Coming to Grips with the Inextricable

We're all backward. Our machines are all modern and shit - but our minds - our minds are primitive.

James Mangold, Cop Land

Three of the most radical thinkers of the 19th & 20th centuries had the word 'White' insinuated into their names: the American Walt Whitman, the Englishman Alfred North Whitehead, and the Glasgow-born Kenneth White. Coincidence? Probably not.

As for the whiteness (of their names or of their work), one can read this as a metaphor for incandescence, and for the ultimate ground of Being that these colossi sought to expound through their various philosophies, theories, and poetics.

Alfred North Whitehead started off as a scientist and abtsract philosopher, a mathematician whose maths was so complex that even experts struggled to understand it. Soon, though Whitehead was delving into nature treating it in much the same way as he treated maths: as a subject that was separate from the mind enquiring into it, that is, as some thing at the end of a microscope or telescope. It was only till he encountered the problem of the enquiring mind (and how it could not possibly be separated from that which was being enquired) that he began to rethink his theories on Nature (now emphatically capitalised). A purely scientific approach to philosophy was, he felt, an impossibility.

In his last period of life, his metaphysical period, he accepts that the current strictures of science are not conducive to knowing one's self, indeed, that they may prevent it. It is at this time that he writes Religion in the Making and Science & the Modern World. At the outset of this period, the last 25 years of his life, he proclaims his message like a prophetic visionary, more in line with Blake or Law, than with a mathematician who was well known for being obscure:

My theme is the energising of a state of mind in the modern world... and its impact upon other spiritual forces.

Whitehead wasn't the only hard-headed scientist to make this turnaround during his lifetime. Niels Bohr, Einstein almost, Erwin Schrodinger, Richard Feynman, the astronomers John Archibald Wheeler and Carl Sagan, the theoretical physicist David Bohm (whose Wholeness & The Implicate Order and On Creativity are examples of a more conscientious approach to the physics), and Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life), also made significant modifications to extant theories, and incorporated these in an attempt to bridge the clefts that had arisen between the sciences, philosophy (the arts), and theology.

Whitehead was aware that science could get the better of itself, that the intellect which fed on logic and reason alone was only half a brain, half a human (namely 'man').

Religion, of course, was the answer, a 'primordial' religion that was more akin to poeisis than it was to anything the institutionalized Church could throw at us. Religion as solitariness (as Whitehead makes out) and as a coming to grips with the inextricable. This religion is more verb than a noun; it is a manner of fastening - religioning - the individual to one's community, to one's land, to one's being. It is a matter of moving, and of transforming. Of becoming part of the 'family'. 'Family', not as some anthropocentred, overheated vortex but as a binding to the essentials which bring forth life and growth, and maturity, and which enables the realization of inextricability. One's relatives are one's relations, and since relations are part of the process and reality of one's living, we are inevitably overcome with a sense of belonging, since now we can recognize these vital energies that cultivate. Religion, then, as far as this is concerned, is nothing more than a genuine recognition (a living) of one's inclusion and involvement in breathing bodies larger than our own.

In his Web of Life, Fritjof Capra concludes with a similar exposition of religion. And in The Tao of Physics, he writes of the moment when science, upon the propogation of quantum theory, confirmed what the mystics and the poets had known all along - that the individual is inextricable, and that the universe (filled with flowings and flowerings) is all there is:

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer.

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As the British anthropologist Tim Ingold remarks, 'Something must be wrong somewhere if the only way to understand our own creative involvement is by first taking ourselves out of it.'

The answer of course is our reconnecting with Nature, and with the being of Being (as Heidegger calls it), and with the local. Globalization has seduced us into thinking we can go anywhere, and be anything. It has reduced the local and the parochial to a kind of dungeon-type existence. The lure of the local has been topped by the admiration of distance and the promise of the exotic. But it's all nonsense.

Backwardness itself is a virtue, progress a curse of Sisyphean proportions. Viewed from this perspective, some kind of peasant connection (the word peasant is derived from Old French paisent meaning local inhabitant) is vital to one's religioning. Crucial to one's coming to grips with the inextricable.

The Eclipse of Reason.

The disease of reason is that reason was born from man's urge to dominate nature; and recovery depends on insight into the nature of the original disease, not on a cure of the latest symptoms.

Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason