20

Covering up Nature

——

Phenomenology

This, then, is the state of affairs: Modern science has led to a prodigious increase of information about phenomena in formerly unexplored or neglected fields, but in so doing it has not brought man any closer to the depths of reality, but has rather distanced and estranged him from them; and what nature “really” is, according to science, escapes any concrete intuition. From this point of view, the latest science has no advantage over earlier, materialistic science. The atoms of yesteryear and the mechanistic conception of the universe at least allowed one to represent something, in however primitive a fashion; but the entities of the latest mathematical physics serve to represent absolutely nothing. They are simply the stitches of a net that has been fabricated and perfected not for the sake of knowing in a concrete, intuitive, and living sense—the only sense that would matter to an undegenerate humanity—but in order to gain an ever greater power, yet still an external one, over nature, whose depths remain closed to man and as mysterious as ever. Nature’s mysteries have simply been covered over, and attention diverted from them by the spectacular successes of technology and industry, where one no longer tries to know the world, but to change it for the purposes of an earthbound humanity—following the program explicitly laid out by Karl Marx.

I will repeat that it is a fraud to speak of a spiritual value in today’s science, just because instead of matter, it talks about energy, or because it sees mass as “coagulated radiations” or a sort of “congealed light,” and because it considers spaces of more than three dimensions. None of that has any existence outside the theories of specialists in purely abstract mathematical notions. When these notions are substituted for those of earlier physics, they still change nothing of modern man’s effective experience of the world. This substitution of one hypothesis for another does not concern real existence, but only interests minds given to pointless divagations. After it has been said that energy, not matter, exists, that we live not in a Euclidean, three-dimensional space but in a curved space of four or more dimensions, and so forth, things remain as they were; my actual experience has not changed a whit, and the significance of what I see—light, the sun, fire, seas, sky, flowering plants, dying beings—the ultimate significance of every process and phenomenon is no more transparent to me. One cannot begin to speak of transcendence, of a deepened knowledge in spiritual or truly intellectual terms. One can only speak of a quantitative extension of notions about other sectors of the external world, which aside from practical utility has only curiosity value.

In every other respect, modern science has made reality more alien and inaccessible to men of today than it ever was in the era of materialism and so-called classical physics. And it is infinitely more alien and inaccessible than it was to men of other civilizations and even to primitive peoples. It is a cliché that the modern scientific vision has desacralized the world, and the world desacralized by scientific knowledge has become one of the existential elements that make up modern man, all the more so to the degree that he is “civilized.” Ever since he has been subject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with “positive” scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively. What, for example, could the symbol of the sunset of a dynasty, like the Japanese, mean to him when he knows scientifically what the sun is: merely a star, at which one can even fire missiles. And what is left of Kant’s pathetic appeal to “the starry sky above me,” when one is educated by the latest astrophysics and its equations about the constitution of space?

The boundary that defines the range of modern science from the very start, whatever its possible developments, appears in the fact that its constant and rigid point of departure has been and is based on the dualistic and exteriorized relationship between the I and the not-I, which is proper to simple sense-knowledge. This relationship is the immutable foundation of all modern science’s edifices: all its instruments are just like so many extensions, improvements, and refinements of the physical senses. They are not instruments of another kind of knowledge, that is, of true knowledge. Thus, for example, when modern science introduces the idea of a fourth dimension, it is always as another dimension in the physical world, not as that of a perception that goes beyond physical experience.

Given this basic situation of a limitation exalted to a method, one can well understand that the consequence of all scientific and technological progress is an inner stagnation or even a return to savagery. Such progress is not accompanied by any inner progress but develops on a plane apart; it does not intersect with man’s concrete, existential situation, which instead is left to itself. It is hardly worth mentioning the absurdity or the disarming naïveté of that modern social ideology that makes science a sort of substitute for religion, giving it the task of showing man the way to happiness and progress, and sending him on that way. The truth is that man has gained nothing from the progress of science and technology, neither in regard to knowledge (and I have already spoken of that), nor in regard to his own power, and still less in regard to any higher law of conduct. At best, one could make an exception for medicine, but still only on the physical level. As for power, let no one claim that the ability of the hydrogen bomb to destroy an entire metropolis, or the promise of nuclear energy that heralds the “second industrial revolution,” or the games for grown-up children that are space exploration, have made a single person more potent and superior in himself, in his concrete being. These forms of a mechanical, external, and extrinsic power leave the real human being untouched; he is no more powerful or superior using space missiles than he ever was when using a club, except in its material effects; apart from those he remains as he was, with his passions, his instincts, and his inadequacies.

As for the third point, the laws of action, obviously science has put at man’s disposal a prodigious system of means, while leaving the problem of ends altogether indeterminate. The image of the modern world’s situation mentioned above is again appropriate: “A petrified forest, having chaos at its center.” Some have tried to argue a finalistic view of the unprecedented accumulation of energy in the atomic era. Theodor Litt, for example, has suggested that man might realize his own nature in the face of a crisis situation by using his free will, deciding in full responsibility, taking the risk, in one direction or the other. Currently the decision is over the destructive and military use of atomic energy, or its “constructive,” peaceful use.

In an epoch of dissolution, such an idea seems completely abstract and fantastic, typical of intellectuals with no sense of reality. First it presupposes the existence of men who still possess an inner law and sure ideas about what course should really be followed—and this, beyond anything that relates to the purely material world. Second, it presumes that these hypothetical men are the very ones entrusted with the use of the new means of power, in one direction or the other. Both suppositions are chimerical, especially the second. Today’s leaders are caught in a tangle of actions and reactions that evade any real control; they obey irrational, collective influences, and are almost always at the service of special interests, ambitions, and material and economic rivalries that leave no room for a decision based on an enlightened freedom, a decision as an “absolute person.”

In fact, even the alternative suggested above, over which our contemporaries agonize so much, may present itself in terms very different from those advanced by a pacifist, progressivist, moralizing humanitarianism. I truly cannot say what the person who still has hope for man should think of the imminence of quasi-apocalyptic destruction. It would certainly force many to face the existential problem in all its nakedness, and subject them to extreme trials; but is this a worse evil than that of mankind’s safe, secure, satisfied, and total consignment to the kind of happiness that befits Nietzsche’s “last man”: a comfortable consumer civilization of socialized human animals, aided by all the discoveries of science and industry and reproducing demographically in a squirming, catastrophic crescendo?

These are the terms in which questions about modern science and its applications must clearly appear to the differentiated human type whom we have in mind. It remains to add a few considerations on the consequences that he can draw from this field for his own conduct. I will not dwell further on the world of technology, having already spoken of how the differentiated man can let it act on him. I have mentioned the machine as symbol; and among the challenges that may serve, in crisis situations, to activate the transcendent dimension in him, we may also include everything that, after the total wars already experienced, the atomic era may hold for us, thanks to the “miracles of science.” One need only emphasize that the state of affairs is given and irreversible, to be accepted and turned to one’s own advantage, as one might do, for example, when faced with a cataclysm. Apart from that, my verdict on the intrinsic value of science and technology remains valid, and what I have said on the subject should be kept in mind.

A different point of view may enter into consideration regarding the scientific method in itself. Modern science in no way reveals the essence of the world, and has nothing to do with real knowledge, but more often puts the seal on its dissolution. Still, scientific activity has an ideal of clarity, impersonality, objectivity, rigor, and the exclusion of personal sentiments, impulses, and preferences. The scientist thinks that he can exclude himself and let objects speak for themselves; he is concerned with “objective” laws that have no respect for what pleases or does not please the individual, and nothing to do with morality. Now, these are also traits of the realism that I have included among the elements valid for the integrated man. In classical antiquity, after all, mathematics was recognized as a discipline for cultivating intellectual clarity. The practical character with which I have reproached modern science does not prejudice this: I am speaking of the orientation or basic formula of every science of the modern type, and not of the direct and arbitrary interventions of individuals in the course of research that proceeds on this basis, and that will not tolerate them. Scientific activity thus reflects in its own way something of that ascesis of active objectivity mentioned earlier, having a symbolic value similar to that which the machine possesses on another plane.

Anyone endowed with real clarity of vision, however, cannot fail to see the part played by irrational elements in the scientist’s makeup, quite aside from his formal research methods, especially regarding his choice of hypotheses and interpretive theories. There is a substratum of which the modern scientist is unaware: a substratum in regard to which he is passive and subject to precise influences that originate in part from the forces that have shaped a civilization at one or another point of its cycle. In our case it is the terminal and twilight phase of the Western cycle. One gains a presentiment of how important this substratum is from the criticism of science and its “superstition of the fact” (as Guénon puts it¹), showing that the fact means little in itself, but that the essential factor is the system into which it fits and on whose basis it is interpreted. This also indicates the limitations that prejudice the ideal of clarity and objectivity in the modern type of scientist. The secret and true history of modern science is still waiting to be written.

It may seem contradictory that in the previous chapter I approved of an attitude of distance and the detachment of the I from things, whereas now I have disapproved of the dualistic system in which the I is juxtaposed to the not-I of the external world, nature, and phenomena, which is the basic premise of all modern science and also the origin of a system where true knowledge is out of the question. This contradiction vanishes with insight into the inner formation, the attitude, and the possibilities of someone who faces things and nature after having ceased to project feelings and subjective, emotional, and imaginary contents onto them. It is because the inner being is extinct in the modern scientist, leaving him with only gross physical perceptions and an abstract, mathematical intellect, that the relationship between the I and the not-I grows rigid and soulless, so that his detachment can only act negatively. His science is only good for grasping and manipulating the world, not for understanding it or for enlarging his knowledge in a qualitative way.

As for the integrated man, his situation is quite different; the vision of naked reality imposes on him no limits of this kind. The very latest science, as in a reductio ad absurdum, has made painfully visible the characteristics belonging to all of modern science, which must therefore add up to a negative balance; but this signifies for him the end of equivocation. He will put it aside as meaningless, abstract, and purely pragmatic, devoid of any interest or any “scientific” theory of the world. He will judge it, in Othmar Spann’s words, as “knowledge of that which is not worth the trouble of knowing.” Having made a tabula rasa, what remains is Nature, the world in its original state. Thus he arrives at a natural relationship, just as described at the end of chapter 19. Only in the present context, to dissipate completely the apparent contradiction, it is well to introduce a further idea: that of the multidimensional nature of experience. This multidimensionality is quite distinct from the mathematical and merely cerebral one of the latest physics. For a summary explanation I again follow the method of not referring directly (as well I might) to traditional teachings, but of examining one of the modern currents in which it is detectable as a sort of involuntary reflection. I will take for this the “phenomenological ontology” of Edmund Husserl, which has sometimes been confused with existentialism itself.

Husserl’s philosophy also seeks to liberate the direct experience of reality from all the theories, problems, apparently precise concepts, and practical ends that hide it from our minds; also from any abstract idea about what might be behind it, either in philosophical terms (like “essence” or Kant’s “thing in itself”) or in scientific ones. From the objective viewpoint, this almost revives the Nietzschean aspiration to banish any “beyond,” any “other world,” while from the corresponding subjective viewpoint, it revives the ancient principle of the epoché, that is, the suspension of any judgment, any individual interpretation, any application of concepts and predicates to experience. In addition, one seeks to overcome all current opinion, the sense of false familiarity, false obviousness, and habit that one may have about things, in short everything that has overlaid the primordial surprise in the face of the world. That is the initial phase.

Next, one is meant to let the facts or “presences” of experience speak for themselves, in direct relation to the I. The phenomenological school uses the unfortunate term of “intentionality” for this relation, whereas it is really the opposite of any intention in the current sense. (See chapter 18, where it is explained that at this degree there cannot be any more “intentions,” either in reality or in the I.)

I must explain here what the movement in question really means by the “phenomenon” from which it takes its name. It has restored the original meaning to the word, connected to a Greek verb that means to be manifested or revealed. Thus it is supposed to mean “that which is directly manifested,” that which is offered directly as a content of consciousness. It is far removed from the usage of the term “phenomenon” prevalent in modern philosophy, where the phenomenon has been given an implicitly or overtly denigratory meaning, for instance, that of a “mere phenomenon” as opposed to what really is, or as hiding what really is: on the one hand is being, on the other appearance, the “world of phenomena.” This antithesis is now rejected, with the idea that being can manifest itself as it truly is, in its essence and its significance. Hence the expression “phenomenological ontology” (that is, the doctrine of being, based on the phenomenon) is not a contradiction in terms. “Beyond the phenomena as phenomenology understands them, there can be nothing else.”

The next stage is to explain that, if being is not hidden but manifested in the phenomenon, such manifestation has various degrees. The lowest is the obtuse, opaque state of simple sensible presences. But a “disclosing” (Erschliessung) of the phenomenon is possible, which may relate in a certain way to the idea I have mentioned of the living pluridimensionality of the real. Knowing, from the point of view of phenomenology, means to proceed with this disclosure: a procedure that, however, is not logical or inductive, scientific, or philosophical. If anything, Husserl’s idea of what is involved reproduces—even plagiarizes—a traditional teaching. His “reduction” (a technical term of this school) or “phenomenological destruction” with regard to the external world is, as I have said, the stripping of all the conceptual and discursive accretions that cover up the pure and direct experience. When applied to the inner world, this “reduction” or “destruction” is said to lead, as though to an altogether original element, to the perception of the pure I, or, as Husserl calls it, the “transcendent I.” This would constitute that one point of certainty, that original evidence, already sought by Descartes after doubting everything else. Using our terminology, this element or residuum that is left after applying phenomenological reduction to the inner world, and that manifests nakedly, is the “being” within us, the superindividual “Self.” It is a center of clear and immobile light, a pure luminous source. When its light is projected onto phenomena, it determines their disclosure, that is, it reveals in them a more profound dimension, the “living presence” that the phenomenologists also call “the immanent content of meaning” (immanenter Sinngehalt). Thereupon the inner and the outer meet.

There is a further aspect of phenomenology that at least pretends to reflect a traditional view. One is supposed to overcome the antithesis or hiatus that usually exists between the data of direct experience and its significances. The school in question seeks to distinguish itself both from the irrational and vitalistic, and from the positivistic and empirical schools. What remains in those schools, after they have made a tabula rasa after their fashion, is the simple, “positive,” sensible reality (the point of departure for correspondingly “positivist” science), or the pure experience lived as something instinctive, irrational, and subintellectual. In contrast, the disclosure or animation of the phenomenon when the light of the Self, of Being, is projected onto it causes to appear in the phenomenon itself, as its ultimate essence, something one might call “intellectual” (intelligible), if intellectuality did not nowadays mean that which belongs to the rational and abstract mind. One can clarify the idea by saying that what intervenes, beyond the stage of direct experience, certainly, but disanimate and opaque, is a “vision of the sense of things as a presence.” “Understanding coincides with vision, intuition (direct perception) with meaning.” Whereas normally the world is given us in the form of sensible presences (“phenomena”) without significance, or else as merely subjective meanings (ideas of thought) without a sensible presence (without a real intuitive basis), the two things are supposed to coincide in the “phenomenological deepening” on the plane of a higher objectivity. In this way, phenomenology does not present itself as irrationalism or positivism, but as an “eidetics”: a knowledge of intellectual essences. It aims toward an “intellectual” transparency of the real, of which naturally there are very different degrees.

When medieval philosophers spoke of intuitio intellectualis (intellectual intuition), they were not referring to anything different. On the whole, and keeping strictly to the essential points that have been raised so far, and to the way in which I have raised them, the assumptions of phenomenology would seem to correspond to those that I have formulated. Nevertheless, such a correspondence between the phenomenologists’ motives and traditional teachings is superficial and illusory, though as I have said, one sometimes wonders whether it is a case of plagiarism pure and simple. The phenomenological school of Husserl and his followers deals with simple philosophy; it is like the parody of things belonging to an absolutely different world. The whole of phenomenology, being the invention of modern thinkers and academic specialists, has as its sole basis the existential plane of modern man, for whom the disclosure of phenomena, that is, the concrete, living pluridimensionality of the real presented in its nakedness (Nietzsche would say in its “innocence”) is and must be mere fancy. Everything in this school is confined to more or less abstruse books, with the usual vain critical examinations of various systems of the history of profane philosophy, with logical analyses and the usual fetishism for “philosophy,” not to mention the mixture of the valid motives that I have isolated here with many suspect ideas. Among the latter are the significance attributed to time, to history, and to becoming; the misuse of the term Lebenswelt (world of living) for that of pure experience; another misuse, already mentioned, of the concept of “intentionality”; the naïve and irrelevant pictures of a world of “harmony” and “rationality,” and so forth. But this is not the place for a critical analysis or any further discrimination, given that phenomenology has served us no better or worse than existentialism as a simple, incidental point of reference.

I have now pointed out a direction, and the only direction possible once one has realized the great illusion and the spiritual irrelevancy of everything that passes for “knowledge” today, at the end of a cycle. I repeat: This direction was well known to the traditional world, and anyone with the chance of referring to it directly can do perfectly well without Husserl and all the rest. Thus he will avoid from the start the error of “mistaking the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself,” to use a Far Eastern expression. “Phenomenological destruction” rigorously applied cannot spare phenomenology itself; and one can say the same of this recently fashionable movement as of the others of our time: vu, entendu, interré (seen, heard/understood, buried). Nothing has changed: we have not arrived at any real transcendence.

In traditional teachings, the symbol of the eye in the middle of the forehead, whose glance burns up all appearances, corresponds precisely to the idea of “phenomenological destruction.” Similarly, the traditional esoteric doctrine concerning the multiple states of the being has always admitted an “essence” or a “being” that is not the hypothetical counterpart, purely thought or believed in, of the phenomena, but the object of an “intellectual” experience as direct as the common sensorial type. The same doctrine also speaks, not of an “other reality” but of other experienceable dimensions of the one reality. Incidentally, the so-called symbolic conception of the cosmos has the same significance: it is the pluridimensionality of the degrees of significance that reality may present in a differentiated experience, obviously conditioned by the nature of the experiencer (at whose limit there may be that which Husserl calls the “transcendental I”). The final dimension of the object of such an experience might correspond to the views of Zen Buddhism that I have mentioned: pure reality that acquires an absolute meaning just as it is, when it knows no goals, when no intentions are attributed to it, when it has no need of justifications or proofs, and manifests the transcendent as immanent.

I have already treated the echo of such views in Nietzsche’s and Jaspers’ ideas about the “language of the real.” But it is as well to repeat that in speaking of these ideas in order to warn of their errors and offer alternatives, I do not mean to present any of this as an actual possibility, either for my contemporaries in general, or even for the type of man I always have in mind. One cannot ignore everything that modern progress and culture have created, and that is now an established fact in modern man’s makeup, largely neutralizing the faculties necessary for an effective “opening” of the experience of things and beings—an opening that has nothing to do with the philosophical lucubrations of today’s phenomenologists.

The sensation of the current dissolution of knowledge and of the character of that which now passes as knowledge may be a helpful premise; but to go any further, the essential thing is not a simple mental orientation but an inner awakening. Given that throughout this book I have chosen not to consider the differentiated type who wants to, and can, isolate himself from the modern world, but one who lives in the thick of it, it is difficult for him to get beyond a certain limit on the path of knowledge that leads through the multiple dimensions of reality. Apart from the forms of conduct and opening already mentioned in connection with the new realism (forms that remain valid and possible), perhaps only special and traumatic situations can momentarily overcome this limit. And I have already spoken of those.