The Reenchantment of the World/The Turning Point
Kolb, David
A new holistic science? THE REEHCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD Morris Berman Cornell Univ. Press, $34.50, $8.95 paper, 356 pp. THE TURNING POINT SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND THE RISING CULTURE Fritjof...
...Berman is vague about what such a science will look like...
...Will this view remain only marginal...
...Capra's analysis of our contemporary situation centers on three areas: biology and health care, psychology, and economics...
...Once this subject/object dichotomy was established all our crises began to grow...
...Drawing on the work of Polanyi and Reich he argues that the subject/object split rests on a deeper level of being, on that "participatory" consciousness Descartes drove underground...
...a holistic metaphysics...
...We are in a Big Evil from which may come a Big Change...
...The dominant culture is disintegrating and the new is rising...
...Yet, in the full sense which Thomas Kuhn gave to the word "paradigm," it is not enough to have an example of a possible new way of doing things...
...The turning point has come...
...Berman chronicles the rise of the mechanistic view and discusses the prior "participatory" consciousness out of which it emerged...
...Both writers point to new paradigms for science and institutions...
...They believe in progress...
...Capra (practicing the imperialism he criticizes) annexes all mystics and "the" tradition of the East into the particular Taoist-Buddhist blend he favors...
...Berman, more sensitive to differences, examines alchemy and other rejected Western approaches to the world...
...Berman is aware of the dangers posed by the ironic self and the dance of the signifier...
...In olden days people sensed that everything in the universe was alive and interrelated...
...He sketches the new world view emerging from quantum physics and applies it in turn to the three areas, where he finds the beginnings of holistic ideas and institutions concerned with bodily, psychic, and economic health...
...It is too easy to assume that any view or movement which is against capitalism or oppression or subject/object thinking is automatically/or some goal in common with other such movements...
...There is danger of political naivete here...
...Since the seventeenth century we have boxed ourselves into a overly analytical, atomistic, mechanical science and technology that deny the richer existence that makes science possible...
...But science is not the real villain...
...The examples must have been accepted by the relevant group as defining the way to do things...
...THE TURNING POINT SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND THE RISING CULTURE Fritjof Capra Simon and Schuster, $16.95, 464 pp...
...The writings of Gregory Bateson provide Berman with a prototype system which softens all modern dualities without at the same time dissolving all difference into an uncritical primitive animism...
...Capra, drawing on his work in quantum physics, describes the new style of science as based on observation and the construction of models (but not necessarily quantitative models), where all models have limited application and no one model is more fundamental than any other...
...Moreover, awareness of this level of identification reveals to us our existential roots...
...He argues that theories and practices based on subjects manipulating neutral objects have reduced our individual and social health...
...The enemy of my enemy is my friend'' is a bad intellectual rule and a shaky political guide...
...Capra's historical narration suggests that worldviews come before everything else...
...For him capitalism is a result of the subject/ object way of thinking rather than, as Berman would have it, one of the causal elements in a gestalt that includes the scientific worldview...
...Descartes and Newton broke that world into us "in here" and the objects "out there...
...In an earlier book, The Tao of Physics, Capra argued at length that post-Einsteinian physics had escaped the subject/object prison...
...At the moment, however, the directions that Berman and Capra are pursuing remain only directions...
...But to define the new view and the rising culture as these books do is perhaps more than description...
...The point has ethical implications: solidarity with the environment and the importance of balance over maximizing single variables like profit or comfort or growth...
...he will have none of it...
...We are urged to change to an holistic view of "one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process...
...That mode of reasoning sees all entities as part of "minds" which are not separate spiritual substances but holistic systems greater than the sum of their parts, which keep their balance through feedback and mutual inner reactions...
...now he urges other fields to follow that lead...
...Berman gives a clear and sensitive exposition of Bateson's ideas in social anthropology, psychology, and cybernetic theory...
...we must blame our assumption that we are isolated selves facing an indifferent world which we set out to know and control through mechanistic means...
...Bateson offers us a place to step, a non-Cartesian [non subject/object] mode of scientific reasoning...
...He even claims that "the triumph of the Cartesian paradigm . . . was not a scientific but a political process...
...Both writers claim our cultural crises stem from a faulty picture of the world...
...At this level the modern separation of subject/object breaks down...
...Berman is arguing that the crisis of the old will force adoption of the new world view...
...Physicists in general do not accept Capra's claim for their status as revolutionaries, based as it is on daring interpretations of quantum mechanics, a field whose success leaves physicists more puzzled then exultant...
...He worries about the patterns of behavior, notably "guruism," in the same groups Capra heralds as beginning the new culture...
...For anything to be at all means for it to be a member within self-regulating systems on many different levels...
...There are many ways of being against, and definition by negation is not enough, as we know from the struggles that follow intellectual and political revolutions...
...If there is a conspiracy these books give its rationale...
...Both writers find inspiration in non-mainstream traditions...
...it's a political act...
...Nor have the diverse liberation and renovation movements yet found a common metaphysical center...
...But Berman and Capra are swimming in the mainstream...
...For Berman the way to health lies in the recognition that our psychic and bodily connection with reality has not been destroyed by the modern world view, only repressed...
...With coalescence will come power...
...Once the world is seen in this way a new holistic science can begin to grow...
...David Kolb MARILYN FERGUSON in The Aquarian Conspiracy, suggested that a healing way of seeing and being is already in existence in our culture and is moving toward dominance...
...Surely we need the kind of effort these books are making to find less limiting ways of viewing ourselves and the world, and a broader notion of rationality that will enable us to keep the benefits of modernity while shedding some of its burdens...
...Capra radiates political optimism...
...In roundabout ways Capra and Berman have much in common with these movements, especially the proposal for a multitude of kinds of self-limited discourses, but Capra and Berman are old-fashioned realists in comparison to the dances of the other views, which would countenance no overall language, even (or especially...
...Berman is less naive in his discussion of the totalitarian potential of holistic modes of thought and organization...
...Both writers share the vision of a decentralized, human-scale, pluralized Utopia, whose limited social institutions, like Capra's limited scientific theories, are not under any overall master but are loyal to their own natural regions...
...Capra offers a briefer historical survey of the impact of Newtonian science on many areas of knowledge...
...participating consciousness was rejected, not refuted...
...His message is that the new world is upon us unnoticed, awaiting only the coming together of presently scattered movements and ideas...
...Capra contends that the new world is already coalescing...
...Bateson's work has not yet become the progenitor of a new holistic science...
...These books by Berman and Capra urge this new way of looking at the world and discuss its consequences for our lives and institutions...
...It remains to be seen whether the new view and culture will come together and whether they will resist being captured and turned into yet one more "lifestyle" option for the consumer society...
...knowledge - as in poetic insight - is becoming what we know...
...Neither author seems interested in the more radical attacks on the whole Greek-and-Western project currently brewing in deconstructionist and pragmatic circles and appearing in the work of Derrida or Foucault or Rorty...
...What Berman and Capra describe still remains marginal...
...Ber-man's account of the modern split view of the world is well informed and sensitive to the many factors involved, for example, how the subject/object view fitted the needs of the rising social classes...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 12
