10 stars ( )

I suspect Roszak's argument will translate as a diatribe to many, if not an outright rant. He recounts the many ways science has permeated urban-industrial cultures, and prevailed as a substitute for all thinking. It will be easy to take offence and assume he is against science altogether. In fact his argument is that science has become Blake's single vision; the problem is not that science is not valid, but that it isn't valid as the only or even dominant mode of thought. Roszak is so intent upon emphasizing his point it's likely a typical reader will mistake his emphasis for the point itself.

Roszak extends his argument from a prior book, The Making of a Counter Culture, postulating that transcendant vision in urban-industrial society (when present at all) has been alienated from its root intent, with political consequences. Both Christianity and Psychology began in consonance with the Old Gnosis, but ended sharply divorced from it, instead embracing what Blake termed single vision. The Romantic Movement re-connected with transcendant vision, which Roszak also refers to as Rhapsodic Intellect, but that perspective remains compartmentalised and minimised within mainstream culture.

Single vision is a diminished consciousness because its urban-industrial context alienates us from a broader environment, and because its attendant psychic worldview is flattened, finding reality only in appearances. A robust consciousness would find reality behind appearances, but the Freudian reality principle characterising modern culture denies that. "When, therefore, our powers of proprioception dim, it is more than a personal misfortune. It is also the foreclosure of our [collective] ability to know nature from the inside out." [90]

Rhapsodic Intellect's veridical experience persuades of its truth, and engages multiple dimensions of human experience. Ironically, Roszak suggests that it was precisely such a layered and engaging view which persuaded people to embrace science, and subsequently evolved into that urban-industrial culture which rejects its own origins. [173] That is, veridical experience is authentic and a better basis for culture, yet is no fixed or ultimate endpoint, for -- perhaps like our taste for sugar -- it can lead us in unhealthy directions. This weakness he explains as an "innate psychology" among humans, the need for an ethical purpose, and which science appealed to early in its evolution. People lost sight of the central fact that science can provide no purpose, instead is only ever a tool or means, and the allure of that means lies at the root of our cultural failing. The solution must be to establish a sound foundation for human endeavour, and link science (and our other myriad means of knowing) to that root.

Roszak ends with a discussion of the cultural concept of returning to heaven, or apocatastasis: reversing the path we've taken, revitalising society through rhapsodic intellect. He states explicitly such a cultural turn-around would be exceedingly difficult, but doesn't spend much time on attempting to persuade whether it's likely or exhorting the reader to make the attempt. I find it eye-opening to learn there is even a cultural tradition of such an existential turn, that the scenarios have been considered sufficiently seriously to be passed on as a concept (apocatastasis, or Buddha's Paravritti).

//

Goethe: Newtonian objectivity effectively manipulated natural phenomena, demonstrating how Nature can be made to behave, as opposed to disclosing how it works. It's not that science is false, so much as that one meaning (ecology, morphology) is exchanged for another (possibility, and a preference for control leading to artificial environments). Science becomes a means of torturing reality in order to provide answers, yielding answers which perhaps are true but also are manipulated and distorted.

Roszak argues the root of meaning (for transcendant symbols, but perhaps implicitly for all language) is the lived experience, and that such human experience is both subjective (varies with individual context) and universal (though it varies, we all have it). Symbols then are palimpsests or layered receptacles, containing layers of often contradictory information, unified in that all are meanings. Dream as the exemplar today, with puns and homonyms and associations hinting at the layers; in pre-modern culture, symbols did similar work as dreams.

Palimpsest model of meaning suggests Chapman's understanding of requirements for a politics rests upon a consistency that isn't so strict in transcendant meaning. Perhaps it could be adapted: each layer will only cohere with other meanings (or other symbols) in limited ways, but that then presents a view of the sorts of "filters" or subsets that work together in a politics, and not a position claiming a person might not live multiple, even contradictory politics, hopping from one layer or subset of layers to another, as specific interests become more of a priority or relevant to a new context. ( )

The author at one point calls this work a "history and sociology of consciousness." While that might be a grandiose claim, it is closer to the mark than the other references to it I have encountered, which characterize it, for example, as "Roszak's diatribe," and the work of a "New Left cultural historian." This book is much larger in scope and more significant than these readers seem willing to recognize. What strikes me most about it is the almost unrecognizable cultural context of 1971-72, when Roszak was writing, compared to the world we now know and compared to the rest of the twentieth century.

Roszak is a harsh critic of science. So much so that I doubt any dedicated professional scientist would be able to get through the whole book without some form of sedation. This kind of iconoclasm is no longer admissible in polite society. But I found every point he makes to be reasonable, in the broadest sense. And that is ultimately all he is advocating for: the broadening of our idea of reason to include intuition, imagination, awe, and the mythic heritage of our species. He writes:

When scientists think about nature or society or people, they are really thinking about a vast collection of contrived schemes and models which are indispensable to the research their profession respects as worthwhile.

There are so many other ways one can look at the world and so many successful cultural alternatives--successful even by the standards of science--that it is immediately clear how impoverished and unreasonable this "Reality Principle" bestowed to us by Bacon and Newton is. This narrow worldview--this "single vision," as William Blake described it--of the universe we inhabit began with Judeo-Christian religion, which subordinated the primal experience of nature itself as sacred to a legalistic super-natural conception of the divine that, at its Protestant extreme, rejects all mysticism; it was further desacralized and made dominant through the Scientific Revolution; and it is the foundation of our science, our technics, and the "wasteland" that has become of our spirit and our external environment alike.

In the late 1960s, Roszak had reason to hope that the most hopeful elements of the counter culture might prevail, but, by the time his book was published, that glimmer was already waning. His target audience, once deemed large enough to merit a Bantam mass-market paperback, seemed to have virtually disappeared by the turn of the next decade. The spiritual awakening he predicted amounted to nothing more than the "New Age" consumer lifestyle, a disgrace to the ancient wisdom it purports to sell. Now, after 40 years, as people once again are assembling publicly to express their desires for a life not prefabricated by the purveyors of single vision, maybe there is a real chance for the awakening he envisioned.
(edited 8/10/19) ( )