Two possibilities exist for us in life – [1] we can exist within a context which is Mythological (or Metaphorical), which means that it isn’t limited by what the Thinking Mind has to say, or [2] we can live our lives within a context which is purely rational, purely literal which is the context provided for us by the thinking mind. The TM – when it comes down to it – can never be any more than a ‘mechanical device’ (albeit a glorified one), which means therefore that to live within the rational or literal picture of the world is to live within ‘mechanically-determined limits’. We live entirely within our idea of what’s real, our theory or belief of what’s real, and this is a very peculiar thing indeed, although we very rarely see just how peculiar it is. We won’t acknowledge anything that can’t be expressed in terms of black and white Aristotelian logic and to say that this is ‘limiting’ is a grand understatement…
Whilst the ‘literal context’ is bounded (which is to say, ‘confined’) since it provides us only with limited possibilities – it’s bounded because it has to take place within the ‘official but at the same time entirely arbitrary’ limits imposed by our conventional view of things – the Mythological Context, on the other hand, is of course unlimited. Who after all can draw a limit around the possibilities that may or may not exist within mythology? We can of course say the same about the possibilities inherent in the Realm of Metaphor – the whole point of a metaphor is that it isn’t limited in the way that a definite ‘statement of fact’ (which is the only thing that the thinking mind can deal in) is. If a statement is metaphorical (or ironic) in its nature then this can mean anything at all, whilst a non-metaphorical statement can only ever mean what it says it means…
We have been living in what we might call the ‘Rational Mode’ for a long time now (two famous names associated with the advent of the new scientific /mechanical paradigm that came into prominence in the seventeenth century being René Descartes and Isaac Newton) and because of this the idea of living within the context of understanding that is purely mythological (and not at all mechanical) tends to sound pretty silly to us; it sounds like something that ignorant superstitious people might do; most of us would definitely have a good laugh at this idea. It’s absurdly fluffy, it’s woolly-headed and ridiculous. For us – living in the modern, rational era – if a thing isn’t precisely and unambiguously defined then it’s pure fantasy. It’s not scientific, we say. The thing is however that science itself has moved on from the purely rational or mechanical paradigm – which we might call ‘the Paradigm of Certainty’. The Paradigm of Certainty (which is where everything gets defined in a black and white way) reached its climax in the late Nineteenth Century and has since been ‘busted’ as regards its central thesis, which is that everything – including the universe itself – can be understood as being a machine, as being purely mechanical in nature.
We no longer live in a universe made out of absolutes but in a relativistic one, one in which all definite values are only true in relation to the specific framework of reference that we happen to be using at the time (which is a choice, not a ‘given’). What we see is conditioned by the way that we have of seeing it, which is the point Robert Anton Wilson (the author of Quantum Psychology) is making here –
Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which ‘real’ reality can be seen; we’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.
The relativist view is a slippery one, therefore – it’s so slippery that we can’t grasp it at all, and this is a property of reality that we are profoundly uncomfortable with. We don’t just like to have a non-slippery view of the universe to orientate ourselves towards, we absolutely need it if we are to continue to have a definite view of ourselves – a definite picture of what the world consists of is necessary if we are to have a definite picture of who we are within that world. This is the ‘secret advantage’ we gain from conforming to the rule-based social environment, the ‘unacknowledged advantage’ that we obtain from being members of a rigid and restrictive society – we get to have a clear and unambiguous definition of who we are and what we should be doing in life. We might complain about society, but at the end of the day we rely on it for our identity (‘identity’ meaning ‘a fixed / unchanging picture of who we are’). If we want an identity (which we do) then we have to remain obedient to the rules of the agreed-upon social system, we have to continue to put up with being ‘the slaves of other peoples’ opinions’. If we ‘rebel against who we are said to be’, if we ‘break free from the tyranny’, then we lose the rigid black and white idea of who we are, as Jean Baudrillard says here –
It is always the same:once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
The external authority that is provided for us by society imprisons us – we don’t like to say this out loud but it is nevertheless the unvarnished truth of the matter. We’re prisoners who won’t admit ourselves to be such, slaves who cling to the idea that we are free. Society itself anchors itself to the dominant idea of the time, the Overall Paradigm, and – as we have just said – we have in the last one hundred years undergone a ‘shift’ in paradigm that does not in any way add to our sense of security in the universe. Certainty has been eroded and with it our concrete sense of who we are and what we’re about. It used to be mass religion that did this for us, and then (as has been widely observed) it was science, but now that we have entered the era of what science journalist John Horgan calls ‘ironic science’ – which is to say, science that has recognised the essential relativity of all possible statements, any possible ‘literal understanding’ that we might have of the world – the bottom has fallen out of our nicely regulated lives. Not only is God dead (as Nietzsche tells us) so too is science (or at least, ‘science as we used to understand it’, ‘science as we want to understand it’).
