This is actually a pre-edited chapter from my thesis. If anybody is actually insane enough to read it, I would appreciate feedback. Actually, a skim-read would be more suggested, considering it is 38 000 words!
Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Western Rationalist Hegemony
Part 1: Introduction
1.1 Introduction and overview
1.2 Ways of knowing
1.3 Indigenous peoples and ways of knowing
1.4 Mystical and indigenous ways of knowing
1.5 Wilber’s pre-trans model
Part Two: Seminal Moments in the Genealogy of Mind and Intelligence From Ancient Greece To the Birth of the Modern Secular State
2.1 Overview
2.2 The emergence of rationalism in Ancient Greece
2.3 Medieval Europe
2.3.1 Rational Christianity and the suppression of the mystical
2.3.2 Creation spirituality versus fall-redemption Christianity
2.4 Towards the scientific revolution: the birth of the university and the Aristotelian revival
2.5.1 The Enlightenment
2.5.2 The Enlightenment and the development of the modern scientific method
2.5.3 The rationalists versus the empiricists
2.5.4 The instruments of reason
2.5.5 The five foundational values of the modern scientific revolution
2.6 The industrialisation of society, the emergence of the secular state and the entrenchment of egoic consciousness
Part Three. Seminal Moments in the Genealogy of Mind and Intelligence: Biology, Psychology and the Modern Era
3.1 Overview
3.2.1 Biological theory and intelligence
3.2.2 Evolutionary theory
3.2.3 Some effects of the neo-Darwinian hegemony
3.2.4 Genetic Theory
3.3.1 Modern psychology and intelligence theory
3.3.2 Early cognitive psychology
3.3.3 Early intelligence theory
3.3.4 The influence of Freud
3.3.5 Behaviourism
3.3.6 The influence of Piaget
3.3.7 Neuroscience
3.3.8 IQ and intelligence theory
3.3.9 The computer as metaphor for mind
3.4 Parapsychology as a handmaiden to empiricism
3.5 Overview: general insight into the limitations of modern psychological methods
4.1 The mechanistic syllogism
5.1 Conclusion: the covert regulative mechanisms of power
Part 1. Introduction
1.1 Introduction and Overview
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Expurey (quoted in Ross, 1993: 272)
But Helmholtz abhorred the mush of the Romantic. His mathematical treatment of the principle (of conservation of energy) coldly placed the emphasis where it has been ever since: there are no outside forces in our closed world of energy transformations. There is no corner in the stars for any god, no crack in this closed universe of matter for any divine influence to seep through, none whatever.
Julian Jaynes (1982: 437-438)
In the previous chapter it was shown that the development of an atomistic and mechanistic paradigm has been the overriding factor in the predominance of mechanistic science and rationality in the Western world, and that underpinning these are eight psycho-spiritual imperatives. In this chapter, in line with the methodology of genealogical theory (Foucault, 1984) and causal layered analysis (Inayatullah, 2002a), the defining moments within the development of western rationality and mind science will be unpacked. This historical analysis asserts Foucault’s belief that the present state of any given discourse is “the arbitrary result of (the)... configuration of self-producing forces.” (quoted in Shapiro, 1992: 3)
This chapter traces the development of the Western mechanistic worldview and its rational ways of knowing, from the ancient world to the dawn of the modern industrial era; the following chapter (four) establishes the relationship between this development and subsequent defining moments within modern dominant discourses within modern biological science, psychology and intelligence theory. It is found that the ways of knowing that are embedded within the various ideas, philosophies, institutions, fields of enquiry and worldviews have been, and continue to be, seminal in the establishment and perpetuation of these dominant discourses. The following historical analysis offers an elucidation of the ways in which the current discourses are reflective of various non-objective factors and subtle struggles for power (both conscious and unconscious) that have existed throughout the history of western civilization, and particularly its rationality and science. It will also be shown that there are discursive practices or rules of reasoning constituted within the language of the discourses and their texts, according to the dictates of the paradigms in which they are embedded, as well as their legitimated ways of knowing. note: Here I have followed similar terminology to Franklin (1999: 347)
Conceptions of consciousness and intelligence have varied greatly both within and between cultures and historical periods，as have the preferred ways of knowing. There are both continuities and discontinuities. With fields as vast as those discussed below, critical selections have been made in order to keep the analysis focused. While numerous other thinkers, movements and eras could have been added, those included have been deemed to be the most crucial.
In the discussion which follows, each of the key events within this genealogy will be referred to as “seminal moments”. Within each of these seminal moments, the effect upon the key way(s) of knowing within the given discourse and western science and/or civilization in general will be made explicit. It will be argued that the cumulative effect of these seminal moments and the ways of knowing that underpin them, is that there has been a slow but hegemonic process within western cultures involving the imposition of rational modes of thought and perception, in turn resulting in the consequent obfuscation of intuitive and non-rational ways of knowing. This will be referred to as the western rationalist hegemony
Sardar (1998) argues that western culture and society has relegated all competing ideologies and cultures to the position of “other.”
… moderrn science has been instrumental in shaping some of the most potent myths – of race, of the inferiority of the non-European people, of the origins of Europe, of the ‘problems’ of the third world, of the inseparable distance between ‘knowledge and ‘values’ and the inevitability of certain futures. Science has been the dominant instrument in the subjugation of the Other – the non-west – by western civilization, and the prime mechanism form the globalization of the western worldview. It is the bastion of Eurocentrism par excellence. (Sardar, 1998: 202)
According to Sardar, European science “appropriated” these other - non western - sciences, positing them within “a specific reductive and secular framework.” Thus these other sciences were rendered as non-science and “written out of history.” (Sardar, 1998: 202) The argument that follows makes explicit the ways in which intuitive ways of knowing (and particularly integrated intelligence) and the knowledge that they may have otherwise engendered in western culture, have been excluded from contemporary dominant scientific discourse.
Thus a mere analysis of contemporary intelligence theory in isolation from a broader civilisational perspective is fundamentally inadequate if we are to fully comprehend the establishment of its dominant themes and modes of enquiry. We must first examine the genealogy of ways of knowing in the west, and how a rationalist hegemony came to underpin science in the west.
Summary of the sections to follow
Section two begins with an introduction to indigenous ways of knowing, and also examines the question of whether they can be considered “lesser than” the ways of knowing of developed societies, focusing upon Wilber’s (2000a, 2000b, 2000c) pre/trans fallacy. In section three an almost traditional starting point of historical analyses of western rationality is examined - the atomism, mathematical predilection and defining rationality of the ancient Greeks; identified by numerous thinkers as having a vital impact on the development of scientific thought (de Bono, 1986; Hollinshead, 2002; Sheldrake, 2004 ). Moving forward in time, section four focuses upon the middle ages, where the influence of Christianity is considered. In particular there is an examination of the Christian rejection of mysticism. This includes the rejection and persecution of Gnosticism, and the development of an overtly rational bent to Christian thought, culminating in the scholasticism of Augustinian theology and Protestantism. (Ross, 1993；Fox, 1998). The rebirth of Aristotelian thought in Europe and its influence on rationalism from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries (Huff, 2003) is examined. In section five turns to the so-called fathers of modern science, such as Newton, Copernicus, and Galileo. The influence of the rationally-minded empiricists and philosophers of Britain and Europe (Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Kante, Locke and Hume) – and the French philosophes is also considered; as is the beginnings of experimental ways of knowing, and new technologies such as the telescope and microscope. (Pickstone, year) Section six examines the influence of the industrialisation of society, the emergence of the secular state and how this helped perpetuate the rationalist hegemony. In section seven, the influence of modern reductionist and molecular biology is highlighted. This includes the crucial influence of Darwin and the beginning of the neo-Darwinian paradigm. In particular the increasing dominance of reductionism, and the death of vitalism are seen as crucial in the rejection of mystical and inner ways of knowing.
In section eight, the focus moves towards the turn of the twentieth century, where the emergence of modern psychology is traced, through its experimental beginnings, to the influence of Freud, the mid-century dominance of behaviourism, and then to the development of modern cognitive psychology. It will be argued that modern cognitive psychology has become “a handmaiden to neuroscience” (Maddox, 1999) and its reductionist and analytical/rational ways of knowing. In the middle of the twentieth century, the influence of a genetic theory of psychology, undergirded by the hegemony of the DNA molecule, is shown to be seminal. Likewise, it will be posited that parapsychology has been subsumed by the empiricist and rationalist hegemony of western science. (Schlitz, 2001; Varvoglis, 2003) Modern intelligence theory is deconstructed in the wake of the previous findings, and it is argued that the depiction of intelligence in predominantly mathematical and rational/linguistic terms (Gardener, 1993; Gardener et al., 1996), and consciousness as a function of neuronal machinations, is a culmination of the evolution of the rationalist hegemony in western civilisation and science. Section nine is a brief critique of the lack of introspection in modern psychology, while section ten introduces the idea of the mechanistic syllogism, a misapplied, barely conscious syllogism which underpins contemporary science.
The “others”
Dominant paradigmatic representations within any given discourse tend to posit the worldview espoused by that paradigm as a linear and inevitable outcome of ineluctable evolutionary and historical forces (Grof, 1985; Kuhn, 1970; Sardar, 1998, 2000). Yet postmodernist thought rejects this construction. Foucault wrote that the present “is the arbitrary result of modernity’s configuration of self-producing forces.” (quoted in Shapiro, 1992: 3). In line with this, throughout the following analyses of psychology, science, and the western rationality, reference will sometimes be made to “the others” – thinkers, philosophers, scientists, schools of thought, and civilisational perspectives that were rejected, forgotten or ignored. It will be argued that the reasons for these rejections have included the self-obfuscating potentialities of the dominant ways of knowing, the parameters of the mechanistic paradigm itself, and levels of consciousness (Wilber, 1999, 2000a, 2000b. 2000c, 2001). Continuing the argument of the previous chapter, the pervading psycho-spiritual issues that underpinned the development of that paradigm, and that affected both individuals and collectives, will be further elucidated.
Intelligence, consciousness and civilisational ways of knowing
Freud wrote, referring to the investigation of the human psyche that: “The starting point for this investigation is provided by a fact without parallel, which defies all explanation or description – the fact of consciousness.” (quoted in Bettleheim, 2001: 79). All discourse on intelligence, is by implication, embedded within conceptions and preconceptions about consciousness. Thus one cannot attempt to truly deconstruct intelligence theorists without first elucidating the givens embedded within the discourse, and upon which the research is predicated. It will be argued below that the assumption of consciousness as neuron-based and localised (Dossey, 1993, 1999, 2001; Grof, 1985, 1992; Sheldrake, 1990, 2003; Sheldrake et al., 2001) represents a self-stultifying and self-obfuscating given within consciousness and intelligence theories. This given represents a paradigmatic boundary, and delimits the conceptions and tools which are legitimated within both the discourse and its underpinning methodological practices and ways of knowing (Grof, 1985). Only through making the unconscious conscious can the machinations of the psyche and its self-instituted boundaries of be examined and expanded (Freud, 1962; Jung, 1989). It is argued below that the conception and thus employment of integrated intelligence has lain outside the boundaries of the modern discourse on intelligence for these reasons, and has remained an invisible and ignored domain.
Diagrammatically, in regard to the positing of intelligence theory in current dominant discourses, the argument can be depicted as follows. (Diagram # 1, below).
Diagram # 1: Schema Depicting Layers of the Problematic re. Dominant Contemporary Representations of Intelligence and Mind
1. Levels of consciousness (rationalism)
︾
2. Ways of knowing (rational modes: incl. experimental, classificatory, and technological)
︾
3. The mechanistic paradigm
︾
4. Molecular Biology and the Neo-Darwinist paradigm
︾
5. Neuroscience
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6. The field of psychology
︾
7. Specific theory/theorist of intelligence
In the diagram above, each level is defined and mediated by the level above it. It can be seen that the discourse on intelligence moves through layers, and is ultimately determined by the highest level of the system: the pervading level of consciousness - vision logic – (Wilber, 2000c) of western civilisation in general. The thesis to follow thus mirrors the arguments of transpersonalists, such as Bradley (2004), Grof (2000), Hawkins (1995, 2002), Walsh (1990) and Walsh and Vaughan (1993) and Wilber (1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2001) who find that the rationalist mode of consciousness and its preferred and restrictive ways of knowing is but a developmental stage in the greater evolution of humanity towards trans-rational awareness.
There are two overriding paradigms in the diagram above. At the fourth level there is the Neo-Darwinian paradigm. (Loye, 2004c: introduction) Yet this paradigm can be seen to be a part of a yet greater paradigm, the mechanistic paradigm, as outlined in the previous chapter. Levels two and three can be seen to influence each other. While the rational level of consciousness development has, by implication, rational ways of knowing (Hawkins, 1995, 2002), paradigms also delimit ways of knowing. (Grof, 1985, 2000) This suggests that levels two and three of the schema exhibit an intertwined causal relationship: while rational ways of knowing may have reinforced the establishment of the mechanistic paradigm, the mechanistic paradigm itself has preferred empirical and rational ways of knowing, which in turn have stultified the potentail for humanity to evolve into the trans-rational levels of consciousness, as will be argued below.
Diagram one depicts the problematic as it exists within the present era. The same diagram for the year 1939, the beginning of word war two, would not see psychology being posited below neuroscience and molecular biology. The following genealogy will demonstrate why this was so: molecular biology, the DNA revolutions and neuroscience were not yet developed.
1.2 Ways of knowing
Central to this genealogy is the concept of ways of knowing. The argument shall be that it is primarily the employment of ways of knowing (Broomfield, 1997; Pickstone, 2000), mediated by historical, civilisational and paradigmatic factors and ultimately levels of consciousness which have affected the development of science, and thus scientific conceptions of intelligence and consciousness.
The argument in this thesis is predicated upon an essential distinction between rational and intuitive ways of knowing. However these two categories are themselves generalised, and can be further broken down into more specific categories as follows.
Table # 1. Intuitive and Rational Ways of Knowing
Intuitive
Implicit knowledge (Torff and Sternberg, 2001; de Bono, 1999).
Integrated intelligence, domain one (psychic)
Integrated intelligence, domain one (transpersonal)
Rational
Classificatory (Pickstone, 2000)
Analytical (Pickstone, 2000)
Experimental (Pickstone, 2000)
Mathematical/logical (Gardner, 1993).
Rational/ linguistic (Gardner, 1993).
Note: These categories should not be seen as distinct and inseparable. In regard to rationality, Pickstone’s (2000) three dominant ways of knowing in science can be seen as interdependent. Further, all of these can be seen to involve the final two categories – mathematical and rational/linguistic, to some degree. For example, the so-called fathers of modern science, such as Galileo, Kepler and Newton, all employed mathematics to complement their experiments and/or observations. (Hawking, 2003).
The intuitive ways of knowing
The distinctions amongst the three various intuitive domains of intelligence have been outlined in chapter one, and will only be briefly restated here. Torff and Sternberg (2001) define intuitive intelligence as a form of implicit knowledge, or “knowledge or knowledge structures that individuals acquire and use largely without conscious reflection or explicit instruction”. (Torff and Sternberg [eds.], 2001: introduction: vii) As Ben-Zeev and Star (2001) argue, such “intuitions” contain a barely conscious reasoning process. This is consistent with the inferential-intuitionist viewpoint (ibid.). This construction of intuition is an overtly rational one, and incorporates no metaphysical or mystical component. It thus differs radically from the classicalist position, such as that of Spinoza and Bergson, which holds that intuitions are essentially metaphysical, a priori and antithetical to reason. (Ben-Zeev and Star, 2001: 31, 51) Integrated intelligence, domains one and two, can be seen as part of the classicalist position.
Note: There are other possible ways of knowing that could have been classified in the intuitive domain such as spiritual intelligence (Levin, 2001; Zohar, 2000); cosmic consciousness (Bucke, 1991; Kubler-Ross, 1977); while Wilber’s (2000a, 2000b, 2000c) subtle, causal and non-dual modes of consciousness are incorporated into level one integrated intelligence. Various depictions of the psychic realm, such as that of Wilber (ibid.).; Broomfield (1977); and Targ & Katra, (1999, 2001); are consistent enough to be been included under domain two integrated intelligence.
The rational ways of knowing
Max Weber argued that the west is distinguished from the middle east in its rationalising of all forms of thought. (Huff, 2003: 6) The rational ways of knowing that are listed here can be seen as subsets of the broader general concept of rationality, which is “the power of the intellect to comprehend, reflect, abstract, analyze, and draw conclusions.” (Rohmann, 1999: 337)
Dawkins (1998) epitomises this rationalist mode of cognition within modern science when he writes that:
With the aid of external memories and symbol-manipulating artifacts - paper and pens, abacuses and computers - we are in a position to construct a working model of the universe and run it in our heads before we die. (Dawkins, 1998: 312)
Rationality in this sense is the mind of symbol, of data and manipulation; the mind of the ratio. (Wildman, 1996) In essence the empirical-scientific worldview is the world of the symbol, where the word, the number, and the computer image are what constitute the real. The result is that the ways of knowing (method) of science are virtually incapable of dealing with quality in general, and are, as Whitehead stated, “primarily quantitative”. (quoted in Wilber, 2001: 24)
There are five rational ways of knowing identified here: classification/natural history, analysis, experimentalism, rational/linguistic intelligence, and mathematical/logical intelligence.
Pickstone’s three ways of knowing
Pickstone (2000) identifies rationality (as deployed in the age of science) as consisting of three ways of knowing: classification and analysis (natural science), experimentalism (invention), and technoscience. These ways of knowing are not exclusive from each other, and yet they have developed sequentially in this order during the scientific era. Revolutions in science, suggests Pickstone, do not totally dispense with previous ways of knowing; they merely displace them (Pickstone, 2000: 25) The argument that follows builds upon Pickstone’s (2000) three-tier model of rationality, with the addition of Gardner’s (1993) generalised rational/linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligences.
Classification/natural history
Natural history is broadly similar to Wilber’s (2001) “eye of flesh.” Pickstone finds that this “notebook science” employed a way of knowing that was “about describing and collecting, identifying and classifying, utilizing and displaying” (Pickstone, 2000: 60). The main purpose was to record the wonder of nature, and was motivated by “a compulsion to identify and collect” (ibid.), and not for functional use, nor to elicit meaning from nature (Pickstone, 2000).
Pickstone states that natural history as a way of knowing dominated science beginning around the year 1500, when medieval anatomy texts featured naturalistic diagrams. (Pickstone, 2000: 63) Thereafter, natural science and analysis were primarily responsible for the “massive restructuring” of science, technology and medicine beginning from the late eighteenth century. (Pickstone, 200: 106) The main driving forces of natural history were “the pride of possession”, “intellectual satisfaction”, and the needs of “commerce and industry.” (ibid.; 60).
Analysis
Analysis as a way of knowing can be seen in science’s analyses of the structures, processes and forms of plants and animals. Analysis also incorporates the earth and social sciences, which began to emerge around 1800. (ibid.: 106) In modern medicine the proliferation of analysis can be seen in hospital laboratories, where the components of bodies are examined by post-mortem anatomies or microscopial specimens, by analysis of blood chemicals and bodily tissues, by immunological testing for antibodies, by electrical sensors including electrocardiodiagrams (ECGs) and electroencephalograms (EEGs). (ibid.)
Experimentalism
According to Pickstone, experimentalism emerged around the mid-nineteenth century. (ibid.: 30) It can be seen that it has broad similarities to Wilber’s (2001)“eye of flesh.” Experimentalism was “about making and displaying new worlds (Pickstone, 2003: 30). Pickstone argues that experimental science was essentially a product of the nineteenth century. (ibid.; 136) Its emergence emphasises the relationship between experimentation and systematic invention. As Pickstone states, experimentalism “concentrates on the creation and control of novelty.” (ibid; 136) He argues that the parallels between experiment and invention are so close that they may be considered the same thing. (ibid.;136). An example is when Pasteur designed bent-drawn-out necks on his flasks, satisfying audiences that he could control fermentation, and showing that fermentation was not a spontaneous process. (ibid.:135)
Maddox (1999) finds that the understandings of physics of recent decades are "intellectual triumphs of the first order, but none of them would command confidence without the crucial clues provided by experimenters." (Maddox, 1999: 88) Maddox’s point not only shows that experimentation is a prime way of knowing in physics, it also suggests one of the reasons why psi phenomena (such as clairvoyance, ESP and telepathy) and integrated intelligence are not readily acknowledged in modern science is the fact of the “capricious, actively evasive, unsustainable nature of psi” is not readily amenable to empirical analysis. (Kennedy, 2003: 53)
Mathematical/logical intelligence
Moving beyond Pickstone’s (2000) three ways of knowing, mathematics has been added here because its significance in the development of the modern world and science is so great that it requires a category in its own right. Logical-mathematical intelligence is employed to calculate and quantify mathematical problems, and secondly to examine hypotheses and propositions. (Gardner, 1993)
It can be seen that western rationalist hegemony has been greatly influenced by the development of this intellectual capacity. Ben-David (1964, 1971) sees the scientific age beginning in the seventeenth century, with the coming together of the mathematical tradition of Europe and the experimental and empirical movement in England. (ibid.). Needham (1969) finds that “the application of mathematical hypotheses to Nature,” including “the geometrization of space” was seminal in the development of modern science in the late Renaissance." (Needham, 1969: 15) Further, the central issue raised by the Copernican revolution was “the right of the mathematical astronomer to make claims in natural philosophy". (Huff, 2003: 345) The ultimate answer, as adjudged by the eventual implementation of the heliocentric universe in modern science, was “yes” - and mathematics has played a seminal role in scientific breakthroughs ever since. It is arguably the final arbiter of truth in modern science.
Rational/Linguistic intelligence
This intelligence is the capacity use language and words to construct and understand thoughts, ideas and meanings (Gardner, 1993). It can be seen that rational/linguistic intelligence is a prerequisite for all four the other ways of knowing listed here, including mathematical, for it is difficult to imagine understanding mathematical conceptions without the aid of language to posit questions, conceptions and problematics. It appears that consciousness as we understand it is predicated upon language and that the kind of self-awareness that we associate with being conscious would not be possible without the use of language. (Jaynes, 1990)
Linguistic intelligence is not only important in terms of what it is, but also in terms of what it is not. The question is whether it represents the ultimate evolutionary leap of mind (Sagan, do NET check) or whether it constricts certain kinds of perception, and indeed integrated intelligence. Note: this is a matter for further research. Mystical experience is closely identified with the ineffable - that which is beyond words and language (Bucke, 1991; Inayatullah; 2002b; Jacobson, 1991; Niskar, 1998; Schlitz, 2001; Storm, 1999). This is quite different from the learning states of contemporary knowledge systems which require the processing of increasingly vast amounts of information such that a recent
If the mystics and transpersonalists are correct in that there are non-dual and psychic realms beyond the rational that incorporate a peculiarly non-linguistic nature, then it is reasonable to assume that there are states of consciousness and/or perceptual modalities that transcend language, and thus that the dominant ways of knowing of the science are limited and possibly self-stultifying.
The verbs of perception reveal the way of knowing.
Through an examination of the verbs of perception used by various scientists, philosophers and mystics, the cognitive processes (ways of knowing) of theorists can be made explicit. This reveals two levels of a discourse. Firstly, in the case of individuals who were seminal in the establishment of the western rationalist hegemony, it can be determined what ways of knowing they employed to perceive and communicate their understandings. Secondly, where researchers and philosophers are commenting and critiquing other individuals, institutions, and even civilisations, the verbs that they employ can be used to determine the civilisational or paradigmatic biases of the critic. Wilber’s (2001) concept of “category error” is particularly relevant here, as the employment of an inappropriate “eye of knowing” to attempt to understand knowledge gleaned from a different “eye of knowing” may lead to misunderstandings.
Though certain verbs may be used in both intuitive and rational modes of perception, they may be generalised into two distinct groups in the following manner.
Table # 1: Classification of verbs of knowing into rational and intuitive
Intuitive
Rational
Intuit
Feel
See
Hear
Contemplate
Meditate
Sense
Perceive
Channel
Reveal (revelation)
Connect with
Divine (verb)
Access
Actualize
Rationalise
Postulate
Intellectualise
Theorise
Extrapolate
Cognise
Conclude
Think
Deconstruct
Examine
Dispute
Argue
Observe
Measure
Read
Research
Deduce
Calculate
Detect
Dispute
Take apart
Reduce
Collect
Gather
Extrapolate
Study
While it is acknowledged that any dichotomy such as this involves some degree of approximation and generalisation, the verbs have been placed according to their most common usage in the texts which constitute the subject matter of this thesis. In the texts that are transcribed and referred to in the argument to follow, the verbs of knowing, where appropriate, will be highlighted in bold text.
Concluding note on part 1
Thus far this chapter has situated the discourse on intelligence and consciousness within a layered framework that incorporates a civilisational perspective (described in diagram 1). It then outlined in more detail the distinctions between intuitive and rational ways of knowing, including identifying the five primary rational ways of knowing that have underpinned the development of western history and civilisation.
The chapter now turns to a chronological historical analysis of the development of the western rationalist hegemony, with the ultimate purpose of demonstrating how this hegemony has deeply affected contemporary intelligence and consciousness discourses. The analysis begins (section 2.0) with an outline of the preferred ways of knowing of indigenous societies; relevant because the development of the first truly historical period of analysis which follows it; the ancient Greeks (section 3.0). This historical analysis will then proceed era by era, culminating in the modern psychology and intelligence theory of the present day (section 8.0).
