in order to avoid being manipulated himself. The aim is the protection of the self, but since that self is in fact cut off from any meaningful intercourse, it suffocates. The environment becomes increasingly unreal as human beings distance themselves from the events of their own lives. As this process accelerates, the self begins to fight back, to nag itself (and thus create a further split) about the existential guilt it has come to feel. We are haunted by our phoniness, our playacting, our flight from trying to become what we truly are or could be. As the guilt mounts, we silence the nagging voice with drugs, alcohol, spectator sports-anything to avoid facing the reality of the situation. When the self-mystification we practice, or the effect of the pills, wears off, we are left with the terror of our own betrayal, and the emptiness of our manipulated "successes."

The statistics that reflect this condition in America alone are so grim as to defy comprehension. There is now a significant suicide rate among the seven-to-ten age group, and teenage suicides tripled between 1966 and 1976 to roughly thirty per day.

Introduction: The Modern Landscape

More than half the patients in American mental hospitals are under twenty-one. In 1977, a survey of nine- to eleven-year-olds on the West Coast found that nearly half the children were regular users of alcohol, and that huge numbers in this age group regularly came to school drunk. Dr. Darold Treffert, of Wisconsin's Mental Health Institute, observed that millions of children and young adults are now plagued by "a gnawing emptiness or meaninglessness expressed not as a fear of what may happen to them, but rather as a fear that nothing will happen to them." Official figures from government reports released during 1971-72 recorded that the United States has 4 million schizophrenics, 4 million seriously disturbed children, 9 million alcoholics, and 10 million people suffering from severely disabling depression. In the early 1970s, it was reported that 25 million adults were using Valium; by 1980, Food and Drug Administration figures indicated that Americans were downing benzodiazepines (the class of tranquilizers which includes Valium) at a. rate of 5 billion pills a year. Hundreds of thousands of the nation's children, according to The Myth of the Hyperactive Child by Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky (1975), are being drugged in the schools, and one-fourth of the American female population in the thirty-to-sixty age group uses psychoactive prescription drugs on a regular basis. Articles in popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan urge sufferers from depression to drop in to the local mental hospital for drugs or shock treatments, so that they can return to their Jobs as quickly as possible. "The drug and the mental hospital," - writes one political scientist, "have become the indispensable lubricating oil and re-servicing factory needed to prevent the complete breakdown of the human engine." 10

These figures are American in degree, but not in kind, Poland and Russia are world leaders in the consumption of hard liquor; the suicide rate in France has been growing steadily; in West Germany, the suicide rate doubled between 1966 and 1976.11 The insanity of Los Angeles and Pittsburgh is archetypal, and the "misery index" has been climbing in Leningrad, Stockholm, Milan, Frankfurt and other cities since mid-century. If America is the frontier of the Great Collapse, the other industrial nations are not far behind.

It is an argument of this book that we are not witnessing a peculiar twist in the fortunes of postwar Europe and America, an aberration that can be tied to such late twentieth-century problems as inflation, loss of empire, and the like. Rather, we are witnessing the inevitable outcome of a logic that is already centuries old, and

The Reenchantment of the World

which is being played out in our own lifetime. I am not trying to argue that science is the cause of our predicament; causality is a type of historical explanation which I find singularly unconvincing.

What I am arguing is that the scientific world view is integral to modernity, mass society, and the situation described above. It is our consciousness, in the Western industrial nations-uniquely so-and it is intimately bound up with the emergence of our way of life from the Renaissance to the present. Science, and our way of life, have been mutually reinforcing, and it is for this reason that the scientific world view has come under serious scrutiny at the same time that the industrial nations are beginning to show signs of severe strain, if not actual disintegration.

From this perspective, the transformations I shall be discussing, and the solutions I dimly perceive, are epochal, and this is all the more reason not to relegate them to the realm of theoretical abstraction. Indeed, I shall argue that such fundamental transformations

impinge upon the details of our daily lives far more directly than the things we may think to be most urgent: this Presidential candidate, that piece of pressing legislation, and so on. There have been other periods in human history when the accelerated pace of

transformation has had such an impact on individual lives, the Renaissance being the most recent example prior to the present. During such periods, the meaning of individual lives begins to surface as a disturbing problem, and people become preoccupied with the meaning of meaning itself. It appears a necessary concomitant of this preoccupation that such periods are characterized by a sharp increase in the incidence of madness, or more precisely, of what is seen to define madness. 12 For value systems hold us (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.

Introduction: The Modern Landscape

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 spoilation, 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 morel than 99 percent of human history, the world was enchanted and I 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 110listic, 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

The Reenchantment of the World

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, Rene 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.

[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 find 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.

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637)

Two archetypes pervade Western thinking on the subject of how reality is best apprehended, archetypes that 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.

The Reenchantment of the World

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 t 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 of the air we now breathe.

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

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 falsifies 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. . . ." 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 super-inducing 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." 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.

The Reenchantment of the World

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.

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

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

This is a truly remarkable passage, for it suggests for the first time that the knowledge of nature comes about under artificial conditions. Vex nature, disturb it, alter it, anything - but do not leave it alone. Then, and only then, will you know it. The elevation of technology to the level of a philosophy had its concrete embodiment in the concept of the experiment, an artificial situation in which nature's secrets are extracted, as it were, under duress.

It is not that technology was something new in the seventeenth century; the control of the environment by mechanical means in the form of windmills or plows is almost as old as homo sapiens himself. But the elevation of this control to a philosophical level was an unprecedented step In the history of human thought. Despite the extreme sophistication of, for example, Chinese technology down to the fifteenth century A. D., it never had occurred to the Chinese (or to Westerners, for that matter) to equate …ing or gunpowder manufacture with pure knowledge, let alone with the key to acquiring such knowledge. 7 Science did not, then, grow up "around" Bacon, and his own lack of experimentation is irrelevant. The details of what constituted an experiment were worked out later, in the course of the seventeenth century. The overall framework of scientific experimentation, the technological notion of the questioning of nature under duress, is the major Baconian legacy.

Although it may be reading too much into Bacon, there is a dark hint that the mind of the experimenter, when it adopts this new perspective, will also be under duress. Just as nature must not be allowed to go its own way, says Bacon in the Preface to the work, so it is necessary that "the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step; and the business be done as if by machinery." To know nature, treat it mechanically; but then your mind must behave mechanically as well.

Rene Descartes also took his stand against Scholasticism and philosophical verbiage, and felt that nothing less than certainty would do for a true philosophy of nature. The Discourse, written some seventeen years after the New Organon, is in part an intellectual autobiography. Its author emphasizes the worthlessness of the ancient learning to himself personally, and in doing so implicates the rest of Europe as well.

The Reenchantment of the World

I had the best education France had to offer, he says (he studied at a Jesuit seminary, the Ecole de La Fleche); yet I learned nothing I could call certain. "As far as the opinions which I had been receiving since my birth were concerned, I could not do better than to reject them completely for once in my life time. . . ." 8 As with Bacon, Descartes' goal is not to "engraft" or "superinduce," but to start anew. But how vastly different is Descartes' starting point! It is no use collecting data or examining nature straight off, says Descartes; there will be time enough for that once we learn how to think correctly. Without having a method of clear thinking which we can apply, mechanically and rigorously, to every phenomenon we wish to study, our examination of nature will of necessity be faulty. Let us, then, block out the external world and sort out the nature of right thinking itself.

Everything I thought I knew up to this point. This act was not undertaken for its own sake, or to serve some abstract principle of rebellion, but proceeded from the realization that all the sciences were at present on shaky ground. "All the basic principles of the sciences were taken from philosophy," he writes, "which itself had no certain ones." Since my goal was certainty," 1 resolved to consider almost as false any opinion which was merely plausible." Thus the starting point of the scientific method, insofar as Descartes was concerned, was a healthy skepticism. Certainly the mind ought to be able to know the world, but first it must rid itself of credulity and medieval rubbish, with which it had become inordinately cluttered. "My whole purpose," he points out, "was to achieve greater certainty and to reject the loose earth and sand in favor of rock and clay."

The principle of methodical doubt, however, brought Descartes to a very depressing conclusion: there was nothing at all of which one could be certain. For all I know, he writes in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), there could be a total disparity between reason and reality. Even if I assert that God is good, and is not deceiving me when I try to equate reason with reality, how do I know there is not a malignant demon running about who confuses me? How do I know that 2 + 2 do not make 5, and that this demon does not deceive me, every time I make the addition, into believing the numbers add up to 4? But even if this were the case, concludes Descartes, there is one thing I do know: that I exist. For even if I am deceived, there is obviously a lime" who is being deceived.

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

And thus, the bedrock certainty that underlies everything: I think, therefore I am. For Descartes, thinking was identical to existing.

This postulate is, of course, only a beginning. I want to be certain of more than just my own existence. Confronted with the rest of knowledge, however, Descartes finds it necessary to demonstrate (which he does most unconvincingly) the existence of a benevolent Deity. The existence of such a God immediately guarantees the propositions of mathematics, which alone among the sciences relies on pure mental activity. There can be no deception when I sum the angles of a triangle; the goodness of God guarantees that my purely mental operations will be correct, or as Descartes says, clear and distinct. And extrapolating from this, we see that knowledge of the external world 'will also have certitude if its ideas are clear and distinct, that is, if it takes geometry as its model (Descartes … terms “ideal" and "distinct"). Science, says Descartes, must become a "universal mathematics"; numbers are the only test of certainty.

The disparity between Descartes and Bacon would seem. to be complete. Whereas the latter sees the foundations of knowledge in sense data, experiment, and the mechanical arts, Descartes sees only confusion in such subjects and finds clarity in the operations of the mind alone. 9 Thus the method he sets forth for acquiring knowledge is based, he tells us, on geometry. The first step is the statement of the problem that, in its complexity, will be obscure and confused. The second step is breaking the problem down into its simplest units, its component parts. Since one can perceive directly and immediately what is clear and distinct in these simplest units, one can finally reassemble the whole structure in a logical fashion. Now the problem, complex though it may be, is no longer unknown (obscure and confused), because we ourselves have first broken it down and then put it back together again. Descartes was so impressed with this discovery that he regarded it as the key, indeed the only key, to the knowledge of the world. "Those long chains of reasoning," he writes, "so simple and easy, which enabled the geometricians to reach the most difficult demonstrations, had made me wonder whether all things knowable to men might not fall into a similar logical sequence." 10

The Reenchantment of the World

Although Bacon's identification of knowledge with industrial utility and his grappling with the concept of experiment based on technology certainly underlie much of our current scientific thought, the implications drawn from the Cartesian corpus exercised a staggering impact on the subsequent history of Western consciousness and (despite the differences with Bacon) served to confirm the technological paradigm - indeed, even helped to launch it on its way. Man's activity as a thinking being-and that is his essence, according to Descartes-is purely mechanical. The mind is in possession of a certain method. It confronts the world as a separate object. It applies this method to the object, again and again and again, and eventually it will know all there is to know. The method, furthermore, is also mechanical. The problem is broken down into its components, and the simple act of cognition (the direct perception) has the same relationship to the knowledge of the whole problem that, let us say, an inch has to a foot: one measures (perceives) a number of times, and then sums the results. Subdivide, measure, combine; subdivide, measure, combine.

This method may properly be caned "atomistic," in the. sense that knowing consists of subdividing a thing into its smallest components. The essence. of atomism, whether material or philosophical, is that a thing consists of the sum of its parts, no more and no less. And Descartes' greatest legacy was surely the mechanical philosophy:" which. followed directly from this method. In the Principles of Philosophy (1644) he showed that the logical linking of clear and distinct ideas led to the notion that the universe was a vast machine, wound up by God to tick forever, and consisting of two basic entities: matter and motion. Spirit, in the form of God, hovers on the outside of this billiard-ball universe, but plays no direct part in it. All nonmaterial phenomena ultimately have a material basis. The action of magnets, attracting each other over a distance, may seem to be nonmaterial, says Descartes, but the application of the method can and will ultimately uncover a particulate basis for their behavior. What Descartes does, really, is provide Bacon's technological paradigm with strong philosophical teeth. The mechanical philosophy, the use of mathematics, and the formal application of his four-step method enable the manipulation of the environment to take place with some sort of logical regularity.

The identification of human existence with pure ratiocination, the idea that man can know all there is to know by way of his reason, included for Descartes the assumption that mind and body, subject and object, were radically disparate entities. Thinking, it would seem, separates me from the world I confront. I perceive my body and its functions, but "I" am not my body. I can learn about the (mechanical) behavior of my body by applying the

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

Cartesian method - and Descartes does this in his treatise On Man (1662) - but it always remains the object of my perception. Thus Descartes depicted the operation of the human body by means of analogy to a water fountain, with mechanical reflex action being the model of most, if not all, human behavior. The mind, res cogitans ("thinking substance"), is in a totally different category from the body, res extensa ("extended substance"), but they do have a mechanical interaction that we can diagram as in Figure 3, below. If the hand touches a flame, the fire particles. attack the finger_ pulling a thread in the tubular nerve which releases the “animal spirits" (conceived as mechanical corpuscles) in the brain. These then run down the tube and jerk the muscles in the hand. 11

There is, it seems to me, an uncanny similarity between this diagram and that of Laing's "false self system” depicted in the Introduction (see.Figure-2). Schizophrenics typically regard their bodies as "other," "not-me." In Descartes' diagram, too, brain (inner self) is the detached observer of the parts of the body; the interaction is mechanical, as though one saw oneself behaving as a robot - a perception that is easily extended to the rest of the world. To Descartes, this mind-body split was true of all perception and behavior, such that in the act of thinking one perceived oneself as a separate entity “in here" confronting things "out there." This schizoid duality lies at the heart of the Cartesian paradigm.

…

Figure 3. Descartes' conception of mind-body interaction.

The Reenchantment of the World

Descartes' emphasis on clear and distinct ideas, and his basing of knowledge on geometry, also served to reaffirm, if not actually canonize, the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction. According to this principle, a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. When I strike the letter" A" on my typewriter, I get an "A" on the paper (assuming the machine is working properly), not a "B." The cup of coffee sitting to the right of me could be put on a scale and found to have a weight of, say, 5.24 ounces, and this fact means that the object does not weigh ten pounds or two grams. Since the Cartesian paradigm recognizes no self-contradictions in logic, and since logic (or geometry), according to Descartes, is the way nature behaves and is known to us, the paradigm allows for no self-contradictions in nature.

The problems with Descartes' view are perhaps obvious, but for now it will suffice to note that real-life operates dialectically, not critically. 12 We love and hate the same thing simultaneously, we fear what we most need, we recognize ambivalence as a norm rather than an aberration. Descartes' devotion to critical reason led him to identify dreams, which are profoundly dialectical statements, as the model of unreliable knowledge. Dreams, he tells us in the Meditations on First Philosophy, are not clear and distinct, but invariably obscure and confused. They are filled with frequent self-contradictions, and possess (from the viewpoint of critical reason) neither internal nor external coherence. For example, I might dream that a certain person I know is my father, or even that I am my father, and that I am arguing with him. But this dream is (from a Cartesian point of view) internally incoherent, because I am simply not my father, nor can he be himself and someone else as well; and it is externally incoherent, because upon waking, no matter how real it all seems for a moment, I soon realize that my father is three thousand miles away, and that the supposed confrontation never took place. For Descartes, dreams are not material in nature, cannot be measured, and are not clear and distinct. Given Descartes' criteria, then, they contain no reliable information.

[n summation, rationalism and empiricism, the twin poles of knowledge so strongly represented in Descartes and Bacon respectively, can be regarded as complementary rather than irrevocably conflicting. Descartes, for example, was hardly opposed to experiment when it served to adjudicate between rival hypotheses - a role it retains to this day. And as I have argued, his atomistic approach, and his emphasis on material reality and its measurement easily lent themselves to the sort of knowledge and economic power that Bacon envisaged as possible for England and Western Europe.

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

Still, this synthesis of reason and empiricism lacked a concrete embodiment, a clear demonstration of how the new methodology might work in practice; the scientific work of Galileo and Newton provided precisely such a demonstration. These men were concerned not merely with the question of methodological exposition (though each certainly made his own contribution to that subject), but sought to illustrate exactly how the new methodology could analyze the simplest events: the stone falling to earth, the ray of light passing through a prism. Through such specific examples the dreams of Bacon and Descartes were translated into a working reality.

Galileo, in his painstaking studies of motion carried out in the twenty years preceding the publication of the New Organon, had already made explicit what Bacon only implied as an artificial construct in his generalizations about the experimental method. 13 Frictionless planes, massless pulleys, free-fall with zero air resistance-all of these "ideal types" that form the basic problem sets in freshman physics are the legacy of that Italian genius, Galileo Galilei. Galileo is popularly remembered for an experiment he never performed-dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa-but in fact he conducted a far more ingenious experiment on falling objects-an experiment that exemplifies many of the major themes of modern scientific inquiry. The belief that large or dense objects should strike the ground faster than light ones follows as a direct consequence of Aristotle's teleological physics, and was widely held throughout the Middle Ages. If things fall to the ground because they seek their "natural place," the earth’s center, we can see why they would accelerate as they approach it. They are excited, they are coming home, and like all of us they speed up as they approach the last leg of the journey. Heavy objects drop a given distance in a shorter time than light ones because there is more matter to become excited, and thus they attain a higher speed and strike the ground first. Galileo's argument, that a very large object and a very small one would make the drop in the same time interval, was based on an assumption that could neither be proven nor falsified: that falling objects are inanimate and thus have neither goals nor purposes. In Galileo's scheme of things, there is no "natural place" anywhere in the universe. There is but matter and motion, and we can but observe and measure it.

The Reenchantment of the World

The proper subject for the investigation of nature, in other words, is not why an object falls-there is no why-but how; in this case, how much distance in how much time.

Although Galileo's assumptions may seem obvious enough to us, we must remember how radically they violated not only the common-sense assumptions of the sixteenth century, but common-sense observations in general. If I look around, and see that I am rooted to the ground, and that objects released in midair fall to the floor, isn't it perfectly reasonable to regard "down" as their natural, that is to say inherent, motion? In his studies of childhood cognition, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget discovered that until about age seven at the latest, children are Aristotelians. 14 When asked why objects fell to the floor, Piaget's subjects replied, "because that is where they belong" (or some variation of this idea). Perhaps most adults are emotional=Aristotelians as=well. Aristotle's proposition that there is no motion without a mover, for example, seems instinctively correct; and most adults, when asked to react immediately to the notion, will affirm it. Galileo refuted the proposition by rolling a ball down two inclined planes, juxtaposed as in Figure 4:

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Figure 4. Galileo's experiment for showing that motion does not require a mover.

The ball rolls down B and up A, but not to quite the same height from which it began. Then it rolls back down A and up B, again losing height; back and forth, back and forth, until the ball finally settles in the "valley" and comes to rest. If we polish the planes, making them smoother and smoother, the ball stays in motion for a longer and longer period of time. In the limiting case, where friction = 0, the motion would go on forever: hence, motion without a mover. But there is one problem with Galileo's argument: there is no limiting case. There are no frictionless planes. The law of inertia may state that a body continues in motion or in a state of rest unless acted upon by an outside force, but in fact, in the case of motion, there is always an outside force, if nothing more than the friction between the object and the surface over which it moves. 15

The experiment Galileo designed to measure distance against time was a masterpiece of scientific abstraction.

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

…

Figure 5. Galileo's experiment for deriving the law of free-fall.

To drop weights from the Leaning Tower, Galileo realized, was absolutely useless. Simon Stevin, the Dutch physicist, had tried a free-fall experiment in 1586 only to learn that the speed was too fast for measurement. Thus, said Galileo, I shall "dilute" gravity by rolling a ball down an inclined plane, made as smooth as possible to reduce friction. If we were to make the slope steeper by increasing the angle a, as in Figure 5, we would reach the free-fall situation that we seek to explore at the limiting case, in which a = 90 degrees. Hence let us take a smaller angle, say a = 10 degrees, and let it serve as an approximation. Galileo first used his pulse as a timer, and later a bucket of water with a hole in it which permitted the water to drip at regular intervals. By running a series of trials, he finally came up with a numerical relationship, that distance is proportional to the square of the time. In other words, if an object-any object, light or heavy-falls a unit distance in one second, then it falls a distance of four times that in two seconds, nine times that in three seconds, and so on. In modern terminology, s = kt, where s is distance, t time, and k a constant.

