The Reenchantment of the World Read Online Free Page B

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