1.3 Mystical and indigenous ways of knowing
In this section the some common ways of knowing of indigenous peoples are outlined. For the purposes of this argument, it will be assumed that the dominant ways of knowing of indigenous peoples, both contemporary and premoderrn, are essentially similar.
The way of knowing of indigenous peoples of premoderrn and modern times is vastly different from that of the modern developed western world. Contemporary Iroquois mystic Twylah Nitsh wrote of this as follows.
There was an interdependency and total relationship with all things. Everything the people heard, saw, sensed, and touched intuitively belonged to a powerful Essence in which all things were and integral part. This Presence was indestructible and a common substance throughout creation. (quoted in Ross, 1993: 274).
It was quintessentially an intuitive and holistic way of knowing. Analysis and reductionism, which take the world apart and examine its components, are intrinsic features of western epistemology. (Bloom, 2001; Capra, 2000; Pickstone, 2000; Sahtouris, 1999; Sheldrake, 1981) Yet holism – the perception and belief that the cosmos as a whole reflects a meaning and intelligence that cannot not be understood from a mere examination of its parts - was an intrinsic aspect of all indigenous cultures, including those that have survived into the modern world. (Grof, 1985, 1995, 2000; Ross, 1993; Sahtouris, 1999; Wildman, 1996). Sahtouris(1999) writes:
It's our Western obsession with taking the world apart, putting it in boxes, to separate science from politics, from religion, from the arts, for instance. That was not the case in other cultures. It helped them therefore to see things holistically simply because they weren't taking things apart. They, in fact, see other dimensions which we relegate into the realm of religion as part of ordinary reality. They are not obsessed with drawing lines between fact and fiction. (Sahtouris, 1999. Emphasis added.)
The indigenous peoples of the world held a strongly integrated perspective of self and cosmos. These included concepts such as revelation, spirit and angelic guidance, and the telepathic transfer of knowledge between people and the land or nature. (Broomfield, 1997; Grof, 1995, 2000; Lawlor, 1991; Pearsall, 1999; Wildman, 1996) In Australian Aboriginal culture, the Aborigines believed that they were engaged in a telepathic relationship with the earth itself. (Lawlor, 1991; Wildman, 1996)
Shamanism is common amongst native cultures across all inhabited continents. (Grof, 1995, 2000), and features strong practices that necessitate integrated intelligence. Shamans communed with the spirits of the dead, as well as various entities of the spirit world. They were also believed to communicate with various nature spirits and gods. (Grof, 1994) Shamanism dates as far back as the Paleolithic era. It is universal, and evidence for it can be found in the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and Polynesia. A connection to the forces of nature and the supernatural realms are strong features of shamanism. (ibid.) Shamanism, following Wilber’s (2000c) quadrennial model of spiritual states of awareness (psychic, subtle, causal and non-dual) is primarily situated within the lower stratum of spiritual development, the psychic. (Wilber, 2000c: 600-601; also Walsh, 1990)
Native cultures also commonly held the view that divine healing potentials could be transferred through skilled individuals. This vital force went by various names such as “mana” (Hawaii); “Prana” (India and Tibet); “orendam” (the Iraquois); and “megbie” (the Ituraea pygmies). (Pearsall, 1999: 58-59)
Animism, pantheism, and panentheism
Many indigenous cultures held (and many still hold) strong beliefs about the integrated nature of human consciousness and the universe. Pantheistic and panentheistic beliefs permeated their cultures. The former worldview holds that God is present in all things, and that nature and God are identical; the latter maintaines that God is part of the world but greater than it. (Rohmann, 1999: 293) In both these societies God is immanent and present within the world, which contrasts greatly with the Judeo-Christian stance that God is transcendent and separate from nature (ibid.).
Australian Aborigines followed the song lines of the land, tracing the steps of their ancestors. Aboriginal culture saw humans and the cosmos as inseparable. (Lawlor, 1991; Wildman, 1996). For the Australian Aborigines the present represents the dreams of the ancestors, while their dreams and their unconscious represent the present moment of their ancestors; the future represents a kind of entwining of the ancestors’ consciousness which emerges from the present moment. (ibid.) The Aborigines believed in a form of telepathy, and consciousness emerging from the land. Wildman describes this as “a sort of noosphere emerging from the morphogenic spirit of place.” (Wildman, 1996)
Other indigenous cultures employed a type of integrated intelligence in their healing practices. Traditional Hawaiians referred to this as “mana.” “Mana” is a kind of non-localised “energy” which one Hawaiian healer described as “as infinite as the sky.” (Pearsall 1999: 58) Pearsall (1999) writes that such conceptions were pervasive in indigenous and ancient societies, being referred to by over one hundred different names. In India and Tibet it is called “Prana;” the Sufis called it “baraka;” Jews in the cabalistic tradition refer to it as “yesod;” the Iraquois describe it as “orendam;” the Ituraea pygmies call it “megbie;” and the Christians call it “Holy Spirit.” (Ibid.: 59) Pantheism is also present in eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, although in the latter case the unity of the cosmos is devoid of quality and fundamentally different from indigenous and theistic conceptions of God. (Rohmann, 1999: 295)
1.4 Wilber’s pre/trans model
Wilber (2000a, 2000b, 2000c), argues for a hierarchic developmental model of consciousness evolution for both the individual and the human collective. He finds that the shamanism of indigenous cultures represents the insertion of a transpersonal realm into the typically prepersonal mode of consciousness of the ancient and indigenous peoples. Within Wilber’s model, consciousness evolves from the prepersonal and undifferentiated modes, through rational realms (including the typical “vision-logic” stage of contemporary humanity), and to the transpersonal modes, incorporating the psychic, subtle, causal and non-duel modes. (ibid.) Conversely Wilber finds that the fusion experiences of indigenous peoples are typically not higher states of consciousness, but evidence of an earlier premoderrn mode of consciousness, which is prior to egoic and rational modes of awareness. Wilber’s argument is consistent with Jaynes’ (1990) argument that until ancient times, humanity existed within the bicameral mind, the unconscious and conscious minds fused, before developing into the modern conscious and rational mind. (note: Jaynes (1990) does not argue for the existence of transpersonal modes, and dismisses religious and spiritual experiences as essentially delusional. Instead Jaynes’ model is two-tier: juxtaposing the unconscious and conscious. He equates consciousness with the machinations of a rational/ linguistic self-awareness.
Wilber (2000c: 210-213) makes a key distinction between prerational and transrational states of awareness. He argues that while both prerational and transrational states are non-rational, the similarity is but superficial. The modernist tendency to confuse this distinction creates two fallacies. The first is that transrational states are reduced to prepersonal; regression to the infantile. This is the case of Freud in The Future of an Illusion (Wilber, 2000c: 211). In such accounts rationality is seen as the ultimate pinnacle of consciousness development. (ibid.) The second fallacy occurs when those sympathetic to the concept of the higher states of consciousness which transcend the rational, elevate all non-rational states to the status of “higher.” Wilber cites Jung and his followers as a prime example, whereby “indissociated and undifferentiated” states are granted spiritual status, but actually lack any genuine integration. (ibid.) A key distinction according to Wilber’s argument is that transrational states incorporate and transcend reason, whilst the “elevationists” such as the Jungians, Romantics, and New Agers tend to reject rationality as a kind of evil. (ibid.).
Thus Wilber’s pre-trans fallacy is a crucial distinction for the thesis at hand. It provides a clear guideline as to which modes of awareness constitute legitimate examples of integrated intelligence, as opposed to prepersonal undifferentiated modes. Following Wilber’s perspective, it can be stated that indigenous cultures operated in non-rational/pre-rational modes of awareness, with the exception being shamanic experience, which can be posited as genuinely transrational mode of awareness.
Note: there is evidence to suggest that domain two integrated intelligence was common in indigenous cultures. For example, both Lawlor (1991) and Wildman (1996) find that the Australian Aboriginal people exhibited a telepathic relationship with the land, and communicated to spiritual ancestors via dreams and divination. This represents a contradiction to Wilber’s thesis that only the shamans had access to transrational domains; because in Wilber’s model the psychic realm is posited at the lower end of the transrational domains of consciousness.
Part Two. Seminal Moments in the Genealogy of Mind and Intelligence: From Ancient Greece To the Birth of the Modern Secular State
2.1 Overview
Attention now turns to an analysis of a broad stretch of history that established the hegemony rational ways of knowing in the western world. It begins in the ancient world with in Greece where rational ways of knowing first became prominent. Then the focus moves to medieval Europe and the development of Christianity and its preferred “rational” and textual ways of knowing. The influence of the enlightenment scientists and philosophers is considered next, especially their experimental, philosophical and machine-aided ways of knowing. This includes an analysis of the founding values of enlightenment science. Finally, the eventual industrialisation of society in the mid nineteenth century, and its effect upon humanity’s relationship with nature and the cosmos (and implicitly our ways of knowing) is outlined.
2.2 The emergence of rationalism in ancient Greece
The effective integration of individual, mundane and transpersonal/divine space (integrated intelligence) was also an intrinsic aspect of ancient cultures such as that of the Greeks (Brumbaugh, 1981; Shapiro, 1991) ancient Chinese (Jiyu, 1998), Jewish (Kafatou and Kafatos, 1991; Pearsall, 1999: 58-59), Egyptian, Indian, Islamic (Grof, 1985, 1994, 2000) and numerous other cultures. Ancient cultures held strong beliefs in gods and various psychic potentials of human beings. Strongly transpersonal aspects can be found in the cultures of Buddhism, Taoism, The Kabbalah, Tibetan Vajrayana, Sufism, Christian mysticism, the various forms of yoga and many others. (Grof, 1994). The ancients employed tools such as prayer, breath control, meditation, and movement meditation for inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness. (ibid.)
Integrated intelligence in ancient Greece
Ancient Greek culture was premised upon integrated conceptions of intelligence. The plays of Sophocles (2000) refer repeatedly to the will of the gods and the futility of attempting to go against that will. They also feature prophets communing directly with revelatory realms of spirit. (Sophocles, 2000) Likewise Homer’s The Odyssey points to the futility of railing against divine will. (Homer, 2002) As pointed out by Shapiro (1992), ancient Greek culture depicted space in vertical dimensions, suggesting some places were more sacred, more divine than others. There was much less separation between the divine and the mundane than Western cultures permit. (Shapiro 1992: 6)
The Greeks also valued dreams as an important source of wisdom. Greek physicians gleaned wisdom regarding the nature of illnesses from their patients’ dreams in their healing temples, called asklepion. (Dossey, 2001: 195) Further, The Pythagorean concept of “Harmony of the Spheres” and the Hippocratic “sympathy of all things” reflected a universe premised upon integrated consciousness. Sympathetic magic, alchemy and astrology, neo-Platonism and the philosophers of the early Renaissance held similar views. (Dossey, 2001: 115).
The roots of mechanistic science in neo-platonic mysticism and atomism
Yet here the role of the rationalism of the ancient Greeks is the focus, because even as their society and culture was one in which integrated consciousness was a commonly held belief, their society incorporated a rational representation of nature, cosmos and consciousness which represents a seminal incursion point of the mechanistic worldview and rational ways of knowing into western science and depictions of consciousness. Note: On this matter, Pickstone’s (2000) argument differs from Huff (2003), de Bono (1986), Schrodinger (1996), and Sheldrake (2004) in that his emphasises is on social factors such as the innovative legal and educational systems which emerged from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries in Europe. It was these, argues Pickstone, along with a relatively permissive clergy, that permitted enough institutional autonomy for rationality to become integrated into the practice of science, and into education and society. He thus plays minimal emphasis on the ancient Greeks, because they were not the originators of these social factors. (Pickstone, 2000: 136).
Photo # 1 (from Jardine, 2000: 26), showing an imagined meeting of Aristotle, Hevelius and Kepler suggests this confluence of the conceptions of the ancient Greeks and later enlightenment science. The rational mode of knowing is represented in the depicted way of knowing, with the three men “disputing” the positions of comets. The charts they utilise symbolise the inherent codification of knowledge.
Sheldrake (2003) argues that the roots of the mechanistic paradigm can be located in two incursion points within ancient Greek space, which established the belief that reality is “timeless and changeless.” (Sheldrake, 2004) The first of these nodal points is the tradition which emerged from the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, and their fascination with mathematical laws. (Sheldrake, 1994; 194, Sheldrake, 2004) Plato was deeply influenced by the mathematician Archytas, who suggested that all knowledge could be reduced to mathematics (Brumbaugh, 1981: 139). Although Plato did not follow this to the extreme degree that Archytas did (he incorporated various other questions and methods, being also influenced by Socrates), nonetheless the social sciences he founded at his Academy were predicated upon mathematical models (Brumbaugh, 1981: 139). Brumbaugh (1981) writes of the motivation behind this elevation of the mathematical within Plato’s epistemology.
If one could present political problems in the objective, neat, deductive form of geometric analysis, one could probably detect fallacies and ambiguities. Perhaps one might arrive at intelligent policy in this way, instead of by the usual guesswork and whimsy that swayed political decisions at that time (Brumbaugh, 1981: 139. Italics and emphasis added).
Here was an important incursion point of the mechanistic worldview into western thinking. The linear and sequential (“objective”, “neat”, “deductive”), and thus the predictable and controllable became valorised. It was ultimately a cry against chaos (“ambiguity”) and the uncertainty of the human condition. The world could be known through numbers.
Atomism and the ancient Greeks
The second important conception of the ancient Greeks which fundamentally shaped the western worldview, argues Sheldrake, was the atomistic tradition of materialism, which later contributed to the seventeenth century idea that the universe was mechanistic and changeless. (Sheldrake, 2004) Parmenides, writing and thinking before the time of Socrates, concluded that reality is a static, homogenous, sphere. To explain changes in life and the world, Parmenides stated that the world is a delusion. Other atomists, identifying the problematical nature of this thesis and its contradiction to common experience, attempted to preserve the essence of the thesis by claiming that reality is comprised of numerous homogenous, changeless spheres or particles – namely atoms. Parmenides’ giant changeless sphere was thus replaced with many small, unchanging spheres moving in the void. The dynamic nature of the phenomenological world was thus explained in reference to the movements of the atoms. (ibid.)
The static nature of Greek conceptions
de Bono (1986) finds that ancient Greek thought’s influence on west is a “great intellectual disaster”. (de Bono, 1986: 17) Ancient Greek society was “static.” The goal of the Greek’s thinking was to perfect their conceptualisations to a point where they no longer required change. They “preferred the certainty of logic to create truths,” as opposed to modern science’s experiment and observation. (ibid.) Writes de Bono:
…ideas were treated much as a child might treat coloured blocks on a table. They were played with and moved around and fitted together. The game was logic, and the basic tools of the game were YES and NO, which indicated whether the arrangements were permissible or not. New concepts were produced either by taking apart existing concepts in the process called analysis or by fitting the together to give bigger concepts. The result was a sharp, precise, and self-contained thinking system that examined the relationship between static and fixed concepts. This was a system that was not capable of evolution and not designed to cope with change. (de Bono, 1986: 27. Italics added)
de Bono’s critique suggest the parallels between the thinking habits of the ancient Greeks, and the contemporary mechanistic paradigm. The universe of the Ancient Greeks was a world of separate bits (“blocks”) in which reductionism became prominent – the “blocks” being “taken apart,” then manipulated to form their model of the cosmos (“bigger concepts”). As with mechanistic science, it was “hard” (Ross, 1993), rigid and inflexible (“sharp, “precise,” and “static and fixed”); and predicated on control and certainty (being “self-contained,” with no “evolution” or “change”). (de Bono, 1986: 27) Note: It is not being argued here that knowledge in modern science is static and non-evolutionary. Yet, while the conceptions of mechanistic science do indeed evolve, the mechanistic parameters of the dominant discourses remain inflexible, and posited within the rigid confines of empiricism. It is the paradigm which remains fixed.
Ancient Greek thought was linear and sequential
de Bono (1986) is also critical of the sequential and linear nature of “traditional thinking”, which he states originates from ancient Greece. He refers to “the sequence trap” (de Bono, 1986; 56), where “you have to be right at each stage and you can keep going forwards” (ibid., 60). He calls this “the very basis of Greek/Renaissance thinking.” (ibid.: 61)
In any system in which information comes in piece by piece this rule is just nonsense. It is because we cling to this rule that we have so much difficulty in changing obsolete ideas and in solving social problems. (de Bono, 1986: 61)
The “sequence trap” can be seen as part of the linear, sequential nature of western logic. It stands as the antithesis of the immediacy of perception of integrated intelligence. This is because the sequential processing of logic requires the constant mediation of the conscious mind – thus stultifying the fluidity and receptivity that is the basis of integrated intelligence, as outlined in the previous chapter.
The Socratic method
The Socratic method has also been highly influential in education and ways of knowing in the west for more than two millennia, and also influenced Freud’s methods and depth psychology. (Buckley, 2001) Socrates (c.470-399B.C.) felt he had “a duty to enquire.” (Brumbaugh, 1981, 124) Socrates was a man who wanted to move beyond science and to be able to understand deep metaphysical questions. (Brumbaugh, 1981). As Brumbaugh writes:
… throughout Greece his interest in the human self and his spirit of impartial enquiry found many admirers who continued his work; and, to the present day, his example reminds us of the importance of intellectual freedom, and the right and duty of the individual to engage in intelligent inquiry. (Brumbaugh, 1981: 124. Italics added)
The Socratic method was a question and answer process, with an emphasis on the status of the individual to challenge the polity of the state, and the consensus of society. It was a thus a precursor of modern western intellectual individualism; the process was intellectual, the focus was individual. Its impartiality foretold the detachment of western scientific enquiry, and its emphasis on freedom of individual thought foretold the possibility of alienation in modern society. (Clark, 1989) Socrates also claimed that he did not know anything with certainty, and tended to employ hypotheses instead of didacticisms. (Brumbaugh, 1981: 126, 129) This foreshadowed scientific skepticism, a process that impinges upon the immediate knowing of integrated intelligence.
Ancient Greeks helped foster dualism in western thought
The philosophy of the ancient Greeks, argues Ross (1993) “implanted the philosophy of dualism very firmly in the western psyche.” (Ross, 1993: 39) Ancient Greece was a culture that “separated God and nature, mind and body, males and female, master and slave and cause and effect.” (ibid.: 39).
Ross argues further that the predicates of scientific objectivity are present in the ideas of the men known as the first scientists – Thales, Anaximenes and Heraclitus. (ibid.: 40) These men were practical-minded, and sought understanding through observation, which allowed them to discern the theories of basic elements. However, their worldview, as with most ancient Greeks, was mystically imbued with the idea of a psycho-spiritual sub-stratum. (Ross, 1993: 40)
Note: Nonetheless, the atomic theory of Democritus which followed, did deny the spiritual (Ross, 1993: 40).
However, early Christian theology was more heavily influenced by the more mystical tradition of Pythagoras, with its strong Platonic influences (Ross, 1993: 40). The Western psyche became enamored by the idea of a metaphysically stratified cosmos. This Platonic metaphysic entailed a strong dualism – divinity, mind and reason were clearly differentiated from the body and matter, including nature. The mind was viewed as divine and an eternal emanation of the soul, which was able to comprehend the underlying absolute order of the cosmos because it was an aspect of that very order. It could in effect “tune into it.” (Ross, 1993: 40).
For Plato (and for Socrates), truth was something that was available through perfect reason. (Zohar, 1994: 108). Plato’s Realm of Perfect Forms was a place of perfect truth, with each Form being the one perfect representative model of the same imperfect objects found in the mundane world. For Plato, knowledge of the forms was innate, and truth could be accessed without ambiguity. This single, ultimate knowable truth became the foundation of enlightenment science (Zohar, 1994: 108). Thus the dualism of the Church and enlightenment science both find their lineage from the metaphysics of ancient Greece.
The twentieth century psychoanalysts and ancient Greek thought
Greek philosophy presaged psychoanalysis
Buckley (2001) argues that “the intellectual worldview” and contemporary ego-psychological model of psychoanalysis was presaged by the Greeks. (Buckley 2001: 458)
Freud himself was influenced by the ancient Greeks, especially Socrates and Plato (Buckley, 2001). His elevation of reason above the blind forces of the Id mirror similar conceptions in Greek thought, with its valorisation of reason, and distrust of the base instincts of the psyche. (Buckley, 2001). Buckley further states that Plato anticipated the therapeutic potency of psychoanalysis with its basis of “the healing power of both the word and the therapeutic relationship…” In The Republic, Plato’s representation of the psyche is a conflict model in which instinctual drives pose a constant threat to rationality. (Buckley 2001)
Following the research of Simon, Buckley finds that there are three main models in ancient Greek conceptions of mind that would influence psychotherapy and psychiatry. (Buckley, 2001). These models are:
1) The poetic (mainly Homeric). In Homer’s conceptions mental structure is nebulously delineated, with mental illness seen as something externally "sent" by angry gods. This corresponds to some degree with the contemporary sociocultural representation of mental illness, with its sources being located in “external pathogenic forces impinging on the individual.” Family therapists also employ similar concepts in their therapy. (Buckley, 2001)
2) The Hippocratic, which finds its modern relative in the contemporary biomedical model. Here Hippocrates finds the course of psychic impulses in the brain and “natural” sources, as opposed to “divine.”
3) The Platonic or philosophical model, where conceptions focus heavily on defining and characterising the structure of the mind. Plato equated “the abstract and the rational” to the moral good. Self-knowledge was equated with self-restraint, and knowledge was seen as virtue. The absence of knowledge and irrationality, were juxtaposed with moral evil and insanity. Plato posited a triune model of psyche, with its components the rational, the affective, and the appetitive. Thus conflict is represented as a struggle between the rational and the “appetitive” domains of the psyche as they both try to entice the “affective” onto their side. This mirrors Freud’s tripartite model of the psyche, with its ego, id, and superego. Plato identified the predicates of mental illness in the imbalance caused when the instinctual aspects of mind take hold over the rational. The Platonic dialogue constitutes the healing methodology, which parallels the psychoanalytic dialogue and its goal of bringing the contiguous aspects of the psyche into balance, with the rational assuming control. (ibid.)
Yet Buckley (2001) points out that Plato’s “logos” cannot be literally translated as “logic,” because of the rapid advances in formal logic since 1879 which have shaped our comprehension of the nature of logic. Plato’s “logos” was more informal than modern “logic,” and not quite empirical - but nonetheless rigorous. (Buckley 2001)
The Aristotelian victory of reason over intuition, and its effect on conceptions of intelligence
Aristotle defined mankind as a rational animal (Burke, 2001), and this can be seen as an increasingly prevalent theme in the ancient Greek world. This has influenced both science in general and consciousness and intelligence theory. Burke argues that this Aristotelian idea has led to an obsession with IQ (Burke, 2001: 8). Thus the ancient Greeks have helped shape the dominant view that intelligence is the capacity for abstract reasoning in mathematics and language. The schools established by Plato, Aristotle and others valorised logic, geometry, and “disputation.” (Gardner et al., 1996: 33). The influence of this system extended over two millennia and was still influential in the late 1900s when scientific psychology was being established. (ibid.)
Competing ideologies in Ancient Greece
Any interpretation of a culture as long-lasting and diverse as ancient Greece will necessarily reflect the prejudices of the observer’s paradigm. Sahtouris (1999) finds that the development of the mechanistic worldview in ancient Greece constituted a victory over other competing ideologies. This victory was the outcome of the debate between Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras – who all believed reason was transcendent and separate from the world of experience; and Heraclitus and Anaximander – who held an organic worldview and believed that the cosmos was a living entity. Anaximander wrote that: “Everything that forms in nature incurs a debt which it must repay by dissolving so that other things may form.” (quoted in Sahtouris, 1999) Western philosophy followed the victory of the Platonists, and focused on logic and mathematics, the predicates of mechanistic science. Heraclitus and Anaximander were largely forgotten by the Renaissance scholars, while Aristotle’s ideas were reborn in the universities of Europe in the second millennium AD. (Huff, 2003)
Conclusion to 3.0
Physicist Rosenfeld (in Harrison, 2000), talking about the difficulties in understanding the physicist Neils Bohr’s conception of complementarity, demonstrates the dramatic effect that Aristotelian and reductionist thinking has had on the Western mind.
(In 1961) I had occasion to discuss Bohr's ideas with the great Japanese physicist (Yukawa), whose conception of the meson with its complementary aspects of elementary particle and field of nuclear force is one of the most striking illustrations of the fruitfulness of the new way of looking at things that we owe to Neils Bohr. I asked Yukawa whether the Japanese physicists had the same difficulty as their Western colleagues in assimilating the idea of complementarity… He answered “No, Bohr's argumentation has always appeared quite evident to us; ... you see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle.” (quoted in Harrison, 2000)
Yukawa’s comments suggest that the difficulty of the western mind in assimilating (integrating) “non-intuitive” conceptions - such as those of quantum physics, or the integrated intelligence of the mystics - is due to social conditioning, derived from the lineage of ancient Greek rationality.
Thus it can be seen that ancient Greek thinking deeply influenced the development of modern western science, including its depictions of consciousness and intelligence. The interpretation of Greek thought that was revived during the enlightenment, was one of the dualism of mind and matter, of rigid conceptualisations, and linear sequential thinking. But there was no comparable revival of the spiritual and mystical elements of the ancient Greeks
2.3.1 Medieval Europe
In this section (2.3) there are two general historical movements which are analysed. The first is the emergence of a “rational” Christianity. Here the influence of Augustine is seen as seminal; the revival of his theology in the scholastic movement is considered. It is argued that Fox’s (1988) and Ross’ (1993) distinction between “fall-redemption” and “creation” spirituality is important. The tenants of Protestantism are also analysed for their effect on ways of knowing. An important theme examined throughout this discussion is the Christian church’s rejection and persecution of mysticism. The second theme centers upon the establishment of the university system in Europe beginning at around the eleventh century (Huff, 2003). Here the influence of Aristotelian thought, and the legal structures which permitted the possibility of a high degree of institutional freedom from the interference of state and church, are posited as being crucial to the on-going influence of rational ways of knowing in western culture and society.
2.3.2 Rational Christianity and the suppression of the mystical
Christian thought has been seminal in the development of ways of knowing in western culture. Here the significance is the development of an overtly rational cognitive modality within what was the dominant social and political structure throughout Christendom for more than a millennia. In particular the effects of the rationalist modes found in Protestantism and fall-redemption Christianity ( 1988; Ross, 1993) are highlighted here.
Nelson (1991) argues that the development of modern science was deeply influenced by Christian theology and Western philosophy (a synthesis of Aristotle, Plato, and Averroes), as well as by uniquely Western legal conceptions. The idea, for example, that the world has a rational and coherent order, that the world is a machine, and that a divine being created the world according to "number, weight and measure," are all medieval themes elucidated by Christian clerics/ natural philosophers, theologians, and canonists. (Huff, 2003: 40-41; Nelson, 1991) Indeed, the idea of laws of nature had Judeo-Christian groundings. Thus Nelson argues that both Newton and Copernicus held a realist interpretation of the world, and that this was founded on the theological belief that men are imbued with reason and conscience, empowering them to find “subjective certitude beyond objective demonstration”, a conception seen as acceptable in the sight of God as well as man. (Nelson, 1991: 158-159; quoted in Huff, 2003: 41. Italics added) Thus the subjective and objective foci of western science were presaged by similar themes in Christian thought.
St Augustine
The theology of St Augustine (AD 354-430) is a seminal incursion point of rationalist ways of knowing into the western collective psyche. It had a tremendous influence upon the philosophy and thinking of the West. (Fox, 1988; Ross, 1993; Wilber, 2000c: 372). Augustine’s was a decidedly “otherworldly” philosophy, deriding the body and sexuality as evil and as being of original sin (Rohmann, 1999: 33), which Wilber sees as “the stamp of frustrated ascent” and “mythic dissociation”. (Wilber, 2000c, 372)
Augustine also denied the feminine, a cornerstone of mysticism (Ross, 1993) and receptivity, and thus integrated intelligence. Augustine wrote that: “Man but not woman is made in the image and likeness of God.” (quoted in Ross, 1993: 270) Fox (1988) and Ross (1993), state that much of the suppression of the feminine in western cultures, and the destruction of Mother Earth originates in Augustinian philosophy. Wilber (2000c) states that in the denial of the earth and the body there can be no ascent into transrational realms of consciousness. (Wilber, 2000c: 349-354)
Scholasticism
Scholasticism dominated Christian theology from approximately the years 1000 to 1500. Its prime method was the scholastica disputatio, whereby faith was subjected to reason via questioning and evidence. Both faith and reason were viewed as emanating from the mind of God. The influence of scholasticism on the western mind cannot be underestimated: it formed the foundation of all schooling and university education up till the twentieth century. (Rohmann, 1999: 353) Perhaps the most influential scholastic figure was Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225-1274). Notably, the scholastics leant heavily on classical philosophers, especially Aristotle, and early Church fathers, particularly St. Augustine. (ibid.) Copernicus, Gallielo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Newton were all products of the procrustean and scholastic universities of Europe. (Huff, 2003: 344)
Here the lineage of the rationalist hegemony is clearly seen. Analysis via questioning, disputation and the requirement of evidential procedures cemented this process, and can be seen in educational processes in the west to this day.
Christians versus mystics
Frazer (1914) shows that Christianity has strong pagan, and animistic roots. Shamanism, visionary experience and prophecy were all apparent in early Christian thought and practice. (Sheldrake, 1994: 185) However, orthodox Christianity came to discourage mystical experience. The Church, both Protestant, and Catholic, sided with the “ascenders” (Wilber, 2000c) (those who found the divine to be above and beyond) and denied the body and the experience of mysticism.
The dualism of Plato and the ancient Greeks was adopted by the early Christian Church, with matter seen as lower and the divine as higher. It was a hierarchical system, with humans situated between the angels and the lower animals. (Ross, 1993) From the time of Augustine to the time of Copernicus, the Church valorised the divine and the angelic, but effectively reviled the body and the Earth. Wilber (2000c) writes that the Church “held out the goal of perfect Ascent in Christ” while simultaneously “prohibiting it.” (Wilber, 2000c: 419) Thus the religious practice of the mediaeval Church discouraged spirituality as “an ongoing living experience.” (Ross, 1993: 41) Indeed it repressed Gnostic Christianity and mysticism which not only saw gods and the divine in nature, but encouraged the development of personal spiritual experience as a source of knowledge. (Ross, 1993: 41) Instead a “theological elitism” prevailed, with the clergy as the source of revealed wisdom. This put the Divine beyond the reach of the common people; “above” and “beyond” them. In effect the physical world was “despiritualised.”(Ross, 1993: 41) The effect of this on the common people was that they became:
… vulnerable to total exclusion in the scheme of things and it made the systematic empirical investigation of (the) denigrated demystified material realm inevitable. (Ross, 1993: 41)
In this metaphysic of alienation of mind and matter, of psyche and cosmos, of intellect and intuition, integrated consciousness became increasingly obfuscated. In the medieval era, the persecution of mystics such as Meister Eckhart (Chalquist, 1997) stands as a poignant example of this; in the scientific era, the exclusion, ridicule and oftentimes exclusion of those purporting to employ or conceptualise integrated intelligence are representative of this, as discussed in the literature review of this thesis.
This persecution of mysticism was no more apparent than in the Christian rejection and persecution of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was prominent in the early years of Christianity up until about 300AD. According to the Gnostics, a divine essence permeated all human souls. Despite the fall of man into the corporeal world, the divinity within could be awoken via gnosis, or esoteric knowledge. However the Church denounced Gnostics as heretics. This had the critical effect of forcing the Church to concretize the cannon of the scriptures and establish a theological creed. The establishment of an Episcopal body to protect orthodox beliefs followed. (Bullock and Trombley, 1999: 368)
This conflict of gnosis (intuitive, mystical) and theology (rational/critical) is a seminal issue in the hegemony of rationalism in western world. For in the victory of theology and scriptural interpretation over the inner ways of knowing of the Gnostics, mystical knowledge and understanding, as well as knowledge of inner ways of knowing, were further obfuscated.
Further persecutions and rejections
In medieval Europe the Church rejected other conceptions of mysticism, and persecuted those who practiced or preached ideas such as the immanence of God, accessibility to divine intelligence (and not via the revelation of the clergy), and pagan and druidic rituals and philosophy in general.
Various mystics were condemned by the Church, and the inquisition was established in order to police the dominant Church-centered view of a transcendent God accessible only through the power structures of the Church. In the thirteenth century Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) was criticised and excommunicated for his mystical interpretation of spirituality. Eckhart’s mysticism stands as an example of integrated intelligence, as epitomized by his statement that: “When I am one with that in which are all things, past, present and to come, all the same distance and all just the same, then they are all in God and all in me.” (Chalquist, 1997)
Witchcraft, a form of paganism, was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in Europe, while in America the Puritan clergy often targeted strong and independent women. This led some writers such as Murray (1921) to argue that the attempt to eliminate witchcraft was predicated upon a fear of women empowered via an intimate relationship with nature. This threatened the patriarchal establishment, and most notably its rational nature. (Rohmann, 1999: 429-430)
The effect on western development of this persecution and rejection of mystics, Gnostics and witches, was that its ways of knowing remained centred upon external modalities; the world of the senses, rather the internal world of consciousness. (Ross, 1993: 150) The Christian Church, one of the most powerful influences on the development of the Western civilisational worldview, has thus exhibited the tendency to reject mysticism and the psyche, instead, focusing upon ritual and subservience to clerical power figures.
The Protestant reformation and Puritanism
The transcendental Protestant cosmologies of the seventeenth century, which depicted a God that had created the world but was not bound by it, created a distance between nature and both man and God. People studied nature “for its fullness and regularities, no longer for its messages” (Pickstone, 2000: 29). Thus natural philosophy became independent of philosophy. Further, nature could be “interrogated by experimental manipulation” (ibid.). The fundamental attitude here is the antithesis of the attitude of reverence and awe that underpins the indigenous and romantic relationship with nature. It can be seen in this respect that the “reading” of nature and psi phenomena - an integral aspect of integrated intelligence – is the antithesis of the distancing effect of Protestant theology.
The Protestant reformation was itself deeply influenced by Augustinian thought. Martin Luther (1483-1546), the prime instigator of the Protestant reformation (Rohmann, 1999: 239) was himself an Augustinian monk. His refutation of the infallibility of the pope and power of the clergy and their ideal that the divine was accessible to the individual (ibid.) could potentially have opened the way for a more expansive integrated intelligence. Yet the reformation reinforced a “intellectualised” way of knowing. For it was the Bible which was posited as the sole source of divine wisdom, not any inner voice or mystical union with the divine. Despite the religious and spiritual subject matter, theological interpretation is a form of analysis, a rational way of knowing, not intuitive. Theology was itself a kind of science - the science of faith. It was predicated upon “a great faith in reason” amongst the European medievals. (Huff, 2003: 6)
2.3.3 Creation spirituality versus fall-redemption Christianity
Fox (1988) finds that there are two essentially different Christian traditions: fall-redemption spirituality and creation spirituality. Rosemary Radford Reuther summarises Fox’ interpretation in the following manner.
Fall-redemption spirituality abolishes the original goodness of creation, the original goodness of our own created natures, rooted in God as the ground of our being. Our natures and the nature of the world around us is defined as sinful, alienated and cut off from God. Salvation is then bought down from above, from a place transcendent to our sinful nature, making us the unworthy recipients of a gratuitous redemption that has no connection with our own created capacities (Reuther, quoted in Ross, 1993: 268. Italics added).
This mirrors Wilber’s (2000c) argument that Christian medieval theology left its parishioners adrift, unable to connect with the Divine (“above”) and dissociated from the body (“below”) (Wilber, 2000c). The Augustinian tradition was permeated with fall-redemption spirituality, and this was re-vitalised in the Protestant reformation. Dualism was apparent. Fall-redemption spirituality featured:
…the splitting of God from Creation, soul from Body and human consciousness from the natural world. The human intellectual soul, as the recipient of saving grace, stands alone, separated from the nexus of relations to the larger psyche, to the body, to human community and to the earth. Fall—redemption spirituality tends towards rationalism and individualism (Reuther, quoted in Ross, 1993: 268. Italics added).
And further, fall-redemption spirituality is:
…death denying and anti-ecological, seeking to extricate the immortal (male ruling class) intellect from its embededness to morality, process and relationships (Reuther, quoted in Ross, 1993: 269. Italics added).
We see here the obvious tenants of the rationalist hegemony: the various dualisms, splitting of humanity from nature, alienation from the psyche; and the valoristion of rationalism and individualism.
Even as fall-redemption Christianity came to dominate Christendom, another kind of Christianity was “largely repressed” by the orthodox Christianity. (Ross, 1993: 267) This was creation spirituality. (Fox, 1988; Ross, 1993) Notably, its roots lie in the cosmologies of the indigenous people of the world. It was a strong feature of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the mystics of the Rhineland in medieval Europe. (Ross, 1993) According to Ross (1993) Christ was the prime exemplar of this tradition, and it later found expression in other medieval theologians like Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and Nicolas of Cusa. (Ross, 1993: 269) It was a deeply mystical tradition, with a strongly held pantheism. It held that divinity permeated the entire cosmos. (Ross, 1993: 267) For the advocates of this tradition, what was important was the "celebration of life and a reverence for the beauty of nature.” (ibid.) They thus held to the concept of an imminent divinity.
Fall-redemption Christianity, in contrast, had a great distrust of nature. In Genesis 1:28 it is stated that God gave humans power “over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (quoted in Eisler, 2004: 86), and this was echoed in Bacon’s well known words that science must “torture nature’s secrets from her.” (ibid.) Bacon posited a philosophy of domination over nature, which followed from the biblical imperative that human purpose was to exercise power over nature and conquer it (Dossey, 1993: 164). These tenants of fall-redemption Christianity can be seen as consistent with the dominator paradigm (Eisler, 2004) and the aggressive tenants of western science.
A most striking aspect of fall-redemption Christianity is that once the surface of worldview is stripped away, it can be seen that its cognitive and psychological processes have a striking resemblance to significant aspects of modernist and positivist science. This includes the separation of consciousness from the world (the object/subject split in science); the rejection of the psyche as in behaviourism and American cognitive psychology (Bettelheim, 2001); and the tendency towards unbalanced rationalism. To this we can add the denial of death and suppression of nature, as discussed in the previous chapter.
Thus there are two crucial aspects to emerge from the prevalence of fall-redemption spirituality. Firstly, the potential for integrated intelligence is stultified within fall-redemption spirituality. The individual is seen as unworthy of integrated knowledge and divine consciousness, and the divine is delivered to a transcendent sphere beyond the reach of the ordinary individual. Secondly fall-redemption spirituality presaged some of the themes of modern science and its ways of knowing: the splits of mind/body, conscious mind/psyche, and man/nature. It exacerbated the tendency towards individualism and rationalism, even in regard to the understanding spiritual and mystical conceptions.
2.3.4 Towards the scientific revolution: The birth of the university and the Aristotelian revival
The re-introduction of Aristotle in the 11th and 12th centuries
Up until the sixteenth century in Europe, the Christian Church was “the ultimate arbiter of reality” and conceptions of the cosmos were predicated upon the Church’s teachings. (Dossey, 1993: 163; Laura & Leahy, 1988). Yet a shift in locus of power from clergy to scientist occurred over several centuries, and this shift both featured, and was mediated by, the continued shift towards predominantly rational ways of knowing. In the argument that follows, the findings of Huff (2003) are seminal to the thesis. Huff writes that:
What laid the foundations for the scientific revolution was Europe’s unique synthesis of Greek philosophy (Aristotle), Roman law (The corpus juris civilis) and Christian theology. (Huff, 2003; 317)
This shift created a social and legal revolution which laid the foundations of modern society. (Huff, 2003: 317)
As has been argued, the atomism and rational ways of knowing of Aristotle and the ancient Greeks played a seminal role in the development of rational thought and science in the west. Up till the time of the thirteenth century, the science of Europe, China and the Islamic nations was approximately on par (Huff, 2003). There had been impressive technological developments in Islam (most notably in astronomy, medicine and mathematics) and China (the invention of movable printing, the seismograph) but this failed to translate into something equivalent to the scientific enlightenment in the west (Huff, 2003). The question is: what was unique about the west that laid the foundations for the scientific revolution? It will be argued here that rational ways of knowing played a large part in that revolution. The same factors that obfuscated intuitive knowledge, elevated and expanded rational knowledge and those domains of enquiry which they pertain to: the modern sciences and industrial society. Note: As argued in chapter – education – these ways of knowing have continued to dominate in the post-industrial economies of the knowledge society.
Huff (2003) argues that the introduction of Aristotelian thought into Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the real point at which the western rationalist revolution occurred; and thus he describes the common assumption that the scientific revolution began in England in the seventeenth century as “a strictly internal history.” (Huff, 2003: 19) (Note: other historians of science place the incursion point at other temporal locations: Ben-David (1964; 1971: 17) sees the scientific age beginning in the seventeenth century, claiming that the enlightenment began with the fusion of the mathematical movement of the Continent with the experimental and empirical tradition in England. (Huff, 19); Kuhn (1972) challenges this, claiming the “anti-mathematical but highly empirical/experimental” scientists in England had little effect on scientific structures until the mid eighteenth century; and later moved this to the mid-nineteenth century. (Huff, 2003: 19; Kuhn, 1972: 166-78; Kuhn, 1976: 19-27;.) Indeed Kuhn (1972) suggests that it was the German universities' capacity to change the pedagogical methods of their classic and medieval origins that granted them superiority in modern physics early in the twentieth century. (Kuhn, 1972)
Huff (2003) concludes that experimentalism was not the new driving force of modern science and that it was triggered prior to Galileo. (Huff, 2003: 32) Huff argues that there was a powerful intellectual and social revolution beginning at approximately the twelfth century. Reason and rationalism were valorised as a means to truth, something which was “deeply embedded in the vocabulary and discourse” of the Europeans of this period. (Huff, 2003: 187)
Huff states that this shift:
…was both sponsored by and motivated by the idea that the natural world is a rational and ordered universe and that man is a rational creature who is able to understand and accurately describe the universe. Whether or not men and women can solve the riddles of existence, so this view goes, they are able to advance human understanding mightily by applying reason and the instruments of rationality of the world we inhabit. (Huff, 2003: 1)
Huff finds that the organised skepticism associated with science began no later than the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. Biblical criticism was common in schools and universities, where rational demonstration was valorised and believed to grant humanity the capacity of comprehending the universe and nature “with or without the aid of Scripture.” (Huff, 2003: 340) Significantly, these medieval Europeans often used the metaphors of the "world machine", and the "Book of Nature", which suggests the depth of the metaphysical and religious foundations of science. (Ibid.: 340-441)
At this time the shift in university education was a direct result of the re-introduction of the Aristotelian emphasis upon “explaining the world in terms of fundamental elements, causal processes, and rational enquiry.” (Ibid.: 339) For this was the cornerstone of the arts curriculum through which students passed before studying the higher faculties of law, theology and medicine (ibid.). This system was still in lace when Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus were developing modern physics and astronomy. (Ibid.) By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries European universities were:
… establishing neutral zones of intellectual autonomy which allowed philosophers and scientists to pursue their agendas free from the dictates of the central state and the religious authorities. The founders of the universities consolidated the curriculum around a basically scientific core of readings and lectures. This was embodied in the natural books of the new Aristotle that became known during those centuries. These books included Aristotle's Physics, Meteorology, On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul, The Small Works on Natural Things, and so forth. All of these works established a new naturalistic frame work. (Huff, 2003: 317-318)
This represented a new naturalistic, intellectual agenda. It became the core of “an evolutionary mode of study.” (Huff, 2003: 318) This was an open forum, where scholars could ask questions, and indeed were taught how to do so, “and were even enjoined to dispute every aspect of it.” (Huff, 2003: 318) The Aristotelian emphasis was on explaining the natural world "in terms of fundamental elements, causal processes, and natural enquiry” (Huff, 2003: 339), an overtly analytical and rational process.
Huff also finds that “a new set of universal mathematical symbols and a corpus of manuals, texts, and other documents” were brought together in the West between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries in order to aid the teaching of astronomy in universities. (Huff, 2003: 346). Thus Aristotelian thought was supplemented with a new curriculum. (Huff, 2003) This was called the "corpus astronomicus", new scientific knowledge which included standard texts, scientific instrumentation (such as the abacus, armillary sphere and astrolabe), and collections of data, as well as tables of astronomical observations. These permitted the measurement of local time, and prediction of astronomical events including eclipses and conjunctions of planetary bodies. (Huff, 2003: 345-346) Huff finds that such curriculum shifts were “symptomatic of the deep interest in astronomy and naturalistic inquiry among medieval Christian scholars”. (Huff, 2003: 346) Notably these changes were introduced into the curriculum by Pope Sylvester II, which supports Huff’s thesis that the Church itself was not entirely hostile to the new knowledge and ways of knowing. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a new “arithmetic mentality" had emerged. (ibid.)
Institutional power increases
Another factor that Huff (2003) identifies as being seminal in the development of western science, was the great “social, intellectual, and legal revolution” in the medieval period (Huff, 2003: 339) that allowed institutions to develop relatively independently from the power of state and Church. Huff argues that even though there was a clash between church and scientist, it was not as great as often imagined, and allowed for the gradual introduction of rational and scientific enquiry into education and society. Thus the Copernican revolution vindicated the efficacy of the institutional structures that had been developed to protect “spheres of neutral space within which offensive, revolutionary and even heretical ideas could be openly debated.” (Huff, 2003: 358)
The legal revolution led to the creation of new forms of social interactions, group and social agency, as well as new areas of autonomy in the intellectual and political domains. In respect to the developmental modern science the seminal breakthrough was the legal watershed which permitted the development of autonomous institutions such as the university. (Huff, 2003: 339)
Huff writes that the new legal systems:
… granted legal status to a variety of other collectivities, such as residential communities, cities and towns, universities, and economic groups such as guilds, as well as professional associations. In creating these spheres of autonomy, the western legal tradition created both neutral zones (universities) and a variety of public spaces in which various kinds of open discussion and debate took place. These new forums included courts of law with regularized procedures, standards of due process, and the use of advocates to defend the rights of the accused. (Huff, 2003:317. Italics added)
Thus there was the assumption of:
…collective and individual rights and interests, which must be reconciled through open debate and representative delegation of authority. This revolution also sharply demarcated the religious domain - the moral and the ethical - from the secular state. Not lest of all, these changes created both the legal and institutional foundations for the emergence of professional associations of physicians, lawyers, merchants, and, eventually, scientists." (Huff, 2003: 317. Italics added).
We thus see a number of processes occurring to facilitate the further development of rational ways of knowing. The open discussion and debate allowed for individual thought, thus enhancing individuality and ego-centered autonomy. This, together with the separation of the religious and secular, meant that institutions, the individuals within them, and their respective philosophies were no longer burdened with the need for spiritual and mystical considerations. This represented a freeing of control of the Church, and allowed the intellectual and scientific method to flourish. However it also moved those very institutions and the populace further away from spiritual conceptions, especially in terms of the meditative processes that might otherwise have facilitated experiences of integrated and transpersonal intelligence.
2.4.1 The Enlightenment
In this section the ways in which the enlightenment contributed the western rationalist hegemony is considered. It is found that the methods used to determine the real during the enlightenment further entrenched rationalism as the dominant way of knowing the west. In particular, mathematical and analytical ways of knowing came increasingly into play, while the insistence upon observation reinforced the external, sensory focus of the dominant perceptual modalities.
2.4.2 The Enlightenment and the influence of the scientific method
Enlightenment science rejected inner worlds, and created a modern science which valorised exteriors. (Wilber, 2001) Below, the genealogy of ways of knowing is traced through the sixteenth century shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe, and briefly examines the ideas of the fathers of modern science.
Needham (1969) finds that modern science developed in Western Europe at the time of Galileo in the late Renaissance, when the essential structure of the natural sciences was initiated. This structure was mediated by “the application of mathematical hypotheses to Nature, the full understanding of the experimental method, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the geometrization of space, and the acceptance of the mechanical model of reality." (Needham, 1969).
The Copernican shift
The heliocentric universe as posited by Copernicus (1473-1543) was a seminal shift in human history. Yet it was not only an intellectual shift, it was metaphysical one. (Huff, 2003) As Huff (2003) writes:
The fundamental issue at stake in the struggle over the Copernican hypothesis was not whether the particular theory had or had not been established but whether in the last analysis the decision regarding truth and certitude could be claimed by anyone who was not an officially authorized interpreter of revelation. (Huff, 2003: 183)
Here was a crucial shift of power, and with it a crucial shift in the dominant civilisational way of knowing of the western world. Copernicus’ vision of the cosmos represented a great challenge to the Church and its power to interpret revelation. It was in a sense "the last gasp of a restrictive ideology, which no longer had the power to regulate such questions." (Huff, 2003: 183) As Grof (1985) states, paradigms delimit not only conceptions, but also the methods of enquiry. To this it can be stated that paradigms delimit the ways of knowing. After the Copernican revolution, the scientific method slowly but certainly became the final arbiter of the real in western culture. Thus Kepler, Galileo, and Newton could not have contributed to western knowledge without the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe. (Huff, 2003: 327) But what is more important was that the study of such ideas became the core of the university curriculum. This new examination system represented what was probably an irreversible step towards "the inculcation of a scientific worldview." (Huff, 2003: 183)
Seminal moment: observation and the scientific method
The development of the scientific method critically shifted the western world’s dominant ways of knowing. From the time after the development of this method, phenomena which were not easily measured and observed became less real, and intelligibility was seen as being found in the observation of matter. (Ross, 1993: 41; Grof ,1985: 19) This affected the representation of the phenomena of consciousness itself, which was essentially ignored until the very last years of the twentieth century because of its intangible nature. (Blackmore, 2001; Maddox, 1998: 2-3) As Maddox (1999) points out, the interplay between observation and explanation was made more explicit with the clarification of scientific method. At this moment extra-sensory phenomena began to be left off the map.
Photo # 2 (below) indicates the way that the act of external observation became seminal to the way of knowing of the scientific method. Hervelius’ gaze is firmly centered upon the measurement he is making. It is the measurement, rendered real by the pervasive power of the machine, that is real. We thus see represented a crucial development in the codification of knowledge and the abstraction of the real. The artist has placed pieces of machinery in the foreground, scattered across the floor seemingly to validate the entire process via pervasive mechanisation. The giant sextant is centered, overwhelming the two men, as if to emphasise the valorisation of the machine. Yet there is no living matter present in the room besides Hevelius and his assistant, depicting the alienation of man from nature. The stars themselves are nowhere to be seen, dislocated to a realm beyond the perceptual apparatus of the machine. Ultimately what is most real is the machine: centre stage, and larger than humanity itself.
