The Reenchantment of the World Read online

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

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

  1 The Birth of Modern Scientific Consciousness

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

  -- René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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 mining 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.

  René 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. I had the best education France had to offer, he says (he studied at a Jesuit seminary, the Ecole de La Flèche); 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.

  To start with, says Descartes, it was necessary to disbelieve 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, "I 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 "me" who is being deceived. 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 never really did define, to anybody's satisfaction, the terms "clear" 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 gnowleage 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