Читать книгу Seeing Further - Группа авторов - Страница 14

In the early eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke claimed that it wasn’t stable for a society to have only a science of body. According to Locke, we would eventually need to develop a complementary science of mind, which is what Freud attempted in the late nineteenth century. The psychoanalytic tradition of the past century may be read, in part, as one

Portrait of John Locke, after Sir Godfrey Kneller.

reaction to the cosmological shift that took place two hundred years earlier. Freudian psychoanalytics and its many descendants are attempts to make sense of the self in a non-spatial framework and in a very real way to get beyond the metaphysical dualism of our Christian and Greek heritage. Personally I find myself greatly in sympathy with the whole exercise and although I think its therapeutic effects are easily overstated, I do believe the psychoanalytic stream of theory and practice is a powerful response to what remains within our society a cosmologically inspired trauma.

I do not mean to propose here that every individual is personally feeling this rent; but it is clear that a great many of us are. For all of the immense practical and epistemic triumphs of modern scientific metaphysics, which is premised on a homogeneous continuous conception of space, it is manifestly not being accepted by huge slabs of our population. Reactions against it have been vast and varied from Blake’s and Keat’s scathing poetic critiques (that science would ‘conquer by rule and line’, ‘unweave the rainbow’ and so on), to Alfred Whitehead’s enigmatically difficult ‘process philosophy’, which attempts to articulate a reality in which neither matter nor mind take precedence, rather both are artefacts of a fundamentally procedural world. Intellectual alternatives to pure physicalism are myriad: Teilhard de Chardin, Loren Eiseley, Mircea Eliade and Rupert Sheldrake may all be read as responses, to say nothing of the exponentially expanding volume of New Age literature. To the continuing horror of many champions of science, belief in astral planes, psychic channelling, reincarnation and past lives seems to be growing stronger.

In part I believe what this represents is a widespread social refusal of spatial monism. Whole sectors of our society are just not buying it! More than twenty million people bought The Celestine Prophecy (it is one of the most successful books of all time), which posits that when we become the beings we ought to be our souls ‘cross over’ (via some processes of quantum mechanics) to a higher spatial plane. In the age of science, one of the most pervasive fantasies is indeed the existence of other spaces of being: from the X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Lost and Battlestar Galactica, our television screens offer a steady diet of realities in which multiple spaces and planes of being co-exist. (Cyberfiction offers yet another response – the fantasy of downloading one’s mind into a computer to live for ever in a virtual world is nothing more, though a good deal less, than a technological version of Heaven.) One of the great philosophical projects of the post-Enlightenment era has been to articulate non-spatialised conceptions of the self in relation to the cosmos; yet judging by the evidence of the most pervasive medium on our planet the enterprise has met with little success in a sociological sense. Even science fiction writers – Carl Sagan, no less – keep on inventing wormholes through the physio-spatial matrix to other, suspiciously spiritualised, places of being.

Those of us who love science may choose to interpret all this as a kind of play, and in some sense it is, but the refusal to accept spatial monism is also in part fuelling the rise of Creationism and other fundamentalist brands of Christianity. At the same time that spatial monism erased the division between earthly and heavenly space, it also provided a platform for erasing any fundamental distinction between living and non-living things. In the new era of science, continuity itself became the epistemic model – the continuity of the laws of nature, the continuity of space, the continuity of matter, the continuity of life. No body is special, because no thing is special, because no place is special. Humans are related to apes because, in the end, we are all just inert matter floating in a homogeneous void. The fundamentalist rebellion against Darwinism is not just a rejection of the continuity proposed by biology but in a wider, and less obvious way a rejection of the very premise of totalised cosmic continuity. Christians who insist on a space for the soul wish to reclaim that part of the medieval world picture that literally gave a place to moral human agents. Though I do not endorse their specific responses, I believe that in this respect the religious right point us to a deep and abiding sociological problem that will not be easily resolved and which ought not be so readily dismissed.