This metaphysical dualism is an assumption that remains largely unchallenged in mainstream mechanistic science, despite the fact that quantum theory, which introduces the interplay of observer and the observed, is still unable to bring the observer formally into its theory. (Kafatos & Kafatou, 1991: 8, 9) This shift led to the situation in contemporary science where the interplay between observation and explanation has become crucial. A theory is not deemed a valid explanation unless it has been tested by observation or experiment. Thus all phenomena demand a physical explanation, and this includes the working of the human brain (Maddox, 1999: 2), a factor which has made both the examination and representation of integrated intelligence highly problematic within modern science.
Enlightenment science valorised the sensory, and rejected the subtle
With the coming of the enlightenment, a new philosophy emerged, based upon reason and sensory evidence. As Panek (2000) writes of the new astronomers such as Galileo:
(they)… trusted in evidence from the telescope, but they trusted in it even more when it didn’t depend on the interpretation of the observer; when it was answerable to the higher power not of ancient authority, or even to God, but of Nature; when it was quantifiable, measurable, replicable, absolute – when it was, in a word, mechanical. (Panek, 2000: 85)
Thus in a matter of decades, the Church, which had stripped away inner knowing with its denunciation of gnosticism and mysticism (Ross, 1993), and replaced it with the divinity of the priesthood, had itself been usurped as the arbiter of ultimate knowledge. (Dossey, 1993; Laura and Leahy, 1988) Panek (2000) writes that in the space of two centuries, “man had gone from being the apple of God’s eye to being God’s eye.” (Panek, 2000: 61) If Eckhart (and his knowing “eye”) had been born after the scientific revolution, it is likely that he would have found it more difficult to find the social/cognitive space in which to experience “the eye of God.” Enlightenment science thus posited the human eye as the ultimate source of knowing, with a singular, fragmented self perceiving an externalised universe.
Perhaps the greatest contrast between the enlightenment rationalists and the mystics, was that the latter were profoundly interested in consciousness. (Kafatos & Kafatou, 1991:12) Conversely, the former, although interested in the idea of higher realms (Wilber, 2000a), paid no heed to awareness itself from a first person perspective. This situation became more pronounced, leading to twentieth century cognitive science, which attempted to ignore consciousness altogether. (Blackmore, 2001)
The differences between the mechanistic representations of consciousness that are depicted in mainstream science, and the holistic representations seen in traditional mystical and spiritual philosophies, are a direct result of the application of their polarised methodologies. The ancient mystics of India, Tibet, Kashmir, Japan, China and Europe, used first person methodologies, and wrote extensively about consciousness. They revealed a set of general principles which have been universally validated. (Wilber, 2001; Kafatos & Kafatou, 1991:. 3) Note: Ferrer (2002) finds Wilber’s “objectification” of mystical experience to be untenable, and criticises it as…. Thus in the East, looking in and seeing out were considered complementarities. (Kafatos and Kafatou, 1991) There was no negation of inners as found in Western science. Further, the validation process was a direct experiential one, not, as with the enlightenment philosophers, a function of intellectualisation (Wilber, 2001) rendered as textual codifications.
Dualism exacerbated fragmented intelligence
A dominant conception of reality developed as dualism emerged from the birth of the scientific era. The seventeenth century philosopher Rene Descartes’ oft-quoted ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (I think therefore I am) encapsulated the essence of this dualism. Cartesian dualism depicted mind as separate from matter. (Grof, 1985: 19; Gardner et al., 1996: 33; Ross, 1993: 42) Descartes’ dualism was seminal in the birth of Newtonian science and its mechanistic and materialistic predicates. (Ross 1993: 42)
This implied a split between humanity and nature, and between the individual and society. As the authority of science increased, this dualism was increasingly legitimated within the psyche of the population. (Kafatos and Kafatou, 1991;17) Kafatos and Kafatou argue that this damaged the “very ideals” of Western culture. (ibid.) The new science was incapable, because of its nature, to answer deep questions about the meaning of life and each person’s place in society. The loss of divine purpose meant that the individual’s personal advancement, including freedom and rights, were often at odds with the rights of the greater society. (ibid.)
This estrangement from the greater society mirrored a parallel alienation from the whole at a psychic level, as consciousness became increasingly self-fixated, and the processes of cognition became externalised and alienated from the inner dimensions of the psyche. Hugh Elliot typified the attitudes to consciousness and spirit that became prevalent at the height of the mechanistic paradigm:
…there exists no kind of spiritual substance or entity of a different nature from that of which matter is composed… there are not two kinds of fundamental existence, material and spiritual, but one kind only… (quoted in Wolf, Quantum Leap: 46)
Ultimately, mystical states of consciousness would come to be termed “non-ordinary” (Grof, 1985) or “altered” (Grof, 1994; Tart, 1972), thus concretizing the status of intuitive and integrated perception as “other”. It was the latter which had connected people with the whole, with integrated consciousness, according the mystical traditions such as the Buddhist, Hindu, Kabalistic, and Taoist spiritual practices. (Kafatos and Kafatou, 1991; Niskar, 1998; Ross, 1993; Zohar, 2000) Fragmented consciousness thus became the norm of western culture and society, rendering the wisdom of the mystics nonsensical and absurd within the mechanistic norms of scientific reductionism and its externalised sensory fixation.
The enlightenment was a victory for the descenders
Wilber (2000c) argues that the period from the Renaissance to the enlightenment was a great battle between the “ascenders” (those that sought enlightenment in higher realms of consciousness) and the “descenders” (materialists who rejected transcendent phenomena). It was “arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European History.” (Wilber, 2000c: 374-375) Wilber suggests that in Western philosophy, these “two Gods” (ibid.: 374) “wrestled for the soul” for more than a thousand years, and still do so today. (ibid.). The enlightenment was ultimately a victory for the descenders, and all “other worlds” were denied. This was a total reversal from the dominance of the ascenders of the Church who had previously held power. (Wilber, 2000c: 374) The spiritual basis of Western society, which had been built upon the philosophy of Christ, was attacked and ultimately dismantled within the scientific community. This severed the link between the divine and humanity and nature. (Kafatos and Kafatou, 1991: 17)
Wilber (ibid.) makes a seminal distinction when he finds that the Enlightenment scientists and philosophers did believe in “inner” dimensions, but rejected “beyond:”
The Enlightenment would continue to take the “turn within”… and then forget the beyond. The disengaged ego of the Enlightenment turned within…and got stuck there, dangling haplessly over a holistic flatland that had no room for it: not within and beyond, but within and withdrawn. “Knowledge closed in on itself,” as Foucault put it, and there was no way to actually reconnect the self with a “holistic cosmos,” since that cosmos of interlocking exteriors excluded the interior on its own terms…” (Wilber, 2000c: 370)
Wilber calls this the “collapse of the Kosmos to the cosmos,” which he also refers to as “subtle reductionism.” (Wilber, 2000: Sex: 370) This passage highlights that the scientific revolution contained an inherent dissociation process of psyche and cosmos, of the part and the whole. In the atomism of the enlightenment, the metaphor of Newtonian billiard ball atoms extended itself to the individual, who became a mechanistic entity detached from the cosmos which had spawned it.
Medieval space consisted of hierarchies ranging from the mundane to the celestial and supercelestial (Shapiro, 1992). Yet enlightenment space ultimately banished all hierarchy, non-locality and divinity from the cosmos in favor of a clockwork, mechanistic atomism. The ultimate rejection of all hierarchy also meant that non-localised spiritual ways of knowing were rejected. Divination, revelation, and angelic communication also imply a hierarchy of consciousness (Fox and Sheldrake, 1996), with the human recipient of information as a lower link in the chain. Thus in the enlightenment model, all space became localised and neutralised.
Wilber argues that the great achievement of the Enlightenment was to lift humanity from the mythic (prepersonal, undifferentiated) consciousness to the rational, but the reduction of all the “Kosmos” to a “flatland” of “its”. (Wilber, 2000c: 354).
For it was precisely this nondual Kosmos that broke in two, crippled and fallen, in the coming nightmare of Western spirituality and philosophy and science. The fractured footnotes to Plato began to litter the landscape with their partialities and favored dualisms, and it is now, just now, only now, that we have begun to pick up the pieces. (Wilber, 2000c: 354)
Wilber, identifying the preferred verbs of knowing, clarifies that the enlightenment philosophers merely intellectualised the higher realms, but did not experience them directly; merely “postulated”, “assumed” and “rationalised” them. (Wilber, 2000C: 421-422) This is clearly different from the way of knowing of mystics such Meister Eckhart who proclaimed that: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” (quoted in Ross, 1993) The very means of cognition being employed by the enlightenment philosophers not only reflected their lack of direct perception of an integrated consciousness, it effectively cut them off from it. This estrangement from the realms of spirit continues to this day, argues Wilber, in the reductionism of “Flatland” mechanistic science, and the “relativism” of the postmodernism which has followed it. (Wilber, 2000a: 52-61)
The definition of rationalism was narrowed
Each age defines rationality in ways that befit the dominant modes of consciousness, and prevailing assumptions about what constitutes the real. Shapiro (1992) writes:
What one regards as rationality in a given age has to do with what are regarded as legitimate performances within the strictures of prevailing institutions that control the meanings, which have a historically specific and local character. (Shapiro, 1992: 25)
For the mechanistic paradigm, the boundaries are posited within the limitations of the sensori-motor domain (Wilber, 2000), following the demarcations of the empirical philosophers. Using Wilber’s (2001) tripartite model, the eye of flesh (empiricism) is seen as the primary arbiter of truth. Those that delve into the phenomenological (philosophical) domains - the eye of reason - are tolerated, but treated with suspicion. Note: For example those skeptical of Freud’s claims question whether or not Freud’s understandings are merely a creation of his imagination. (Maddox, 1999). Those who delve into the eye of contemplation and the transcendent realms of spirit are often ridiculed or simply ignored; only fifty per cent of psychology texts book even refer to parapsychology. (Schlitz, 2001).
Zohar (1994) argues that prior to Descartes, thinkers had used reason to ask fundamental questions such as what were the most important values, and what constitutes a good life (Zohar, 1994). Ideas were judged as rational according to whether they made sense within an holistic and broader context. However, after Descartes and the seventeenth century rationalists, reason became associated with logic and mathematical truth. Descartes used a reductionist approach to problems, breaking them down to understand them. This approach led to the eventual dominance of reductionism, and the viewing of nature as an object. The conceptions of reductionists Bacon and Galileo were also crucial in this respect. Later, Newton and other eminent scientists adopted Descartes’ atomism, and it became “the basis of our rational, scientific culture.” (Zohar, 1994: 183). Thus nature was objectified, as something to be broken down, reduced and measured.
Photo # 3 (from Hawking [ed.], 2003: 85) suggests the crucial role that measurement and observation played in the enlightenment. In this figure taken from On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres (1st edition, 1543), Copernicus’ work in decoding the universe through observation, measurement and the attribution of number is readily seen. The real is determined by the number assigned by observation, thus creating an essential abstraction and dissociation process as the symbol/code becomes more real than the observed phenomenon. The process also undermines the collapse of subject/object dichotomy that typifies integrated intelligence and transcendent experience. (Hayward, 1984)
Science thus developed a dualism, based on the rational observer, and the non-sentient object. In this way rationalism and the scientific method became the new paradigm, which underpinned all thinking. This sense was typified by enlightenment philosopher David Hume:
If we take in one hand any volume – of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance – let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it them to flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (quoted in Zohar, 1994: 184)
Thus is was that the enlightenment and modern science effectively discarded non-measurable phenomena, including, religion, aesthetics and morals (Zohar, 1994: 184) To this we may add the conception and practice of integrated consciousness.
Other interpretations of what might constitute rationality are perfectly imaginable. Sardar (1998). As Sardar writes: “There is nothing that dictates that reason can only be defined in a single, western way.” (Sardar, 1998: 227). To other cultures whose knowledge systems may also be predicated upon “objectivity, systematic enquiry or experimentation”, western rationality may be nonsensical. (ibid.) Wildman (1996) refers to “the tendency of limiting the meaning of science and technology to its narrow Western ‘textual’ rationality.” (Wildman, 1996: 19) He argues that symbol and text dominate Western education, while “relationship” knowledge has been rejected. (Wildman, 1996: 19)
Thus the narrowing of what constitutes rationality in Western ways of knowing, restricts the perception of phenomena and experience that falls beyond the scope of such delimited constructions of the real. This effectively creates an inherent alienation from direct mystical/intuitive perception, which can be seen as a part of Wildman’s (1997) relationship knowledge.
The fathers of science were more integrated than modern scientists
The development of modern science is usually attributed to the ideas and work of five men – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Newton. (Kafatos & Kafatou, 1991: 18) Yet these men were not scientists in the contemporary sense of the word (Kafatos and Kafatou, 1991). Indeed the term “scientist” is a relatively new one - and was not used until the second half of the nineteenth century when developed by Cambridge philosopher William Whewell. Prior to this time, there was no title in English to collectively refer to chemists, mathematicians, physicists and those who studied the natural world. (Huff, 2003: 20) It is therefore anachronistic to refer to individuals prior to that time to have a completely formed self-image as a scientist. (Huff, 2003: 21) Thus, argues Huff: ”scientific values and the ethos of science are constructs that emerged over time and evolved out of nonscientific contexts.”(Huff, 2003: 20)
The range of interests of the enlightenment “scientists”, and their worldviews, differ significantly from the scientists of the modern era. A notable distortion of modernist interpretations of “the fathers of science” lies in the underplaying of their spirituality. (Grof， 1985, 19；Ross, 1993: 42)
Thus Hawking (2003) employs verbs of rationality to describe the ways of knowing of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Copernicus “calculated” planetary positions, and “observed” the motions of planets (Hawking, 2003: 2, 3); Galileo “invented” the hydrostatic balance and the “calculating” compass, “described” the motions off falling bodies, “interpreted” his discoveries, “demonstrated” the principles of motion and “calculated” the path of projectiles (ibid.: 394-397); Newton “defined” the laws of motion and the laws of gravity, “experimented” on the properties of light, “researched” celestial mechanics and gravitation, “deduced” the inverse square law, and “explained” motions of the planets. (ibid: 725-732) Note: I have changed the tense of some of these verbs from Hawking’s text for purposes of grammatical consistency.
It may appear from Hawking’s account that these men were “scientists” in the modernist sense. Yet according to Kepler himself, astronomers were not mere observers:
"… in all acquisition of knowledge it happens that, starting out from the things which impinge upon the senses, we are carried by the operation of the mind to higher things which cannot be grasped by any sharpness of the senses." (quoted Huff, 353. Italics added).
It is notable to see those aspects of Kepler’s account that are at odds with mechanistic science. The ego/self does not appear to be in full control (“we are carried”), and is taken to what may be a transrational domain not accessible to the eye of flesh (“higher things which cannot be grasped by…the senses”). Yet in the representation of Kepler by historian of science, Jardine (2000), we see little of this in her employment of verbs of knowing. Jardine states that Kepler “argued” for the truth of the Copernican system, “calculated” planetary orbits, “proved” that sight was triggered by the eyes reception of light, and “wrote” about the optics of telescopes. (Jardine, 2000: 378-379) Another historian of science, Gribbin (2003) concedes that Kepler was “too mystically inclined to be known as the first scientist.” (Gribbin, 2003: 54) He informs us that Kepler was a student of astrology, though adds with distain that “he was well aware that the entire business was utter tosh.” (Gribbin, 2003: 53). Nonetheless Gribbin finds that Kepler “used pure reason and imagination” to explain the cosmos, “puzzled” over the question of why there were only six planets, and “came up with” the idea of elliptical orbits for the planets - although it only “seemed to him to be like a Divine revelation” (ibid.: 56. Italics added). Finally, he “described” his third law which “quantified” Copernicus’ general pattern. (ibid: 65) The virtual sarcasm of Gribbin represents a civilisational bias, which effectively derides the conceptions of Kepler as “lower than” western contemporary science.
God was a seminal predicate of both Copernicus and Newton’s conceptions, and Copernicus was actually a priest (Hawking, 2003: 1) Newton’s spiritual bent included a fascination with astrology, occultism and alchemy. He did not think that the universe could be explained from material causes, but only through reference to God. (Grof, 1985: 19-20) Descartes also believed that only the direct perception of God created the objectivity in the universe. Thus the belief in divine intelligence was at the core of worldviews of the first “scientists”, something that is often not apparent, or played down, in contemporary histories such as that of Hawking, Jardine, and (to a lesser degree) Gribbin.
2.4.3 The rationalists versus the empiricists
The enlightenment debate between the rationalists such as Descartes, and the British empiricists such as Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke established a precedent that is still seminal in consciousness and intelligence theory in the contemporary world. (Gardner et al., 1996: 33) Locke and Hume argued that the contents of the mind could be explained entirely in terms of sensory inputs. Their argument was predicated upon the idea of the mind as “tabula rasa” or a blank slate, with the environment determining mind and personality. (Ross, 1993: 115) These assumptions would be echoed in the early to mid years of the twentieth century, when behaviorists postulated similar notions. (Ross, 1993: 115)
Kant adopted aspects of both camps. (Gardner et al., 1996: 35-36) On the one hand he argued that the human mind held various innate conceptions such as relation, unity, quantity, and time and space. Like the rationalists, he argued that the mind lacked a material substrate, and thus could not be examined empirically. Yet he also held the view that knowledge was dependent upon sensory experience, although he claimed that the ways that this knowledge is acquired is innately determined. Kant’s ideas formed a vital and influential impact upon various branches of psychology such as Piaget’s developmental conceptions. (Gardner et al., 1996: 35-36)
Significantly, both rationalists and empiricists failed to consider the possibility of intelligence being universally integrated or transpersonal. Thus the primary debate within consciousness theory during the enlightenment period (continuing up till the end of the twentieth century) effectively by-stepped the issue of inspiration from non-localised sources. The mechanistic assumptions of the empirical camp were obvious – only that which was measurable was deemed important and scientific. Yet the assumption underpinning the rationalist camp was that intelligence emanated from the brain, thus placing it firmly within the mechanistic science camp. The rationalists, stating that the mind was non-material, did not question its status within a localised and essentially Cartesian/Newtonian space-time framework, and thus by implication limited their representation to the confines of the individual and his/her physical boundaries. Their approach was “philosophical,” and the ways of knowing that they employed did not involve deeply introspective, mystical or non-ordinary states of consciousness. An example is the empirical and philosophical approach of one of psychology’s founders, Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt acknowledged introspection, but his method was overtly experimental/empirical, as he modeled his methods upon the way that physicists mapped the external world. (Gardner, et al., 1996: 38)
The confusion of mind and mind content
The enlightenment continued the rationalisation of the western mind which had begun with the ancient Greeks and been exacerbated by the “rational” Christianity of the west. Thus along with access to the integrated consciousness of the inner mind, science lost the capacity to perceive the whole, including the indivisibility which had been such a notable aspect of mystical insight. (Kafatos and Kafatou, 1991; Nisker, 1998; Wilber 2000c) Although philosophical reflection is a type of “inner” cognitive process, it is fundamentally different from the “inner” process of mystical insight. The former is essentially intellectualism. The latter requires a focus upon awareness itself, and away from thoughts and feelings. (Shear & Jevning, 2002: 190-191) Thus Russell (2005) finds that Scottish enlightenment philosopher Hume failed to understand this distinction.
But what was this self? What was it like? Where could it be? Scottish philosopher David Hume spent considerable time looking within, trying to find something that was his own true self. But all he found were various thoughts, sensations, images and feelings. The reason he never found the self was that he was looking in the wrong place; he was looking in the realm of experience, in the contents of consciousness. But the self, by definition, cannot be another content of consciousness. It is that which experiences the contents of consciousness. (Russell, 2005:
http://www.ru.org/93russell.html).
Hume’s error is oft repeated in many contemporary depictions of intuitive cognition, such as Gardner’s (1993) intrapersonal intelligence, De Bono’s (1999) “red hat” thinking, or Goleman’s (1995, 1999) emotional intelligence, all of which fail to posit any distinction between the realm of pure awareness, and the contents of thought.
The divine became rationalised
Wilber (2000a) states that a hierarchal map of reality, mapping “matter, body, mind , soul, and spirit” has been the dominant model of reality throughout human history. (Wilber, 2000a: 225-226) Wilber argues that the enlightenment philosophers believed in the great Chain of Being, where human beings were nested in a hierarchical order of consciousness which spanned the undifferentiated prepersonal realms through to the rational to the cosmic. Human beings were assumed to be posited somewhere in the central positions of the schema, epitomised by Locke’s words: “there are far more species above us, than there are beneath; we being in degrees of perfection much more remote from the infinite Being of God, than we are from the lowest state of being…” (quoted in Wilber, 2000c: 420-421)
However Wilber points out that the existence of such higher realms of reality were merely “postulated” to exist by these philosophers. To specify the verb of knowing, it was a “rationalised” hypothesis, an assumption, which helped to explain the “gaps” between God and humanity. (Wilber, 2000c: 421) These spaces were depicted as “other” and rendered effectively unreachable. Yet to the originators of such conceptions, such as Plotinus, Dionysius and Eckhart these were human potentials which could be actualised. (Wilber, 2000c: 421-422).
Wilber’s last point highlights a crucial distinction in understandings and representations of mystical insight: the distinction between those who theorised about the existence of expanded states of consciousness, but without apparent direct perception of them, and those who both experienced them, and wrote about them. Wilber’s claim suggests that the enlightenment philosophers fell into the latter category, and represented a different kind of “knower” than previous mystics, such as Christ, Meister Eckhart, and St Teresa of Avila, who all reported direct experiences of the divine.
2.4.4 The instruments of reason
Edwin Hubble, after whom the Hubble Space telescope is named, declared in 1948 that: “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science.” (quoted in de Grasse Tyson, 2001: 84) Thus it is that the development of a particularly rational science in the western world has been greatly facilitated by the development of technologies which have enhanced the five senses. de Grasse Tyson (2001) sums up modern science’s perceptual approach to understanding the universe:
Equipped with our five senses - along with telescopes and microscopes and mass spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and detectors sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum - we explore the universe around us and call the adventure science. (de Grasse Tyson, 2001: 87)
A seminal aspect of the development of modern science has been the development of technologies which have influenced, refined and metamorphosed human perception, our ways of knowing, and in turn our map of the universe. The period involving the scientific revolution is particularly important. At this time both questions and answers were largely driven by the developments of this new instrumentation. (Jardine, 2000: 9) The emerging ideas quickly began to spread to other disciplines: botany, geography, geology, mineralogy, zoology, physiology and pharmacology. (Panek, 2000: 73)
The enlightenment coincided with the development of the telescope and microscope, both of which radically altered humanity’s perceived place in the universe. At the beginning of the scientific revolution, the Copernican model had placed the sun at the centre of the universe. (Panek, 2000). The shift in perspective that occurred as a result of the invention of the telescope alone is difficult to envisage. Before the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius in 1610 the Copernican universe stretched as far as Saturn, with the sun as the centre of the universe. (Panek, 2000) The New World had yet to be discovered by Europeans. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the universe had expanded until it had become “exactly one galaxy big.” (Panek, 2000: 123); and by January 5th, 1996, that number had expanded by approximately forty billion times, the number of estimated galaxies reveled by the Hubble Space Telescope. (Panek, 2000: 1)
Such was the enormous influence of the telescope that Panek (2000) writes:
The relationship between the telescope and our understanding of the dimensions of the universe is in many ways the story of modernity. It’s the story of how the development of one piece of technology has changed the way we see ourselves and of how the way we see ourselves has changed this piece of technology, each set of changes reinforcing the other over the course of centuries until, in time, we’ve been able to look back and say with some certainty that the pivotal division between the world we inhabit today and the world of our ancestors was the invention of this instrument… it’s what we have designed it, and then refined it … to do: address our place in the universe, literally. To size up all of space and figure out where we are in it. (Panek, 2000: 4)
Prior to the invention of such instruments of advanced perception, the frontiers of knowledge had belonged to philosophers and sages, employing what Wilber (2001) refers to as the eyes of reason and contemplation. However Wilber points out that the map of reality which emerged from the enlightenment depicted the universe in “empirical and monological” terms. (Wilber, 2000a: 226). This extended to what Wilber calls this a “well intentioned but deeply confused attempt to understand consciousness…by putting (it) under the microscope of the monological gaze.” (Wilber, 2000a: 226) The result was the evaporation of all “interior depths,” because they could not be seen with reductionist apparatus, and thus “they were pronounced nonexistent or illusory or derivative or epiphenomenal – all polite words for ‘not really real.’” (Wilber, 2000a: 226)
Galileo, Newton, Kepler and the enlightenment “scientists” shifted the focus and the power firmly back to the sensori-motor domain, aided by the advanced instrumentation and mathematics which they employed. Galileo stated that he placed his faith “not in ancient tomes, but in close observations and personal consecration…”(quoted in Panek, 2000: 72) It was sensory evidence of “the great book of nature” that became the ultimate purveyor of truth. (ibid.) When investigating the nature of gravity, Galileo became convinced of his ideas “because he had the math to prove it.” (Panek, 2000: 102)
The word telescope is derived from the Greek telescopio, or “to see at a distance.” (Panek 2000: 55). The telescope, the microscope, the spectroscope, and ultimately computer-aided means of information processing took human perception from inners to outers; the cosmos became distanced. The world of faith, divinity and even philosophy was relegated to secondary status, and often derided as limited, irrelevant or even dangerous. With this shift, came a secondary shift: an emphasis upon, observation, measurement and their mathematical means of verification. (Panek, 2000) The means of verification was no longer an intuitive process. Truth was to be derived via the manipulation of numbers, with strict mathematical laws and procedures. (Panek, 2000: 53-56) Ironically, although the telescope was expanding humanity’s perceptual fields, it was at the same time limiting it in other ways:
In seeming to bring a distant object closer and closer, the telescope wound up concentrating on a smaller and smaller field of view – the length and breadth of what the eye could see through a telescope. (Panek, 2000: 70)
Mystical perception had been the doorway to transpersonal experience, to the perception of the wholeness and connectedness of the universe. By the time of the advent of modernity, the perceptual processes of the new science had rendered inners obsolete. (Wilber, 2000) Typical of such a viewpoint is de Glassse Tysion (2001), who discusses the limitations of human sensory perception in the scientific journal Natural History.