Both of these inclined plane experiments illustrate the highly ingenious combination of rationalism and empiricism which was Galileo's trademark. Consult the data, but do not allow them to confuse you. Separate yourself from nature so you can, as Descartes would later urge, break it into the simplest parts and extract the essence - matter, motion, measurement. In general terms, Galileo's was not an altogether new contribution to human history, as we shall see in Chapter 3; but it did represent the final stage in the development of nonparticipating consciousness, that state of mind in which one knows phenomena precisely in the act of distancing oneself from them. The notion that nature is alive is clearly a stumbling block to this mode of understanding. For when we regard material objects as extensions of ourselves (alive, endowed with purpose) and allow ourselves to be distracted by the sensuous

The Reenchantment of the World

details of nature, we are powerless to control nature, and thus, from Galileo's point of view, can never really know it. The new science enjoins us to step outside of nature, to reify it, reduce it to measurable Cartesian units; only then can we have definitive knowledge of it. As a result - and Galileo was not interested in ballistics and materials science for nothing - we shall supposedly be able to manipulate it to our advantage.

Clearly, the identification of truth with utility was closely allied to the Galilean program of nonparticipating consciousness and the shift from "why" to "how." Unlike Bacon, Galileo did not make this identification explicit, but once natural processes are stripped of immanent purpose, there is really nothing left in objects but their value for something, or someone, else. Max Weber called this attitude of mind zweckrational, that is, purposively rational, or instrumentally rational. Embedded within the scientific program is the concept of manipulation as the very touchstone of truth. To know something is to control it, a mode of cognition that led Oskar Kokoschka to observe that by the twentieth century, reason had been reduced to mere function. 16 This identification, in effect, renders all things meaningless, except insofar as they are profitable or expedient; and it lies at the heart of the "fact-value distinction," briefly discussed in the Introduction. The medieval Thomistic (Christian-Aristotelian) synthesis, that saw the good and the true as identical, was, in the first few decades of the seventeenth century, irrevocably dismantled.

Of course, Galileo did not regard his method as merely useful, or heuristically valuable, but uniquely true, and it was this epistemological stance that created havoc with the church. For Galileo, science was not a tool, but the one path to truth. He tried to keep its claims separate from those of religion, but failed: the church's historical commitment to Aristotelianism proved to be too great. In this conflict Galileo, as a good Catholic, was understandably worried that the church, by insisting on it so infallibility, would inevitably deal itself a serious blow. Galileo's life, in fact, is the story of the prolonged struggle, and failure, to win the church over to the cause of science; and in his play Galileo, Bertolt Brecht makes this theme of the irresistibility of the scientific method central to the story. He has Galileo wander through the drama carrying a pebble, which he occasionally drops to illustrate the power of sensory evidence. "If anybody were to drop a stone," he asks his friend Sagredo, "and tell [people] that it didn't fall, do you think they would keep quiet?

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

The evidence of your own eyes is a very seductive thing. Sooner or later everybody must succumb to it." And Sagredo's reply? "Galileo, I am helpless when you talk." 11 The logic of science had a historical logic as well. In time all alternative methodologies-animism, Aristotelianism, or argument by papal fiat-crumbled before the seductiveness of free rational inquiry.

The lives of Newton and Galileo stretch across the whole of the seventeenth century, for the former was born in the same year that the latter died, 1642, and together they embrace a revolution in human consciousness. By the time of Newton's death in 1727, the educated European had a conception of the cosmos, and of the nature of "right thinking," which was entirely different from that of his counterpart of a century before. 'He now regarded the earth as revolving around the sun, not the reverse. He believed that all phenomena were constituted of atoms, or corpuscles, in motion and susceptible to mathematical description; and saw the solar system as a vast machine, held together by the forces of gravity. He had a precise notion of experiment (or at least paid lip service to it), and a new notion of what constituted acceptable evidence and proper explanation. He lived in a predictable, comprehensible, yet (in his own mind) very exciting sort of world. For in terms of material control, the world was beginning to exhibit an infinite horizon and endless opportunities.

More than any other individual, Sir Isaac Newton is associated with the scientific world view of modern Europe. Like Galileo, Newton combined rationalism and empiricism into a new method; but unlike Galileo, he was hailed by Europe as a hero rather than having to recant his views and spend his mature years under house arrest. Most important, the methodological combination of reason and empiricism became, in Newton's hands, a whole philosophy of nature which he (unlike Galileo) was successful in stamping upon Western consciousness at large. What made the, eighteenth century the Newtonian century was the solution to the problem of planetary motion, a problem that, it was commonly believed, not even the Greeks had been able to solve (the Greeks, it should be noted, took a more positive view of their own achievement). Bacon had derided the ancient learning, but he did not speak for the majority of Europeans. The strong revival of classical learning in the sixteenth century, for example, reflected the belief that despite the enormous problems with the Greek cosmological model, their epoch was and would remain the true Golden Age of mankind.

The Reenchantment of the World

Newton's precise mathematical description of a heliocentric solar system changed all that; he not only summed up the universe in four simple algebraic formulas, but he also accounted for hitherto unexplained phenomena, made accurate predictions, clarified the relation between theory and experiment, and even sorted out the role of God in the whole system. Above all, Newton's system was atomistic: the earth and sun, being composed of atoms themselves, behaved in the same way that any two atoms did, and vice versa. Thus both the smallest and the largest objects in the universe were seen to obey identical laws. The moon's relationship to the earth was the same as that of a falling apple. The mystery of nearly two millennia was over: one could be reassured that the heavens that confront us on a starry night held no more secrets than a few grains of sand running through our fingers.

Newton deliberately titled his major work, popularly called the Principia, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1686), 19 the two adjectives serving to emphasize his rejection of Descartes, whose Principles of Philosophy he regarded as a collection of unproven hypotheses. Step by step he analyzed Descartes' propositions about the natural world and demonstrated their falsity. For example, Descartes envisaged the matter of the universe circulating in whirlpools, or vortices. Newton was able to show that this theory contradicted the work of Kepler, which seemed quite reliable; and that if one experimented with models of vortices by spinning buckets of fluid (water, oil, pitch), the contents would eventually slow down and stop, indicating that on Descartes' hypothesis the universe would have come to a standstill long ago. Despite his attacks on Descartes' views, it is clear from recent research that Newton was a Cartesian right up to the publication of the Principia; and when one reads the work, one is struck by an awesome fact: Newton made the Cartesian world view tenable by falsifying all of its details. In other words, although Descartes' facts were wrong and his theories insupportable, the central Cartesian outlook - that the world is a vast machine of matter and motion obeying mathematical laws - was thoroughly validated by Newton's work. For all of Newton's brilliance, the real hero (some would say ghost) of the Scientific Revolution was Rene Descartes.

But Newton did not have his triumph so easily. His entire view of the cosmos hinged on the law of universal gravitation, or gravity, and even after it had been given an exact mathematical formulation, no one knew just what this attraction was.

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

Cartesian thinkers pointed out that their own mentor had wisely restricted himself to motion by direct impact, and ruled out what scientists would later call action-at-a-distance. Newton, they argued, has not explained gravity, but merely stated its effects, and thus it really is, in his system, an occult property. Where is this "gravity" that he makes so much of? It can be neither seen, nor heard, nor felt, nor smelled. It is, in short, as much a fiction as the vortices of Descartes.

Privately, Newton agonized over this judgment. He felt that his critics were correct. Early in 1692 or 1693 he wrote his friend the Reverend Richard Bentley the following admission:

That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without tl1e mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has'in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers. 20

Publicly, however, Newton adopted a stance that established, once and for all, the philosophical relationship between appearance and reality, hypothesis and experiment. In a section of the Principia entitled "God and Natural Philosophy," he wrote:

Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power. This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centers of the sun and planets. . . . But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. 21

Newton was echoing the major theme of the Scientific Revolution: our goal is how, not why. That I cannot explain gravity is irrelevant. I can measure it, observe it, make predictions based on it, and this is all the scientist has to do. If a phenomenon is not measurable, it can "have no place in experimental philosophy." This philosophical position, in its various forms called "positivism," has been the public face of modern science down to the present day. 22

The Reenchantment of the World

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Figure 6. Newton's subdivision of white light into monochromatic rays.

The second major aspect of Newton's work was best delineated in the Opticks (1704), in which he was able to wed philosophical atomism to the definition of experiment which had been crystallizing in the minds of scientists throughout the previous century. As a result, Newton's researches on light and color became the model for the correct analysis of natural phenomena. The question was, is white light simple or complex? Descartes, for one, had regarded it as simple, and saw colors as the result of some sort of modification of the light. Newton believed white light was in fact composed of colors that somehow cancelled each other out in combination to produce the effect of white. How to decide between these two claims?

In the experiment illustrated in Figure 6, Newton took white light, broke it into parts with a prism, selected one of the parts, and showed that it could not be further broken down. He did this with each color, demonstrating that monochromatic light could not be subdivided. Next, Newton ran the experiment in the opposite direction: he broke the ray of white light into its parts, and then recombined them by passing them through a convex lens (see Figure 7). The result was white light. This atomistic approach, which follows Descartes' four-step method exactly, establishes the thesis beyond doubt. But as in the case of gravity, the Cartesians took issue with Newton. Where, they asked, is your theory of light and color, where is your explanation of this behavior? And as in the previous case, Newton retreated behind the smokescreen of positivism. I am looking for laws, or optical facts, he replied, not hypotheses.

The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

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Figure 7. Newton's recombination of monochromatic light rays into white light.

If you ask me what "red" is, I can only tell you that it is a number, a certain degree of refrangibility, and the same is true for each of the other colors. I have measured it: that is enough.

In this case too, of course, Newton struggled with possible explanations for the behavior of light, but the combination of (philosophical) atomism, positivism, and experimental method-in short, the definition of reality-is still very much with us today. To know something is to subdivide it, quantify it, and recombine it; is to ask "how," and never get entangled in the complicated underbrush of "why." It is, above all, to distance yourself from it, as Galileo pointed out; to make it an abstraction. The poet may get uncritically effusive about a red streak across the sky as the sun is going down, but the scientist is not so easily deluded: he knows that his emotions can teach him nothing substantial. The red streak is a number, and that is the essence of the matter.

To summarize our discussion of the Scientific Revolution, it is necessary to note that in the course of the seventeenth century Western Europe hammered out a new way of perceiving reality. The most important change was the shift from quality to quantity, from "why" to "how." The universe, once seen as alive, possessing its own goals and purposes, is now a collection of inert matter, hurrying around endlessly and meaninglessly, as Alfred North Whitehead put it. 23 What constitutes an acceptable explanation has thus been radically altered. The acid test of existence is quantifiability, and there are no more basic realities in any object than the parts into which it can be broken down.

The Reenchantment of the World

Finally, atomism, quantifiability, and the deliberate act of viewing nature as an abstraction from which one can distance oneself-all open the possibility that Bacon proclaimed as the true goal of science: control. The Cartesian or technological paradigm is, as stated above, the equation of truth with utility, with the purposive manipulation of the environment. The holistic view of man as a part of nature, as being at home in the cosmos, is so much romantic claptrap. Not holism, but domination of nature; not the ageless rhythm of ecology, but the conscious management of the world; not (to take the process to its logical end point) “the magic of personality,” but “the fetishism of commodities." 24 In the mind of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medieval man (or woman) had been a passive spectator of the physical world. The new mental tools of the seventeenth century made it possible to change all that. It was now within our power to have heaven on earth; and the fact that it was a material heaven hardly made it less valuable.

Nevertheless, it was the Industrial Revolution that put the Scientific Revolution on the map. Bacon's dream of a technological society was not realized in the seventeenth century or even in the eighteenth, although things were beginning to change by 1760. Ideas, as we have said, do not exist in a vacuum. People could regard the mechanical world view as the true philosophy without feeling compelled to transform the world according to its dictates. The relationship between science and technology is very complicated, and it is in fact in the twentieth century that the full impact of the Cartesian paradigm has been most keenly felt. To grasp the meaning of the Scientific Revolution in Western history we must consider the social and economic milieu that served to sustain this new way of thinking. The sociologist Peter Berger was correct when he said that ideas "do not succeed in history by virtue of their truth but by virtue of their relationships to specific social processes. Scientific ideas are no exception.

2 Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

From whence there may arise many admirable advantages, towards the increase of the Operative, and the Mechanick Knowledge, to which this Age seems so much inclined, because we may perhaps be inabled to discern all the secret workings of Nature, almost in the same manner as we do those that are the productions of Art, and are manag'd by Wheels, and Engines, and Springs, that were devised by humane Wit.

-Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665)

The collapse of a feudal economy, the emergence of capitalism on a broad scale, and the profound alteration in social relations that accompanied these changes provided the context of the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe. The equating of truth with utility, or cognition with technology, was an important part of this general process. Experiment, quantification, prediction and control formed the parameters of a world view that made no sense within the framework of the medieval social and economic order. The individuals discussed in Chapter 1 would not have been possible in an earlier age; or, perhaps more to the point, would have been ignored, as were Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste, who pioneered the experimental method in the thirteenth century. Modern science, in short, is the mental framework of a world defined by capital accumulation, and ultimately, to quote Ernest Gellner, it became the "mode of cognition" of industrial society. 1

The Reenchantment of the World

It is not my intention to argue that capitalism "caused" modern science. The relationship between consciousness and society has always been problematic because all social activities are permeated by ideas and attitudes and there is no way to analyze society in a strictly functional way. 2 We are confronted, then, with a structural totality, or historical gestalt, and my point in this chapter will be that science and capitalism form such a unit. Science acquired its factual and explanatory power only within a context that was "congruent" to those facts and explanations. It will be necessary, therefore, to look at science as a system of thought adequate to a certain historical epoch; to try to separate ourselves from the common impression that it is an absolute, transcultural truth. 3

Let us begin our examination of this theme by comparing the Aristotelian and seventeenth-century world views, and then consider the changes wrought by the Commercial Revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the social and economic world of feudalism (see Chart 1).

The most striking aspect of the medieval world view is its sense of closure, its completeness. Man is at the center of a universe that is bounded at its outermost sphere by God, the Unmoved Mover. God is the one entity that, in Aristotle's terminology, is pure actuality. All other entities are endowed with purpose, being partly actual and partly potential. Thus it is the goal of fire to move up, of

Chart 1. Comparison of world views

World View of the Middle Ages

Universe: geocentric, earth in the center of a series of concentric, crystalline spheres. Universe closed, with God, the Unmoved Mover, as the outermost sphere.

Explanation: in terms of formal and final causes, teleological. Everything but God in process of Becoming; natural place, natural motion.

Motion: forced or natural, requires a mover.

Matter: continuous, no vacua.

Time: cyclical, static.

Nature: understood via the concrete and the qualitative. Nature is alive, organic; we observe it and make deductions from general principles.

World view of the seventeenth century

Universe: heliocentric; earth has no special status, planets held in orbit by gravity of the sun. Universe infinite.

Explanation: strictly in terms of matter and motion, which have no higher purposes. Atomistic in both the material and philosophical sense.

Motion: to be described, not explained; law of inertia.

Matter: atomic, implying existence of vacua.

Time: linear, progressive.

Nature: understood via the abstract and quantitative. Nature is dead, mechanistic, and is known via manipulation (experiment) and mathematical abstraction.

Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

Earth (matter) to move down, and of species to reproduce themselves. Everything moves and exists in accordance with divine purpose. All of nature, rocks as well as trees, is organic and repeats itself in eternal cycles of generation and corruption. As a result, this world is ultimately changeless, but being riddled with purpose, is an exceptionally meaningful one. Fact and value, epistemology and ethics, are identical. "What do I know?" and "How should I live?" are in fact the same question.

Turning to the world view of the seventeenth century, we are apt to note first of all the absence of any immanent meaning. As E. A. -Burtt describes it, the seventeenth century, which began with the search for God in the universe, ended by squeezing Him out of it altogether. Things do not possess purpose, which is an anthropocentric notion, but only behavior, which. can (and must) be described in an atomistic, mechanical, and quantitative way. As a result, our relationship to nature is fundamentally altered. Unlike medieval man, whose relationship with nature was seen as being reciprocal, modern man (existential man) sees himself as having the ability to control and dominate nature, to use it for his own purposes. Medieval man was given a purposeful position in the universe; it did not require an act of will on his part. Modern man, on the other hand, is enjoined to find his own purposes. But what those purposes are or should be cannot, for the first time in history, be logically derived. In short, modern science is grounded in a sharp distinction between fact and value; it can only tell us how to do something, not what to do or whether we should do it.

The openness that we see as characteristic of seventeenthcentury consciousness is also antithetical to the medieval cosmos. The universe has become infinite, motion (change) is given, and time is linear. The notion of progress and the sense that activity is cumulative characterize the world view of early modern Europe.

Finally, what is "really" real for the seventeenth century is what is abstract. Atoms are real, but invisible; gravity is real, but, like momentum and inertial mass, can only be measured. In general, abstract quantification serves as explanation. It was this loss of the tangible and meaningful that drove the more sensitive minds of the age-Blaise Pascal and John Donne, for example-to the edge of despair. The "new Philosophy calls all in doubt," wrote the latter in 1611; "Tis all in peeces, all cohaerance gone." Or in Pascal's phrase, "the silences of the infinite spaces terrify me." 5

The Reenchantment of the World

The culture that was permeated by the Aristotelian world view was, as we know, characterized by a feudal economy and a religious way of life. By and large, food and handicrafts were produced not for market and profit, but for immediate consumption and use. Excepting luxury items, trade existed only within local areas, and more closely resembled the tribute structure of the ancient Roman Empire (out of whose disintegration feudalism arose) than our modern notion of commercial exchange. Until the late

fifteenth century almost all shipping was coastal: boats stayed within sight of land for fear of getting lost. The guilds, which produced for personal commission, emphasized quality rather than quantity, and closely guarded the secrets of craftsmanship. There was no notion of mass production, and very little division of labor. The economy was, essentially, a self-contained reward system. It could not be described as “going" anywhere, and, in general, our notions of growth and expansion would have made little sense in this static and self-sufficient world. In the Middle Ages, meaning was assured, both politically and religiously. The church was the ultimate reference when one sought to explain a phenomenon, whether it occurred in nature or in human life. Furthermore, the social order made sense in a direct and personal way. Justice and political power were administered in terms of loyalty and attachment - vassal to lord, serf to landed apprentice to master - and the system, as a result, possessed few abstractions. If the Middle Ages seem, from our vantage point, to be hermetically sealed, they had the advantage (despite the extreme instability afforded by plague and' natural disaster) of being psychologically reassuring to their inhabitants. 6

It was, however, in the economic sphere that the feudal system became increasingly nonviable. In terms of economic payoff, the limits of feudalism had been reached as early as the thirteenth century. Since significant capital investment in agriculture was not forthcoming, there existed an upper limit to productivity. This limit in turn caused a strain that was starting to transform peasant rebellions that had begun in the thirteenth century into a class war. In response to this threat, there emerged an enormous pressure to expand the geographical base of economic operations. New areas for the cultivation of sugar and wheat, direct access to the spices that could disguise bad meat, new sources of wood, and more extensive fishing grounds were all seen as necessary to the survival of European civilization. In addition, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 gave the Ottoman Turks hegemony over Eastern trade, creating the need for a non-Mediterranean passage to the East.

Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

All these factors contributed to the rapid ascendancy of the imperial program of expansion, and with this interest came a host of inventions that made such a program possible. The full-rigged ship appeared, better able to harness the wind. In the sixteenth century the English set cannon in portholes for easier maneuverability. Gunpowder, which the ancient Chinese had invented and used for fireworks displays, became the basis for the firearm industry. It was no accident that Francis Bacon identified the compass and gunpowder as the twin keys to naval hegemony. The first maps designed with compass knowledge - the beautiful portolani still preserved in the libraries of major European cities - began to appear, as did new models of the globe. The images of boats hugging the coast, almost a perfect metaphor for the tight mental horizon of the Middle Ages, was crumbling. It was now the age of Magellan and Columbus and Vasco da Gama. The expansion of consciousness, and territory, made the closed medieval cosmos seem increasingly quaint.

Concomitant to, and directly following on, the. Commercial Revolution was a series of developments which smashed the feudal system and established the capitalist mode of production in Western Europe. Commerce naturally began to influence industry. The Commercial Revolution, with its sharply increased volume of long-distance trading, broke down the personal relationship between guild master and customer. If the former were to sell to distant markets, he needed merchant help and credit. The merchant first obtained exclusive disposal of the manufacturer's output, and later began to advance the artisan money on raw materials. Eventually, the artisan fell into such debt that he had to turn his shop over to the merchant, who became a merchant manufacturer, or entrepreneur. The same process that destroyed guild-master and journeyman turned the peasant into a wage earner. In fifteenth-century England, the rise of the rural "putting out" system (domestic industry), especially in textile manufacture, marked the beginning of a shift of capital investment away from the cities. Peasants began to devote their energies to various aspects of cloth production, and the cloth guilds began to fail as a result.

The Commercial Revolution also generated profits from trade which could be invested in. agriculture and manufacturing.

The Reenchantment of the World

Some industries, such as mining, book printing, shipbuilding (which now employed thousands), and the manufacture of cannon, required great capital outlay from the start, and thus could not be contained within the narrow world of craft production. In some cases, especially when the product had a military use, the state itself became the leading customer. State arsenals, such as the great arsenal at Venice, the scene of much of Galileo's research, became major manufacturing centers in themselves. Military manufacture also had close ties to mining and metallurgy, which expanded dramatically in the early modern period. The application of water power to mining, and the creation of a new type of forge, made possible the casting of guns. A host of technical improvements for pumping, ventilating, and driving mechanisms was developed-and illustrated in lavish detail in such books as … Pirotechni_ (1540) and Agricola's De Re Metallica (1556). England in particular experienced both industrial growth and commercial expansion after 1550. She began casting cannon in iron (since she lacked bronze); introducing such industries as paper, gunpowder, alum, brass, and saltpeter; substituting coal for wood; introducing new techniques in mining and metallurgy; and squeezing the Hanseatic merchants out of the textile market.

There was no way that the medieval Christian-Aristotelian synthesis could withstand such revolutionary changes, and if we consult the characteristics of the seventeenth-century world view listed earlier in this chapter, we find the counterpart to the economic transformation just described. Heliocentricity reflects not only the awareness that the. universe is infinite, but also the European discovery of other worlds and the consequent loss of the sense of European uniqueness. In his On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs (1543), Copernicus cites the widening of geographical horizons as a major influence on his thinking. Turning to the category of explanation, we see that explanations of events are now couched in terms of the mechanical, and mathematically describable, motion of inert matter. Nature (including human beings) is seen as so much stuff to be grasped and shaped. Nothing can have purpose in itself, and values-as Machiavelli was among the first to argue-are just so much sentiment. Reason is now completely (at least in theory) instrumental, zweckrational. One can no longer ask, "Is this good?," but only, "Does this work?," a question that reflects the mentality of the Commercial Revolution and the growing emphasis on production, prediction, and control.

Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

Because we ourselves live in a society so completely dominated by a money economy, because the cash value of things has become their only value, it is difficult for us to imagine an age not ruled by money and almost impossible to understand the formative influence that the introduction of a money economy exerted on the consciousness of early modern Europe. The sudden emphasis on money and credit was the most obvious fact of economic life during the Renaissance. The accumulation of vast sums in the hands of single individuals, like the Medici, gave capital a magical quality, the more so as the increasingly popular sale of indulgences brought entry into heaven under its sway. Salvation had literally been the goal of Christian life; now, since it could be purchased, money was. This penetration of finance into the very core of Christianity could not help but rupture the Thomistic synthesis. The German sociologist George Simmel argued that the money economy "created the ideal of exact numerical calculation," and that the "mathematically exact interpretation of the cosmos" was the "theoretical counterpart of a money economy." In a society that was coming to regard the world as one big arithmetical problem, the notion that there. existed a sacred relationship between the individual and the cosmos seemed increasingly dubious. 7

Money's seemingly unlimited ability to reproduce itself further substantiated the notion of an infinite universe which was so central to the new world view. Profit, the crux of the capitalist system, is open ended. A "capitalist economy and modern methodical science," wrote the historian Alfred von Martin, are the expression of an urge towards what is on principle unlimited and without bounds; they are the. expression of a dynamic wilt to progress ad infinitum. Such were the inevitable consequences of the breakup of an economically as well as intellectually closed community. Instead of a dosed economy administered in the traditional mode and by a privileged group by way of monopoly, we now find an open cycle and the corresponding change in consciousness. 8

The emphasis on individual will which we identify with Renaissance thought, specifically with the merchant-entrepreneurial class, also had an obvious affinity with the new arithmetical Weltanschauung. The same class that came to power through the new economy, that glorified the effort of the individual, and that began to see in financial calculation a way of comprehending the entire cosmos, came to regard quantification as the key to personal success because quantification alone was thought to enable mastery over nature by a rational understanding of its laws.

The Reenchantment of the World

Both money and scientific intellect (especially in its Cartesian identification with mathematics) have a purely formal, and thus "neutral" aspect. They have no tangible content, but can be bent to any purpose. Ultimately, they became the purpose. Historically, the circle was thus complete, as Figure 8 illustrates:

regarding nature arithmetically

creation of wealth, credit, individual success

mastery over nature and its resources through rational calculation

Figure 8. The new cycle of economic-scientific life in early modern Europe.

Finally, even the notion of time-and few things are as basic to human consciousness as the way in which the passage of events is perceived-underwent a fundamental transformation. As Mircea Eliade points out in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the premodern conception of time is cyclical. For the people of the Middle Ages, the seasons and events of life followed one another with a comforting regularity. The notion of time as linear was experientially alien to this world, and the need to measure it correspondingly muted. But by the thirteenth century this situation was already changing. Time, wrote Alfred von Martin,

was felt to be slipping away continuously. . . . After the thirteenth century the clocks in the Italian cities struck all the twenty-four hours of the day. It was realized that time was always short and hence valuable, that one had to husband it and use it economically if one wanted to become the "master of all things." Such an attitude had been unknown to the Middle Ages; to them time was plentiful and there was no need to look upon it as something precious. 9

Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

The new concern with time running out was much in evidence by the sixteenth century. The phrase "time is money" dates from this period, as does the invention of the pocket watch, in which time, like money, could be held in the hand or pocket. The mentality that seeks to grasp and control time was the same mentality that produced the world view of modern science. Western industrial nations have pushed this change in attitude to an almost absurd conclusion. Our cities are dotted with banks that post the time in large electronic lights that flash minute by minute and sometimes second by second (there is one in Piccadilly Circus which actually tells the time in tenths of a second). From the seventeenth century on, the clock became a metaphor for the universe itself. 10

Clearly, then, one can speak of a general "congruence" between science and capitalism in early modern Europe. The rise of linear time and mechanical thinking, the equating of time with money and the clock with the world order, were parts of the same transformation, and each part helped to reinforce the others. But can we make our case more strongly? Can we illustrate the interaction in terms of problems picked, methods used, solutions found, in the careers of individual scientists? In what follows, I shall attempt to demonstrate how these trends crystallized within the mind of Galileo, a figure so central to the Scientific Revolution. But our understanding of Galileo depends in part on our awareness of yet another aspect of the changes described above: the erosion of the barrier between the scholar and the craftsman which occurred in the sixteenth century. For many scientists, including Galileo, it was the availability of a new type of intellectual input which enabled their thoughts to take such novel directions.

Much has been made of the refusal of the College of Cardinals to look through Galileo's telescope, to see the moons of Jupiter and the craters on the surface of the moon. In fact, this refusal cannot be ascribed to simple obstinacy or fear of truth. In the context of the time, the use of a device crafted by artisans to solve a scientific (let alone theological) controversy was considered, especially in Italy, to be an incomprehensible scrambling of categories. These two activities, the pursuit of the truth and the manufacture of goods, were totally disparate, particularly in terms of the social class associated with each. Bacon's argument for a relationship between craft and cognition had as yet made little headway even in England, a country that, compared to Italy, had undergone an enormous acceleration in industrial production.

The Reenchantment of the World

Galileo, who studied projectile motion in the Venice arsenal, conducted scientific studies in what amounted to a workshop, and claimed to understand astronomy better by means of a manufactured device, was something of an anomaly in early seventeenth-century Italy. Where did such a person come from?

It was not until the late fifteenth century that the strong intellectual bias against craft activity, with its lower-class associations, began to break down. The crisis in the feudal economic system was accompanied by a historically unprecedented increase in the social mobility of the artisan class (including sailors and engineers). 11 At the same time, scholarly attacks on Aristotle (and they were not typical) drew ammunition from the history of technological progress, and in doing so lavished praise on the now exalted artisan, "who sought truth in nature, not in books." 12 The result - and the trickle which began ca. 1530 became a torrent by 1600 - was a host of technical works published by artisans (very much an aberration in terms of class structure) and an increasing number of methodological critiques of Aristotelian-Scholastic science based on its complete passivity vis-a-vis nature. This new "mechanics literature," which was written in vernacular tongues, became popular among merchants and businessmen and was frequently reprinted. The breakthrough of artisans, craftsmen, engineers, and mariners into the ranks of publishing and scholarship, notes historian Paolo Rossi, "made possible that collaboration between scientists and technicians and that co-penetration of technology and science which was at the root of the great scientific revolution of the seventeenth century."13

By and large, the artisan classes were simply asking that their work receive a hearing, not seeking a theory of knowledge based on technology; and those writers who did claim that technical activity constituted a mode of cognition (Bacon included) were at a loss as to what such a merger of theory and practice would look like. Yet the period 1550-1650, says Rossi, saw "continuous discussion, with an insistence that bordered on monotony, about a logic of invention. . . ." 14 Technology was hardly new in the sixteenth century, of course, but the level of its diffusion and the insistence on its being a mode of cognition were novel, and these events inevitably began to have an impact on scientists and thinkers. No longer restricted to such devices as catapults and water mills, technology became an essential aspect of the mode of production, and, as such, it began to play a corresponding role in human consciousness. Once technology and the economy became linked in the human mind, the mind started to think in mechanical terms, to see mechanism in nature - as Robert Hooke recognized.

Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

Thought processes themselves were becoming mechanico-mathematico-experimental, that is to say, "scientific." The merger of scholar and craftsman, geometry and technology, was now occurring within the individual human mind.

The change in attitude to artisanry on the part of some scholars also led to the rediscovery and sixteenth-century reprinting of a large number of classical technical works, including those of Euclid, Archimedes, Hero, Vitruvius, Apollonius, Diophantus, Pappus, and Aristarchus. Whereas much of previous mathematics had been conceived in terms of numerology, Pythagorean number mysticism, or even ordinary arithmetic, it was now increasingly possible to approach it from the point of view of an engineer: This development was to have an enormous influence on the work of Galileo, among others.

We have seen that the Galilean method incorporated a denial of teleological explanations (emphasis on how, rather than why); the formulation of physical processes in terms of "ideal types," which reality can be tested against by experiment; and the conviction that mathematical descriptions of motion and other physical processes are the guarantors of precision, and thus of truth. We saw too that Galileo had a very practical approach to such investigations (actually, an engineering approach), and that his method explicitly involved distancing himself from nature in order to grasp it more carefully - an approach that I have called nonparticipating consciousness. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Galileo's particular intellectual outlook stemmed from influences originating outside of the traditional academic framework. Despite his various professorships, he was directly involved with precisely those facets of the technological tradition which were impinging upon certain scholars as a result of the collapse of the dichotomy between scholar and craftsman. Rossi correctly calls Galileo the premier representative of the scholarly and technological traditions, but it is the latter that should be emphasized. 15 With professorships at Pisa and Padua, and contact with popes, dukes, and the educated elite, Galileo was destined for an academic career; but in terms of orientation he did not fit comfortably into such a context. Galileo had direct contact with sailors, gunners, and artisans.

The Reenchantment of the World

Two of his mentors (or heroes), Niccolo Tartaglia and Giovanni Benedetti, had no university education whatever; another, Guido Ubaldo, studied mathematics on his own; and a fourth, Ostilio Ricci, was a professor at the Accademia del Disegno (School of Design) in Florence, a place that was turning out a new breed of artist-engineer. All four of these men stood at the forefront of the Renaissance revival of Archimedes, who had been as much an engineer as a mathematician. Tartaglia and Benedetti were also steeped in technical fieldwork. The former was the founder of the science of ballistics, his book New Science (1537) emerging out of problems he had encountered with the artillery at Verona in 1531; and Benedetti, an early Copernican who vigorously criticized Aristotle and held that bodies of unequal density fell with equal speed, served as court engineer at Parma and Turin. In short, Galileo was unique in the early seventeenth century. He was heir to the new mechanics, which had developed entirely outside the university; but significantly, he himself was …ted to an academic setting.

Although it is not possible, in this brief discussion, to elaborate in any greater detail on Galileo's intellectual antecedents, some comments on Tartaglia are in order because his works and style provide a major clue to Galileo's methodology. New Science was the earliest attempt to apply mathematics to projectiles, and it dealt extensively with the trajectories of cannonballs. Tartaglia was first to break with the Aristotelian notion of discontinuous trajectories, to state that the projectile path was curvilinear, and to demonstrate that the maximum range of a projectile occurred at a gun elevation of 45 degrees. Contradicting Aristotle, he claimed that the air resisted motion, rather than assisting it. Between the covers of a book on ballistics, then, Tartaglia advanced a theoretical analysis of motion. This same combination occurred in a book he wrote in 1551 on the raising of sunken vessels, a topic of obvious interest to a republic like Venice. To this study he appended his Italian translation of Archimedes' essay On Bodies in Water. Again, the text emerged not merely as a technical treatise, but as the first open challenge to Aristotle's law of falling bodies, for it used Archimedes' theory of buoyancy and surrounding media to argue against Aristotle's rigid distinction between up and down. Galileo was to follow in Tartaglia's footsteps, arguing that there was no natural upward motion; using Archimedes to overturn Aristotle; refining the mathematics of projectile motion; and intimately connecting, as Tartaglia had done in all his work, technical fieldwork with theoretical conclusions.

Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

Galileo's involvement in technical problems was most intense during the so-called Paduan period (1592-1610) when he was engaged in his studies of motion. His own laboratory was like a workshop, where he manufactured mathematical apparatus. Galileo tutored privately on mechanics and engineering; did research on pumps, the regulation of rivers, and fortress construction; and brought out his first printed work, on the military compass, or "sector," as it was called. He also invented the "thermobaroscope," and took a strong interest in the field of engineering (now called materials science) which deals with the resistance of materials. Although Galileo made a distinction in his own mind between craft and theory, he broke with the prevailing view that saw them as totally unrelated. He was not just a scientist who also happened to be interested in technology, but rather used technology, both in spirit and method - as the source of theory. His last work, the Two New Sciences, opens with the following conversation between two imaginary interlocutors:

Salviati: The constant activity which you Venetians display in your famous arsenal suggests to the studious mind a large field for investigation, especially that part of the work which involves mechanics; for in this department all types of instruments and machines are constantly being constructed by many artisans, among whom there must be some who, partly by inherited experience and partly by their own observations, have become highly expert and clever in explanation.

Sagredo: You are quite right. Indeed, I myself, being curious by nature, frequently visit this place for the mere pleasure of observing the work of those who, on account of their superiority over other artisans, we call "first rank men." Conference with them has often helped me in the investigation of certain effects including not only those which are striking, but also those which are recondite and almost incredible. 16

The book not only contains a discussion of projectile motion, but also includes a table of ranges for firing. Galileo makes much of the value of his theory to gunners, but as it turns out, they did much more for his science than he did for theirs.

How exactly did the technological tradition surface in Galileo's studies of motion? He not only agreed with the literature of this tradition, that construction is a mode of cognition, that manipulating nature is a key to knowing it, but he also showed precisely how this type of investigation should be carried out.

The Reenchantment of the World

The analysis of projectile motion, of course, was derived from a practical problem, and was, at the same time, a crucial blowelian physics. Since Aristotle divided motion into two … and natural, he concluded that projectile motion seemed to be discontinuous (that is, it had to consist of a force throwing the object into the air) and a natural one (the dearth):

8. natural

9. Aristotelian conception of projectile motion.

When [readers] hear about this theory, they often ask how intelligent [men] could have believed it, since all one has to do is [to observe a] projectile to see that the above "curve" does not correspond to reality. In fact, the acceptance of Aristotle's theory is a good case of the gestalt principle of finding what you seek. Most Probably they not watched a projectile very closely, and never have plotted on a graph exactly where its apogee occurs; then takes place. Furthermore, from the point of view of the thrower, a stone does seem to rise and then vertically drop.

Not until the end of the sixteenth century were cannon fired... range, so such motion was not typically a part of the ent. As late as 1561 graphs in some textbooks were superimposed over a cannon, with the motion of the ball being shown continuous (see Plate 1). In a world of qualitative science, the Aristotelian picture is roughly "true" in that it is one appar... of projectile motion. Only with the rise of standing armies... military concentration on ballistics was there any interest in a precise mathematical description of cannonball flight, which in any case is never really parabolic (see below) due to the effective resistance. We thus see how blurry, or complex, a

simple... be: it seems to be shaped by what is being asked.

In a... closer and closer scrutiny of projectiles made it more ... maintain the Aristotelian distinction between force and ... motion. Since it is virtually impossible to map the [path on a] graph for an object actually thrown into the air, Galileo ... abstracted the essentials of the situation and

Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

"Plate 1. The Aristotelian theory of projectile motion, from Daniele Santbech, Prolr...ematum Astronomicorum (1561). Courtesy Ann Ronan Picture Library.

adapted them to laboratory conditions. Projectile motion, he reasoned, is a free-fall situation with a horizontal component. At the apogee of the curve, the object starts its downward descent due to the force of gravity, but it still retains some of the horizontal impetus originally imparted to it. The path would thus be smooth, not discontinuous, as Aristotle had maintained; and rather than abruptly falling to earth in a sheer vertical drop, the object would describe a curve, a combination ("resultant") of the vertical and horizontal components of motion. Galileo's experiments to ascertain this curve mathematically involved rolling a ball down an inclined plane that had a horizontal deflector at the bottom, and which was sitting on the edge of a table. The ball was released from different points along the plane, and thus in each trial struck the floor at a correspondingly different point. This generated a mass of data-really a collection of curves-which enabled Galileo, using his law of free-fall, to, derive a mathematical description of these

The Reenchantment of the World

curves as parabolic. In a nonresistant medium, he finally concluded, the trajectory of a projectile would be a perfect parabola. The significance of this was not merely the mathematical description of a curve, but the challenge to Aristotelian physics. Not only did this weaken the distinction between forced and natural motion; it also called into question Aristotle's assertion that vacua could not exist (since" projectile motion was supposedly maintained by displacing air rushing in to prevent a vacuum from forming), as well as the whole concept of immanent purpose contained in the Aristotelian doctrines of natural motion and natural place. Galileo's discovery of the independence of the horizontal and vertical components of motion, which is another aspect of the above investigation, led to his formulation of the composition and resolution of forces-what we now call vector mechanics. Here again, measurement, rather than any sort of purpose, is seen to lie at-the heart of scientific explanation (if so it can be called). We see, then, that a military problem, which had been investigated by an engineer like Tartaglia, was converted into a controlled laboratory experiment to produce a mathematical expression, and then used to smash several fundamental tenets of the Aristotelian world view. Galileo's studies of ballistics not only refuted Aristotelian concepts; they were also beginning to delineate a new method for exploring reality.

All of Galileo's investigations served as vivid demonstrations of the relationship between theory and experiment which was slowly forming in the minds of a few European thinkers. They also vindicated the unproven assumption made by the technological literature of the sixteenth century: there can be a fundamental link between cognition and manipulation, between scientific explanation and mastery of the environment. The economic history sketched in the early pages of this chapter is thus much more than an interesting backdrop to these developments in the seemingly abstract realm of scientific thought. Cognition, reality, and the whole Western scientific method are integrally related to the rise of capitalism in early modern Europe.

We have talked in terms of a gestalt principle, of facts being plastic, "created" by theoretical constructs that are in turn linked to a socioeconomic context; and of the Scientific Revolution and its methodology as being part of a larger historical process. We are then brought face to face with an unsettling question: Is reality nothing more than a cultural artifact? Are Galileo's discoveries not

Consciousness and Society in Early Modern Europe

the hard data of science, but simply the products of a world view that is a more or less localized phenomenon? If, as the foregoing analysis suggests, the answer is yes, we are cast adrift on a sea of radical relativism. There is then no Truth, but merely your truth, my truth, the truth of this time or that place. This is the implication of what is commonly called the sociology of knowledge. The distinction between knowledge and opinion, between science and ideology, crumbles, and what is right becomes a matter of majority rule, or "mob psychology."17 Modern science, astrology, witchcraft, Aristotelianism, Marxism, whatever-all become equally true in the absence of objective knowledge and the concept of a fixed, underlying reality. Is there no way to protect ourselves from such a conclusion? '

My answer is that radical relativism arises out of the peculiar I attitude that modern science 'has adopted toward participating consciousness, which I discussed very briefly in the Introduction.

It will be necessary, in the first place, then, to analyze the nature of participating consciousness in some detail. To do so, we must pursue the sociology of knowledge into a neglected chapter in the story of the Scientific Revolution: the world of the occult.

The phrase is Weber's: riie E1zt:aubenmg der Welt. Schiller, a century earlier, had an equally telling expression for it: die Entgottenung der Natur, the "disgodding" of nature. The history of the West, according to both the sociologist and the poet, is the progressive removal of mind, or spirit, from phenomenal appearances.

The hallmark of modern consciousness is that it recognizes no element of mind in the so-called inert objects that surround us. The whole materialist position, in fact, assumes the existence of a world "out there" independent of human thought, which is "in here." And it also assumes that the earth, excepting certain slow evolutionary changes, has been roughly the same for millennia, while the people on that earth have regarded the unchanging phenomena around them in different ways at different times. According to modern science, the further back in time we go, the more erroneous are men's conceptions of the world. Our own knowledge, on this sche

The Reenchantment of the World

ma, is of course not perfect, but we are rapidly eliminating the few remaining errors that do exist, and shall gradually arrive at a fully accurate understanding of nature, free of animistic or metaphysical presuppositions. Modern consciousness thus regards the thinking of previous ages not simply as other legitimate forms of consciousness, but as misguided world views that we have happily outgrown. It holds that the men and women of those times thought they understood nature, but without our scientific sophistication their beliefs could not help but be childish and animistic. The "maturation" of the human intellect over the ages, particularly in this century, has (so

the argument goes) almost completely corrected this accretion of superstition and muddled thinking. 1

One of the goals of this chapter is to demonstrate that it is this attitude, rather than animism, which is misguided; and that this attitude stems, in part, from our inability to enter into the world view of premodern man. We have already established that modern science and capitalism were, historically, inextricably intertwined, and can appreciate that the perceptions and ideology of modern science are a part of large-scale social and economic developments. But because this scientific attitude is our consciousness, it is nearly impossible to abandon, even momentarily. Indeed, doing so is usually regarded, as prima facie evidence for insanity. Nor does the recognition of the relativity our own consciousness serve, by itself, to place us at the center of a different consciousness. In short, it is very difficult to form a reliable impression of the consciousness of premodern society.

One thing that is certain about the history of Western consciousness, however, is that the world has, since roughly 2000 B.C., been progressively disenchanted, or "disgodded." Whether animism has any validity or not, there is no doubting its gradual elimination from Western thought. For reasons that remain obscure, two cultures in particular, the Jewish and the Greek, were responsible for the beginnings of this development. Although Judaism did possess a strong gnostic heritage (the cabala being its only survivor), the official rabbinical (later, talmudic) tradition was based precisely on the rooting out of animistic beliefs.2 Yahweh is a jealous God: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"; and throughout Jewish history, the injunction against totemism-worshipping "graven images"-has been central. The Old Testament is the story of the triumph of monotheism over Astarte, Baal, the golden calf, and the nature gods of neighboring "pagan" peoples. Here we

The Disenchantment of the World (1)

see the first glimmerings of what I have called nonparticipating consciousness: knowledge is acquired by recognizing the distance between ourselves and nature. Ecstatic merger with nature is judged not merely as ignorance, but as idolatry. The Divinity is to be experienced within the human heart; He is definitely not immanent in nature. The rejection of participating consciousness, or what Owen Barfield calls "original participation," was the crux of the covenant between the Jews and Yahweh. It was precisely this contract that made the Jews "chosen" and gave them their unique historical mission. 3

The Greek case is less easily summarized. At some point between the lifetime of Homer and that of Plato, a sharp break occurred in Greek epistemology so as to turn it away from original participation and contribute, out of very different motives, to the gradual disappearance of animism. It is difficult to conceive, of a mentality that made virtually no distinction between subjective thought processes and what we call external phenomena, but it is likely that down to the time of the Iliad (ca. 900-850 B.C.) such was

the case. The Iliad contains no words for internal states of mind. Given its contextual usage in this work, the Greek word psyche, for

example, would have to be translated as "blood." In the Odyssey, however (a century or more later), psyche clearly means "sou1." The

separation of mind and body, subject and object, is discernible as a historical trend by the sixth century before Christ; and the poetic,

or Homeric mentality, in which the individual is immersed in a sea of contradictory experiences and learns about the world through

emotional identification v;ith it (original participation), is precisely what Socrates and Plato intended to destroy. In the Apology, Soc

rates is aghast that artisans learn and pursue their craft by "sheer instinct," that is, by social osmosis and personal intuition. As

Nietzsche pointed out, the phrase "sheer instinct," which in Socrates' mouth could only be an expression of contempt, epitomized

the attitude of Greek rationalism toward any other mode of cogni

tion. For this reason, he found Socrates (and indeed all of Western

civilization) tragically inverted. The creative person, wrote

Nietzsche, works by instinct and checks himself by reason; Soc

rates did just the reverse. And, Nietzsche continued, it was the

Socratic form of rational knowledge which (despite Socrates' trial

and sentencing) spread itself across the public face of Hellenism

after his death.4

According to Eric Havelock, Plato regarded. nonparticipating

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consciousness, as exemplified by the Greek poetic tradition, as pathological. 5 Yet this tradition had been the principal mode of consciousness in Greece down to the fifth or sixth century before Christ, and during that period it served as the sole vehicle for learning and education. Poetry was an oral medium. It was recited before a large audience that memorized the verses in a state of autohypnosis. Plato used the term mimesis, or active emotional identification, to describe this submission to the spell of the performer, a process with physiological effects that were both relaxing and erotic, and that involved a total submergence of oneself into the other. Pre-Homeric Greek life, concludes Havelock, "was a life without self-examination, but as a manipulation of the resources of the unconscious in harmony with the conscious, it was unsurpassed.

Plato himself represented a relatively new tradition, one that sought to analyze and classify events rather than "merely" experience or imitate them. He spoke for the notion that subject was not object, and that the proper function of the former was to inspect and evaluate the latter. This perception could never take place if subject and object were merged in the act of knowing; or, to be more precise, if they never diverged to begin with. In the poetic tradition, the basic learning process was a sensual experience. In contrast, the Socratic dictum "know thyself" posited a deliberately nonsensual type of knowing.

Plato's work thus marks the canonization of the subject/object distinction in the West. Increasingly, the Greek began to see himself as an autonomous personality apart from his acts; as a separate consciousness rather than a series of moods. Poetry, to Plato, spoke of contradictory experiences, described a "many-aspect man" of inconsistent traits and perceptions. Plato's own psychological ideal was that of an individual organized around a center (ego), using his will to control his instinct and thereby unify his psyche. Reason thus becomes the essence of personality, and is characterized by distancing oneself from phenomena, maintaining one's identity. Poetry, mimesis, the whole Homeric tradition, on the other hand, involves identification with the actions of other people and things-the surrendering of identity. For Plato, only the abolition of this tradition could create the situation in which a subject perceives by confronting separate objects. Whereas the Jews saw participating consciousness as sin, Plato saw it as pathology, the archenemy of the intellect. At bottom, says Havelock,

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Platonism "is an appeal to substitute a conceptual discourse for an

imagistic one."6

Of course, Plato did not have his victory overnight. As Owen Barfield points out, original participation, knowledge via imagery rather than concepts, survived in the West down to the Scientific Revolution. Throughout the Middle Ages men and women continued to see the world primarily as a garment they wore rather than a collection of discrete objects they confronted. Yet the mimetic tradition was severely attenuated from Plato's time on, for some form of objectivity was now present; and it was chiefly the alchemical and magical tradition that attempted to demonstrate how limited this objectivity was.

The "Hermetic wisdom, 11 as it has been called, was in effect dedicated to the notion that real knowledge occurred only via the union of subject and object, in a psychic-emotional identification with images rather than a purely intellectual examination of concepts. As indicated, this outlook had been the essential consciousness of Homeric and pre-Homeric Greece. In the following analysis of the Renaissance and medieval world views, then, it will be understood that premodern consciousness was located, mentally

speaking, somewhere between pre-Homeric consciousness and the

objective outlook of seventeenth-century Europe. \Vith the Scien

tific Revolution, the considerable remnants of original participation were finally ousted, and this process constituted a significant episode in the history of Western consciousness.

The sixteenth century was an unusual period in European intellectual history, one that \vitnessed a vigorous re\"ival, or resur

facing, of the occult sciences, which church Aristotelianism had

successfully kept out of sight during the Middle Ages. Yet despite its vast differences from medieval Aristotelianism, the alchemical world view had in fact permeated medieval consciousness to a

significant degree. Aristotle's doctrine of natural place and motion,

for example, was part of the magical doctrine of sympathy, that like

knows like; and the notion that the excitement of "homecoming" causes a body in free-fall to accelerate as it nears the earth is cer

tainly an expression of participating consciousness. Furthermore,

the highly repetitive and meditative nature of alchemical oper

ations (grinding, distilling, and so on), which would induce altered

states of consciousness through a prolonged narrowing of attention, was duplicated in hundreds of medieval craft techniques such as stained glass, weaving, calligraphy, metalworking, and

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the illumination of manuscripts. In general, medieval life and thought were significantly affected by animistic and Hermetic notions, and to some extent can be discussed as a unified conscious

ness.7

What were the common denominators of that consciousness?

What did knowledge consist of, given the epistemological

framework of sixteenth-century Europe? In a word, in the recogni

tion of resemblance. 8 The world was seen as a vast assemblage of

correspondences. All things have relationships with all other

things, and these relations are ones of sympathy and antipathy.

Men attract women, lodestones attract iron, oil repels water, and

dogs repel cats. Things mingle and touch in an endless chain, or

rope, vibrated (wrote Della Porta in Natural Magic) by the first

cause, God. Things are also analogous to man in the famous alchemical concept of the microcosm and the macrocosm: the rocks of the earth are its bones, the rivers its veins, the forests its hair and the cicadas its dandruff. The world duplicates and reflects itself in

an endless network of similarity and dissimilarity. It is a system of

hieroglyphics, an open book "bristling \\;th written signs."

How, then, does one know what goes with what? The key, as

one might imagine, consists it! deciphering those signs, and \'\'as

appropriately termed the "doctrine of signatures." "Is it not true,"

wrote the sixteenth-century chemist Oswald Croll, "that all herbs,

plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic books and signs?" Through the stars, the Mind of God impressed itself on the phenomenal world, and thus

knowledge had the structure of divinatIon, or augury. The word

"divination" should be taken literall_r: finding the Divine, par

ticipating in the Mind that stands behind the appearances. Croll

gives as one example the "fact" that walnuts prevent head ailments

because the meat of the nut resembles the brain in appearance.

Similarly, a man's face and hands must resemble the soul to which

they are joined, a concept retained in palmistry even as it is prac

ticed today, and in the common proverb (in many languages) that

"the eyes are the windows of the soul."

One of the clearest expositions of the doctrine of signatures is

found in the work of the great Renaissance magician Agrippa von

Nettesheim, his De Occulta Philosophia of 1533.9 In chapter 33 of this

book he writes:

All Stars have their peculiar natures, properties, and conditions, the

Seals and Characters whereof they produce, through their rays, even

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in these inferior things, viz., in elements, in stones, in plants, in animals, and their members; whence every natural thing receives, from a harmonious disposition and from its star shining upon it, some particular Seal, or character, stamped upon it; which Seal or character is the significator of that star, or harmonious disposition, containing in it a peculiar Virtue, differing from other \irtues of the same matter, both generically, specifically, and numerically. Every thing, therefore, hath its character pressed upon it by its star for some particular effect, especially by that star which doth principally govern it.

Given this system of knowledge, modern distinctions between inner and outer, psychic and organic (or physical), do not exist. If you wish to promote love, says Agrippa, eat pigeons; to obtain courage, lions' hearts. A wanton woman, or charismatic man, possesses the same virtue as a lodestone, that of attraction.lO Diamonds, on the other hand, weaken the lodestone, and topaz weakens lust. Everything thus bears the mark of the Creator, and knowledge, says Agrippa, consists of "a certain participation," a (sensuous) sharing in His Divinity. This is a world permeated with meaning, for it is according to these signatures that everything belongs, has a place. "There is nothing found in the whole world," he writes, "that hath not a spark of the \irtue [of the world soul]." "Every thing hath its determinate and particular place in the exemplary world."

During his lifetime Agrippa was branded a charlatan and conjurer, and as we have noted, magic and Hermeticism were in continual conflict with the church. But this conflict, like the theory of knowledge that underlay it, was also one of resemblance, for the medieval church (as we shall discuss below) was steeped in magical practices and sacraments from which it derived its power on the local level. Consequently, it would tolerate no rivalry on this score.ll The important point, however, is that all premodern knowledge had the same structure. As Michel Foucault tells us, divination "is not a rival form of knowledge; it is part of the main body of knowledge itself." Erudition and Hermeticism, Petrarch and Ficino, ultimately inhabited the same mental universe.

It is the collapse of this mental universe, beginning (if such a thing can be dated) in the late sixteenth century, that so radically marks off the medieval from the modern world; and nowhere is this more clearly portrayed than in Cervantes' epic, Don Quixote. 12

The Don's adventures are an attempt to decipher the world, to transform reality itself into a sign. His journey is a quest for resemblances in a society that has come to doubt their significance.

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Hence, that society judges him to be mad, "quixotic." Where he

sees the Shield of Mambrino, Sancho Panza can make out only a barbers basin; where (to take the most famous example) he per

ceives giants, Sancho sees only windmills. Hence the literal mean

ing of paranoia: like knowledge. The division of psychic and mate

rial, mind and body, symbolic and literal, has finally occurred. The

madman perceives resemblances that do not exist, that are seen as

not signifying anything at all. By 1600 he is "alienated in analogy,"

whereas four or five decades earlier he was the typical educated

European. For the madman the crown makes the king, and

Shakespeare captured the shift in the definition of reality in his line, "All hoods do not monks make." Given the meaninglessness

of such associations, practices such as conjuring could no longer be

regarded as effective. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," says

Glendower to Hotspur in Henry IV, Part I. "Why so can I, or so can

any man," replies the latter; "But wil1 they come when you do call

for them?"

Hotspur's words are the first steps toward a relationship with

the world with which we are very familiar. Glendower, on the

other hand, sounds the last chords of a world largely lost to our

imaginations; a world of resonance, resemblance, and incredible

richness. Yet these chords may, even today, echo vaguely in our

subconscious minds. Before turning to a more extended discussion of the collapse of original participation, then, it wil1 be worth our

while to stay v.'ith it a bit longer, and see if we cannot feel our way

into this manner of thinking.

Participation is self and not-self identified at the moment of ex

perience. The pre-Homeric Greek, the medieval Englishman (to a

lesser extent, of course), and the present-day African tribesman

know a thing precisely in the act of identification, and this identifi

cation is as much sensual as it is intellectual. It is a totality of

experience: the "sensuous intellect," if the reader can imagine such

a thing. \Ve have so lost the ability to make this identification that

we are left today with _only 1\vo experiences that consist of par

ticipating consciousness: lust and anxiety. As I make love to my

partner, as I immerse myself in her body, I become increasingly

"lost." At the moment of orgasm, I am the act; there is no longer an

"I" who experiences it. Panic has a similar momentum, for if suffi

ciently terrified I cannot separate myself from what is happening to

me. In the psychotic (or mystic) episode, my skin has no boundary.

I am out of my mind, I have become my environment. The essence

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of original participation is the feeling, the bodily perception, that there stands behind the phenomena a "represented" that is of the same nature as me-mana, God, the world spirit, and so on. 13 This notion, that subject and object, self and other, man and environment, are ultimately identical, is the holistic world view.

Of course, we sometimes experience participation in less intense forms, although sexual desire and panic remain the best examples. In truth-and we shall treat this in detail in Chapter 5--participation is the rule rather than the exception for modern man, although he is (unlike his premodern counterpart) largely unconscious of it. Thus as I wrote the first few pages of this chapter, down to this page, at least, I was so absorbed in what I was doing that I had no sense of myself at all. The same experience happens to me at a movie, a concert, or on a tennis court. Nevertheless, the consciousness of official culture dictates my "recognition" that I am not, and can never be, my experiences. Whereas my premodern counterpart felt, and saw, that he was his experiences-that his consciousness was not some special, independent consciousness-I classify my own participation as some form of "recreation," and see reality in terms of the inspection and evaluation Plato hoped men would achieve. I thus see myself as an island, whereas my medieval or ancient predecessor saw himself more like an embryo. And although there is no going back to the womb, we can at least appreciate how comforting and meaningful such a state of mind, and view of reality, truly was.

But was this view at an real? Weren't my predecessors simply li\-ins in the same world as I am, but somehow conceptualizing it differently (i.e., incorrectly)? Doesn't the subject/object dichotomy represent a distinct advance in human knowledge over this primitive, even orgiastic identification of self and other? These questions, which are all essentially asking the same thing, are the ones most crucial to the history of consciousness, and require closer scrutiny. For there are only two possibilities here. Either original participation, which was the basic mode of human cognition (despite the gradual attenuation of that mode) do\\'n to the late sixteenth century, was an elaborate self-deception; or original participation really did exist, was an actual fact. 14 We shall try to decide between these two alternatives by means of an analysis of the paradigm science of participation, alchemy.

If the standard history textbooks are to be believed, alchemy was the attempt to find a chemical substance that, when added to lead,

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transformed it into gold. Alternatively, it was the attempt to prepare a liquid, the elixir vitae, that would prolong human life indefinitely. Since neither of these goals is attainable, the entire alchemical enterprise is dismissed as a nonsensical episode (more than two thousand five hundred years) in the history of science, a venture that could be viewed as tragic were it not so silly in content. At most, modern science concedes that the alchemists did, in the pursuit of their spurious ends, discover as by-products various medicines and chemical substances that have some utilitarian value.

As is the case with all cliches, this one contains something of the truth. The quick production of the lapis, or philosopher's stone, whether in the form of gold or elixir, was certainly an irresistible goal for many alchemists, and the term "puffer" was used to denote the commercial opportunist and charlatan. "Of all men," wrote Agrippa, "chymists are the most perverse."lS Yet a brief perusal of medieval and Renaissance alchemical plates, such as those collected by Carl Jung, is enough to convince us that such charlatanry was hardly the whole story to alchemy. 16 What could these strange images (see Plates 2-6) possibly mean? A green and red snake swallowing its tail; an "androgyne," or man-woman, joined at the waist with an eagle rising behind it and a pile of dead eagles at its feet; a green lion biting the sun, with blood (actually mercury) dripping from the resultant "wound"; a human skeleton perched on a black sun; the sun casting a long shadow behind the earth-these and other images are so fantastic as to defy comprehension. Surely, if all one \'\'anted was health or wealth, there was no need for the painstaking preparation of such elaborately illustrated manuscripts. Mythopoeic artwork of this sort forces us to abandon the simplistic utilitarian interpretation of alchemy and try, instead, to chart the totally unfamiliar terrain of consciousness that this bizarre imagery represents.

It was the achievement of Carl Jung first to decipher the symbols of alchemy by means of clinical material from dream analysis, and then on this basis to formulate the argument that alchemy was, in essence, a map of the human unconscious. Central to Jungian psychology is the concept of "individuation," the process whereby a person discovers and evolves his Self, as opposed to his ego. The ego is a persona, a mask created and demanded by everyday social interaction, and, as such, it constitutes the center of our conscious life, our understanding of ourselves through the eyes of others.

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Plate 2. The Ourobouros, symbol of integration. S\'n(1siu_ \1s. !!rec :!327, f.279. Phot. Bibl. nat. Paris.

The Self, on the other hand, is our true center, our awareness of ourselves without outside interference, and it is developed by

bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of our mind into

harmony. Dream analysis is one way of achieving this harmony. We can unlock our dream symbols and then act on the messages of

our dreams in waking life, which in turn begins to alter our dreams. But how to analyze our dreams? They are frequently cryp

tic, and so often violate causal sequence as to border on gibberish.

But it is precisely here, Jung discovered, that alchemy can make a

crucial contribution. In fact, it is by something like the doctrine of

signatures that we are able to figure out what our dreams mean,17

The language of alchemy, as well as of dreams, follows a type of

reasoning which I have termed "dialectical," as opposed to the

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Plate 3. The alchemical androgyne. Aurora consurgens, Ms. Rh 172, Zentralbibliothek Zurich.

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Plate 4. The green lion swallowing the sun. Arnold of Villanova, Rosarium philosophorum (1550), Ms. 394a, f.97, Kantonsbibliothek (Vadiana), St. Gallen.

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Plate 5. So/niger: the nigredo; from l. D. Myliu5, Piziiosopizia refonnata (1622). Repro

duced by C. G. lung in Gesammelte Werke, pub!. Walter-Verlag.

critical reason characteristic of rational, or scientific, thought. 18 As

we saw earlier, Descartes regarded dreams as perverse because they violated the principle of noncontradiction. But this violation is

not arbitrary; rather, it emerges from a paradigm of its own, one

that could well be called alchemical. This paradigm has as a central

tenet the notion that reality is paradoxical, that things and their

opposites are closely related, that attachment and resistance have

the same root. We know this on an intuitive level already, for we

speak of love-hate relationships, recognize that what frightens us

is most likely to liberate us, and become suspicious if someone

accused of wrongdoing protests his or her innocence too hotly. In

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short, a thing can both be and not be at the same time, and as lung, ;_. Freud, and apparently the alchemists all understood, it usually is.

Within the context of the alchemical paradigm, it is critical reason that appears meaningless, and actually rather stupid, in its attempt to rob significant images of their meaning. Thus, in the example given in Chapter I, if I dream that I am my father and that I am t_:1J' arguing with him, it is irrelevant that this is not logically or empiri'\J._; cally possible. What is relevant is that I awake from the dream in a ;wr:' cold sweat and remain troubled for the rest of the day; that my

.1" psyche is in a state of civil war, tom between what I want for myself and what my (introjected) father wants for me. To the extent that this dilemma remains unresolved, I shall be fragmented, un-whole; and since Oung believed) the drive for wholeness is inherent in the psyche, my unconscious will send out dream after

Plate 6. The sun and his s1uufow complete the work, from Michael Maier, Scrutinium chymicum (1687). Reproduced by C. G. Jung in Gesammelte Werke, pub!. WalterVerlag.

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dream on this particular theme until I take steps to resolve the conflict. And because life is dialectical, so too will be my dream images. They will continue to violate the logical sequences of space and time, and to represent opposing concepts that, on closer examination, prove to be pretty much the same.

Jung's specific contribution, both to the history of alchemy and to depth psychology, was the discovery that patients with no previous knowledge of alchemy were having dreams that reproduced the imagery of alchemical texts with a bewildering similarity. In his famous essay "Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy," Jung recorded a series of one such patient's dreams and produced for nearly every dream a separate alchemical plate that duplicated the dream symbols in an unmistakable way.19 Inasmuch as Jung claimed that others had produced a similar set of dream images while undergoing the individuation process, Jung \'.las forced to conclude that this process was indeed inherent in the psyche and that the alchemists, without really knowing exactly what they were doing, had recorded the transformations of their own unconscious which they then projected onto the material world. The gold of which they spoke was thus not really gold, but a "golden" state of mind, the altered state of consciousness which

, overwhelms the person in an experience such as the Zen satori or the G_od-experience recorded by such Western mystics as Jacob Boehme (himself an alchemist), St. John of the Cross, or St. Theresa of A vila. Far from being some pseudo-science or protochemistry, then, alchemy was fully real-the last major synthetic iconography of the human unconscious in the \Vest. Or, in Norman O. Brown's terms, "the last effort of Western man to produce a science based on an erotic sense of reality.fllO

Alchemy's rejection as a science, in Jung's view, coincided with the repression of the unconscious characteristic of the West since the Scientific Revolution-a repression that he saw as having tragic consequences in the modern era, including widespread mental illness and orgies of genocide and barbarism.11 Thus Jung believed that the failure of each individual to confront his own psychic demons, the part of his personality he hated and feared (what Jung called the "shadow"), inevitably had disastrous consequences; and tha_ the only hope, at least on the individual level, was to undertake the psychic journey that was in fact the essence of alchemy. In the cryptic words of the seventeenth-century alchemist and Rosicrucian, Michael Maier: The SU11 and his shadow complete the work

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(see Plate 6).22 The creation of the Self lies not in repressing the

unconscious, but in reintroducing it to the conscious mind.

Armed with this analysis, Jung found that the peculiar imagery represented in alchemical texts suddenly made sense. The "Ourobouros" of Plate 2, for example, a symbol that occurs (in one form or another) in almost every culture, represents the achievement of psychic integration, the unification of opposites. Green is the color of an early stage of the alchemical process, whereas red (the rubedo, as it was called) is that of a later one. Hence beginning and end, head and tail, alpha and omega, are united. The gold, or the Self, inherent from the first, is finally separated out. The world is the same, but the person has changed. As T. S. Eliot put it in "Little Gidding":

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

The dialectical nature of reality, which was embedded in the

theory of resemblance, was captured in alchemy by pictures of

androgynes (Plate 3), hermaphrodites, and brother-sister mar

riages or sexual unions. The conjunction of opposites occurs in the

alchemical alembic, where lead is seen to be gold in potentia, where mercury is both liquid and metal, where what is volatile (represented by the rising eagle) becomes fixed, and what is fixed (the dead eagles at the bottom) volatile.

The danger of the work is the point of Plate 4, which depicts a

green lion attempting to eat or swal1ow the sun. As already indi

cated, green is an early stage of the process, where the raw, vegetative force of the unconscious is released and the conscious mind feels itself in danger of being devoured. The alchemical slogan, "Do not use high-grade fires," is qppropriate here. The cycle of sublimation and distillation is slow and infinitely tedious, as are all the alchemical operations, and any attempt to hasten the process will only prove abortive. The danger in tapping the unconscious is that one will get more than one bargained for; that the repressed unconscious will overwhelm the conscious as a hole is poked in the dike separating the two. This phenomenon is well known to many psychiatrists, as well as to many people who have studied yoga, meditation, or have experimented with psychedelic drugs (J/high

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grade fires").23 The person in search of integration may be permanently scared off, or forced to undertake his or her search from the very beginning. At the very worst, the eruption of unconscious information can dismember the soul, result in psychosis.24 The alchemical process is often summed up in the phrase solve et coagula; the persona is dissolved (on the psychic level) so as to enable the real Self to coagulate, or come together. But as R. D. Laing points out in The Politics of Experience, there is no guarantee that this Self will coagulate; indeed, such a result may be especially unlikely in a culture that is terrified of the unconscious and rushes to drug the individual back into what it defines as reality.25 Even the relatively alchemical culture of the Middle Ages was keenly aware of such danger, as Plate 4 indicates; and it was part of the alchemical opus to "tame" the green lion, or "cut off his paws"an act that (in material terms, from our point of view) consisted in touching sulfur with mercury or boiling it in acid for an entire day. If this taming were not carried out, the breakthrough of the unconscious, the dissolution of the ego, the collapse of the subject/object distinction, the sudden conviction that there is a Mind behind phenomenal appearances-this single, unified flash of light could catapult the practitioner into heaven or hell, depending on his or her makeup and the particular circumstances. Hence another crucial alchemical slogan: NO1Inulli perierunt in opere nostro-"not a few have perished in our work."

Finally, Plate 5 represents the first phase of the work, the nigredo, in which the lead is dissolved and the solution becomes black. This is the "dark night of the soul," the point at \vhich the persona has been dissolved and the Self has not yet appeared on the horizon. Hence the skeleton, the death of the ego, and the black sun (sol niger), representing acute depression. The "shadow" has now completely eclipsed the conscious ego. In The Divided Self, Laing quotes the writing of a schizophrenic patient who, with no previous knowledge of alchemy, uses the phrase "black sun" to describe her way of experiencing the world. But in dialectical fashion, lead contains the nugget of gold, and the skilled alchemist can bring about the transmutation by careful attention to his experiments. Hence the concluding line of Laing's book: "If one could go deep into the depth of the dark earth one would discover 'the bright gold,' or if one could get fathoms down one would discover 'the pearl at the bottom of the sea.' "26

Jung's analysis of alchemy is brilliant, and he produces provoca

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tive evidence that the alchemists were quite deliberate about the

psychic aspect of their work. Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi,

they write; "our gold is not the common [Le., commercial] gold."

Tam ethice quam physice; "as much moral as material." Or as one al

chemist, Gerhard Dorn, candidly put it: "Transform yourselves into

living philosophical stones!" Thus Jung was able to claim that what

, was "really" taking place in the alchemist's laboratory was the psy

chic process of self-realization, which was then projected onto the

contents of the furnace or alembic. The alchemist thought he made

gold, but of course he didn't; rather, he made some concoction that,

due to his altered state of consciousness, he called "gold."

This hypothesis is a very attractive one, especially since we know that in the course of their work alchemists practiced a number of

techniques that can produce these altered psychic states: medita

tion, fasting, yogic or "embryonic" breathing, and sometimes the

chanting of mantras. These techniques have been practiced for

millennia, especially in Asia, for the express purpose (in our terms)

of breaking down the divide between the conscious and uncon

scious parts of the mind. They strip the person of mundane de

sires, enabling him to penetrate another dimension of reality; and

as Western science is just beginning to discover, they are certainly

efficacious in physiological terms, especially if we adopt the (to me,

quite reasonable) position that soul is another name for what the

body does. It is easy to assume that the psychic aspect is the reality,

and the material aspect deluded or irrelevant.

Unfortunately, Jung's interpretation does not tell us anything

about what the alchemist actual1y did with his pots and alembics.

Instead, it extracts from his activity the portion that we find com

prehensible, and discards the rest. Such an interpretation is, in

short, the product of a modern scientific consciousness, assuming

as it does that matter was forever the same, and that only mind

(concepts of matter) changed. But the alchemical world view sim

ply did not construct reality in our terms. The subject/object dis

tinction was already blurry in the first place, and thus such an

interpretation of reality makes no sense, for "projection" assumes

a sharp dichotomy that the alchemist did not make. Obviously the

alchemist was doing something; but the projection argument, al

though an improvement over the standard textbook version, still

takes him less than seriously. The goal of magical practice was to

become a skillful practitioner, not a self-realized being. The quotes

from Dorn and other alchemists cited above are not typical, and

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they date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Scientific Revolution was relentlessly driving a wedge between matter and consciousness. For most of its history, alchemy had been perceived as an exact science, not a spiritual metaphor. If we succumb to Jung's formulation, we do so because of our inability to enter into a consciousness in which the technical and the divine were one, a consciousness in which finding a science of matter was equivalent to participating in God. Thus, Jung's formulation begs the question, for it is that very consciousness that we seek to penetrate. The very modernity of the projection concept precludes this possibility. The problem can only be solved (if at all) by trying to recreate the actual procedures of the discipline, and learning what the alchemist was doing in material terms.

Alchemy was first and foremost a craft, a "mystery" in medieval terminology, and all crafts, from the most ancient of times, were

'regarded as sacred activities. As Genesis tells us, the creation or modification of matter, the crux of all craftsmanship, is God's very first function. Metallurgy was intentionally compared to obstetrics: ores were seen to grow in the womb of the earth like embryos. The role of the miner or metalvolorker was to _elp nature accelerate its infinitely slow tempo by changing the modality of matter. But to do so was to meddle, to enter into sacred territory, and thus, down to the fifteenth century, the sinking of a new mine was accompanied by religious ceremonies, in which miners fasted, prayed, and observed a particular series of rites. In a similar fashion, the alchemical laboratory was seen as an artificial uterus in which the ore could complete its gestation in a relatively short time (compared to the action of the earth). Alchemy and mining shared the notion, then, that man could intervene in the cosmic rhythm, and the artisan, writes Mircea Eliade, was seen as "a connoisseur of secrets, a magician. . . ." For this reason, all crafts involved "some kind of initiation and [were] handed down by an occult tradition. He who 'makes' real things is he who knows the secrets of making them. "27

From these ancient sources came the central notion of alchemy: that all metals are in the process of becoming gold, that they are gold in potentia, and that men can devise a set of procedures tv accelerate their evolution. The practice of alchemy is thus not really playing God-though the notion is certainly latent in the Hermetic tradition-but is, to continue the obstetrical metaphor, a type of midwifery. The set of procedures came to be called the "spagyric

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art," the separating of the gross from the subtle in order to assist the evolution and obtain the gold that lay buried deep within the

lead. "Copper is restless until it becomes gold," wrote the

thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart;28 and although Eckhart

may have had something more Jungian than metallurgical in mind,

the alchemist, as we have stated repeatedly, made no such distinc

tions, but (in our terms) concentrated on his reagents and let na

ture (both human and inorganic) take its course.

What, then, were the procedures? Reading alchemical texts, the

first thing one discovers is that there is very little unity of opinion

on the subject. Transmutation consisted in the following set of

operations: purification, solution, putrefaction, distillation, subli

mation, calcination, and coagulation. However, the order and content of them is unclear, and not all alchemists employed all the

techniques. Circumstances, especially the nature of the ores, always seemed to alter the methods. Hence what is agreed upon in

terms of procedure is very general, consisting only of the basic

outlines. Mercury is the dissolver, the active principle of things,

and in fact had been used from the earliest times as a wash in

gilding, to extract gold from other minerals. Sulfur (also called the

green lion) is a coagulant, the creator of a new form. One must first

perform the dissolution of the metal to the materia prima and then

recrystallize, or coagulate, this formless substance. If done cor

rectly, gold will be the result. Solve et coagula meant reduction to

chaos-a watery solution, a primal state-followed by fixation into

a new pattern.

In fact, the process was rarely this straightforward. The very

delicacy of the procedure meant that it could be thrown off by the

slightest mistake. Furthermore, it was central to the tradition that

each student must learn this complex procedure by himself. There

was no standardized recipe that could be handed on, but rather an

elaborate practice that required a profound commitment. The vari

able factors were thus legion; failure rather than success was the rule. A number of intermediate steps, such as putrefaction, distilla

tion, sublimation and calcination, normally had to be employed;

and dearly, the terse formula solve et coagula expressed only an

ideal.

Sometimes, the metal first had to be made to decay, or putrefy.

The stink of this process came from hydrogen sulfide (the odor of

rotten eggs), which was prepared and then passed through metal

lic solutions to obtain various colors (in the Middle Ages, colors

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and odors were substantial entities, not secondary qualities). Or,

an evaporable substance would have to be extracted from its mix

ture so as to obtain it in a pure state. Sulfur, in particular, was

obtained in this way. Hence, the long and exacting process of

sublimation that in turn necessitated the complementary process of

distillation, or filtering. Finally, if a metal would n_t dissolve, cal

cination was employed to convert it to a soluble oxide so that the

processes of solution and separation could be performed. 29

That there are various psychoanalytic and religious correlates to

these procedures is perhaps obvious. In a spiritual interpretation,

all personalities (metals, ores) are potentially divine (golden), and

are trying to reach their true nature, trying to transcend the weight

of their past (lead). An old reality decays for me, I stink and feel

rotten, but this change in matter is ultimately good, for it is a

change in what matters. Old realities die, new things become my

reality. The rigidity of my personality is dissolved, a new pattern-is slowly allowed to coalesce. The ferocious desire for pattern itself is

tamed, and I begin to look at my former pattern as just one possibility among many. I become less rigid, more tolerant. I see that all

that real1y exists is fusability and creativity, which mercury repre

sents. Mercury, or Hermes, the messenger of the gods, acts as

"trickster" here, even though he is called "psychopomp," guide of

the soul. As Freud realized, we have to be tricked into conscious

ness, see our true nature almost by accident, for example, through

jokes or slips of the tongue. Mercury was also associated with

glass, the vessel that enables one to see into it. The contmner of my

problems is transparent: I come to see that my problems not only

hold the solution, they arc the solution. Thus R. D. Laing: "The

Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it."

The alchemist is thus like a miner, probing deeper and deeper

veins of ore. One vein leads to another, there is no right answer.

Life, and human personality, are inherently crazy, multifaceted;

neurosis is the inability to tolerate this fact. The traditional model

of the healthy sou] demands that we impose an order or identity

on all of these facets, but the alchemical tradition sees the result

as an aborted metal that sulfur fixed too quickly. Solve et coagula, says the alchemist; abandon this prematurely congealed persona that forces you into predictable behavior and a programmed life

of institutionalized insanity. If you would have real control over

your life, says the tradition, abandon your artificial control, your

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Jlidentity," the brittle ego that you desperately feel you must have for your survival. Real survival, the gold, consists in living accord

- ing to the dictates of your own nature, and that cannot be achieved until the risk of psychic death is confronted directly. This, in the alchemical view, is the meaning of the Passion. When Christ said "I am the Way," he meant, "you yourself must go through my ordeaL" No one else can confront your demons for you; no one else can give you your real Self.3O

The conclusion seems unavoidable, then, that alchemy corresponds to a primal substrate of the unconscious, and both R. D. Laing and Jungian analyst John Perry have noted the identical imagery thrown up by the tortured psyche during the psychotic experience-imagery that is clearly alchemical in nature.31 Still, the alchemist did not regard himself as a shaman or yogi, but as an expert on the nature of matter. Given the above description of laboratory procedures, what have we learned about the material aspect of the work? Essentially, nothing. That the alchemist was serious about his work, and the manufacture of gold, is beyond doubt. But what was he actually doing in his laboratory?

With this question we reach a total impasse. The literature of alchemy records that gold was in fact produced, and the testimony is not so easily dismissed. In one case, a transmutation was witnessed by Helvetius Oohann Friedrich Schweitzer), physician to the Prince of Orange, in 1666, and verified by a number of witnesses, including a Dutch assay master and a well-known silversmith. Spinoza himself got involved in the case, and reported the testimony without questioning it.32 In the end, the answer to our question may depend only on whether or not one believes such a metallurgical transmutation is possible.

Nevertheless, I believe we can take this problem one step farther. Since the worlds constructed by participating and nonparticipating consciousness are not mutually translatable, the question, "What was the alchemist actually doing?" turns out to be something of a red herring when we examine what we mean by the word "actually." What we really mean is what we would be doing, or what a modern chemist would be doing, if we or he could be transported back in time and space to an alchemist's laboratory. But what was "actually" going on was what the alchemist was doing, not what we moderns, with our nonparticipating consciousness, would do if we could be transported back to the four

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teenth century. Had we belonged to that era we would have possessed a participating consciousness and necessarily would have been doing what the alchemist was doing. Thus the question "What was the alchemist actually doing?" can have no meaningful answer in modern terms.

Let me put this another way. The world in which alchemy was practiced recognized no sharp distinctions between mental and material events. In such a context, there was no such thing as "symbolism" because everything (in our terms) was symbolic, that is, all material events and processes had psychic equivalents and representations. Thus alchemy was-from our viewpoint-a composite of different activities. It was the science of matter, the attempt to unravel nature's secrets; a set of procedures which were employed in mining, dyeing, glass manufacture, and the preparation of medicines; and simultaneously a type of yoga, a science of psychic transformation.33 Because matter possessed consciousness, skill in transforming the former automatically meant that one was skilled in working with the latter-a tradition retained today only in fields such as art, poetry, or handicrafts, in which we tend (rightly or wrongly) to regard the ability to create things of great beauty as a reflection of the creator's personality. We say then, that the talent of the alchemist in his laboratory was dependent on his relationship with his own unconscious, but in putting it that way we indicate the limits of our understanding. "Unconscious," whether used by Jung or anyone else, is the language of the modern disembodied intellect. It was aU one to the alchemist: there was no "unconscious." The modern mind cannot help but regard t the occuJt,sciences as.a yast welter of confusion about the _ature of t the materIal world, Since for the most part the modern mind does t

not entertain the notion that the consciousness with which the,

alchemist confronted matter was so different from its own. If the

\state of mind can at all be imagined, however, we can say that the alchemist did not confront matter; he penneated it.

It is thus doubtful that the alchemist could have described what'

he was doing to us, or to a modern chemist, transported back to the fourteenth century, even if he had wanted to. His was (again, from our point of view) partly a psychic discipline that no nonpsychic method (save neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor) can possibly accomplish. The manufacture of gold was not a matter of replicating a material formula. Indeed, its manufacture was part of a much larger work, and our attempt to extract the material essence

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" from a holistic process reveals how contracted our own knowledge

of the world has become. We cannot know the alchemical process

of making gold until we know the "personality" of gold. We, here and now, have no real sympathetic identity with the process of

becoming golden; we cannot fathom the relationship between be

coming golden and making gold, The medieval alchemist, on the

other hand, was completed by the process; the synthesis of the

gold was his synthesis as well.

The only conclusion I can come to, then, is one that will probably

strike most readers as radical in the extreme. The above analvsis

forces me to conclude that it is not merely the case that men con

ceived of matter as possessing mind in those days, but rather that

in those days, matter did possess mind, "actually" did so. When

the obvious objection is raised that the mechanical world view

must be true, because we are in fact able to send a man to the moon

or invent technologies that demonstrably work, I can only reply that the animistic world view, which lasted for millennia, was also

fully efficacious to its believers. In other words, our ancestors con

structed reality in a way that typically produced verifiable results,

and this is why Jung's theory of projection is off the mark. If

another break in consciousness of the same magnitude as that rep

resented by the Scientific Revolution were to occur, those on the

other side of that watershed might conclude that our epistemology

somehow "projected" mechanism onto nature. But modern sci

ence, with the significant exception of quantum mechanics, does

not regard the gestalt of matterlmotionlexperimentlquantification

as a metaphor for reality; it regards it as the touchstone of reality.

And if the criterion is going to be efficacy! we can on1y note that

our own world view has pragmatic anomalies that are as extensive

as those of either the magical or the Aristotelian world view. We are not, for example, able to explain psychokinesis, ESP, psychic

healing, or a host of other "paranormal" phenomena by means of

the current paradigm. There is no way, on a pragmatic basis, to

make a judgment in tennS of any epistemological superiority, and

in fact, in terms of providing for a comprehensible world, original

participation might even win out. Participation constitutes an in

superable historical barrier unless we consent to regenerate a dead

evolutionary pattern-an act that would return us to a world view

in which it would be meaningless to ask: Which epistemology is

superior? Regenerating this pattern, we would, in some important

sense, have fallen back through the rabbit hole whence we origi

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nally came. In such a world, the material transformation of lead to

gold may well OCcur, but we cannot know that now, nor can we

: know it for the Middle Ages.

The delusion of modern thinking on alternative realities is rarely

exposed. Most historical and anthropological studies of witchcraft,

for example, never speculate that the massive number of witchcraft

trials during the sixteenth century might have been caused by

something more than mass hysteria. (Will Our descendants, we

wonder, regard our involvement with science and technology as

mass hysteria, or more correctly realize that it was a way of life?)

The number of works that depict participating consciousness from

the inside, such as Chinua Achebe's description of Nigerian village

life in Things Fall Apart, is very small indeed; and I know of only

one writer who has managed both to enter that world and to articu

late its epistemology in modern terms-Carlos Castaneda.34 I shall

be discussing alternative realities in greater detail later on in this

book. For now, the reader should be aware of how stark the choice

really is. Either such realities were mass hallucinations that went

on for centuries, or they were indeed realities, although not com

mensurable with our own. In his critique of Castaneda's work,

anthropologist Paul lliesman confronts the issue directly, though

the reader should note that Riesman hardly represents mainstream

thinking on the subject:

Our social sciences [he writes] generally treat the culture and knowl

edge of other peoples as forms and structures necessary for human

life that those people have developed and imposed upon a reality

which we kno\\'-or at least our scientists know-better than they do.

We can therefore study those forms in relation to "reality" and mea

sure how well or ill they are adapted to it. In their studies of the

cultures of other people, even those anthropologists who sincerely love the people they study almost neVer think that they are learning

something about the way the world really is. Rather, they conceive of

themselves as finding out what other people's conceptions of the ",,'odd

are.3S

In the case of the history of alchemy as well, or of premodern

thought in general, we have made precisely this mistake. We seek

to describe what the alchemist thought he was up to; we never grasp that what he was "actually" doing was real. Moreover, we

rarely apply this methodology to Our Own methodology; we never

manage to see Our culture and knowledge as "forms and structures

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.I, necessary for human life" as it exists in Western industrial societies.

The truth is that we can always find previous world views lacking if we judge them in our terms. The price paid, however, is that _. what we actually learn about them is severely limited before the . inquiry even begins. Nonparticipating consciousness cannot "see" participating consciousness any more than Cartesian analysis can "see" artistic beauty. Perhaps Heraclitus put it best in the sixth century B.C. when he wrote, "What is divine escapes men's notice because of their incredulity."36

This brings us, finally, to the question of values, a question that is especially relevant because of the role of values in shaping our perceptions. Our purpose with respect to gold is not very different from that of King Midas. We seek to know how the alchemist "did it" because we see gold as a vehicle for obtaining other things. To the true alchemist, gold was the end, not the means. The manufacture of gold was the culmination of his own long spiritual evolution, and this was the reason for his silence. "The material aim of the alchemists," writes the historian Sherwood Taylor,

the transmutation of metals, has now been realized by science, and the alchemical vessel is the uranium pile. Its success has had precisely the result that the alchemists feared and guarded against, the placing of gigantic power in the hands of those who have not been fitted by spiritual training to receive it. If science, philosophy, and religion had remained associated as they \",ere in alchemy, we might not today be confronted with this fearful problem.37

By 1700, alchemy had been significantly discredited by the

mechanical world view, or driven underground to become part of the ideology of so-called obscurantist groups: Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and others. In terms of making a claim on the dominant culture, its last great stand occurred during the English Civil War and Commonwealth period (1642-60), and its last great practitioner was Isaac Newton, though he wisely kept it a private matter.38 Yet because alchemy (and all of the occult sciences) represents a map of the unconscious, because it apparently corresponds to a psychic substrate that is trans-historical, alchemy is still with us, both privately and publicly, and it is doubtful that dialectical reason can ever be completely extirpated. Privately it survives, as we have seen, in dreams, and also in psychosis.39 Publicly it has

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but one surviving domain-the world of surrealist art. The express purpose of the Surrealist Movement in the first half of the twentieth century was to free men and women by liberating the images of the unconscious, by deliberately making such images conscious. There is, as a result, a peculiar visual link between alchemical plates, dreams, and surrealist art which seems to go deeper than appearances. All three use allegory and the incongruous juxtaposition of objects, and all three violate the principles of scientific causality and noncontradiction. Yet they do create a message by somehow managing to reflect, or evoke, certain familiar states of mind. These messages are intuitive, even numinous, rather than cognitive-rational, but we somehow "know" what they are saying. Their rules are those of premodern logic, of participating consciousness, of resemblance and "a secret affinity between certain images." "One cannot speak about mystery," wrote Rene Magritte; "one must be seized by it."4O Hence the highly alchemical nature of a painting like The Explanation (Plate 7), in which a carrot and a bottle are both reasonably seen as distinct, and no less reasonably fused into a single object. Salvador Dali's The Persiste11ce of Memory (Plate 8) has the same dreamlike quality, in which linear, mechanical time has started to wilt and run down in the arid desert of the twentieth century. Both of these paintings employ the same sort of logic and imagery that we observed in Plates 2-6.

We shall have to examine more closely what the public revival of alchemy in the twentieth century could possibly mean later on in this work. Our task now, however, is to try to solve the puzzle of why it \\'a_ ever Jost in the first place. Although v,;e may have succeeded in immersing ourselves in that world view, we have not yet addressed the question of how modern science managed to refute it. The holistic framework of the occult sciences lasted for millennia, but it took Western Europe a mere two hundred years-roughly between 1500 and 1700-to break it apart, revealing that the Hermetic tradition was, despite its long tenure, rather fragile.

The problem lay in the tradition's (from our viewpoint) inherently dualistic nature. Magic was at once spiritual and manipulative, or, in D. P. Walker's terminology, subjective and transitive.41 Each of the occult sciences, including alchemy, astrology, and the cabala, aimed at both the acquisition of practical, mundane objectives, and union with the Divinity. There was always a tension between these two goals (which is not the same thing as an an

The Disenchantment of the World (1)

Plate 7. Rene Magritte, The Explanation (1952). Copyright @ by A.D.A.G.P., Paris,

1981.

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PI.,. 8, Salvador Dali, The Pmi",ncr of Memory (1931), oil on canvas, 9',," x 13",

ColJection, The Museum of Modern Art. Ne'w York.

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__ degree rather than kind, for at what point in our acceleration of

nature's tempo can we be said to have crossed the line from mid

-,. i\1I',wifery t_ induced birth, or even abortion? What degree of inter

. If _.ference tips the balance from harmony to attempted mastery? In a __. ,,; feudal context of subsistence economy and only moderately dif:1c_':1' fused technology, in a religious context that regarded nature as

e _: alive and our relationship to it as one of participation, it was very

,h_ difficult for such a question to arise, and in this sense the alchemi:_ "> cal tradition was not all that fragile. But with the social and eco

(;; nomic changes wrought in the course of the sixteenth and seven. teenth centuries, the sacred and the manipulative were split down 1 the middle. The latter could easily survive in a context of profit, expanding technology, and secular salvation; indeed, that was

: what the manipulative aspect was all about, severed from its reli. gious basis. Thus Eliade rightly calls modern science the secular

version of the alchemist's dream, for latent within the dream is ,.,i';-_ "the pathetic programme of the industrial societies whose aim is _1_ the total transmutation of Nature, its transformation into

____' 'energv.' "42 The sacred aspect of the art became, for the dominant

.,"" .. .

9 _.l'. culture, ineffective and ultimately meaningless. In other words,

(_ the domination of nature always lurked as a possibility within the Hermetic tradition, but was not seen as separable from its esoteric framework until the Renaissance. In that eventual separation lay the world view of modernity: the technological, or the zweckralional, as a logos.

What is perhaps remarkable, from the modern point of view, is that magic could actually have served as a matrix for the Scientific Revolution. As explained in Chapter 2, technology had no theoretical or ideological basis, at least not until Francis Bacon. Even down to the time of Leonardo da Vinci, machines tended to be seen as toys, whereas the concept of force was linked to the Hermetic theme of universal animation.43 Technology, in short, could not be a rival to Aristotelianism because it was not a philosophy about how the universe worked. Magic was. Of course, there were many types of magic and many magical philosophies, but all of them, in sharp contrast to church Aristotelianism, urged the practitioner to operate on nature, to alter it, not to remain passive. In this sense, then, the ascendancy of magical doctrines and techniques in the sixteenth century was fully congruent with the early phases of capitalism, and Keith Thomas has recorded (for England, at least) how extensive and intense occult activity was during this time.44

tagonism) because they constituted a rather deJicate ecoJogical

framework. ]f, for example, 1 am acting as a "midwife" to nature,

aCCelerating its tempo in altering the nature of matter, it is dear that

I am interfering in its natural rhythm. Any type of human action

upon the environment can be seen in these terms. But. the point is

that the interference was always consciously acknowledged. It was

sanctified through ritual, lest the earth strike back against man for

this incursion into its womb. This interference was performed in the context of a mentality, and an economy (steady-state), that

sought harmony with nature, and in which the notion of mastery of

nature would have been regarded as a contradiction in terms.

Nevertheless, cthe distinction ultimately involved a difference of

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The idea of dominating nature arose from the magical tradition, perhaps the first explicit statement of the notion occurring in a work by Francesco Giorgio in 1525 (De Harmonia Mundi), which is not about technology, but-of all things-numerology. This art, he says, will confer upon man as regards his environment vis operandi et dominandi, "the power of operating and dominating." We should not be surprised that, in the sixteenth century, this concept was easily extended from numerology to accounting and engineering.

Numerology provides a very instructive example, in fact, of the split between the esoteric and exoteric traditions of the occult sciences. At the heart of the cabala, for example, lay the notion of a "dialing code." In the Hebrew alphabet, letters are also numbers, and hence an equivalence can be established between totally unrelated words based on the fact that they "add up" to the same amount. The right combination, it was believed, would put the adept in contact with God. Pico della Mirandola, for example, was fascinated by the mystical ecstasy brought on by number meditation, a trance in which communication with the Divinity was said to occur (the meditation could, of course, produce such ecstasy if the activity narrowed one's attention in a yogic fashion).45 At the same time, similar techniques formed the basis of a practical cabala that the adept might use to obtain love, wealth, influence, and so on.

Under the pressure of the technical and economic changes of the sixteenth century, pursuit of God or world harmony began to seem increasingly quaint, and emphasis on the practical or exoteric tradition resulted in a purely representational use of the Hebrew alphabet. vVe can see this shift in books published only a decade apart by Robert Fludd and Joseph Solomon Delmedigo. In Plate 9, Fludd's illustration of the Ptolemaic universe (1619), the Hebrew letters signify the "spiritual intelligences" that rule each of the twenty-two spheres, from the World Mind ("Mens") down to the sphere of the earth. (This same type of labeling also occurs in cabalistic illustrations of the human body, where Hebrew letters serve to identify the spiritual intelligences that govern each particular part.) Fludd was a major proponent of the view that the Hebrew letters in the diagram corresponded to something real: they concretely identified the ruling archetypes of each region, and this information could be plugged into certain types of cabalistic "equations" to generate significant results for the practitioner. It was hardly a problem that the letters did not correspond to anything material or substantial in nature.

100

Plate 9. The Ptolemaic universe according to Robert Fludd. 1619. Courtesy. The

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

A very different use of the Hebrew alphabet is depicted in Plate

10, an engineering sketch from Joseph Solomon Delmedigo's book

Elim (1629). Here, the letters are used to label a set of gears in a diagram illustrating how power can be multiplied so that, in AI

chirnedean fashion, an individual with a place to stand can move a

large section of the earth. It is no accident that Rabbi Delmedigo

had been a student of Galileo at Padua, that he was an ardent

Copernican, the first Jewish scholar to employ logarithms, and

ultimately a leading popularizer of scientific knowledge. Yet the

101

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Plate 10. Engineering illustration from EUm, by Joseph Solomon DeImedigo, 1629.

102

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labels have a still more complex significance. Elim means "powers" or "forces," and its implication can be both sacred and secular. Thus Jehovah is addressed as El in Hebrew liturgy; and more generally, an el can be a power that carries the essence ("spiritual intelligence") of God. But el can signify a purely material force as well, such as the power developed by a gear train. This ambiguity is reflected in the book itself, which deals with both religious and scientific matters, and in the author's attitude toward the cabalaan attitude that was so ambiguous that present-day Jewish scholars remain uncertain whether Delmedigo was a critic or a proponent. For a time, then, disparate concepts of number could exist side by side, even within a single mind, but ultimately, the esoteric tradition was unable to sustain itself. Under the pressures of a new economy, the spiritual aspect of the cabala, along with the evocative power of the spoken Hebrew word, became increasingly irrelevant. It was not that the cabala was "wrong," but that technology and mercantile capital had little use for religious mathematics.46

A similar transition occurred in all of the occult sciences during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with the possible exception of witchcraft, which was (to my knowledge) purely transitive and without a subjective, or self-transforming, aspect. What science accomplished (or rather, what became science) was the adoption of the epistemological framework, indeed the whole ideology, of the exoteric tradition. All of the "natural magicians" of the sixteenth century, such as Agrippa, Della Porta, Campanella, John Dee, and Paracelsus, right down to Francis Bacon, drew on both the technological and Hermetic traditions for the phrase "evoking the powers of nature." Both traditions began to fuse at this time and form the basis of modern scientific experimentation. Both were active ways of addressing reality, constituting a sharp contrast to the static nature of Greek science and the frozen verbalism of medieval Scholastic disputation. The identity of knowledge and construction which we discussed in Chapter 2, the "making that is itself a knowledge," which received its clearest expression in the work of Bacon, was derived from the numerous writings on magic and alchemy which appeared in Europe during the sixteenth century. 47 Della Porta candidly termed magic the "practical part of natural science," and such men as Dee, Campanella, and Agrippa tended to blur (from our point of view) control of the environment by means of the art of navigation with control of the environment by means of astrology.48 Prior to and during the En

103

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glish Civil War, remarked John Aubrey in Brief Lives, "astrologer, mathematician, and conjurer were accounted the same things. "49 It was only after magic had provided technology with a methodological program that the latter was in a position to reject the former. But it was more in the fusion of the two, than in their subsequent separation, that the esoteric tradition was lost.

Examples of this sort can easily be multiplied. The esoteric tradition in astrology, for example, as represented by the Florentine scholar Marsilio Picino (1433-99), who translated the entire Hermetic corpus for Cosimo de Medici between 1462 and 1484, sought to condition the body and spirit through music or incantation in order to alter the personality ("receive the celestial influence"). Bacon himself approved of this aspect of the art, calling it "astrologia sana," and D. P. Walker has in effect said the same thing when he calls Ficino's system "astrological psychotherapy."so But the ultimate legacy of the tradition, even among present-day astrologers who consider themselves serious students, is for the most part manipulative and this-worldly, and the horoscope column in the daily newspapers represents the pathetic outcome of what was once a magnificent edifice of dialectical thought.

In the case of alchemy, the causes of the exoteric-esoteric split were once again technological, particularly because of alchemy's age-old relationship to mining, metallurgy, and numerous crafts and manufactures. The sixteenth century saw the emergence of a coterie of artisans who denounced the alchemists, this attitude being most clearly expressed in works such as Biringuccio's Pirotcc/11lia and Agricola's De Re /vletallica. 51 The split is at the same time a response to changing economic relationships, in particular, the collapse of the guilds. An increasingly laissez-faire economy challenged both the feudal notion of maintaining secrecy about a craft's techniques and the oral tradition that had been the basis of initiation into these "mysteries." Pressure to reveal these secrets, to make them accessible to all by way of Gutenberg's movable type, led to the publication of craft handbooks (like those of Biringuccio and Agricola) which provided detailed accounts of processes and illustrations of guild practices (see Plate 11). These works, the appearance of which would have been viewed with horror in the Middle Ages, now served the interests of a large and amorphous social class. Craft processes themselves had become commodities; and secrecy, revealed knowledge, and microcosm! macrocosm.analogies were seen as superfluous and even inimical

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Plate 11. Separating gold from silver, from De Re Mctallica (1556). Courtesy, The

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

by an artisanry that was increasingly caught up in a market econ

omy. Thus, when the surgeon Ambroise Pare (1510-90) was ac

cused of having betrayed guild secrets, he felt confident in replying

that he was not of those men who "make a cabala of art."S2 Indeed, the whole notion of scientific organization which was trumpeted

by Bacon in the New Atlantis was completely incompatible with the

medieval ideal of deliberate secretiveness.

The ideology of this attack was heavily linguistic in nature. Once

the idea of an inner psychic landscape (in our terms), or original

participation, was partly lost, technology was able to judge the

alchemical tradition from the point of view of technical clarity and

precision and, of course, find it sorely lacking. As we have seen,

the language of alchemy is dreamlike, symbolic, imagistic, but this

world of resemblance was disintegrating. Carrots were not bottles,

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lions no longer devoured the sun, androgynes were inventions in the same category as unicorns. Cryptic phrases such as "the sun and his shadow complete the work" did not glaze pots or extract tin, and names for substances such as "butter of antimony" or "flowers of arsenic" (which, however, lasted down to the late eighteenth century) were now seen as cumbersome and inefficient. The whole alchemical imagery of things being themselves and their opposites, or possessing inherent ambiguity, was now regarded as stupid, incomprehensible! an obstacle to be rooted out. Biringuccio, Bacon, Agricola, Lazarus Ercke,r, and many others deliberately set themselves against the tradition of wonder at nature, of credulity about fabulous beasts and plants and stones-a tradition that had characterized medieval literature from Pliny to Agrippa. The notion of satsang still present in esoteric disciplines like Zen and yoga, that the truth is miraculously communicable through a relationship with a teacher, was an anathema to these men, who correctly saw that the attempted domination of nature depended on cognitive clarity. The collapse of an ecological, or holistic, orientation toward nature went hand in hand with the rejection of dialectical reason. 53

The second factor contributing to the split between the esoteric and exoteric traditions was organized religion, both Catholic and Protestant. It was the very intimacy between magic and Catholicism which led to an exaggerated emphasis on alchemy's esoteric aspects (indeed, prior to this, alchemy was not seen as having "aspects"), an emphasis that served to sharpen the distinction between the esoteric tradition and the growing body of techno]o_ica] studies which \vere rejecting that tradition in the first place. This same intimacy also left magic extremely vulnerable to Protestant rationalism, both during and after the Reformation.

According to Keith Thomas, the church was quite heavily involved in magical practices on the local level during the Middle Ages. Indeed, without the network of rituals and sacraments it is doubtful that the church could have had the leverage that it did. The liturgy of the time included rituals for blessing houses, tools, crops, and people setting out on journeys; rituals to insure fertility; and rituals of exorcism. In the popular mind, the priest had special powers, and a whole range of beliefs, or superstitions, had grown up around the ceremony of the Mass. Thus the wafer was seen as having the power to cure the blind, and it could also be crushed and sprinkled in the garden -to discourage caterpillars. At

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the same time, the church deliberately blurred the distinction between prayers, which were appeals for supernatural help, and the tools of magic, such as charms or spells, which were supposed to

work automatically. The church recommended the use of prayers

when gathering medicinal herbs; and the repetition of ave marias or

pater nosters fostered the notion that these Latin "incantations" had

a mechanical efficacy. All in all, despite the church's opposition to

magic on the official level, it appeared to the populace "as a vast

reservoir of magical power, capable of being deployed for a variety

of secular purposes." 54

As for alchemy, its relationship to the church, at least during the

Middle Ages, was practically heretical, for it occasionally claimed

to provide the inner content of Christianity which it felt no or

ganized religion could supply. 55 Thus it argued, every so often, for

an analogy between Christ and the alchemical work itself, the 50

called lapis-Christ parallel. This analogy and the claim of material

transformation resulted in several encyclicals and papal bulls

against the art, but as the social structure of the church began to

crumble in the fifteenth century, alchemy and religion became in

tertwined in a most unusual way. In particular, the soteriological (salvationist) aspect of the art began to receive more attention even

as the "puffers" and charlatans were subject to increasing attack.

This development was, in fact, another facet of the esotericexoteric split. Sir George Ripley (1415-90), canon of Bridlington

and an alchemis_ as well, frankly stated that the purpose of al

chemy was the union of the soul with the body. By the sixteenth

century, the church had drawn up a document establishing corre

spondences between the various alchemical processes and church

sacraments. Hence putrefaction was extreme unction; distillation,

ordination; calcination, repentance; coagulation, marriage; solu

tion, baptism; sublimation, confirmation; and of course, transmu

tation, the Mass.56 We might infer from these correspondences that

the collapse of church magic under the pressure of heretical sects,

- and later, the Protestant Reformation, led to an overemphasis on

the religious dimension of alchemy. This, in addition to the attack

being mounted by the growing technological literature, ultimately

served to split it off from the exoteric tradition.

It was during the Renaissance that the soteriological aspect of

alchemy was pushed to its extreme, becoming, says Jung, "an

undercurrent of the Christianity that ruled on the surface." In addi

tion to the lapis-Christ parallel, some texts referred to mercury as

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the Virgin Mary, and the spirit of mercury as the Holy Ghost. Sir

George Ripley constantly intermingled Christian and alchemical

symbols in a way that turned into an unwitting parody of Catholi

cism. In one of his sketches, for example, the green lion lies bleed

ing in the lap of the virgin, an obvious caricature of the Pieta. 57 The Christian attitude toward alchemy at this time is also revealed in the choice of animals used as metaphors for Hermes, which were

the same as had been used for Christ in patristic literature: dragon,

fish, unicorn, eagle, lion, and snake. Transubstantiation was seen

as, in essence, an alchemical process. Ripley and others praised the

making of the stone as the Second Coming which, lung notes,

"sound[s] very queer indeed in the mouth of a medieval ecclesias

tic." Indeed, what we see is an unwitting distortion of Christianity,

an apotheosis that was at the same time a melting down. The

medieval Christian synthesis was thus recast in alchemical terms,

and this tendency reached its climax at the end of the sixteenth

century with the rise of the Rosicrucians, a semisecret, occult

brotherhood that still exists today.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the intimate relationship

between magic and the church had become such an obvious target

for the Reformation that magical practices of all kinds began to draw fire from Catholic as wel1 as Protestant quarters. The story is

rather complicated, because Catholic-Protestant relations them

selves were very complex, and the attack on magic was part of an

internecine cross fire that is not easily unraveled. Catholic opposi

tion to magic was facilitated by a Protestant commitment to the

Hermetic tradition on the part of those \\'ho, suggests lung, saw

that tradition (perhaps unconsciously) as a way of remaining

Catholic. Thus toward the end of the sixteenth century in Ger

many, a group of occult practitioners began to argue openly for

Hermeticism as being the path to divine illumination, explicitly

stating the lapis-Christ paral1el. 58 This group began to have an

impact on Lutheran circles, and to rally behind those Protestant

forces that could offer it protection from the long arm of the Inqui

sition. The movement thus acquired a political tinge, which

emerged in anonymous manifestoes of 1614-15 defending Rosi

crucianism and the occult sciences.

Europe Soon found itself swept up in a frenzy over Rosicru

cianism and its heretical implications. Orthodox religion was

convinced of the existence of something approaching a world-wide

conspiracy, a charge explicitly denied by the alchemist Michael

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Maier in his Laws of the Fraternity of the Rosie Cross (Latin edition 1618)-a book that nevertheless affirmed the existence of a secret brotherhood of enlightened mystics dedicated to the improvement of mankind. Two years prior to this, the English physician and alchemist Robert Fludd published his own defense of the brotherhood (Apologia Compendaria Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce) which he followed with a series of volumes from 1617 to 1621. Fludd argued for the inner content of the occult sciences, an alchemical interpretation of the Bible (e.g., seeing the creation as a divine chemical separation), and the view of nature as one vast alchemical process.

Of course, the emergence of a fraternity of alchemists arguing in support of alchemy, as well as of publications defending this group, probably reflected not the strength of the tradition but the fact that it was dying. As frightening as a defense of religious alchemy was to the church, it is clear from hindsight that it came about, in part, as an attempt on the part of some to maintain and preserve what they regarded as the genuine spiritual content of Catholicism. In the context of the times, however, alchemy's claim to provide the only true salvation could not be regarded as anything but pernicious heresy. Thus in 1623, a proclamation appeared in Paris announcing the arrival of the brotherhood, which declared that it would remain invisible but would lead people onto the true path. The following year, an open meeting held to defend alchemical theses was dispersed by order of Parlement, and its leading spokesman (one Estienne de Clave) arrested. It was in such a context that the Minorite friar Marin Mersenne set out to save both church and state. 25 \\"el1 as philosophy itself, from this dangerous I turn of events. This attack so snowballed, enlisting as it did the

, finest minds of Europe, that it has rightly been regarded as the death knell of animism in the West. It involved not merely a widespread rejection of esoteric alchemy, but possibly the first clear enunciation of both the fact-value distinction and the positivist conception of science.

As a man deeply intere,?ted in religion and natural philosophy, Mersenne was alarmed not only by the Rosicrucian phenomenon but also by the fact that the growing aversion of scholars to Aristotelianism had led them to Hermeticism, which offered a more active and experimental approach to nature. He saw that it would be necessary not only to refute Fludd, but to work out a Christianized version of Aristotelian rationalism which would simultaneously facilitate a more dynamic approach to the natural world.

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In lengthy works written and published over the period 1623-25, Mersenne denounced Fludd as an "evil magician" and attacked alchemy as an attempt to offer salvation without faith, that is, to set itself up a counter-church. By attributing power to matter itself, the Hermetic tradition had denied the power of God, Who should rightly be seen as Governor of the world, not immanent in it. Instead of advocating the abolition of exoteric alchemy, however, Mersenne proposed something that was ultimately far more effective in this regard: that the state should establish alchemical academies to police the field of charlatans. These academies would clean up the language of alchemy, substituting a clear terminology based on observed chemical operations. They would also avoid all discussion of religion and philosophy. He proposed, in effect, the deliberate divorce of fact from value which would soon become the distinguishing hallmark of modern science.

In the course of his attack on Fludd, Mersenne enlisted the aid of his fellow Minorite Pierre Gassendi. A professor at Aix-enProvence, Gassendi moved to Paris in 1624, eventually (through the influence of Cardinal Richelieu) becoming Provost of the Cathedral of Digne and Professor of Mathematics at the College Royale. His attack on Fludd was, like Mersenne's, religious, accusing the Englishman of trying to make alchemy "the sole religion of mankind"; but it was a scientific critique as well, arguing that Fludd's central notions could not be empirically demonstrated. There was no way, for example, to prove that all human souls contained a part of God, or that a world soul actually existed. Gassendi's attack on Fludd may have been, in effect, the earliest statement of scientific positivism. This equating of the measurable with the real was another version of the public stance Newton adopted when the concept of gra\'ity was challenged as an occult cause.

Gassendi's attack, however, was much more than a critique. In the course of the 1630s he elaborated a world view of matter and motion that, despite its differences from the ideas of Hobbes and Descartes, amounted to a billiard-ball conception of the universe. Change was external, occurring through physical causation, rather than through the internal (dialectical) principles posited by the alchemists. All we can know, he argued, are appearances, not things in themselves. Matter, as well as the earth, is effectively dead; and God is not a world soul, but a world director. 59

The similarities that the reader ma\' have noted between Carte

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The Disenchantment of the World (1)

sian physics and the views of Mersenne and Gassendi are not

accidental. Descartes was also close with Mersenne, moving to

Paris in 1623 and contributing to the common effort of providing a

Christianized atomism that would preserve religious and political

stability. In the Principles of Philosophy, the world spirit of the al

chemists had become a world mechanism (ether moving in vor

tices), with mind expunged from matter and God relegated to the

periphery. The destruction of participating consciousness, and the

role of God as external director, were hardly unwitting features of

the system. Both provided "scientific" sanctions against indepen

dent religious or political thought. As Descartes wrote Mersenne in

1630, "God sets up mathematical laws in nature, as a king sets up laws in his kingdom."

The collapse of alchemy was the result, not merely of learned

publications, but of the very organization of science. Mersenne's

monastic cell became the virtual nerve center of European science. He conducted weekly meetings and a \'ast correspondence with

scientists in every country, introducing their works to each other

and to the educated public. Proponents of mechanism, such as Galileo, were translated or explicated. Contacts were made with men who would later be key figures in the Royal Society of London, and these ties were strengthened when a number of them went into exile in Paris during the Civil War. Walter Charleton introduced Gassendi's ideas to England in 1654, and soon thereaf

ter Robert Boyle began a series of publications attacking alchemy

and arguing for the mechanical world view, which, he tried to

show by experiment, conformed to actua1 experience. A1chemica1

doctrines were "chemicalized" by a process of linguistic clarification and translation into strictly exoteric terms. The mechanica1

philosophy, and the divorce of fact from value, were built right into

the guidelines of the Royal Society.

After Mersenne's death, Gassendi presided over the weekly

meetings, which now took place at the house of the wealthy Habert

de Montmor. This house became the t\1ontmor Academy in 1657,

and its meetings were attended by the secretaries of state, several

abbes of the nobility, and other top-ranking officials. The Academy

championed the mechanical philosophy and maintained close ties

with the Royal Society. In 1666, Louis XIV's minister Colbert reor

ganized the Academy as the French Academy of Sciences. As was

the case with the Royal Society, the notion of a value-free science

was part of a political and religious campaign to create a stable

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social and ecclesiastical order throughout Europe. What modern science came to regard as abstract truths, such as the radical separation of matter and spirit, or mind and body, were central to this campaign. The success of the mechanical world view cannot be attributed to any inherent validity it might possess, but (partly) to the powerful political and religious attack on the Hermetic tradition by the reigning European elites. 60

Just as the Mersenne circle's opposition to Hermeticism took the form of an attack on the occult affiliations of Protestantism, so was the Protestant attack on magic an integral part of its opposition to .

Catholicism. We have already seen how intimate were the ties between magic and the church on the local level, and how essential these were to the maintenance of its authority. We should not be surprised, then, to discover that the Reformation adopted a deliberately rationalist front. All the sa

.craments were scrutinized for i

their magical affiliations. Lists of popes who had allegedly been' conjurers were compiled ,:md circulated, and t:\'en such practICes as if saying "God bless you" when a person sneezed were attacked as '" _

superstitious claptrap. Ultimately, the attack succeeded. By 1600 the view that God could not be conjured, and that ritual ceremonies (such as .transubstantiation) could not have material efficacy, was gaining ground. The idea that physical objects had Mind, or mana behind them, and could be altered by exorcism or alchemical procedure, began to be seriously attenuated. 61

In addition, Protestantism was able to undercut the soteriological claims of Hermeticism with the concept of secular salvation. It is interesting that this concept adopted the structure of magical prac

. tice exactly. As we have already noted, the efficacy of the practitioner was seen as being a function of his inner purity or virtue. In the same way, the evidence of grace in, for example, Calvinism, was worldly success. As Weber described at length, money was now viewed as salvation made manifest, the touchstone of real piety. And in the context of nascent capitalism, the concept of personal salvation through internal psychic regeneration, which was now openly advocated by groups such as the Rosicrucians, simply could not compete. For the middle and upper classes, at'\

least, the vacuum left by the Protestant attack on the supernatural could be filled by prayer and worldly success. But since secular salvation was so obviously a "winner's" philosophy, Protestantism was in the position of imposing a doctrine on a populace long used to other types of explanation.62 Throughout Northern Europe,

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both the notion of secular salvation and the mechanical philosophy

informed the world view of the rising bourgeoisie; it was their

spiritual needs alone that would be catered to. The imposition of

this new doctrine involved not only oppression of others, but re

pression of self. The Puritan values of competitiveness, orderli

nesS, and self-control came to typify a world that had previously

regarded such behavior as aberrant; or, in the case of Isaac New

ton, as frankly pathological. 63 As Christopher Hill puts it, the

"preachers knew what they were doing. . . . They were up against

'natural man.' The mode of thought and feeling and repression

which they wished to impose was totally unnatural."64 Today, we

have to live with the consequences of their success, and regard it, and the mechanical world view, as "normal. II But if Hermeticism

does correspond to an archaic substrate in the human psyche, as

Jung's work seems to indicate, and if creativity and individuation

are drives inherent in human nature, then our modern view of .

reality was purchased at a fantastic prict:o Fur \\hat "\,is ultimatdy

created by the shift from animism to mechanism was not merely a

new science, but a new personality to go with it; and Isaac Newton

can rightly be seen as a microcosm, or epitome, of these changes. I

wish, then, to complete this survey of the collapse of participating consciousness with a separate examination of Newton's life and work in relation to the political and religious events of his day 0

Only then will we be in a position to assess the cost of the loss of

holism in the West and to open the question of what is still possible for those of us who are, both philosophically and psychologically, the heirs of the Newtonian synthesis.

113

For nature is a perpetual circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids; fixed things out of volatile, and volatile out of fixed; subtle out of gross, and gross out of subtle; some things to ascend, and make the upper terrestrial juices, rivers, and the atmosphere, and by consequence others to descend for a requital to the former.

-Isaac Newton, from a letter to Henry Oldenberg, 2S January 1675/6

It seems probable to me that Cod in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties and in such proportion to space as most conduced to the end for which he formed them And therefore, that nature may be lasting, the changes of corporeal things are to be placed only in the various separations and new associations and motions of these permanent particles. . . .

-Isaac Newton, 31st Query to the Opticks, 4th edition, 1730

115

Isaac Newton is the symbol of Western science, and the Principia

may rightly be called the hinge point of modern scientific thought. As we saw in chapter 1, Newton defined the method of science itself, the notions of hypothesis and experiment,' and the techniques that were to make rational mastery of the environment a viable intell_ctual program. Through the public stance adopted by Newton and his disciple Roger Cotes, the positivist conception of truth first advanced by Mersenne was stamped upon the European mind. And although twentieth-century physics has modified the details of the Newtonian synthesis significantly, all modern scientific thinking, if not the character of contemporary rationalempirical thought in general, remains, in essence, profoundly Newtonian. .

It was thus with some amazement that, when masses of Newton's manuscripts were auctioned off by his descendants at

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Sotheby's in 1936, the British economist John Maynard Keynes read through them and discovered that Newton had been steeped in, if not obsessed by, the occult sciences, particularly alchemy. 1 As a result, Keynes could not avoid making the following judgment:

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians. . . . He looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and this is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty.2

Keynes realized that the eighteenth century had essentially

"cleaned Newton up" for public viewing; that the Principia and the Opticks were but the published portion of a larger quest that had much more in common with the world view of, say, Robert Fludd than with that of a nineteenth-century physicist. But the recent biography of Newton by Frank Manuel, and the brilliant study of Newton and his cultural context by David Kubrin, have shown that to a great extent, Newton cleaned himself up as well. 3 To find the answ_r to the riddle of gravity on the particulate level, Newton turned to the Hermetic tradition; and he came to see himself, Keynes suggests, as the contemporary representative, indeed even the God-chosen inheritor of that tradition. But for both

, psychological and political reasons, Newton found it necessary to repress that side of his personality and his philosophy, and to present a sober, positivist face. In significant ,ways, the _volution of Newton's consciousness reflects not only the fate of the alchemical tradition in Restoration England, but also the evolution of Western consciousness in general. Indeed, Manuel has suggested that his personality and outlook were but extreme expressions of the age.4

Newton's childhood was characterized by an intense dose of the separation anxiety that is a part of all of our early lives and that later serves as a model for the sensation of bodily responses that occur whenever we face object-loss. Newton's father died three months before he was born, and his mother remarried when he

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The Disenchantment of the World (2)

was just about three years of age. She went to live a mile and a half away with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving Isaac with his grandmother in Wools thorpe, Lincolnshire, the town of his birth. She returned to Woolsthorpe only when her second husband died, by which time Newton was about eleven. Hence Newton was quite literally abandoned during a crucially _ -Y-";' formative period,- after a period in which his mother had been the sole parent. As a result, writes Manuel,

- his fixation upon her was absolute. The trauma of her original departure, the denial of her love, generated anguish, aggressiveness, and fear. After the total possession-undisturbed by a rival, not even a father, almost as if there had been a virgin birth-she was removed

and he was abandoned.

'The loss ?f his mo,ther to anothe_ man," continues Manuel, "was a. traumatic event in Newton's hfe from which he never recovered." Newton recorded in one of his adolescent notebooks "sins"

, such as "threat[e]ning my father and mother Smith to bume them f and the house over them," and "wishing death and hoping it to _.., , some."

L ,-_ It should also be noted that Newton's belief that he was part of

f' ._ the aurea catena, the II golden chain" of magi, or unique figures

t... designated by God in each age to receive the ancient Hermetic i. wisdom, was reinforced by the circumstances of his birth. He was i bornprematurely, on Christmas Day 1642, and was not expected to

_ Jive. Indeed, that particular parish had a high rate of infant

" I mortality, and Newton later believed that his survival (as well as

.. ;. <" "

t '- ;his escaping the ravages of the plague while still _ young man)

'signified divine intervention. The same parish, according to Manuel, also credited some form of the widespread belief that a male child born after his father's death is endowed with extraordinary

, powers. This attitude, combined with Newton's great fear of object-loss, produced his peculiar stance with respect to past and present thinkers. Moses, Thoth, Thales, Hermes, Pythagoras, and

'I"others like them enjoyed his praise; contemporary scientists were by and large a threat. Newton went into extreme rages in his arguments over priority with men such as Hooke and Leibniz, and

'"c'lregarded the system of the world described in the Principia as his personal property. He was certain that "God revealed himself to only one prophet in each generation, and this made parallel dis

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The Reenchantment of the World

coveries improbable." At the bottom of one alchemical notebook Newton inscribed as an anagram of his Latin name, Isaacus Neuutonus, the phrase: Jeova sanctus un us-Jehovah the holy one.

Along with these psychological traits, Newton manifested those common to Puritan morality: austerity, discipline, and above all, guilt and shame. "He had a built-in censor," says Manuel, "and lived ever under the Taskmaster's eye " Such conclusions

emerge from a study of Newton's adolescent exercise notebooks, which include sentences chosen for translation into Latin in the manner of free association-sentences in which dread, selfdisparagement, and loneliness abound as themes. Hence:

A little fellow.

He is paile.

There is noe roome for mee to sit. What imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for?

He is broken.

The ship sinketh.

There is a thing which trobeleth mee. He should have been punished.

No man understands mee.

What will become of me.

r will make an end.

I cannot but weepe.

I know not what to doe.

These are remarkable sentences for a youth to choose for Latin exercises, indeed, the selection is almost unbelievable. "In all these youthful scribblings," writes Manuel,

there is an astonishing absence of positive feeling. The word Love never appears, and expressions of gladness and desire are rare. . . . Almost all the statements are negations, admonitions, prohibitions. The climate of life is hostile and punitive.

Had history heard nothing more from Isaac Newton, these notebook entries would amount to nothing more than a psychiatric curiosity. But we are talking about the creator of the modern scientific outlook, and that outlook, the insistence that everything be totally predictable and rationally calculable ("kill anything that moves," as Philip Slater puts it) cannot be separated from its pathological

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basis. "A chief source of Newton's desire to know," writes Man_" tiel, "was his anxiety before and his fear of the unknown." ,,' "Knowledge that could be mathematicized ended his quan"" daries. . . [The fact] that the world obeyed mathematical law was I¥s security."

To force everything in the heavens and on earth into on_ rigid, tight

___-fiame from which the most minuscule detail would not be allowed to

escape free and random was an underlying need of this anxiety

ridden man. And with rare exceptions, his fantasy wish was fulfilled

, _ during the course of his lifetime. The system was complete in both its

physical and historical dimensions. A structuring of the world in so

absolutist a manner that every event, the closest and the most remote,

.,_ fits neatly into an imaginary system has been called a symptom of illness, especially when others refuse to join in the grand obsessive design. It was Newton's fortune that a large portion of his total system was acceptable to European society as a perfect representation of reality, and his name was attached to the age.s

The schizophrenic, wrote the _nthropologist Geza Roheim, is

t the magician who has failed.6 Despite his eventual nervous breaki'_ ",down, Newton was no psychotic; but that he bordered on a type of

"madness, and allayed it with a totally death-oriented view of nature, is be_ond doubt. What is significant, how_ver, is not his vi.ew f,nature Itself, but the broad agreement that It found, the exclte

" ,"I!1ent that it generated. Newton was the magician who succeeded. ! .,"Instead of remaining some sort of isolated crank, he was able to get f all of Europe "to join in the grand obsessive design," becoming % .president of the Royal Society and being buried, in 1727, amidst pomp and glory in Westminster Abbey in what was literally an intemational event. With the acceptance of the Newtonian world view, it might be argued, Europe went collectively out of its mind.