‘The future has arrived – it’s just not evenly distributed yet’, as William Gibson is credited as saying. It’s not the case that the new paradigm – which is the Paradigm of Uncertainty – is something that has impacted the collective mind of humanity – our collective understanding of what constitutes ‘science’ lags far behind the discoveries that have relegated the classic mechanical view of the universe to the status of a ‘special case’ (rather than an all-determining universal framework of understanding). We haven’t caught up yet and we’re in no hurry to do so! The popular understanding of science is best characterised as degenerate scientism –all we want out of our ‘science’ is that it should provide us with validation for what we believe in, so that we don’t ever have to question it, and this is no different to what we required out of religion. We want an excuse ‘switch off’, we want a system made out of definite answers so that we don’t ever have to engage our brains – so that we can simply ‘coast along’ on automatic… The idea or assumption that this is what science is all about (i.e., providing ontological security) is of course a complete insult to the spirit of science, which is not about ‘finding easy answers to suit our foolish prejudices’. That is what humanity has always done, and the philosophy of science arose precisely to challenge this mental laziness. That’s what distinguishes science from mere ‘bias confirmation’.
Even in the world of science itself we find deeply entrenched prejudices (in the way that we think about things) as Rupert Sheldrake has argued in The Science Delusion. The philosopher of science Herbert Dingle goes so far as to say the following –
It is ironical that, in the very field in which Science has claimed superiority to Theology, for example—in the abandoning of dogma and the granting of absolute freedom to criticism—the positions are now reversed. Science will not tolerate criticism of special relativity, while Theology talks freely about the death of God, religionless Christianity, and so on.
The profound unflinching equanimity that is required of us if we are to be worthy of the mantle of genuine practitioners of science (rather than being ‘mere practitioners of materialistic scientism’ – which is ‘science as a belief system’ – is beyond (it would seem fair to say) all but a very few of those who make a living in this field. True science is more like mysticism in that it has nothing to do with beliefs. Materialistic scientism is essentially nothing more than a belief in rationality as the ultimate guide to what is real and what is not. The ‘ontological security’ that we gain here derives from our unreflective (or uncritical) belief in the impermeable nature of our thought-created boundaries (which is the very same thing as a belief in logic as an actual descriptor of reality) and this is precisely what makes what we’re doing scientism rather than science. This is very clearly a major ‘flaw’ – it is hopelessly naïve for us to unreflectively believe in boundaries in this way, and yet still call this ‘science’. Ultimately, there are no boundaries – this is just a convention we adopt for the sake of convenience.
To live in what we have called a ‘mythological context’ is not to be contained within the assumed boundaries of thought; it is to live life in an open rather than a closed way. The significance of living within the rational (or literal) context is that we are living in a world that is the same size as we are (since everything that happens to us is interpreted by the very same rational formula, is processed via the very same mental categories). Our overall ‘paradigm’ never gets challenged; whatever it is that we experience always has to be squeezed into ‘the rational straight jacket’. This is ‘nothing-but-ism’ -whenever something happens that we can’t explain we straightaway say that it’s ‘nothing but this’ or ‘nothing but that’ with the end result that absolutely nothing is ever allowed to be there that doesn’t obey the basic rules governing our ‘mental simulation of reality’. The end result – in other words – is where we get to live in a world that is the same size as we are (or the same size as the cage of our rational thinking) and this is a tautology, this is a null domain. To be real – we have to live in a world that is bigger than we are, a mythological realm -so to speak – and this is something that we are simply too fearful to do. Fear causes our world to shrink to the point where there is no ‘adventure’ in it (as Joseph Campbell might say) and if there’s no adventure in it then there’s no meaning in it, no life in it, no anything in it.