Consider that the human machine, while good at decoding the basics of the immediate environment (if it's day or night, if a creature is about to eat us), has very little talent for decoding how the rest of nature works. For that, we need the tools of science. If we want to know what's out there, then we must resort to detectors other than the ones we are born with. The job is to extend and, when we can, transcend the breadth and depth of our senses. (de Grasse Tyson, 2001: 85. Italics added)
He further adds:
…scientists do not claim to have special powers, just special hardware. In the end, of course, the hardware converts the information it gleans into simple tables, charts, diagrams, or images that our innate senses can interpret. (de Glasse Tyson, 2001: 86. Italics added)
de Grasse Tyson’s human is quite explicitly a machine, a data processor decoding external stimuli. When the stimuli are codified (Wildman, 1996) into “tables, graphs, diagrams or images” they become real. It is a universe “out there”, in which humanity is estranged and alienated; perception is reduced to mathematical and visual abstractions, and approximations. It is only with artificial “detectors” that one might expand or transcend ones way of knowing; these have led to our “technologically evolving into supersentient beings.” (de Glasse Tyson, 2001: 87) de Grasse Tyson, epitomizing the tenants of modernist science, believes that only the mechanistic tools of science can deliver us such “transcendent” knowledge. The wisdom and knowledge gleaned from thousands of years of recorded mystical insight, with its transformative first person technologies are lost to de Glasse Tyson and modernist science because such ways of knowing fall beyond the parameters of the mechanistic world view.
This is graphically represented in photo # 4 (below, from Gribbin: 2003: 40), an illustration from the year 1569 depicting astronomer Tycho and his “great quadrant”. Here we see something of the spirit of the age, with the excitement of the outside universe opening up before an ever-more precise and calculating science. The gaze is notably outward; the way of knowing is exoteric, a contrast to the mystical introversion of the mystics of the Christian era and indigenous peoples.
Technology has not only become the mediator of perception, it has come to represent metaphorically the very validation of what is real and what is not real. In Brainstory, (BBC Worldwide, 2001) the BBC television production, the profound spiritual experiences of Rene Carter are introduced with the words: “Her temporal lobe epilepsy seems to have been a key factor in her religious beliefs.” As Carter relates an experience of an intense spiritual vision she had of Jesus on the cross, the camera keeps shifting back and forth from a close up of her face, to the needle of an EEG machine scribbling furiously. The needle symbolically represents the validation of the real, the codification of consciousness, rendering it to the “flatland” (Wilber, 2000c) of the computer paper. It is the abstraction, the codification which becomes real, not the experience. Further, the process renders the person and the experience as “objects”, and therefore effective “others.” Direct perception is thus rendered illegitimate, as it has been since the enlightenment. (Hollinshead, 2002)
Jung (1989), one of the most prominent inward-looking theorists of mind of the twentieth century chose a verse from Coleridge to preface the introduction to his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
He looked at his own Soul
With a Telescope. What seemed
All irregular, he saw and
Shewed to be beautiful
Constellations; and he added
To the Consciousnesses hidden
Worlds within worlds. (quoted in Jung, 1989, Introduction: v.)
As the telescope moved humanity’s gaze further outward, the inner telescope became increasingly blurred, along with the worlds and “Consciousness hidden” therein.
2.4.5 The five foundational values of the modern scientific revolution
The values upon which the enlightenment and modern science are predicated must be considered in any genealogical analysis of the ways of knowing of science. The enlightenment was predicated upon a core set of values (Huff, 2003). These values are the fundamental and deliberate predicates of science. Note: These are the deliberate foundational values of science, as opposed to the psycho-spiritual predicates outlined in the previous chapter, which are partly or wholly unconscious. What follows here is a brief discussion of the scientific values in terms of their effect upon intuitive ways of knowing. Points three and four will be discussed together, as their implications overlap. Note, Lizhi and Link (Huff, 2003) identify one other value which I have not discussed here, as it has not impacted intuitive ways of knowing in a significant way. That point is that science requires the free flow and exchange of information. (Huff, 2003) It is difficult to see that this value had a direct effect upon the practice of methods associated with integrated intelligence, and theoretically would enhance it.
1. “Science begins in doubt”: scientific progress rests on the questioning of received wisdom, not the “ingenious repetition” of party slogans. (Huff, 2003: 24)
The scientific worldview is “ever present and always doubtful of the latest…intellectual consensus.” (Huff, 2003:1) This organised scepticism involves a “temporary suspension of judgment and the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria.” (Huff, 2003 24) In Sahtouris’ (1999) terms, the enlightenment began with Descartes’ doubt, and the basic rejection of knowledge based on revelation or given truth. (Sahtouris, 1999) Note: Huff quotes Nelson as making the point that: “In reality the founders of modern science and philosophy were anything but skeptics, but were committed spokesman of the new truths clearly proclaimed by the Book of Nature … which, they supposed, revealed secrets to all who earnestly applied themselves in good faith and deciphered the signs so lavishly made by the Author of Nature." (quoted in Huff, 43; Nelson, 1991: 132)
Much of what is perceived with integrated intelligence is not gleaned from an external observation, but from an inner knowing that requires an immediate choice. This choice involves the acceptance or rejection of the intuitive voice. Thus in Myss’ (2001) intuitive perception of the integration of the three religious traditions (thesis page ref), she accepted the intuition immediately and seemingly without doubt. In this sense it is a kind of faith that plays a role here, which can be seen as the complete antithesis of the scientific method. It is the central argument of this genealogy that with advent of the scientific revolution inner worlds and subjectivity lost ground. Integrated intelligence is largely incompatible with the ethos of skeptical doubt. At the very least its employment was eradicated from deliberate use in science. The scientific method necessitated “neutral zones of free enquiry” (Huff, 2003: 2). This in effect created various dualisms – the split of subject and object, mind and body, feelings and rationality, earth and cosmos, divine and mundane, man and nature. Doubt is also found in integrated intelligence in that it is seminal to the process of radical questioning, found in both Asian (Hindu, Buddhist, Zen) and western intuitive discourses. (Plato, Socrates). See (Rothberg, 2000 p. 169-170)
2. The task of arriving at the truth rests on all inquiries, not just a body of politicos (or religious scholars).
While this obviously enhanced the development of empirical science, it may well have exacerbated the fragmented ego state – via its requirement for independent thought at the expense of received wisdom. Thus we see enlightenment philosopher Kant’s (1784) rejection of the received knowledge of society, and valorizing independent thought, a crucial turning point in western individualism.
3. Science is egalitarian in the sense that each opinion of a scientific researcher must be taken into account and weighed, resulting in collective judgment.
According to this value, the actual findings of research belong to the wider community and “are not to be secreted or appropriated solely by the researcher.” The scientist must publish results as soon as normal cautions in regard to error and precision have been taken. (Huff, 2003: 24)
4. Universalism: Science is universal: it does not belong to one ethic group.
“Science and democracy” go together. (Huff, 2003: 380). Huff (2003) states that this has two components. Firstly, “knowledge claims should be judged impersonally according to standard criteria and without regard to the personal characteristics of the researcher” (Huff, 2003: 23); and secondly: “all persons, regardless of ethnic or kinship ties, or religious knowledge, should be freely admitted into the universe of scientific discourse.” (ibid.)
In the mystical traditions, those with advanced perceptual acuity, such as the Buddha or Lao Zi Jiyu, (1998) often contributed to the reevaluation of understanding. The collectivisation of science meant that extreme views falling beyond the paradigmatic boundaries or conventions were excluded, especially if they could not be empirically measured and tested. (Grof, 1985; Kuhn, 1970) However as Wilber (20001) points out, the Buddhist tradition follows process of communal agreement, with the knowledge of Buddhism seen as a body of understanding gleaned from centuries of meditative insight. Indeed eastern cultures rational communication was believed to be transcended by the transpersonal. The highest truths were perceived as intuitively. This was especially the case in the Indian episteme, as Williams (1999) notes:
Within Indian culture the communication of meaning is considered to be only weakly linked to language, its fuller expression lying beyond language. Interpersonal communication stands as secondary to intrapersonal communication which is itself consummated only in transpersonal communication – ‘in which oneness of the world is unambiguously perceived.’ As such truth is not considered to relate closely with either language or rational logic, being more fully realized in the intuitive realm – something experienced inwardly. (Williams, 1999: 157)
Similar statements can be found in the words of mystic Sarkar, also of the Indian episteme (Inayatullah, 2002b); in Buddhism - where “true communication is believed to occur only when one speaks without the mouth and when one hears without ears” (quoted in Williams, 1999: 157) - and in the Taoist philosophy of Lao Zi, who stated that: “He who knows does not speak/ And he who speaks does not know.” (Jiyu, 1998: 76)
In a similar vein, contemporary mystic Hawkins (2002), who claims to have experienced profound transpersonal states of awareness, finds that information and understandings gleaned from higher states of awareness are not comprehensible to ordinary human beings. Using a consciousness calibrating tool based on exercise kinesiology, Hawkins finds that the greatest minds of science such as Newton, Freud and Einstein reached the zenith of rational intelligence, but failed to cross the threshold into trans-rational dimensions of awareness. (Hawkins, 1995: introduction) Note: In terms of this genealogy a more significant point than the validity/invalidity of Hawkins’ process of enquiry is that it is paradigmatically incompatible with western empirical science. It is rendered nonsensical by a science that insists that individuals are isolated entities, and that consciousness is localised and restricted to individual brains. That bodies contain a substrate that can access an effective universal intelligence is absurd in a mechanistic universe, but perfectly compatible with the concept of integrated intelligence. Hawkins’ kinesthetic calibration method is thus rendered invalid by the very historical process identified in this chapter, and the epistemic presuppositions that underpin the current domination of rationalist modes of consciousness in the modern age.
A related point involves the “primarily nondiscursive” spiritual enquiry method of systematic contemplation found in Buddhist mindfulness meditation, Christian contemplation, and numerous other similar mystical religious traditions in Hindu, neo-Confucian, Taoist, Greek, Jewish and Islamic sources. (Rothberg, 2000: 166) Systematic contemplation is assumed to “give insight into the surface patterns and deeper nature of … (human experience) and potentially opens up awareness of the most fundamental spiritual insight.” It requires the practitioner to be “present” with the phenomena under consideration. (Rothberg, 2000: 166) This is linked to the concept of receptivity (which, as outlined in chapter… and is seminal in the employment of integrated intelligence), involving “training to develop a relatively open and receptive contemplative or meditative awareness.” (ibid.)
If some kinds of mystical insights are indeed not comprehensible to the general community, and if language and rationality in the western sense are inadequate for both perception and communication of transrational knowledge, the foundational scientific value of communal sharing of this knowledge becomes highly problematic. Further, if the general (scientific) community imposes that only knowledge which is communally verified is valid, then those forms of knowledge which are incomprehensible to the majority of the community will tend to be invalidated. If the eastern episteme and Hawkins’ claim is true, then the communalism of science may have been one of the factors which led to the exclusion of trans-rational knowledge from scientific discourse.
The point that knowledge claims should be judged impersonally and according to standard criteria (point four) requires an immediate mistrust of what one perceives, especially at an inner level. As with point one (above) it seems unlikely that the immediacy and internality of integrated intelligence could flourish in such an environment.
A central issue of universalism and communalism is that if one admits a hierarchy of perceptual levels, it is not valid to admit all people into the knowledge community on an equal basis. Just as at a practical level, non-scientists’ conceptions are not recognised as scientifically credible in scientific journals, those with transrational levels of perception would need to be given a greater level of accreditation and acknowledgement within such a system that recognised their perceptual acuity. This is what happens in indigenous societies, and especially where shamans are granted responsibility within the community for spirit communication, healing, counseling and general conveying of wisdom (Osumi & Ritchie, 1988; Walsh, 1990). Thus Wilber (2001) states that in terms of transcendent knowledge, only those who are trained in the practice of meditation and insight may be permitted to contribute knowledge claims at that level. (Wilber, 2001) However this would be highly problematic in modern science, as it would rest power away form scientists and academics who are not also trained/proficient in mediation and transcendent perception, because this way of knowing falls beyond the parameters of the paradigm. It would effectively exclude all but a few scientists from knowledge claims in the transcendent realms.
Summary of section 2.4.
The enlightenment was a revolution of externalities. During this transformational period of history, the processes of observing and recording data were rectified and clarified, with empirical and sensory data being increasingly seen as constituting the real. Simultaneously, inner worlds were progressively denied, including the intuitive, mystical and the spiritual. Indeed they were left off the map, becoming an irrelevant vestige of antiquity. The scientific method, the new technology that accompanied it, and their rational ways of knowing ensured that mechanistic conceptions of the universe and consciousness became enshrined. The restrictive ways of knowing of science – classificatory, analytical and experimental rationality - ensured that the cognitive processes that might provide the insight and data to challenge the status quo were rendered illegitimate.
2.5 The industrialisation of society the emergence of the secular state and the entrenchment of egoic consciousness
Most of the enlightenment philosophers and scientists lived, worked and contemplated nature and the cosmos in a pre-industrial society. Yet a massive social and indeed civilisational shift followed soon after. Newton died in 1727, just a few decades before the beginning of the industrial revolution, which is generally considered to have begun in the mid eighteenth century. The influence of the industrialisation of western society and emergence of the secular state had a profound affect on the western mind and its relationship with nature, the cosmos and the divine. Such effects have included the establishment of an increasingly utilitarian education system, the desacralisation of space, and the reinforcement of ego-centered consciousness, all of which contributed to the entrenchment of the western rationalist hegemony.
The industrialisation of society and the ego
The industrial revolution saw profound changes in society (Gardner et. al, 1996). In Britain, masses of people left agriculture and migrated to the cities. The great growth of urban centers and their industries created a demand to identify and train individuals with the capacity to manage the social and economic challenges that were occurring. (Gardner et al. 1996: 41) This would eventually lead to the development of “technoscience” (Pickstone, 2000), which in itself would radically alter the way that humanity saw itself, and the universe (ibid.) and contribute to the entrenchment of the hegemony of rationality.
Gillian Ross (1993) equates the period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the ego-centric consciousness of adolescence; with individuals seeking identity through comparison to societal norms, and “keeping up with the Jonses.” Others to equate modernity with ego-centred consciousness are Elgin, (1993, 2000), Wilde, (1993, 2000), and (Reanney, 1991). Ross describes the last two centuries as a period of “anthropocentric optimism,” which “bred the philosophy of atheistic materialism.” (Ross, 1993: 35) The industrialisation of society compounded the movement towards ego-centered modes of consciousness and their preferred rational ways of knowing, as it was seminal in the establishment of the modern world with its individualised, competitive and fragmented nature. (Clarke, 1989) This mirrors Grof’s (1985) argument that the mechanistic paradigm is unable to acknowledge “higher values” such as spiritual perception, love, aesthetic requirements, or the sense of justice. This paradigm “endorses individualism, egoistic emphasis, competition, and the principle of ‘survival of the fittest’” as normal and healthy. Cooperation, synergy and ecological factors are not assigned value in this model. (Grof 1985: 27; also Loye, 2004a)
Education and rationality
Beare and Slaughter (1993) suggest that modern schools are largely modeled upon the factory model which emerged from the industrialisation of society. The economic system and worldview which developed in Europe in the wake of the industrial revolution had its focus upon science, technology and instrumental reality. (Beare and Slaughter, 1993; also in Burke 2001: 13; Milojevic, 2004) This impetus continues to this day in the globalisation movement. (Milojevic, 2004) In this sense, students became mere cogs in the societal machine. The goal of education became not wisdom, but short-term economic and political considerations. (Moffett, 1994) Milojevic (2004) also argues that globalised education today is a follow-on from the industrial models. They are part of the same worldview, with its, “scientism, instrumentalism, secularism, empiricism and technological determinism.” (Milojevic, 2003: 324) Further, this extended into universities, where at the dawn of the scientific era, even “pure” sciences such as botany and entomology were driven by “commercial interest and consumer demand.” (Jardine, 2000: 9; Dossey, 2000) Note: further effects of the industrial revolution on education, and specifically the development of IQ tests, will be discussed in chapter (II and education). Thus in modernity, instrumental rationality and technoscience came to dominate society, science and education. (Slaughter, 1999)
Separation of Church and state
Modern western society is one constructed around the idea of the separation of Church and state. (Laura and Leahy, 1988) This separation can be traced back through the two centuries preceding the birth of Newton in 1642, which represented a period of great change in Western Europe. (Kafatos and Kafatou, 1991; 17) An emerging merchant class gained power through wealth. As a result, medieval feudalism collapsed, with the nobility and royalty suffering a consequent reducation in power. This power shift altered the philosophical outlook of society. No longer were spirituality and God the focus of the typical person’s life. Christian theology was questioned, and the individual became the center of the universe. (Kafatos and Kafatou, 1991; 17)
Shapiro (1992) points out that medieval space ( in which the idea of divine will and spiritual representations of the universe and life abounded) was predicated upon the “estate system” (Shapiro, 1992:13) Space was vertically constructed: sacred and profane, protected and open, urban and rural; and in cosmological theory there were terrestrial, celestial and super celestial places. (Shapiro, 1992: 12) However with the rise of commercial interests in the late seventeenth century, space was being contested, and this “produced imaginative cartographies at odds with those that had been generated by spiritually orientated forms of authority.” (Shapiro, 1992: 13)
In order to validate commercial enterprise, various thinkers developed critiques and political ideologies which supported commercial enterprise. These ideologies undermined the validity and power of the estate-based society, with its static, divine predicates. (Shapiro, 1992, 13) Thus Adam Smith’s liberal political economy:
…recast divine will as a set of dynamic mechanisms regulating the process of production…the creator was banished from the world and was replaced by a view of nature that construed it as a series of mechanisms in the world regulating the play of interests and exchange of value. (Shapiro, 1992: 13. Italics added)
In short Smith replaced “piety with calculation.” (Shapiro, 1992: 13) Political space was reorganized, and this made room for the analysis of political economy, as epitomised by Marxism. (Shapiro, 1992: 13) It was Marx that depicted the intellect as a pawn in the struggle for economic hegemony, thus undermining the validity of autonomous human intention. (Ross, 1993: 42) Later, the development of early psychology and behaviourism would be deeply influenced by “the exploratory and exploitative drives of nineteenth century capitalism.” (Ross, 1993: 116)
Instrumental rationalism’s modern prevalence is epitomised in the philosophy of Ayn Rand and “objectivism”, a philosophy which can be seen to be the logical outcome of increasingly fragmented, desacralised and ego-centred space. Here human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to meet the economic/labour demands of the industrial society/knowledge economy. Note: It will be argued in chapter six that despite structural differences from the industrial society, the knowledge economy perpetuates the ego-centred consciousness of the fragmented mind which became prominent in the industrial society. Rand writes:
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. (quoted in Rand, 2005)
This is the epitome of the fragmented mind pursuing the imperatives of the ego; hedonism (happiness as the moral purpose of life), instrumentality (achievement of the ego), and with cognitive development (notably terminating at the level of reason and failing to acknowledge the transrational) as the only “absolute”, leaving no possibility of accessing the ego-transcendent domains of spirituality.
Shapiro’s analysis points to the importance of Smith’s philosophy as being seminal in a cognitive shift in humanity during the industrial revolution. The fragmented and alienated human ego became more firmly established.
The crucial point here is that the birth of the modern secular state eliminated not only the hierarchical social structure, but also rejected the spiritual and metaphysical framework upon which it was predicated. The focus became economy and work, and mathematical and abstract modes of operation became institutionalised even as “calculation” superseded divination. This situation has effectively continued to the present day, where the contemporary globalisation movement has maintained similar foci, with economics and technoscience as the basis of social organisation. (Milojevic, 2004; Pickstone, 2000) Thus it can be seen that the emergence of the secular state and the desacralisation of space represented a continuation of the development of the rationalist hegemony, laying the foundation for increasingly ego-based and fragmented depictions (and experience of) of intelligence and mind in the modern era.
Summary of Part 2
Thus far in this chapter it has been shown that the western rationalist hegemony has been situated within a civilisational context, having been directly shaped by seminal moments in the history of this civilisation. These have (ranged) from the beginnings of rationalism in ancient Greece; to the development of textual rationality within Christianity; to the birth of the university and the Aristotelian revival in the second millennium; to the experimental and philosophical ways of knowing predominant during the enlightenment and the birth of modern science; and finally to the transfiguration of divine and mundane space and the expansion of egoic cosciousness which occurred during the industrialisation of western society. Thus by the mid-eighteenth century at the dawn of the modern era, knowledge in western society had developed predominantly rational ways of knowing (classificatory, experimental, linguistic/philosophical, and mathematical). The door was then open for empirical science’s rational ways of knowing to entrench their hegemony on the various discourses on mind (psychology), life (biology) and intelligence – all of which would come to be dominated by those very way of knowing, and at the expense of intuitive ways of knowing including integrated intelligence.
Part Three. Seminal Moments in the Genealogy of Mind and Intelligence: Biology, Psychology and the Modern Era
3.1 Overview
Having established this civilisational context for modern depictions and experiences of mind in Part Two, in Part Three in the four sections to follow (3.1-3.4) the attention now turns to seminal moments within the modern era. In particular the focus is upon modern biology (especially microbiology, genetic biology and neo-Darwinism), psychology (developmental and cognitive psychology, neuroscience, behaviourism and parapsychology) and intelligence theory, and the way that these have shaped the contemporary dominant discourses on intelligence and mind.
3.2.1 Biological theory and intelligence
Biological theory is still dominated by mechanistic representations of life. (Sheldrake, 1990) This can also be seen in the mechanistic assumptions of biological perspectives on consciousness, such as neuroscience and genetic theory. (Dossey, 2001; Grof, 1995, 1992). In the wake of these events, modern cognitive psychology has “become a handmaiden to neuroscience.” (Maddox, 1999: 278) Specifically the hegemonies of neo-Darwinism (Loye, 2004a), the DNA molecule (as argued below) and reductionist methods in biology will be addressed here.
In the Discovery Channel’s The Brain, (Discovery Productions, 1994) commentator David Suzuki makes reference to the differences between the learning capacity of the young versus the old. To support his point he refers to the differences between the neuronal characteristics of a young rat’s brain versus those of an older rat. He says “Let’s take a look at it under a microscope.” The screen immediately shifts to an image of a young rat’s brain, quickly followed by an older rat’s brain.
Although it may seem like a simple way to back up the point, underpinning this television program’s validation process is a worldview, and the assumptions that go with it. It is through reference to the micro-components of the system, via a machine-mediated image, that validity is consecrated. The reductionist validation process entrenches the materialistic and sensory interpretation of consciousness and “mind.”
The underlying dynamic is that much of biological theory is still largely dominated by the mechanistic paradigm, and its inherent reductionism. (Sheldrake 1994; Capra, 2000) Sheldrake (2003) estimates that ninety percent of biologists are mechanistic biologists. Although physics has moved beyond the mechanistic worldview (Davies & Gribbin, 1992), much of current thinking about physical reality is still shaped by it. (Sheldrake, 2004)
Pasteur, experimentalism and the world of the very small
Pasteur is best known as the discoverer of penicillin, but his work and most significant discovery can be seen as an important step in the development of western rational ways of knowing, especially experimentalism. Pasteur’s work branched out into industrial problems and animal diseases, and exploited biotechnologies which could be manipulated. His models led to the development of both practices and principles, continuing in the Pasteur institutes which were created in his honour. (Pickstone, 2000: 136)
With the discovery of penicillin, the world of the very small came further into focus of the mechanistic paradigm, and biology now shifted rapidly towards a reductionist focus. For Pasteur’s method was ultimately a method of control, mirroring that psycho-spiritual imperatives of egoic consciousness. (Sheldrake et al., 2001) It also undermined the concept of “spontaneity” (and thus the immediacy which underpins integrated intelligence) in human knowing. Experimentations became more and more controlled, more and more planned, more and more fully thought out. This ultimately led to a modern science where, as Maddox (1999) laments: “The days have long since gone when a little scribbling on the back of an envelope or two could yield a worthwhile theory of anything, let alone a theory of everything.” (Maddox, 1999: 120) With Pasteur, spontaneity in science continued to diminish.