Where does Newton's Hermeticism fit into all of this? We have already seen that he regarded himself as the inheritor of an archaic tradition, what D. P. Walker has called the prisca theologia (ancient theology), a collection of church-related texts believed, during the Renaissance, to have been inspired by knowledge that dated back to the time of Moses and which embodied the secrets of matter and the universe.7 Newton's alchemical library was indeed large, and his alchemical experiments were a major feature of his life down to 1696 when he moved to London to become master of the Mint. Newton was connected to alchemy by something that was inte

121

The Reenchantment of the World

grally related to his megalomania about inheriting the sacred tradition: his conviction that matter was not inert but required an active, or hylarchic, principle for its motion. In alchemy Newton hoped to find the microcosmic correlate to gravitational attraction, which he had already established on the macrocosmic level. As Gregory Bateson has rightly remarked, Newton did not discover gravity; he invented it. 8 This invention, however, was part of a -much larger quest: Newton's search for the system of the world, the secret of the universe-an ancient riddle stretching back, as Keynes said, to the Babylonians. The Hermetic tradition was thus the framework of early Newtonian thought, and gravity merely a name for the hylarchic principle that he was certain had to exist. 9 Newton was first and foremost the alchemist Keynes saw in him, then. Over the years, however, as the result of a self-repression that had an important political motivation behind it, he gradually evolved into a mechanical philosopher.

English interest in alchemy, and mysticism in general, beca:ne intense during the period of Newton's childhood, the Civil War and after. More alchemical and astrological texts were translated into English during 1650-{)0 than in the entire preceding century. 10 The reasons for this increased interest were largely political. Even today, one's view of matter and force is inevitably a religious question; and in the context of the seventeenth century, religious questions were typically political issues as well. At one level, the Civil War signified the breakdown of a feudal economy; the opposition of the new bourgeoisie, with its laissez-faire outlook, to the monopolistic practices of the crown. This economic struggle was reflected politically in the conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and religiously in the triumph of Puritanism. But the war had another dimension, now recovered in the work of Christopher Hill: the attempt, on the part of a vast number of sects, to fight the crown, and later the Parliamentarians, with the ideology of communism, or what Engels called utopian socialism, and to argue for direct knowledge of God as opposed to salvation either through works or blind faith. 11 The religion of these numerous groups--Levellers, Diggers, Muggletonians, Familists, Behmenists, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters, Seekers--was in many cases some combination of Hermeticism, Paracelsism, or soteriological alchemy, and hence they were often linked in the public mind with what was called "enthusiasm," that is, immoderation in religious beliefs, including possession by God or prophetic fren

122

The Disenchantment of the World ,L)

'P,,} zy. All mystical experiences, naturally enough, ca_e under this

: heading, and many of the radicals had clearly had such ecstatic --" insights. 12 It "was among the mystical sects," writes Keith Thomas, -_" "that alchemy struck some of its deepest roots."13 While there ,'" have been no studies demonstrating the actual extent of such beliefs among the lower classes and radical groups, there is little

q problem in demonstrating that such an association was made in the

-"_public (especially middle-class) mind of the time. At the center of

"'" these beliefs was a view of nature directly opposed to the new

science: the notion that God was present in everything, that matter

o_' was alive (pantheism); that change occurred via internal conflict

,_ (dialectical reason) rather than rearrangement of parts; and that

in contrast to the hierarchical views of the Church of England-any

_ individual could attain enlightenment and have direct experience j . of the Godhead (soteriological alchemy). The attempt of the lower

_ '._ cla_ses to hang. onto Hermetic notions reflected the class split de

I.",.,scnbed by KeIth Thomas, who observed that the ProtestantJ

_ _ti_;rationalist attack on magic left the middle class with secular salva

t -C'c-:;; tion, and the lower classes (in a context of enclosures and accelerat

cj'," ing poverty) with nothing. During this period, then, Hermeticism :, _ had an unmistakably socialist edge.14

,114.. The political threat inherent in the occult world view, however,

,'"_ent far beyond the attack on property and privilege espoused by

'most of these radical sects. It included: outright atheism; rejection '<. of monogamy and an affirmation of the pleasures of the body;

[, _ demands for religious toleration, as well as for the abolition of the

r,," tithe and the state church; contempt for the regular clergy; and

" rejection of any notions of hierarchy, as well as of the concept of

t sin. The ties between occult and revolutionary thought cart be seen

f f,' ,,'in a whole spectrum of leading radicals, but, as already noted, the

t . popular impression that communism, libertinism, heresy, and

" Hermeticism were part of some vast conspiracy is amply

t documented in the numerous statements made on the subject by

t clergymen. 15 This intense politicalloccult ferment, and the fear of

i it, received full expression in the 1640s. In the 1650s, however, the

_,-< tide began to turn; and after the Restoration, the mechanical phi..

L ""'to losophy was seen by the ruling elites as the sober antidote to the

i', enthusiasm of the last two decades. From 1655 onward there was a

_ ': series of conversions to the mechanical philosophy by men who

, had previously been sympathetic to alchemy.

r These conversions were thus part of the reaction against en

123

The Reenchantment of the World

thusiasm on the part of the propertied classes and leading members of the Church of England, groups that coalesced in the Royal Society itself. Thomas Sprat, in the earliest history of the Society (1667), viewed the mechanical philosophy as helping to instill respect for law and order, and claimed that it was the job of science and the Royal Society to oppose enthusiasm. Men like Charleton and Boyle, key figures in the conversion to mechanism, worried about the influence o( an alchemist like Jacob Boehme among English radicals. They feared that the proliferation of religions based on mystical insight or individual conscience would end in no religion at all. "Elevation of the mechanical philosophy above the dialectical science of radical 'enthusiasts,'" writes Christopher Hill, "reciprocally helped to undermine such beliefs."16

As the reader might imagine, Newton, who had his most brilliant insights regarding the system of the world in 1666, was in something of a quandary. It must have been as evident to him as to any student at Restoration Cambridge, writes Kubrin, "that Hermetic knowledge was widely viewed by his contemporaries as an inducement to enthusiasm, and that extreme caution should be exercised with regard to such ideas." At the same time, he saw himself as the inheritor of the sacred tradition, and was convinced that the answer to the riddle of the system of the world was buried within it. What Newton did, then, was to delve deeply into the Hermetic wisdom for his answers, while clothing them in the idiom of the mechanical philosophy.

. Th_ centerpiece of the Newtonian system, gravitational attrac

. - tion, was in fact the Hermetic principle of sympathetic forces,

.. which. Newton saw as a creative principle, a source of divine

-'_energy in the universe. Although he presented this idea in

Il)echanical terms,- his unpublished writings reveal his commitment

to the cornerstone of all occult systems: the notion that mind exists

. inmatter- and can control it (original participation). In his letter to

Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, cited in the epigraph to this chapter, Newton states that "nature is a perpetual circulatory worker," and then offers a description of nature's mode of operation-separating the gross from the subtle, the volatile from the fixed, and so on-which is alchemy pure and simple. Draft versions of published work contain statements that were not publicly heard in the West, in the modern period, until Lamarck and Blake: "all matter duly formed is attended with signes of life"; "nature delights in transformations"; the world is "God's sen

124

The Disenchantment of the World (",

sorium," and so on. His writings abound with alchemical notions,

_ such as fermentation and putrefaction, or the "sociableness" and

i_' i'unsociableness" of various substances for each other; and some of

these statements even made their way into the famous 31st Query

.. of the Opticks.17 As R. S. Westfall puts it, alchemy was Newton's

,j_,j .most enduring passion, and the Principia something of an interrup

tion of this larger quest. 18

Eve

, n some of Newton's published work (like _he 31st Qu_ry)

'reveals his intense interest in the occult. The reader may be sur

prised to learn that Newton wrote on the ancient temple of King

Solomon, and speculated on the size of that ancient measure, the

I;,. cubit. 19 The notion that the secrets of the universe were contained

'. }n the mathematical relationships built into the structure of ancient

f ';jholy buildings was a part of the Hermetic tradition, one that'is

i ",>J making something of a comeback with the current vogue of

i- "_'pyramid power." Indeed, Newton had a similar interest in the

c' '-Great Pyramid of Cheops, and as with his attempt to use alchemi

cal experiments to validate the theory of gravity, this interest was

: much more than an unrelated hobby. Newton was later to state

" that Egyptian priests knew the very secrets of the cosmos which he

had revealed in the Principia.

Newton's retreat from these views, as Kubrin is able to show,

I occurred in the context of a revival of Hermetic ideas in the late

F,_.:;:;r1670s and the 1680s, the years leading up to the Glorious Revolu

, tion.2o Leveller and republican sentiments emerged once again,

_. and a leading proponent of the new Hermeticism, especially in the

_ 169Os, was one John Toland, who had studied with the Newtonian

_ scholar David Gregory. Toland saw the animistic notions lurking in

, . ,,: ._ Newton's work and pointed to them in his own publications,

f' ':,.; .. claiming that nature was transformative and infinitely fecund, and

drawing an analogy to the political arena. Newton's dilemma was

that he secretly agreed with Toland's theory of matter and force,

and had in fact held these views for decades. It thus became im

perative for him to dissociate himself from these ideas; but this

necessarily meant changing his mind about them in what

amounted to a rigorous self-censorship. His disciple Samuel Clarke

was entrusted with the job of attacking Toland in a set of sermons

published in 1704, and when Clarke translated the Opticks i'nto Latin two years later, the phrase, the world is "God's sensorium,"

", .. was altered to read, is "like God's sensorium.lIl1 Statements such

as "we cannot say that all Nature is not alive" were withdrawn

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The Reenchantment of the World

before publications went to press; and most importantly, Newton

',adopted the position that matter was inert, that it changed not dialectically (i.e., internally) but through rearrangement alone. Thus in the quotation from the Opticks cited at the beginning of this chapter, Newton gives as his purpose "that nature may be lasting"; in other words, that it may be stable, predictable, regular-like the social order o*ught to be. As a young man, Newton had been fascinated by the fecundity of nature. Now, its alleged rigidity was somehow all-important.

In the modern empirical sense, there was nothing "scientific"

about this shift from Hermeticism to mechanism. The change was not the result of a series of careful experiments on the nature of matter, and indeed, it is no more difficult to visualize as a living organism than it is to see it as a dead, mechanical object.22 And at the risk of stretching a point somewhat, it seems to me, following Kubrin's argument, that two things must be noted about this transformation, in addition to its nonscientific character. First, the forces that triumphed in the second half of the seventeenth century were those of bourgeois ideology and laissez-faire capitalism. Not only was the idea of living matter heresy to such groups; it was also economically inconvenient. A dead earth ruptures the delicate ecological balance that was maintained in the alchemical tradition, but if nature is dead, there are no restraints on exploiting it for profit. Loving cultivation becomes rape; and that, to me, is most clearly what industrial society in general (not just capitalism) represents. That the current breakdown of such societies, at least in the West, is being accompanied by an occult revival, with all its good and bad aspects, is hardly surprising.

Second, the triumph of the Puritan view of life, which concomitantly repressed sexual energy and sublimated it into brutalizing labor,23 helped to create the "modal personality" of our time-a personality that is docile and subdued in the face of authority, but fiercely aggressive toward competitors and subqrdinates. The severely repressed Newton, as Blake pointed out, was everyman; and various paintings of Newton done over the period 1689 to 1726 (Plates 12-15) reveal an increasing amount of what Wilhelm Reich brilliantly termed "character armor." In the earliest painting, the "Hermetic" Newton retains (despite his childhood) a gentle, ethereal quality that the artist has captured quite beautifully. In the end, however, we see the rigidity of the mechanical world view, the Newton who denied his own internal principles-what Rilke

126

Plate 13. Isaac Newton. 1702. Portrait by Godfrey Kneller.

Courtesy. National Portrait Gallery. London.

Plate_12. Isaac Newton, 1689.

Portrait by Godfrey Kneller. Lord

portsmouth and the Trustees of

the Portsmouth Estate.

127

Plate 14. Isaac Newton, ca. 1710. Portrait by James Thornhill.

By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Plate 15. Isaac Newton, 1726, the year before his death, Mezzotint by John Faber, after painting by

John Vanderbank. Courtesy, Prints Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

128

The Disenchantment of the World (2)

called the "unlived lines in our bodies"24-for the sake of social

approval and outward conformity. We see, in effect, the tragedy of

, modern man.25

_, Finally, as a number of writers have pointed out, just as the

,', lower classes were suppressed at the level of work and labor, so

I" did the middle and upper classes keep themselves in check at the

'" "".. level of literar_ and intellectual acti_ity. The at_ack on enthusiasm

. _R;" was breathtakingly successful, and 1S reflected in the poetry of the

eighteenth century (the ca_efully contr.ived couplets _f I?ryden and . ' Pope) as well as the notIon of classical scholarsh1p 1tself."The

, '" classics!" cried Blake. "It is the classics, and not Goths nor monks,

Ithat desolate Europe with wars.1I26 In his painting of Newton,

':, ,1,' carving up the world with a compass (Plate 16), Blake tried to show

Plate 16. William Blake, N_vto" (1795). The Tate Gallery, London.

129

The Reenchantment of the World

the blindness of this orientation to nature; and nowhere did he say

it better than in his verse letter to Thomas Butts (1802):

Now I a fourfold vision see,

And a fourfold vision is given to me; 'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah's night

- -- And twofold always: May God lis keep

From Single vision & Newton's sleep!21

Newton is pictured in Blake's painting sitting at the bottom of the Sea of Space and Time. The polyp near his left foot symbolizes, in Blake's mythology, "the cancer of state religion and power politics/' while Newton stares at his diagram "with the catatonic fixity

f"I.., "28

0 Sing e VISIOn. . . .

Blake's attack on the Newtonian world view raises a question that Hill has made the theme of The World Tumed Upside Down: how can we be so sure that the way things are is right side up? Bourgeois society, he notes, was a powerful civilization, producing great intellects in the Newtonian and Lockean mold. But, he adds, it was

the world in which poets went mad, in which Locke was afraid of music and poetry, and Newton had secret, irrational thoughts which he dared not publish. . . .

Blake may have been right to see Locke and Newton as symbols of repression. Sir Isaac's twisted, buttoned-up personality may help us to grasp what was wrong with the society which deified him. . . . This society, which on the surface appeared so rational, so relaxed, might perhaps have been healthier if it had not been so tidy, if it had not pushed an its contradictions underground: out of sight, out of con

scious mind. . . . What went on underground we can only guess. A few poets had romantic ideas out of tune with their world; but no one needed to take them too seriously. Self-censored meant selfverifying. 29

"Great though the achievements of the mechanical philosophy were," Hill writes at another point, "a dialectical element in scientific thinking, a recognition of the 'irrational' (in the sense of the mechanically inexplicable) was lost when it triumphed, and is having to be painfully recovered in our own century."30

The emphasis here is on the word "painfully." In Chapter 3, I

130

The Disenchantment of the wu,.u (2)

'discussed the role of surrealist art in attempting to liberate the

unconscious. But because the unconscious is so repressed, its great

mouthpiece in postwar Europe and America has become not art,

, but madness. Without going into too much detail, it is necessary to

_ point out that a major part of the psychotic experience is the return

t to the perception of the world in Hermetic terms. That madness is

t " " the best route to this perception I tend to doubt; but the fact that

f -"c-_;madness triggers the premodern epistemology of resemblance

,t _ does suggest that the insane are onto something we have forgot

f ten, and that (d. Nietzsche, Laing, Novalis, Holderlin, Reich. . .)

f: .,i.'our sanity is nothing but a collective madness.

i Alt_ough. it would take extensive clinic_l studies of insa.nity. to

_. _estabhsh thIS argument, even a casual reVIew of the case histOrIeS

: described by Laing in Tlte Divided Self tends to substantiate it. 31 In

.. general, says Laing, having a disembodied self creates a sense of

merger or confusion at the interface between inside and outside.

"As in soteriological alchemy or mystical experience, the subjectJ

object distinction blurs; the body is not felt as being separate from

"._J___other things or people. One of Laing's patients, for example, did

f2""[_1._':not distinguish between rain on her cheek and tears. She also

"_i. ';_worried that she was destructive, in the sense that if she touched.

anything, she would literally damage it (antipathy theory).

_§ff1izophrenics occasionally demonstrate a belief that inanimate

f£\1. oojects contain extraordinary powers, and Laing describes the case

a man who, while on a picnic, undressed and walked into a

nearby river, declaring that he had never loved his wife and chi!

"dren, pouring water on himself repeatedly, and refusing to leave

the river until he had been "cleansed." Here we have the original

notion of baptism, the belief that water bears the impressed virtue

of God (doctrine of signatures), and thus has healing powers.

... Another patient practiced various techniques to' "recapture reality," such as repeating phrases she regarded as real over and over

in the hope that their "realness" would rub off on her (sympathy theory, notion of mana). Finally, as I indicated in Chapter 3, Laing's

own method is alchemical in that it follows the notion of participat

ing consciousness, or sympathy theory. All humanistic therapies,

in fact, are rooted in original participation. The use of art, dance,

psychodrama, meditation, body work, 'and the like ultimately boils

,down to a merger of subject and object, a return to poetic imagina

tion or sensuous identification with the environment. [n the last

analysis, the good therapist is nothing more than the master al

131

The Reenc1zantment of the World

chemist to his or her patients, and effective therapy is essentially a return to the inherent, organic order that magic represented. The classification schemes of modern science, their Linnaean order and precision, purport to arise from the ego alone, to be fully rationalempirical. They thus represent a logical order that is imposed on nature and the human psyche. As a result, they violate something that magic, for all its technological limitations, had the instinctive wisdom to preserve.

Madness is, in the end, a statement about logical categories, and its reversion to the structure of premodern thought represents a revolt against the reality principle that it sees as crushing the human spirit. The increasing incidence of madness in our time reflects the desperate need for the recovery of dialectical reason. Does alchemy, or technology, represent the altered state of consciousness? Is material production, or human self-realization, most consonant with true human needs? Is subjugation of the earth, or harmony with it, the best way to proceed? I would submit that there is only one answer to these questions, and only one conclusion to .our survey of the disenchantment of the world: in the seventeenth century, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. We discounted a whole landscape of inner reality because it did not fit in with the program of industrial or mercantile exploitation and the directives of organized religion. Today, the spiritual vacuum that results from our loss of dialectical reason is being filled by all kinds of dubious mystical and occult movements, a dangerous trend that has actually been encouraged by the ideal of the disem

. bodied intellect and the classical scholarship that Blake rightly found revolting. Modern science and technology are based not only on a hostile attitude toward the environment, but on the repression of the body and the unconscious; and unless these can be recovered, unless participating consciousness can be restored in a way that is scientifically (or at least rationally) credible and not

merely a relapse into naive animism, then what it means to be a human being will forever be lost.

The remainder of this book will be devoted to an exploration of such options.

132

Perhaps we need to be much more radical in the explanatory

hypotheses considered than we have allowed ourselves to be heretofore. Possibly the world of external facts is much more

fertile and plastic than we have ventured to suppose; it may be

that all these cosmologies and many more analyses and

classifications are genuine ways of arranging what nature offers

to our understanding, and that the main condition determining

our selection between them is something in us rather than something in the external world.

-E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aided in bringing this book to publication.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1981 by Cornell University Press.

First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1981.

Published in the United Kingdom by Cornell University Press Ltd., Ely House, 31 Dover Street, London W1X 4HQ.

Acknowledgment is made to:

The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., for excerpts from Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, translated by Laurence J. Lafleur; copyright @ 1950, 1956, by the Liberal Arts Press, Inc.; reprinted by permission of the Liberal Arts Press Division of the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

Doubleday & Company, Inc., for permission to quote excerpts from The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman; copyright @ 1965 by David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom; and an excerpt from The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Francis Golffing; copyright @ 1956 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., for permission to quote specified brief excerpts from Steps to all Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson (T. Y. Crowell); copyright E 19x2 by Harper & Row. Publishers, Inc.

Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to use an illustration by Fons van Woerkom from The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game by Paul Shepard, illustrated by Fons van Woerkom; text copyright @ 1973 by Paul Shepard, illustrations copyright @ 1973 by Fons van Woerkom.

International Standard Book Number (cloth) 0-8014-1347-0 International Standard Book Number (paper) 0-8014-9225-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 81-67178 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book.

For three friends: Michael Crisp David Kubrin John Trotter