3.2.2 Evolutionary theory
The publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) had a massive impact upon science in general and also upon ways of knowing, and also had a quite a direct effect upon intelligence theory. (Gardner et al,, 1996: 39) The Origin of Species was “the most influential book of the nineteenth century.” (Maddox, 1998: 235) Maddox, following the tenants of mechanistic science, states that Darwin permanently changed humanity’s perspective of its place in nature by demonstrating that all life on the earth is the product of the same processes - chance variation and natural selection. (ibid.)
Darwin's ideas became the guiding concepts of biology by the end of the nineteenth century. (Maddox, 1996: 18), and by the mid-twentieth century the Neo-Darwinian paradigm became “entrenched seemingly beyond all contesting in the textbooks from grade school through graduate studies.” (Loye, 2004c: foreword: 6) It is the “neo-Darwinian hegemony” (ibid.), with both its paradigmatically restrictive conceptions, and rational ways of knowing (analysis, reductionism and experimentalism) that are seminal here.
Evolutionary theory further challenged the idea of a static universe orchestrated by unchanging and immutable laws, and the will of the Divine. (Sheldrake, 2004; Gardner et al, 1996: 40). Previously it had been widely held that human beings were created in the image of God, and endowed with a rational mind. (Gardner et al., 1996: 40) In The Descent of Man Darwin claimed that the same evolutionary forces that operated on animals also operated on man – namely variation, natural selection, and inheritance. This included not only the human body, but also mental ability. Darwin wrote that “mental aptitude, quite as much as bodily structure…appears to be inherited.” (quoted in ibid.)
Comparative studies between animals and humans were soon published in the wake of Darwin. In 1882 Darwin’s friend and disciple George Romanes published Animal Intelligence. (Gardner, 1996: 40) Later the knowledge gleaned from studies of animal learning was applied to human learning. Studies of comparative anatomy proceeded from this, where the functions and development of the nervous systems of animals and humans could be studied. (Gardner et al., 1996: 41) Darwinian theory thus heralded and continues to encourage the study of individual differences in intelligence and the degree to which it is inherited. (Gardner 1996: 41)
The theory created great debate because it confirmed a link between humans and great apes, and needed no place for God. It represented a change of man's place in the world by suggesting that we are a part of nature in origin. It thus reinforced the Copernican Principle. (Maddox, 1998: 7) Yet as has been argued, the rationalist hegemony in western culture, including the scientific method’s separation of observer and object/subject, the rejection of mystical and animistic modes of awareness (Sheldrake, 1994), as well as the industrialisation of society and its education’s focus upon utilitarian and rational ways of knowing (Beare and Slaughter, 1993; Moffett, 1994) had severed any empathic link with nature.
3.2.3 Some effects of the neo-Darwinian hegemony
Darwinism was developed in a mechanistic context
Darwin posited his theory in a period where progressive and evolutionary conceptions of society, art, and science were already taking hold, spawned by the industrial revolution and Marxist theory. (Sheldrake, 2004) Darwin’s assumption was of an evolution driven by "accidental" variations in the genetic material being shaped by the environment. (Sahtouris, 1999) It seems highly likely that this emphasis on the accidental processes of nature, and what were assumed to be atheistic underpinnings, reduced the legitimacy of integrated conceptions of consciousness and intelligence. For if the cosmos truly was driven by random forces, there was indeed “no crack in this closed universe of matter for any divine influence to seep through” (Jaynes, 1982: 437-438), For the implication was that there was no transcendent realm for intelligence to be integrated with. As Grof (1985) argues, the shift to a spiritless, Godless conception of the universe occurred “somewhere very high in the Darwinian pedigree.” (Grof, 1985: 21)
Wilber (2000c) shows how Darwin’s philosophy was based on a misunderstanding of depth in the world. Wilber argues that there was no room for eros in the Darwinian world. Wilber sees that this exacerbated the tendency of western science to extract metaphysical and transcendent depth from the world and cosmos. (Wilber, 2000c: 537)
Notably, The Origin of Species did not appreciably deepen the understanding of its central motif - the origin of species (life), a problem which remains unresolved to this day. (Maddox, 1998: 235). It adds support to Bloom’s (2001) claim that empirical science cannot deal with ultimate causes and is ultimately descriptive in nature.
The problem of neo-Darwinism
David Loye (2004a) argues that the Neo-Darwinists of the twentieth century took Darwin’s name and ideas, and “misused” these to distort the original theory of evolution. Loye writes:
Darwin … had actually gone on to write a completion for his theory that at the level of human evolution almost wholly contradicts the science that claimed his name. Both the nature of the shock and the challenge is most quickly indicated by the fact that in The Decent Of Man – and this nearly a hundred years earlier, clearly anticipating the rise of humanistic psychology – Darwin actually wrote of “love” ninety-five times, of “the moral sense” ninety-two times, and “mind” ninety times versus only twice about “survival of the fittest.” (,2004c: introduction: 10)
Thus, argues Loye, “hegemonic neo-Darwinism” wholly “ignored the humanistic completion” of Darwin’s theory. (ibid.) It is in this deliberate exclusion and denial that the prejudices of the mechanistic paradigm can be clearly seen. The denial of eros (“love”), consciousness (“mind”) and the subtle and immeasurable (“the moral sense”), whilst at the same time valorising and focusing upon natural selection, is typical of the prejudices of the mechanistic paradigm. Survival of the fittest was deemed by Darwin to be of lesser importance than “other agencies” in influencing “the highest part of our natures”. (quoted in Loye, 2004a: 27) Conversely Darwin wrote about “mutuality,” (which Loye interprets to mean “cooperation”) nearly three times as often as “competition.” (ibid.) It may be supposed that the term “survival of the fittest” has been elevated in status because of its consistency with the tenants of the mechanistic paradigm. Natural selection incorporates reduction to the microscale (genetics), the random (random mutation of DNA), and the mechanistic (the “law” of natural selection).
Loye, (2004a) also argues that Darwin was not simply dismissive of religion and spirituality, as has been widely interpreted in popular science and media. In The Decent of Man, Darwin wrote:
… a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal, and apparently follows from a considerable advance in man’s reason, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder. (quoted in Loye, 2004a: 34. Italics added)
Notably belief in spiritual agencies is seen as higher level of reasoning (an “advance”), not a regression, as is the case in many standard psychological texts. (Wilber, 2000c) Loye states that similar sentiments are expressed by Darwin on no less than five occasions in The Decent of Man. (Loye, 2004a) Thus Loye claims that Darwin actually anticipated transpersonal psychology and the renewed interest in spirituality by more than a century. (ibid.: 31)
Loye (2004a) further claims that moral evolution was “the single aspect of most importance to Darwin. Loye notes that the terms “moral evolution” and “moral sensitivity” are mentioned no less than ninety-two times in The Descent of Man. (Loye, 2004a: 30) Darwin himself believed that evolution has a strong moral basis. He wrote in The Decent of Man: “Looking to future generations we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger…and virtue will be triumphant.” (quoted in ibid.: 31)
Conversely Loye (2004b) argues that “Pure chance – which requires the complete absence of causal links – does not appear to be a significant factor in the evolution of life.” (quoted in Loye, 2004b: 253) Darwin himself rejected the idea of blind chance, writing that “The understanding…revolts at such a conclusion.” (quoted in Loye, 2004a: 31)
A further telling indication about both Darwin and the effects of hegemonic rationalism comes from a biographical detail of Darwin’s life. For as he aged Darwin himself lamented that he had completely lost the ability to enjoy poetry. (Haynes, 1976: 171) It might be supposed that the repetitive and empirical processes of left-brain dominated observation and theorising that he employed over the decades of his life retarded his capacity to utilise the non-rational and affective faculties of his own mind. Poetry is conspicuously absent from the “great” minds of science – and from science itself. A paradigm without poetry, and without soul (the affective and non-rational) – was to be the fate of modern science. The fundamental issue with a dominant evolutionary theory predicated on the atheism and the random mutation of DNA is that there is no place for eros (love), consciousness, or divinity within the cosmos. Nor for poetry. Note: Dawkins (1998) argues that there is a place for “ good poetic science”, whilst stating that it is “bad poetic science” that we should be wary of. Yet it is quite clear from Dawkins’ argument, where he spends much time arguing for a skeptics’ view of the universe, that this poetry is confined to that which can be filtered through the lens of mechanistic science and its reductionist processes. As such, for Dawkins the world of mystics, inner visionaries and psi phenomena is excluded from “good poetic science”. (Dawkins, 1998)
3.2.4 Genetic Theory
As the “monolgical gaze” (Wilber, 2000a: 226 ) of western science peered further into the external microscale world, an entire biological worldview was assembled around the gene. Genes have become, in the dogma of modern reductionist biology, the fundamental components of humanity. (Bloom, 2001) This outcome has been served by the establishment of western rational ways of knowing, and continues to reinforce that very paradigmatic process.
The work in genetics of Mendel helped establish modern biology, and like Pasteur’s work, represented a further vindication of reductionism and focus upon the world of the very small. The inevitable implication from Mendel’s work was that cells were the essential units of living things. However this idea had been recognised since the 1830s. (Maddox, 1998: 18) Further Mendel’s work was not well known for some time. Thus Darwin assumed an essentially Lamarckian interpretation of heredity, as he was not aware of Mendel’s work in genetics. (Gardner et al, 1996: 53). However in 1889, Lamarck’s conceptions were discredited by the work of August Wiseman. (Gardner et al., 1996: 53). This led to the rediscovery of Mendel’s research, and this came to dominate conceptions of heredity. Specifically Mendel’s concept of dominant and recessive genes was significant, as it enabled the mathematical prediction of inherited characteristics. (Gardner et al., 1996: 53).
The effect filtered down to intelligence theory. Mendalian conceptions became a popular way to describe human characteristics, including intelligence. Mendel’s ideas remained popular until at least through to the 1920’s, when their simplistic nature became recognised. (Gardner et al, 1996: 54).
The Human Genome Project
In the middle of the twentieth century, the discovery of DNA had a tremendous and pervasive effect upon science in general, and especially biology, psychiatry, and thus psychology. It ranks with Copernicus's heliocentric hypothesis in importance. (Maddox, 1999: 20) Indeed Maddox (1999) finds that “the practical and intellectual consequences of the structure of DNA are without precedent in the whole of science.” (Maddox, 1998: 195)
Yet what is crucial in the development of the western rationalist hegemony is that when Crick and Watson built a structural model of the DNA molecule in 1960s, ontogeny had finally been bought within the bounds of rational enquiry (Maddox, 1999). Writes Maddox:
That was the springboard for a detailed explanation of what has proved to be the universal bio-chemical machinery of living things, which continues still at breakneck pace. (Maddox, 1998: 20. Italics added).
Maddox’s summation suggests both that the model was founded upon the mechanistic assumptions of the Newtonian paradigm, and that this paradigmatic model continues unabated.
The elevation and valorisation of the human genome project can be seen as a function of modernity’s reductionist and mechanistic approach to knowledge and understanding. The gene is microscale, measurable, observable, quantifiable and its functions can be described mathematically. In the image of Crick and Watson standing before the plastic model of the DNA molecule (Photo# 5, below), the reification of he random reaches its zenith. The death of vitalism, animism, pantheism, panentheism and mysticism was seemingly complete. The mechanists’ insistence on an accidental universe where life and consciousness are mere epiphenomena was at that moment made real. For finally the random mutation of the gene, seen as the overriding “driving force” of nature. (Dawkins, 1976, 1987) was then made material, sensible and thus observable and empirical.
Conversely conceptions involving integrated intelligece, with their elusive and unquantifiable nature (Kennedy, 2003) do not fit into the limited perceptual span of mechanistic models. As argued in the literature review, genetic and reductionist approaches are ultimately descriptive, and cannot answer “why” questions. (Maddox, 1998, 189; Bloom, 2001) Thus in the nineteenth century "How?" become the overriding question, not "Why?" (Maddox, 1999: 9) The very questions upon which spiritual discourses were founded have been rendered effectively obsolete by reductionist biology and the hegemony of the DNA molecule and the dominant rational ways of knowing which underpins it. The moment that Crick and Watson sat before their model of the DNA molecule (Photo # 5, below. Gribbin, 2003: 567), represents an apotheosis of the hegemony of rationalism in Western culture. Consciousness and awareness had moved outward and downward, and the inward and upward foci of the mystics became obscured before the plastic model of a single molecule. The microscale reigned supreme.
The limits of reductionism and micro-biology
Reductionist methods within modern genetic biology predominate, with biologists “busily naming the parts of cells and naming the linkages between them.” (Maddox, 1998: 190) Maddox (1999), editor of Nature for some twenty-two years, finds a level of unconscious delusion occurring. He writes:
Uncertainties remain hidden by the aura of success surrounding cell biology. Sheer complexity creates novel difficulties. Sheer success is also a distraction from understanding. The engineers taking cells apart, mechanism by mechanism, are understandably so excited by the marvelous delicacy of what they find that they have little inclination for the systems analysis that engineers in other fields insist upon. The big picture is in danger of being hidden by the detail. (Maddox, 1999: 168. Italics and emphasis added)
Thus micro-biology and genetic biology, and the neo-Darwinism that they drive it, are failing to account for the way that the very components that are examined fit together. This obsession with the machinations of the microscale has led to a situation where transcendent knowledge and meaning and purpose are obscured by the very ways of knowing that are being employed. Reductionism in modern biology has become self-obfuscating, self stultifying, and self-perpetuating, mirroring the general process inherent in western rationalism.
This impinges significantly upon contemporary intelligence theory and constructs of mind. As Diagram # 1 (introduction) shows, modern psychology has come to be a handmaiden to neuroscience; and neuroscience is grounded within micro-biology, and ultimately within the broader field of biology itself.
Thus we now turn our attention to the next level of the schema: modern psychology, and identify the seminal moments therein that represent the perpetuation of the western rationalist hegemony.
3.3.1 Modern psychology and intelligence theory
Modern psychology is a vast field. There are at least six dominant influential approaches to psychology in the modern age: the behaviorist, the psychodynamic, the humanistic, the cognitive, the social constructivist and the evolutionary (Gross, 2003). The attempt here is not to analyse all these fields, but to identify the seminal moments in the history of psychology and intelligence theory that have further defined contemporary psychology in mechanistic and rationalist terms. It will be argued that each of these seminal moments follows the lineage of the rationalist hegemony of western culture, consolidating the conception of consciousness and intelligence in increasingly mechanistic, reductionist and rationalist terms.
The analysis below follows a mostly chronological perspective, identifying the seminal moments in modern psychology which have reinforced the western rationalist hegemony. The focus is not so much upon the content of the theory/theorists themselves, but upon their underpinning presuppositions regarding the integrated/fragmented nature of mind; and upon the dominant ways of knowing that became entrenched because of them. Thus the domains of psychology covered are diverse, ranging from early cognitive psychology and intelligence theory, the work of Freud, behaviourism, Piaget, neuroscience, the computer metaphor of mind, recent intelligence theory and IQ itself, and finally to parapsychology; but the focus remains consistent across them all: the perpetuation of the western rationalist hegemony at the expense of the conception and employment of integrated intelligence.
3.3.2 Early cognitive psychology
The beginnings of modern psychology
Kant (1724-1804) insisted that consciousness could not be studied objectively, and that the mind could not study itself. Yet later anatomical and physiological investigations of the nervous system revealed clear links between human abilities and brain structure. (Gardner 1996: 36, 37) The period from the 1860s until the early 1890s saw the wide deployment of experiments using complications tasks, reaction times and the subtractive procedure. (Gardner et al. 1996: 37)
The research of German anatomist and phrenologist Francis Gall (in the early nineteenth century) implied that the development of the cerebral cortex was linked to enhanced human and mammalian capabilities, as compared with other animals. Other European physicians and scientists were revealing the relationship between brain damage and impaired mental and linguistic functions. These individuals included Marc Dax, Paul Broca, Carl Wernicke, and Hermann von Helmholtz. (Gardiner et al., 1996: 36-37) When Helmholtz demonstrated that nerve impulses travel at 100 metres per second (Gardner et al. 1996: 37), he effectively grounded the brain, and thus consciousness in the physical world. The way was then open to research the mind at a physical level, in line with the tenants of western materialism
In the mid nineteenth century, astronomy was instrumental in establishing an empirical psychology. The studying of the time it took individuals to measure the transit of stellar objects was used as a means to establishing a more scientific understanding of measurement and response. In the light of this, “complication tasks” (where two or more sensory modalities were employed) quickly became the primary means of studying “higher mental processes.” (Gardner et al., 1996: 37)
Complications were believed to reveal more about higher mental processes than single stimuli events used to detect nerve speed. (Gardner et al., 1996: 37)
F.C. Donders (in the late 1860s), a Dutch physiologist, calculated how long it took to make an “operation of discrimination,” by measuring reaction times to a single stimulus, and then subtracting that time from the time it took that individual to solve a complication task. (Gardner et al., 1996: Psychology became increasingly phenomenological and empirical.
The emphasis became more empirical, and the subtle became more obfuscated. To use De Bono’s critique of “old style thinking,” the tendency was to: “tackle only that part of the situation that can be tackled with precision and ignore the rest as if it did not exist.” (de Bono, 1986: 17) As Sardar (1998) writes about the enlightenment:
A second innovation was the notion that only that which could be measured is real. While experimentation and measurement were crucial parts of the sciences of many non-western cultures… in Europe they defined what was real and what was unscientific or literally unintelligible. Ideas, notions, categories, phenomena for which no experimental or observational evidence could be discovered had to be abandoned. What was isolated, rigorously studied and measured, was the ultimate truth which, in its formulation as law, could be appropriated. (Sardar, 1998: 205)
Thus by the early to mid twentieth century, those aspects of consciousness which could not be readily measured were neglected, even rendered irrelevant. (Ross, 1996)
In regard to these events, the study of mind can be seen to have been increasingly focused on measurement, externalities, and the realm of the sensory. Such conceptions as referred to here undermined Kant’s insistence that there could be no mathematical science of consciousness. Prior to this time nerve impulses were seen as unrelated to the physical body, and akin to the immaterial mind or the soul. (Gardner, 1996: 36, 37)
The dawn of experimental psychology: Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Wundt established possibly the world’s first experimental psychology laboratory in 1879. (Gardner et al., 1996: 38) Using complications tasks and other procedures, Wundt proposed that complications were solved by a number of “elements,” including reflex, perception, cognition, judgment and voluntary action. (ibid.) Wundt attempted to study consciousness in a similar vein to the way that physicists studied the external world. His research, based in Germany, was highly influential. Many researchers from around the world were attracted to his work, and later returned to other locations in Europe and North America, where they utilised his methods. (Gardner et al.’ 1996: 38)
Wundt employed the term “elements” to describe mental processes and attributes, an allusion to chemistry. This reflected the empirical basis of the emerging discipline of psychology, following the lineage of Locke’s sensory empiricism. (Gardener et al., 1996: 38) Much of his work was conducted in the clinical environment of the laboratory. It was ordered, linear and controlled in nature, and clearly reflected the psycho-spiritual imperatives of mechanistic science. Further, his work was predicated on reductionist assumptions. For Wundt, even religion, language and customs could be explained as consisting of “elements.” Individuals were the units that developed culture and transmitted it from one generation to the next, moving from simpler to more advanced cultures over time. (Gardner, 1996: 38) Here was the equivalent to Newtonian linear and sequential cause and effect.
Wundt’s attempts to mirror the methodologies of physics is a seminal incursion point of mechanism into psychological theory. The physics of Wundt’s day, being prior to the revolutionary propositions of relativity and quantum theory, was heavily imbued with the suppositions of the mechanist paradigm. Ironically those revolutions were to follow relatively quickly after Wundt’s seminal work, transforming the very paradigm upon which physics is predicated. Yet crucially, psychological theory failed to acknowledge and incorporate these new ideas. (Grof, 1985; Ross, 1993) It remained bound within the theoretical, philosophical and metaphysical framework upon which it was founded.
3.3.3 Early intelligence theory
Francis Galton
Francis Galton’s work in the mid to late nineteenth century was crucial in developing intelligence and aptitude tests. He applied statistics to the study of intelligence. Galton was Darwin’s half-cousin and believed that intelligence was inherited, and not dependent on such factors as class or education. (Gardner et al., 1996: 41-7). Galton gathered data about people’s weight, height, hand strength, power of breath, head size, and psychophysical characteristics such as reaction times and ability to distinguish fine sensory discriminations. (Gardner et al., 1996: 46) These tests focused on sensory modalities, which reflected the philosophy of the British empiricists such as Locke and Hume, who held that data entered the mind via the senses (Gardner et al., 1996). The assumption was that those with greater capacity for sensory perception had a greater amount of data to work with, and greater discriminatory acuity. (Gardner et al., 1996: 47)
Although Galton’s tests were later shown to be of limited predictive value (ibid.), his use of statistical and normative methodology helped establish a trend in modern psychology which continues to this day. This includes the development of factor analysis, which is widely employed in IQ test results. (Gardner et al., 1996: 51) Researchers to adopt similar statistical approaches to intelligence immediately in the wake of Galton’s work included James McKeen Cattell and Clarke Wissler. (Gardner et al., 1996: 47), while in recent times strict domain-general IQ theorists such as Arthur Jensen (1998) and Murry and Hernstein (1994) follow comparable normative approaches. The statistical and normative methods used in much contemporary psychological theory can be seen to have been greatly influenced by Galton.
Alfred Binet
At approximately the same time as Galton, an alternative approach to psychophysical testing was developed by Alfred Binet. (Gardner et al., 1996: 47) He was more interested in comprehension, judgment, and the capacity for reason and inventiveness, rather than the sensory acuity that Galton investigated. His tests became widely adopted in France and elsewhere, and focused upon simple everyday things, such as comparing two objects from memory, counting from twenty to zero, comprehending abstract words, and comprehending disarranged sentences. (Gardner et al 1996: 49) An examination of the tasks which he assigned students (Gardner et al. 1996: 49) shows that they focused primarily upon verbal/linguistic, arithmetic, memorisation and artistic ability. Notable is an absence of any deeper reflective processes, tasks that might require introspection or even mildly non-ordinary states of consciousness. Thus, although Binet was not concerned with eugenics as was Galton, his focus reflected the needs and demands of the education system as it expanded during the time of the industrial revolution. That focus helped entrench the dominance of externalized and phenomenological approaches to human intelligence, by avoiding inner worlds and self-reflexive consciousness. Such models as Binet’s and Wundt’s are fixed at levels one and two of Causal Layered Analysis.
The tendency of some of those who employed Binet’s tests after the time of Binet was to interpret the IQ score as a single universal measure of intelligence of an individual. The IQ score became “reified.” It came to be seen as a “distinct, quantifiable “thing’” within the individual’s head. (Gardner et al., 1996: 50). This is best understood in the context of the period of first half of the twentieth century, which strongly reflected the measurability fixation of experimentalism and mechanistic science. (Ross, 1993)
3.3.4 The influence of Freud
Freudian psycho-dynamics have profoundly influenced contemporary understandings of the human psyche. (Vandermeer, 1996). Freud introduced more completely than any previous psychiatrist the concept of the human psyche and its relationship with the conscious mind. Psychiatry began with Freud, who was “extremely secular and scientific-minded.” (Peck, in Epstein, 2002: 72). Bettleheim (2001) states that developmental psychology “would hardly exist without Freud” (Bettleheim, 2001: 19). (Note) Bettleheim argues that Freud, though widely quoted in introductory psychology texts, has “only superficially influenced the work of the academic psychologists who quote him” (p.19), and the essence of his ideas ignored, as will be argued below. The critics of Freud have been many, but here the criticisms will focus on the way in which the Freudian model contradicted, or stultified the development of both the conceptualisation and direct perception of intelligence as transpersonal and integrated. This stultification may be attributed not only to the intrinsic nature of Freud’s ideas and methods, but as in the case of Darwin, the paradigmatic biases and blind spots of those that followed him and interpreted and applied those ideas and methods.
Like the behaviourists (discussed below), Freud’s model was essentially one of stimulus and response, but with the unconscious and its intricacies as the focus. (Goleman, 1986: 57-60). Information in Freud’s model was sensory and linear. (Goleman, 1986: 58) Writes Goleman:
1 There are interlocking subsystems in the mind, and information flows between them, and is transformed;
2 Information is first unconscious and then conscious;
3 Information may be selected and distorted by filters and censors. (Goleman, 1986: 59-60).
These three points are now widely accepted, although the linearity of Freud’s processing system is now understood to be distributed amongst interacting subsystems (Goleman, 1986: 59). The linearity of Freud’s model can be seen as a function of the pervasive paradigmatic linearity of Euclidean and Newtonian space-time systems (Grof, 1985: 144-46, 190). The modern Freudian equivalent is that of the intertwined network of locally related subsystems. (Goleman, ibid.)
Freud's model, explicating the forces of the external world (society) s they imposed restrictions upon the instinctive id, is quintessentially a stimulus and response model. This also mirrors the machinations of the empirical philosophers and the Newtonian paradigm.
Freud was a mechanist
Ross, (1993), argues that despite the fact that Freud and his fellow psychoanalysts were investigating the phenomena of the deep psyche they remained “at heart incorrigible mechanists and materialists.” (Ross 1993: 117) Thus various critics have argued that Freud’s conceptions were heavily influenced and prejudiced by the mechanistic assumptions of his day (Epstein, 2002; Goleman, 1986; Grof, 1995; Ross, 1993; Vandermeer, 1996; Wilber, 2001). Freud explicitly used the principles of Newtonian physics as he developed his conception of psychoanalysis. (Grof 1985: 37) He wanted to establish psychology as a scientific discipline. (Grof, 1985: 143)
Freud was profoundly influenced by Ernst Bruecke, his teacher and the founder of the Helmholtz School of Medicine. (Grof, 1985) This organisation wished to introduce Newtonian scientific thinking into other fields of enquiry. The school viewed all biological organisms as complex atomic structures strictly governed by scientific axioms, in particular the principle of the conservation of energy. Biological organisms had only one active force, the physiochemical processes contained within matter, which could be reduced to the ideas of attraction and repulsion. (Grof, 1985: 143-144)
Grof (1985) finds that Freud modeled the four basic ideals of psychoanalysis – dynamic, economic, topographical, and genetic - in terms that mirrored the ideals of the Helmholtz school and Newtonian physics. (Grof, 1985: 144-145). This argument is summarized below.
The Dynamic principle. In Newton’s mechanistic universe objects are moved around by forces that are clearly differentiated from them, according to specific laws. In psychoanalysis mental phenomena are explicated with reference to interactions between psychological forces, the most important of which were instinctual drives. Freud also adopted Newton’s principle of action and reaction, particularly in his representation of mental functions as a series of contrasting phenomena. (ibid.: 144)
The economic principle. Mirroring the quantitative, quantifiable, and mathematical features of Newtonian mechanics, with its masses, forces, distances, and velocities, Freud attempted to highlight the energetic economy in psychological phenomena. For example, the mental representations of instinctual drives and their opposing forces were given charges of quantifiable energy, or cathexis. The input consumption and output of energy was seen as vital, with the function of the certain mental processes having the role of preventing the build up of such energies. (ibid.: 144-145)
The topographical or structural principle
Newtonian space is differentiated and essentially Euclidian. Likewise, in Freud’s work, the dynamic processes of the psyche are rendered as individuated and separate structures that interact in ways that mirror the dynamics of Euclidean space. The ego, id and superego all feature the properties of Newtonian dynamics, namely “extension, mass, position, and movement.” (ibid.: 1985: 145)
The genetic or historical principle
Freudian model contains strict determinism. There are readily identifiable linear cause and effect processes. (Groff: 1985: 145-146)
The pessimism of Freud and the optimism of Frankl
Freud was by all accounts a pessimist, and until the end of his life fretted gravely for the future of humanity. (Ross, 1993; Bettleheim, 2001: 80). In his worldview, he was unable to see a solution to the conflicting drives within the psyche, the tug-of-war between the ego and id.
Freud’s pessimism and his essentially mechanistic worldview was predicated upon Aristotelian and Newtonian reductionism, and Darwinian competition and individualism, thus reflecting the hegemony of western rationalism. Freud’s universe was ultimately a void of “nothingness” (Ross, 1993), mirroring the alienation of modernism (Clarke, 1989). He was unable to intuit any deeper meaning to life or human existence, other than the tragedy of life and death. (Bettleheim, 2001)
A contrast to Freud can be found in the work of Viktor Frankl (1985), who despite incarceration in the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, was able to develop the optimistic “logotherapy.” Notably, Frankl’s optimism was grounded in a spiritual metaphysic. He wrote: “The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by (concentration) camp life.” (Frankl, 1985: 83). Further:
The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of heroic nature, which proved that apathy could overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. (Frankl, 1985: 86)
Frankl thus concluded that mankind’s spiritual freedom “cannot be taken away”, and this is what “makes life meaningful and purposeful.” (Frankl, 1985: 87). This is a marked contrast to the pessimistic reductionist materialism of Freud and the European existentialists (Frankl, 1985: preface, 12) throughout most of the twentieth century. Notably, Frankl’s logotherapy is predicated upon the idea that humanity must establish meaning in order to survive. Meaning, along with purpose, is one of the casualties of the mechanistic paradigm, which at its most extreme obfuscates the immeasurable, indivisible and invisible components of the universe.
Any attempt to comprehend psychology after Freud, has had to acknowledge the huge impact that his materialistic pessimism (or interpretation as such) has had upon both psychology and psychiatry. Although many rejected his model of the psyche and the significance of the unconscious in human behaviour (especially the behaviourists) it can be seen that the predicates of the western rationalist hegemony were further entrenched by Freud’s essentially mechanistic and pessimistic worldview.
Freud’s failure to acknowledge the spiritual and transcendent
Freud (1962) dismissed religion as mere infantile wish fulfillment. Grof (1985) argues that this explanation is adequate only in relation to the performance of rituals, and fails to account for the nature of the visionary experience of alternate realties that predicates the development of all great religions. (Grof, 1985: 24) Thus in Freud’s model the superego is the highest determining force. The shadow (id.) is situated below the ego, which is the driving force of much of behaviour. (Freud, 1994) Freud’s superego contains no transcendent element. The superego is simply the noble, higher part of the mind. Freud’s focus was not upon the transcendent, but on the biographical resonances situated within the human psyche. (Grof, 1985)
Thus Grof (1985) finds that the Freudian model is accurate at the biographical level of mind, but fails to account for perinatal (birth) and transpersonal elements. (Grof, 1985, 1992). Thus Grof argues that despite his Newtonian yearnings, Freud’s method was not strictly scientific, but historical and deterministic, mirroring his desire to locate the functionings of mind in rational and linear (and thus biological) chains of causality. (Grof, 1985: 190)
Conversely, the multi-dimensional nature of expanded states of consciousness (including integrated intelligence) transcends three-dimensional space-time (Grof, ibid.; Laura and Leahy, 1988). Thus the essential Freudian model of mind is paradigmatically constrictive of an expanded model of mind and intelligence, and by implication precludes the possibility of integrated intelligence that transcends space and time. The Freudian model of the unconscious therefore is still essentially Newtonian. (Grof, 1985: 144-46). This is clear when one compares its temporal character with relativity theory (four-dimensional space-time) and quantum theory and systems theory, (which have long acknowledged the existence of non-locality). (Ross, 1993; Targ & Katra, 1999). Note: Conversely Jung (1973, 1989) was the first to use a truly scientific approach to mind, argues Grof (1985). His principal of synchronicity (Jung, 1973) transcended the linear mechanics of the Newtonian framework. Notably, Jung was keenly interested in the developments of modern physics, as well as “the paradoxical, mysterious, and ineffable.” (Grof, 1985: 190). Yet he, like the transpersonalists effectively became persona non-grata in the wake of the behaviourist and experimental hegemony of the mid-twentieth century (Ross, 1993). They were relegated to the effective status of “the other.”
Taking Wilber’s (2001) three “eyes of knowing,” Freudian psychoanalysis focuses primarily upon the mental realm or “the eye of reason.” Freud’s method of free association was “almost entirely mental-phenomenological, hermeneutical, and historical.” (Wilber, 2001: 52) It can be seen, therefore, that Freudian conception and method obfuscated the transpersonal and transcendent components of mind and cosmos, setting a precedent which is still dominant in contemporary theories of mind.
Bettleheim and the misrepresentation of Freud
In something of a contradiction to the critics of Freud mentioned above, contemporary and colleague of Freud, psychiatrist Bruno Bettleheim (2001), laments that Freud has been mistranslated and misrepresented in the West. He writes that “most references to Freud’s work are either refutations or trivializations of his work.” (Bettleheim, 2001: 19). Bettleheim’s argument suggests that even more than the actual ideas and methods of Freud, the self-obfuscating parameters of the mechanistic paradigm delimited the way that his wok was interpreted, and thus affected his legacy.
One of the most significant points to emerge from Bethlehem’s argument is the bias in the west in favour of the measurable and quantifiable - the “hard” sciences. (Bettleheim, 2001) It is for this reason that the translators of Freud have tended to misrepresent him, argues Bettleheim. They downplay or fully ignore his references to the soul, the deep psyche and introspections, and render his work more analytical and rational than it actually is. Bettleheim argues that this stems from the translators’ fear of the psyche and the shadow itself. His accusation is that the translators (and the west in general) are afraid of what lies within their own psyches, and so have avoided that most crucial component of Freud’s work. Thus he writes:
The English translations cleave to an early stage of Freud’s thought, in which he inclined toward science and medicine, and disregard the more mature Freud, whose orientation was humanistic, and who was concerned mostly with broadly conceived cultural and human problems and with matter of the soul. Freud himself stated that he considered the cultural and human significance of psychoanalysis more important than its medical significance.” (ibid.)
Whilst emphasising that Freud was an atheist, Bettleheim argues that Freud stressed that “the work of psychoanalysis is spiritual, as distinguished from physical or material work.” (ibid.: 63) A paradigmatic distortion is highlighted by Bettleheim in the following passage, where it is suggested that Freud’s English translations:
…appear to readers of English as abstract, depersonalized, highly theoretical, erudite and mechanized – in short, scientific – statements about the strange and very complex workings of our mind. Instead of instilling a deep feeling for what is most human in all of us, the translations attempt to lure the reader into developing a “scientific” attitude toward man and his actions, a “scientific” understanding of the unconscious and how it conditions much of our behavior. (Bettelheim, 2001: 5. Italics added)
In this statement we see once again the distorting affects of scientism and the mechanistic paradigm – the denial of the affective, and the elevation of the rational and the “hard”. It is in effect the epitome of the “scientistic” approach to knowledge.
Bettelheim (2001) states that in Germany, Freud’s home country, there is a clear distinction between the hard and the soft sciences, and a correspondingly different approach and methodology for each. He finds that in the English speaking world this distinction has been played down, and that the empirical and positivist schools have come to dominate science. Psychoanalysis and the study of the psyche are soft sciences, argues Bettleheim, because the examination of the psyche deals with the immeasurable, the non quantifiable, and the contradictory aspects of the mind. But western psychology has tried to fit psychology into the framework of a medical science, complete with laws and measurements, and hard, discreet elements. This is an error, according to Bettleheim (Bettleheim, 2001)
Bettleheim does not argue that Freud’s “spirituality” was a mystical or transcendent one, but implies that he held a deep empathy for humanity and the human experience, and the soul of humanity. The fact that western translations appear to be unable to permit even this “shallow” spirituality to emerge from the work of probably the most influential psychologist of the modern era, suggests the depth of the western rejection of the spiritual and affective domains of the human experience. It shows that by the mid-to-late twentieth century, the stranglehold of the rationalist hegemony in western society and academia was endemic.
The legacy of Freudian free association
Freud’s major contribution to knowledge was not ideological but his tool of free association. (Wilber, 2001: 52). It is still the basic tool of psychoanalysis. This tool allowed Freud to collect data from the unconscious, and interpret it accordingly. (Wilber, 2001: 53) In his wake all the “dialogical-phenomenological” psychologists employed similar tools. These included Jung, Wundt, Rank, and Adler. (Wilber, 2001: 53) Much of the data corroborated from these psychologists has produced a solid body of knowledge grounded in a strong theory. (Wilber, 2001: 54) Later Piaget’s “method clinique,” followed Freud’s dialogical approach, specifically using question and answers. In wake of the successes of Piaget, other researchers such as Kohlberg, Loevinger, Broughton, and Maslow also employed a dialogic approach. (Wilber, 2001: 54).
The dialogic approach is essentially a verbal/linguistic (analytic) way of knowing. The lineage of Socrates’ questioning method can be seen in its approach. Yet it moves beyond the purely intellectual and rational realm by attempting to glean data from the human psyche, the beyond-ego realms. However, the trans-rational potential of such a method is undermined by the paradigmatic restrictions of Freud’s trans/rational confusion (Wilber, 2001) and the predominant mechanistic assumptions of the Freudian worldview. Yet psychologists and psychiatrists with a more expansive worldview have employed similar processes to explore the transpersonal and perinatal realms. (Grof, 1985; Jung, 1989; Mack, 1999; Weiss; 1985; Woolger, 1994)
Freud utlised the Greeks’ mechanistic conceptions, and discarded the non-rational
As argued in (section 3.0), Freud and the psychoanalysts adopted aspects of ancient Greek thought. Buckley (2001) notes that Socrates’ method of cross-examination had similar means and goals to psychoanalysis. It was not mere intellectual abstraction, but designed to bring out the “commitments” of the “analysand.” Socrates, like the modern psychotherapist did not impose restrictions on how the questions should be answered. (Buckley, 2001) Buckley sees psychotherapy as being superior to the Socratic method as the latter falsely believed that the rational could transcend the irrational. Psychotherapy takes the individual beyond abstract intellectualisation, and into the psyche (Buckley, 2001).
Yet, while Buckley is at pains to avoid “the reductionist danger of making an isomorphic connection between the thought of ancient Greece and that of our own day,” (Buckley 2001: 457), he ultimately does just that. While free association may well take the patient beyond the purely rational and into the psyche as Buckley claims, it has been argued (Grof 1995; Ross, 1993; Wilber, 2000c) that modern mainstream psychotherapy denies the omnipresent/transpersonal aspects of consciousness. We see this in Buckley’s and the psychoanalysts’ paradigmatic blind spots; the inherently self-stultifying delineations of Newtonian/mechanistic space/time. This constrictive interpretation was not inherent in the ancient Greek world itself, where aspects of integrated consciousness proliferated. Theirs was “an antique world… permeated with magical and ‘irrational’ beliefs.” (Buckley, 2001, 458) Ancient Greek thought’s obviously spiritual conceptions can be noted by their beliefs in revelation, prophecy, divine will, demons and daemons, and the existence of an afterlife, ghosts and spirits (as evidenced in the plays of Sophocles (2000) and Homer’s Odyssey. (2002))
Freud took those components of Greek thought which corresponded with the mechanistic and Newtonian worldview, attempted to model and perpetuate them, and rejected the rest. It is not surprising that neither Freud, nor his successors found a place for integrated consciousness in their models of the mind, for the predicates of integrated consciousness contradict the foundations of mechanistic science and the western rationalist hegemony. Thus the assumed lineage of ancient Greek thought with Western rationalism is but a half-truth. Dominant paradigms represent themselves as the logical successors of linear evolutions by denying those aspects of history which contradict their status as superior and privileged. (Grof. 1985; Kuhn 1970; Sardar, 1998, 2000) Thus Freud, with his assimilation of the rational components of ancient Greek thought, and rejection of the mystical and spiritual, can be seen as a vital link in the hegemony of rationalism in contemporary Western psychology.
The final irony of Freud: psychoanalysis became “a housemaid of Psychiatry”
The final irony in regard to Freud, was that he dearly wished to see that psychoanalysis did not become a science merely for medical scientists. (Bettleheim, 2001) Indeed late in his life he insisted upon this, despite what he felt was “the obvious American tendency to turn psychoanalysis into a mere housemaid of Psychiatry.” (quoted in Bettleheim, 2001: 36) Freud did not want psychoanalysts to become mere healers of the body. (ibid.: 35)
The Viennese group around Freud had been the dominant force in world psychiatry early in the twentieth century. (Bettlehaim, 2001) However in a seminal shift, after World War Two the locus of power moved to the USA, and with it there was a paradigmatic shift towards a more mechanistic “psychiatry.” Bettleheim states that the turning point came prior to the war, when American analysts became adamant that psychotherapy should be the sole prerogative of physicians. Indeed in 1926 the New York State Legislature passed a bill declaring any psychotherapy not conducted by a physician to be illegal. (Bettleheim, 20001: 33-34) This was followed by a vociferous campaign to the International Psychoanalytical Association, where they threatened to break away from the association unless their position was accepted. A strong dispute erupted, which led to the disbandment of the association, and each nation being allowed to go its own way. The Americans chose to implement their physical model, where only physicians could become psychoanalysts. (ibid.: 33-35) This had far-reaching consequences. After the war American psychotherapy flourished, “dominating the entire field.” (ibid.: 35) Conversely, because of the advent of Hitler, “psychoanalysis had almost ceased to exist on the continent of Europe.” (ibid. 36)
Freud’s description of the subjugation of psychoanalysis as “a housemaid of Psychiatry” (quoted in Bettleheim, 2001: 36) mirrors the later subjugation of cognitive psychology to the position of “a handmaiden of neuroscience.” (Maddox, 1999: 278) Freud and Maddox are referring to the continuation of the same process – the increasing scientisation and mechanisation of dominant paradigm representations of the mind - half a century apart.
The shift of the locus of power and control of psychiatry/psychology away from Europe and to America can be seen as another seminal occurrence in the advent of the western rationalist hegemony. Freud himself lamented the American commitment to materialism and technological achievement, which excluded the cultural and spiritual values that were most important to him. (Ibid.: 79) America stood as the bastion of individualism, the “great American dream”, where the fragmented and alienated ego could venture forth and attempt to achieve all its desires. (Clarke, 1989).
Thus Freudian theory has been seminal in the proliferation of mechanistic interpretations of mind in the modern world, relegating even deep psychic processes to the realm of mechanisation. This process may not be entirely due to Freudian theory and practice itself. Bettleheim’s analysis suggests that the dominant paradigmatic and intellectual climate of the early to mid twentieth century in the west, contributed greatly to its legacy.
3.3.5 Behaviourism
The emergence of behaviourism from “the exploratory and exploitative drives of nineteenth century capitalism” (Ross, 1993: 116) represents another seminal incursion point of mechanistic representations of consciousness, and the dominant ways of knowing of the rationalist hegemony. It had a significant influence upon the development of psychological theory and practice in the twentieth century. (Dossey, 1999; Gardner et al., 1996; Ross 1993: 112-113). Bullock & Trombley (1999) state that it is seen as the seminal influence on psychology even to the contemporary era.
Behaviourism dominated experimental psychology from the 1920s through the 1940s, (Gardner et al.), with Blackmore suggesting till as long as till the 1970s. (Blackmore, 2001)
It emerged in a time of dominance of mechanistic thinking, where “Science was focusing its materialistic analytic beam on just about everything”. (Ross1993: 115) At this time all mind was being reduced to matter by mainstream scientific thought and represented as materialistic epiphenomena. (Ross, 1993: 115)
Gardner et al. (1996) point out that work of Watson, the first noted behaviourist, was carried out at a time when many theorists shared his views. This was especially the case in the United States and Russia where introspectionists’ claims were thought to be subjective and unreliable. Significantly it was thought that self-articulated reports of one’s own consciousness were not dependable. Instead, objective verification, modeled on the data-specific disciplines of physicists and chemists were felt to be more accurate. (Gardner et al, 1996: 52) Behaviourists wanted to make psychology rigorous and scientific, and to avoid nebulous ideas such as “plans, images, consciousness, schemata, thoughts, ideas and the mind.” (Gardner et al., 1996: 52) Behaviourism was a discipline which attempted to base its foundations on observable behaviours and identify the laws which underpinned them. (Gardner et al., 1996: 52)
Behaviourism denied humanness
Dossey (2001) argues that behaviourism (and modern psychology in general) was an attempt to deny humanness, to deny life. Dossey refers to a survey of the prestigious Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology which concluded that psychology “had become the science of rat learning.” (quoted in Dossey 2001: 50) The rat had been used in 58 percent of all the journal’s studies, while it represented less than .001 percent of the animal population. Dossey goes on to state that as behaviourism fell from favour, the computer replaced it as the leading metaphor, thus perpetuating the denial of life and humanness. (Dossey, 2001, 50-51).
Numerous critics have pointed to the limitations of behaviourism (Dossey, 2001; Green, 2002; Nash, 2005; Ross, 1993; Wilber, 2000c, 2001). Edward Green (2002), who worked in the very laboratory of prominent behaviourist B.F Skinner, points out that behaviourism was “not wrong…but simply incomplete.” (Green 2002: 30) He writes:
I personally can vouch for the fact that those (psychologists) who have focused on the purely corporeal have done so blindfolded by a preconception that has prevented them from seeing more of the game than their rules have allowed. (Green, 2002: 30)
Here the game is the game of research within science, and the rules are the predicates of the mechanist paradigm, as manifesting in experimentalism (Huff, 2003) as the dominant way of knowing. The domain of enquiry is restricted to “the corporeal”, the sensorimotor realm, Wilber’s “eye of flesh.” (Wilber, 2000c, 2001).
Echoing a similar point, Wilber (2001) points out that behaviourism has a “little usefulness,” and works well with “subhuman animals” and “the subhuman level of the human animal.” (Wilber, 2001: 50-51) Yet it fails with humans because human beings have a “mental structure” which does not follow the same laws as the sensorimotor realm. The “intersubjective” realm of the mind is the domain of such things as: “discourse, dialogue, communication, introspection, hermeneutics, phenomenology.” (ibid.) Beyond this, Wilber points out that behaviourism also ignores the world of “transcendelia,” which is Wilber’s term for the world of spirit and transcendent experience. (Wilber, 2001: 51) Integrated consciousness, with its location in spiritual discourse and indeed the transcendent realms, was thus excluded from the empiric discourse of behaviourist science and the cognitive science which it spawned.
Consciousness and behaviourism
The most crucial problematic of behaviourism in terms of this thesis is that it denied consciousness in totality. (Ross, 1993) References to mental entities are rejected by behaviourists, as they represent the nebulous “‘ghosts in the machine’ that haunt the explanatory accounts of human conduct.” (Nash, 2005: 7). Thus Watson wrote that psychology “is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs consciousness as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.” (quoted in Ross, 1993: 113) He also stated that consciousness “has never been seen, touched, smelled, tasted, or moved. It is a plain assumption just as unprovable as the old concept of the soul." (quoted in Dossey, 1999: 22) This denial of consciousness was “an audacity which could only have been countenanced in a society falling into the hypnotic trance of atheistic materialism.” (Ross 1993: 112)
Freud wrote that the issue of consciousness is the starting point for any understanding of the mind. (Bettleheim, 2001: 79) Thus behaviourism took from psychology the predicate that was essential to understanding the mind; and with it the mental and spiritual realms, the latter pertaining to integrated intelligence.
The examples of Watson and Skinner
John Watson is usually credited as the first significant behaviourist. In 1913 he heavily attacked psychological theory and practice that was dependent upon methods involving introspection. (Gardner et al. 1996: 52) Watson believed that all human behaviour was explicable in terms of conditioned responses. (Ross 1993: 113)
B.F. Skinner (1971) refined the field of behaviourism with his concept of operant conditioning. His constructs were heavily imbued with mechanistic thinking. He wrote: “What we need is a technology of behaviour comparable in behaviour and precision to physical and biological technology.” (quoted in Ross, 1993: 114) Skinner was particularly damning of parapsychology and the paranormal, and wrote a scathing critique upon of the Rhine ESP experiments. (Green 2002: 20)
The proclivity of behaviorism towards objective and non-affective modes of perception and behaviour are well demonstrated by Watson’s influential 1928 statement that love and affection were dangerous concepts for the parenting process.
There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as if they were young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task. Try it out. In a week's time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kindly. You will be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.... In conclusion, won't you then remember when you are tempted to pet your child that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wrench your adult son or daughter's vocational future and their chances for marital happiness. (quoted in Dossey, 1999: 22. Italics added)
The emphasis is on being “objective,” and on avoiding love and affection. Watson’s values also demonstrate a materialistic prerogative, in that it is vocational success that he sees as of primary value in the development of a child. Thus Watson projected a strong undercurrent of the mechanistic and capitalistic, following the lineage of the western rationalist hegemony. Watson’s seeming aversion to motherly love suggests the validity of Ross’ (1993) claim that behaviourism and cognitive psychology is predicated upon the unresolved Oedipal issues of its predominantly male protagonists.
Behaviourism focused on the particular, the measurable and the external
The focus of behaviourists was on the “particular” and the “measurable” responses to “particular” and “measurable” stimuli. (Gardner, 1996: 52) As Bettleheim (2001) writes:
Behaviourism concentrates on what can be seen from the outside, what can be studied objectively, by an uninvolved observer, what can be replicated and assigned numerical values. (Bettleheim, 2001 108. Italics added)
To use Wilber’s (2000c) terminology, behaviourism was a Flatland science of surfaces. Even language was depicted as “biosocial stimuli.” It was the “apotheosis of (mechanistic science’s) gross denial of internality.” (Ross 1993: 112) Behaviorism insists that externally observable behavior (material phenomena) is the only proper subject matter of a scientific psychology. (Tart, 1993) It epitomises positivist theory, which makes no distinction between the object of measurement and the measured object, and assumes that the process of counting successfully measures a “concept.” (Nash, 2005:10)
For behaviourists, behaviours were viewed as reactions to environmental stimuli, and not thoughts and plans. (Gardner et al., 1996: 52) The importance placed upon the environment (Gardner et al, 1996: 52) can be seen to be a function of the mechanistic predisposition of focusing upon the measurable, and the “hard.” Thoughts, feelings, plans and ideas are not. Behaviourists were interested only in the observable, the empirical and the external. (Wilber, ABHOE 84). This was a mirror of the conceptions of the empirical philosophers such as Locke and Hume.
The behaviorists took the mechanistic cause and effect predicates of Freudian psychotherapy and translated them into mechanistic cause and affect behaviourism, replacing Freud’s Newtonian billiard ball psychic forces with a Newtonian billiard ball environmental stimulus/response model. Significantly in both models, the possibility of the integrated nature of the psyche of mankind in a universal consciousness was not even considered. Causality was linear, fragmented, localised, and individualised. Thus behaviourism was an almost perfect projection of the mechanistic paradigm, where “the human organism is viewed as a rather complex but totally reactive mechanism.” (Wilber, 2001: 50) In that mechanism there was no place for consciousness or spirit.
It was not until the collapse of behaviourism the 1960s and 1970’s that consciousness could again widely considered, and “only recently” has it become “acceptable” to discuss it. (Blackmore, 2001: 22)
3.3.6 The impact of Jean Piaget
In the field of developmental psychology, there is no more influential figure than Jean Piaget (Wilber, 2000b). His ideas, and indeed his experimental methods, can be seen as following the lineage of the dominant western ways of knowing. Piaget’s thesis of developmental psychology can bee seen to be highly empirical. As Gardner et al. (1996) have pointed out he was interested in how intelligence can be observed in human beings. Thus his methods and concepts stand as a important force that cemented the dominance of rationalism in western psychology, as well as experimentalism as a dominant way of knowing, in modern psychology.
Piaget has dominated developmental psychology, and so have the information and computer models of consciousness. These models do not examine the basis of consciousness. Piaget made no attempt to observe or measure any effect or process involving spiritual or reflexive inner dimensions. This is a limitation of his theory, and of the Piagetian theories of intelligence that followed him.
Most notably, Piaget used the scientist as the basic model of the learner, which reflects the personal biases of Piaget (Gardner and others, 1996: 113) and the limitations of his civilisational and paradigmatic preconceptions. The image of the scientist is very much embedded within the mechanistic paradigm, and Western culture in general. Yet various cultures have developed knowledge bases which may be systematic, empirical and logical, but not scientific in the strict sense (Broomfield, 1997; Sardar, 1998,) while others have developed no science at all (Gardner et al., 1996) and it can be assumed that children in those cultures also think. (Gardner, et al.: 113) Thus in equating thinking with essentially scientific preconceptions, Piaget effectively excluded ways of knowing which do not fit into the scientific worldview.
Piaget’s method clinique was a dialogical question and answer method modeled from Freud (Wilber, 2000c), which in turn can be seen as a continuation of the lineage of the Socratic method. Photo # 6, below, shows a Piagetian experiment. (from Gardner et. al, 1996: 98). It can be seen that the way of knowing is clearly experimental. The child manipulates observes objects, while the experimenter observes his/her behaviour. Thus implicitly, it is what can be observed and measured that is valorised, that is determined as comprising the real. The consciousness of the child as a living entity is denied, as are any intuitive or integrated perceptions that are not readily observable.
A significant factor is that the process was heavily verbal/linguistic, and did not allow for the non-ordinary states of consciousness which facilitate integrated intelligence. (Grof, 1985). Even if it had, given the paradigmatic restriction of the mechanistic worldview, and the learner as scientist metaphor which underpinned Piaget’s understanding and method, it is unlikely that it would have been noticed. In terms of the conception of an integrated intelligence, not only did Piaget fail to test for it, there is no evidence that he even considered its possibility. Further, the process of testing for it with Piaget’s method clinique (an empirical and experimental method) would in the very least be highly problematic.
In wake of the successes of Piaget, other researchers such as Kohlberg, Loevinger, Broughton, and Maslow also employed a dialogic approach, (Wilber, 2001: 54), thus perpetuating a method which obfuscated the inner, the intuitive, and the transpersonal. Note: Maslow (1971) moved beyond the limitations of mechanistic perception, and incorporated a transpersonal dimension into his arguments and research, by researching various transpersonal and spiritual components of human experience
3.3.7 Neuroscience
The names of dominant modern brain sciences – neurology, neuroscience, neurophysiology – all have a their basis the study of the neuron; a micro-component of the brain. “The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to interpret all of our everyday experiences in terms of measurable changes of brain activity,” says neurobiologist Susan Greenfield. (BBC, episode 6) In consciousness theory Francis Crick epitomises this with his “astonishing hypothesis” that “everything about you,” and “all aspects of experience …can be explained by neurons.” (BBC: episode 1; Crick, 1994)
Madddox (1999) argues that is inevitable that psychology has become "a handmaiden of neuroscience" because of an increased understanding of "how neurons are organised and behave.” (1999: 278). Yet within the typically linear histories of dominant paradigm historical analysis, the present inevitably appears to be the ineluctable outcome of sequential forces producing the only possible present. (Grof, 1985; Kuhn, 1970; Sardar, 1998). The great minds of psychology now bow before the image of the tiny neuron. In this section, the seminal moments which have created this situation will be identified.
Incursion point 1949: Donald O. Hebb.
In 1949 psychologist Donald O. Hebb declared a finding that remains the dominant position in neuroscience. (Dossey, 1993)
Modern psychology takes completely for granted that behavior and neural function are perfectly correlated. There is no separate soul or lifeforce to stick a finger into the brain now and then and make neural cells do what they would not do otherwise.…One cannot logically be determinist in physics and biology, and a mystic in psychology (quoted in Dossey, 1993: 138).
Hebb’s materialistic position that the machinations of individual brains and consciousness itself are inseparable remains the foundation of physiological psychology. (Dossey, 1993: 139) Dossey argues that Hebb’s tenants remain as “deeply held beliefs” amongst scientists and physicians. Indeed they have become part of modern sciences’ worldview in regard to consciousness. (ibid.) Hebb’s references to physics and biology show the significant influences of these sciences to thinking in psychology. However it is significant that Hebb seemed unaware of the non-deterministic nature of much of modern physics at the time - found in the work of Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg (Gribbin, 1998) - which suggests either simple ignorance, or a paradigmatically induced cognitive dissonance, whereby that which challenged his worldview was effectively glossed over.
The limits of neuroscience
As Nash (2005) states,
In a realist theory of science, a concept has no place in a causal explanation unless it has an actual reference: and the most successful reference of intelligence’ is, in fact, to a property of the brain. (Nash, 2005:7)
In this way psychology (and thus intelligence theory) has been restricted by the very same parameters that have restricted theories of consciousness and the mind – only fixed, measurable, isolated and preferably microscale entities are permitted to qualify as causal; and the neuron is the perfect fit.
The publication of Crick’s Astonishing Hypothesis (1994) has been paradigmatic; and seminal in the re-introduction of consciousness into recent scientific discourse. (Maddox, 1999). Notably, it is Crick’s hypothesis (the primacy of the neuron in the explication of consciousness) and his methods (microscale focus upon the neuron) that establish the validity of his thesis within consciousness discourse. This epitomises the self-perpetuating and self-obfuscating hegemony of dominant paradigms: only when a conception conforms to the paradigmatic parameters, and is explicated via its preferred ways of knowing, being shaped according to the agreed upon preconceptions, will it be acknowledged as legitimate. In short Crick’s hypothesis is not at all astonishing. Its lineage in psychology can be traced back to Hebb’s 1949 pronouncement, which in turn reflects the western rationalist hegemony, with its roots in ancient Greece.
Thus within the dominant reductionist methods of neuroscience, the concept of integrated intelligence had effectively been silenced before it even had a chance to be heard. For in such a science there is no intelligence as a property of the individual - only as a description of behaviour, (Nash, 2005:7), or as an emanation of the neuron, as verified through experiment. There can be no integrated (transpersonal) domain, as neuroscience is dominated by the eye of flesh (Wilber, 2001), and the domain of reductionism: in short, the vivisection has determined the real.
3.3.8 The computer as metaphor for mind
Dossey (2001) argues that as behaviourism lost credibility, the computer replaced rats as the primary life-and-humanity-denying metaphor of twentieth century psychology. The primary shared characteristic of the two metaphors is that they permitted feelings to be ignored. Dossey points out that both have little to do with “the joys and pains of being human.” (Dossey, 2001: 51).
The effect of this has been the perpetuation of the machine metaphor, and the denial of life and humanness. (Dossey, 2001: 50-51). Note: the debate on the brain-as-computer metaphor is discussed in more detail in the literature review) Yet vestiges of this metaphor had emerged prior to this. At the beginning of the century, Thomas Huxley described human beings as “conscious automata.” (Ross 1993: 116) He was not alone, as all the leaders of psychological theory at the turn of the century including Watson, Wundt, Titchener and McDougal premised their work on the concept of human automata. (Ross, 1993: 116). The situation has changed little in modern consciousness research, where computer metaphor has come to dominate the discourse.
Tart (1993) writes that
Cognitive psychology was inspired by digital computers, and its primary function is to explain consciousness in terms of simpler, non-conscious subsystems, to reduce it to information processing procedures in a physical system, whether that system be digital computer or biological computer. (Tart, 1993)
The issue of the computer metaphor is something of a chicken and egg question in the philosophy of consciousness study. While contemporary consciousness theory is dominated by the concept, philosophers and scientists of pre-computer generations held views which were perfectly compatible with the computer analogy. The “tabula rasa” conceptions of the British empiricists, and the ancient Greeks also assumed the mind to be a blank slate, a veritable receptor of information, programmed by external sources. In these models the environment is the software and wiring the hardware of the brain. (Ross 1993: 115-116)
The Limitations of the computer metaphor.
The mind as computer metaphor is still preferred by many, especially in the field of artificial intelligence (Dossey 2001: 51) However critics note its limitations. John Searle argues that it is no better or worse than the previous dominant metaphors of consciousness theory – the telephone switchboard, a telegraph system, a water pump, or steam engine. (Dossey 2001, 51; Searle, 1991) Significantly all these are mechanical metaphors, grounding the theory of consciousness firmly within the mechanistic paradigm, with its “matter myth”. ( Davies & Griin, 1990).
The prevailing models within consciousness theories, with their obsession with the mind-as-computer, can be seen as pathetic fallacy, where the individual transfers personal conceptions and conditionings onto an object or person, distorting and misrepresenting the object within his/her own mind. As development and proliferation of machinery has been one of the dominant themes of human social and technological developments in these last several hundred years, consciousness theorists might easily be expected to transfer the dominant symbols of their own psyches’ onto the object of their investigations. Photo # 7, below, suggests the way that the image of the machine has come to dominate the landscapes of humanity since the industrial revolution. Here we see a group of people standing, dwarfed before Newcomen’s steam engine, which was invented in 1712. (Gribbin, 2003: 243, 244)
Grof (1985) writes that a predominant characteristic of the history of science is for scientists to develop models of phenomena, and then to confuse “the map for the territory.” He argues that instead of being taken too literally, scientific models should be seen as “a convenient approximation.” (Grof 1985: 5) The brain/mind as computer advocates can be seen to make this error often.
Tart (1993) argues that the mind as computer metaphor discourages a deeper exploration of consciousness, and has encouraged the perception of the deeper recesses of consciousness as being animalistic, dangerous and best avoided. (Tart, 1993) According to Wilber’s transpersonal theory, the transcendent and the primal are, under normal circumstances, both unconscious. (Wilber, 2000) Assuming the validity of this claim, this obfuscation of the psyche inevitably obscures not only the “shadow”, but also integrated intelligence, the latter being of the transpersonal domain.
Ironically, the computer exacerbates the estrangement from inner dimensions. As with other key technological developments such as the telescope, the printing press, and the television, the use of a computer requires an externally focused cognitive process – de-coding written text. While some (Gasson et al., 2004; Kaku,1997;) have argued that the internet will develop into a kind of collective consciousness or world brain, Wilber points out that it lacks inner space. (Wilber, 2000a). In the contemporary school, there is great encouragement for outstanding athletic performance, but virtually none for developing meditative practice and insight. (Targ and Katra: 1999) Today’s children have suffered retardation and impairment of their sensory acuity due to a lack of nurturing love, and the sensory bombardment of modern education, technology, entertainment and society (Walker, 1998; Oppenheimer, 2004). With the secularisation of schools, and the focus upon technology in learning, even public Waldorf schools in the USA (teaching the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner) have had to minimise esoteric practices and conceptions and “have been pretty well stripped of exploration of the spiritual.” (Oppenheimer, 2004: 386) Thus Wildman (1996) argues that Western civilisation has restricted knowledge to “the mind of the ratio” and “textual rationality.” It has effectively imprisoned “the erotic’” which he defines as “relationship knowledge.” (Wildman, 1996: 17-19). The state of receptivity which underpins integrated intelligence is essentially an empathic and relationship knowledge.
3.4 Parapsychology as a handmaiden to empiricism
Western science’s attempts to deal with subtle and “paranormal” phenomena contrasts greatly with those worldviews that acknowledge integrated intelligence, and this throws light upon our civilisational ways of knowing and their limits. Since parapsychology was formally established in the early decades of the nineteenth century, it has attempted to investigate psi phenomena, including expanded conceptions of consciousness and intelligence. However parapsychology has come into existence at the height of the mechanistic paradigm and the hegemony of western rationality. Thus its methodology has been contained within the parameters of rational ways of knowing. Note: This short commentary on parapsychology incorporates the essential argument contained within my article “Education for transformation: Integrated intelligence in the knowledge economy and beyond”, in the Journal of Futures Studies. Vol. 9, no. 3. Feb. 2005, esp. pp. 33-34.
Parapsychology, which predicates its understandings on an attempt at empirical validation of many of the abilities that are constitutive of integrated intelligence - such as clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition and others - demonstrates how controversial and difficult these domains of awareness are to conclusively “prove”. Despite a history dating back to the 1920’s, researchers in modern scientific parapsychology have failed to conclusively demonstrate the existence of psi. Skeptics are numerous, and regularly pour scorn upon any claims for the existence of the “paranormal” (Efremov, 2002; de Grasse Tyson, 2001; Park, 2000). These skeptics base their dismissal upon the evidence (or lack thereof) gleaned from parapsychology.
Many proponents of psi concede that the scientific evidence is weak and/or highly problematical, and point to the elusiveness of psi phenomena. Kennedy (2003) follows a long line of psychic researchers who decry the “capricious, actively evasive and unsustainable” nature of psi (Kennedy, 2003). Others include James (1960), Braud (1985), Eisenbud (1992); Batcheldor (1994); Beloff (1994), and Hansen (2001).
Yet the term “paranormal” (beyond normal) is itself reflective of the western mechanistic paradigm, effectively relegating all psi-related phenomena (including integrated intelligence) to the status of an insignificant “other” within any given discourses, including those on intelligence and consciousness. The implication - and the effect - is that they are not to be taken seriously.
Parapsychology is deeply embedded within the empirical traditions of the scientific tradition and thus the mechanistic paradigm. Varvoglis (2003) points to the limitations of parapsychology as currently practiced, arguing that it focuses too much upon the detached, rationalist and empirical tools of science, thus limiting the valuable insights and knowledge that may be gleaned from other ways of knowing, including emotional, intuitive, metacognitive and creative forms of knowledge (Varvoglis, 2003). Schlitz (2001) echoes this point, urging parapsychologists to move beyond the “physicalist, materialist model” and parapsychology’s “nearly exclusive focus on statistical outcomes” (Schlitz, 2001: 338), and to embrace “the rich nature of qualitative experience” (ibid: 341). Significantly, despite the subject matter, the methodology of parapsychology is experimental, statistical, and mediated by the valorising feedback generated by the computer/machine.
This is epitomised by the ganzfeld, considered the most successful of experimental methods in parapsychology (Blackmore, 2001). Blackmore (2001) describes the ganzfeld as follows.
Subjects… lie comfortably, listening to white noise or seashore sounds through headphones, and wear halved ping-pong balls over their eyes, seeing nothing but a uniform white or pink field (the ganzfeld). By reducing patterned sensory input, this procedure is thought to induce a psi-conducive state of consciousness. A sender in a distant room, meanwhile, views a picture or video clip. After half an hour or so the subject is shown four such pictures or videos and is asked to choose which was the target. It is claimed that they can do this far better than would be expected by chance. (Blackmore, 2001: 24. Italics added)
The process is a completely impersonal one, the participants are rendered as “subjects”, placed in a laboratory “in separate insulated cubicles” (Science Frontiers,
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf089/sf089p15.htm) their perceptions and impressions mediated by machinery. Finally, “everything possible is computerized” (ibid.), and validated via statistical/mathematical outcomes. The two primary components of psi experience – meaningful communication and personal empathy (Sheldrake, 2003; Targ and Katra, 1999) – are completely absent from the process.
In short, parapsychology attempts to gain legitimacy via the very self-limiting ways of knowing that have excluded psi phenomena from contemporary dominant discourse on the nature of the mind. This may represent a self-stultifying problematic for parapsychology. Yet post-critical thought and futures move beyond this sticking point by allowing for other ways of knowing to enter the discourse (Inayatullah, 2002a).
Even critical parapsychologists are not immune from eliciting the cognitive modalities of the mechanistic paradigm. Thus Schlitz (2001) argues that parapsychology is relatively strong in terms of its implementation of empirical methods, judging by its use of the double blind study. She praises various contemporary parapsychologists for their rigor in “attempting to understand the complexities of psi and to develop predictive models that might help us to harness and capture it.” (Schlitz, 2001: 345) Yet her employment of the metaphors “harness” and “capture” are suggestive of the patriarchal consciousness of mechanistic science, with its need for control and power over the world and its “objects.” Thus Schlitz argument is ironically contradicted by the language which she employs, revealing that her conceptions are still in part embedded within the paradigm which she seeks to move beyond.
3.5 Overview: General insights into the limitations of psychology’s methods
Wilber points out that modern psychology is developing a “decently coherent and fairly unified” view of psychological development. This view is essentially “structural, developmental, phenomenological, interpersonal, and systems-functional.” (Wilber, 2001: 54). It employs new injunctive tools as Rorschach’s projective techniques, Murray’s thematic apperception, Piaget’s method clinique, Loevinger’s sentence completion, Jung’s word association, and Kohlberg’s moral dilemma. (Wilber, 2001: 54) In addition, classical psychoanalytic tools such as free association and normative tools such as factor analysis are commonly used. However it is significant that these tools are primarily employed within a paradigm which pre-assumes that consciousness is spatially and temporally bound to an essentially Newtonian/Euclidean construct of space-time. Notable exceptions occur in Jungian psychology, Assagioli’s psychosynthesis (Assagioli, 1965; Grof 1985: 140), and transpersonal psychology. Parapsychologists also generally acknowledge expanded domains of consciousness, but tend to adhere to empiricist methods, as argued above.
4.1 The mechanistic syllogism
In this section the concept of the mechanistic syllogism is introduced, and its effect upon the western rationalist hegemony is outlined.
How the machine became God
As time marched on, and particularly after the dawn of the scientific era, consciousness research and philosophy became venues where the boundaries of data acquisition, subject delimitation, and domains of problem solving all became increasingly constituted according to the implicit, mostly unconscious (note: While various aspects such as the scientific method and the values of science (outlined above) were obviously explicit, the psycho-spiritual and collective derivatives of the paradigm, remained unconscious and unrecognised) regulative processes of mechanistic and patriarchal science. It has been argued that this appropriation of perceptual apparatus by the mechanistic paradigm ineluctably expiated all non-conforming conceptualisations and ways of knowing. Dissociated rationalism (and the science within which it was embedded) became a self-regulating, self-automating oligarchy. The blind-watchmaker (Dawkins, 1987) became the symbol of the dissociated God of the mechanistic and neo-Darwinist paradigms, blindly (randomly) stumbling from molecule to molecule with no ultimate purpose. Thus science, which arose in the enlightenment as a definitively iconoclastic movement driven by the desire to move beyond the subjectivity, mythology and iconography of medieval theology and superstition, ironically itself became enmeshed within a self-ordinating, and self-obfuscating paradigm which elevated a metaphor – the machine - to the status of deity.
The mechanistic syllogism
It is argued here that mechanistic science came to be founded upon a syllogism, tending to obfuscate subtle and immeasurable phenomena and method, because they were not explicable within the codifications of its major premise – that the universe was a great machine. Yet ironically, this syllogism was/is founded upon an “intuition”. As Ben-Zeev and Star (2001) argue, “intuitions” (in this case taken as implicit knowledge) can be acquired. A barely conscious reasoning process underpins this kind of intuition, sometimes called the inferential-intuitionist viewpoint. It differs radically from the classicalist position, such as that of Spinoza and Bergson, which holds that intuitions are essentially metaphysical, a priori and antithetical to reason. (Ben-Zeev & Star, 2001: 31, 51) Research into intuitive knowledge shows that systematic errors of cognition may be predicated upon “internally consistent logic that is overgeneralised from worked out examples and schemas.” Thus the logic which underlies errors in reasoning may produce invalid intuitions. (Ben-Zeev and Star, 2001: 51)
The major premise of the mechanistic syllogism is that universe is mechanistic and materialistic. From this premise is derived the following syllogism:
1 The universe is a giant machine, all aspects of which are constructed, bottom-up, from multiple divisible, predictable components.
2 Consciousness is a part (atomistic assumption) of that universe/machine.
3 Therefore consciousness must be mechanistic, and generated from the material fabric of the universe.
Yet the validity of all syllogisms is determined by the accuracy of their premises. If either of the premises is faulted, all conclusions are rendered invalid, regardless of what intellectual brilliance or sophistication is constituted in the philosophy and research which attempts to validate the conclusion. Quantum physics, chaos and complexity theory, and mystical insight challenge the validity of that the premise that the universe is a reductive, predictable machine. (Broomfield, 1997; Capra, 2000; Davies & Gribbin, 1992; Eisler, 2004; Grof, 1985; 1995, 2000; Targ and Katra, 1999, 2001; Ross 1993; Sheldrake et al., 1998; Wilber, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2001) The major premise of the mechanistic syllogism is untenable, and it follows logically that the syllogism in itself is invalid.
The mechanistic syllogism as misapplied schema
The mechanistic syllogism is an example of the spurious application of schema in problem solving. An appropriate analogy can be made with children who are presented with the following mathematical problem:
There are 125 sheep and 5 dogs in a flock. How old is the shepherd? (from Ben-Zeev and Star, 2001: 42)
Reusser (reported in Ben-Zeev & Star, 2001: 42) found that young students presented with this problem performed a flurry of calculations to determine the solution to the problem: such as adding the number of sheep and dogs, subtracting the number of dogs from the number of sheep, and even dividing the number of sheep by the number of dogs. Despite the apparent humor of these calculations (which are absurd and readily identifiable as logically impossible to adults with a basic knowledge of mathematics and the underlying knowledge base required to understand the absurdity of the problem), similar results have been found by presenting college students with more complex mathematical problems. (Ben-Zeev & Star, 2001: 42) The erroneous procedural methods applied by the students, as well as the conclusions drawn by them, are the result of the application of a rote schema in the identification of variables, and the formal numeration of the relationship between them, without paying attention to the underlying meaning of the problem. (Ben-Zeev and Star, 2001: 42-43)
The obvious error of the students above mirrors the fallacious nature of the mechanistic syllogism. Just as the age of the shepherd cannot be derived logically from the characteristics of his flock because the two phenomena are only related in space/proximity (not in causal relation), it is entirely possible that the genuine nature of consciousness cannot readily be derived from an analysis of the mechanistic/atomistic processes of the microscale physical universe. This would follow if indeed the universe is not simply mechanistic in nature, and secondly if consciousness is, as argued by Kafatou and Kafatos (1991), indivisible. There is little argument that neuronal processes are spatially related to consciousness. (Grof, 1985) Yet as with the sheep and the shepherd being spatially related in the above misapplied schema above, this does not necessarily represent a simple causal relationship. Positing neuronal processes as the cause of consciousness is a purely metaphysical assumption because it is not testable. (Grof, 1985:14) Further, if contemporary science’s insistence that the universe is ultimately meaningless (Frankl, 1985) is incorrect, and the metaphysical claim of various mystics that the universe is inherently purposeful and teleological (de Chardin, 1976; Wilber, 2001) is valid, then contemporary theorists of science may be mirroring the absurdly applied rote schema of the misguided school children above. The rote schema in the former case is the reductionist process of taking things apart in the assumption that both causes and ultimate nature of those things can be determined from an examination of micro-components.
5. 1 Conclusion: The covert regulative mechanisms of power
What has been argued in this chapter is that throughout the history of western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, there have been seminal occurrences regulating both the conceptions and perceptions (ways of knowing) of mind and intelligence. Seminal events included the rational, mathematical, logical and atomistic conceptions of the ancient Greeks; the “rational” theology of Augustine; the Christian rejection and persecution of mysticism; the Aristotelian revival early in the second millennium AD, and the simultaneous establishment of the university in Europe; the advent of new technologies, beginning with the telescope and microscope and evolving into modern scientific technologies such as the EEG and MRI machines; the advent of the machine metaphor which emerged around the time of Newton and continues to this day; the industrial revolution and capitalism with its desacralisation of space and secularisation of education; Darwin and the neo-Darwinian hegemony; the empirically minded experimentalism of early psychologists such as Helmholtz and Wundt; the reductionist focus of microbiology and its effect upon neuroscience; the rationalist tendencies of Freud exacerbated by the overt rationalism of the English language translations; the extreme denial of consciousness of the behaviourists; the reification of the random and reductionism via the hegemony of DNA; the experimentalism of Piaget and modern developmental psychologists; the self-stultifying nature of the mind-as-computer metaphor; and finally the overriding self-limiting obfuscation of the spurious mechanistic syllogism. These seminal events resulted in introspection and insight being increasingly stultified by extroverted, analytical and reductionist ways of knowing. Science became increasingly “rational”, and scientists and humanity at large became less able to experience and accurately interpret intuitive knowledge.
The result was the western rationalist hegemony which depicted a Newtonian billiard-ball universe, where Monad’s (1972) chance and necessity, and Dawkins (1976) selfish gene reigned supreme; and where “There (was) no corner in the stars for any god, no crack in (the) closed universe of matter for any divine influence to seep through, none whatever.” (Jaynes, 1982 : 437-438)
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