Preface to the New Edition

At the time of this writing new shivers are running through the intellectual atmosphere: it only needs courage to face them.

—COMTE DE LAUTRÉAMONT (ISADORE DUCASSE)

I would like it to be known that, as of the time of this writing, the phi losophy of materialism is dead.

Somebody had to come out and say it, so it might as well be me.

Quite recently I was convinced that the statement “materialism is dead” could be directly attributed to Jeffrey Kripal in one of his marvelous books on alternative spiritualities. I wanted to use the quotation for this preface to the new edition of The Physics of Transfigured Light. Unfortunately, try as I might, I could not find the exact quotation in any of his published writings.

I then e-mailed Professor Kripal to ask him in which book I could find the quotation. It turns out that he never wrote such a statement—evidently I only imagined it. Yet we both agreed it was something he could have written, as the statement is fully in accord with his present worldview.

In fact it almost seems anachronistic to come out and make such a bold statement. Surely it is common knowledge that since the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in the field of quantum mechanics, the old atomic view of matter has long been abandoned for far more nuanced, more abstract, and, yes, counterintuitive conceptions of what constitutes the stuff of the world. Rather bizarrely, despite this revolution in the scientific conception of matter (over a hundred years old now), the idea that matter is composed of small, indivisible bodies blindly crashing into one another, and that this chance activity gives rise to both the world and our perception of it, is still adhered to by individuals who should really know better.

In the eighteenth century, Pierre-Simon Laplace explained this philosophy of reductive materialism succinctly.

An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces with which nature is animated, and the respective situations of the beings that compose nature—supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis—would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atom.¹

A century later Thomas Huxley, one of the keenest defenders of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, drew on this philosophy of metaphysical materialism to declare that a “knowledge of the molecules” of what he called the primal “cosmic vapor”^*1 from which the universe was born could lead one to successfully predict “the state of the fauna of Great Britain in 1896.”² It should come as no surprise then that this philosophy of “dull materialism” (as Karl Marx once characterized it) would be reinvoked centuries later to support the ideological program of the “new atheists” and their commitment to evolutionary naturalism. In fact one of the most well known of these new atheists, Richard Dawkins, in his very first popular publication, The Blind Watchmaker, pretty much reproduces Laplace and Huxley’s outlook in what has become the “standard account” of the neo-Darwinian, reductionist version of the evolution of life on Earth.

Very recently a few brave thinkers have questioned the reductionist, materialist explanation of the evolution of life. In particular, Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012) brings the critical intelligence of a highly respected philosopher to bear on what he calls the “highly implausible” idea that “life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.”³

My aim in this preface is not to debate the problems associated with metaphysical materialism, much less to articulate at length an alternative—I will leave such possibilities up to the reader after considering the ideas in this book—but to draw attention to the obvious result of the commitment to the materialist philosophy: our disenchantment with the world, and our consequent, terrifying loss of connection with the living universe that we inhabit. As surrealist thinker Pierre Mabille stated many years ago:

Paradoxically, the more humanity extends its knowledge and mastery over the world, the more estranged it feels from the life of this world, and the more it separates the needs of the whole human being from the information that intelligence provides. A definite antinomy seems to exist today between the ways of the marvelous and those of science.⁴

The progressive loss of the marvelous in everyday life is the inevitable concomitant to our disenchantment, and unfortunately the sciences that once sought to reveal the wonder of our world have been at the vanguard of this loss.^*2

The sociologist Max Weber coined the term disenchantment to describe the quality of human experience that was the inevitable corollary of the radical shift in human labor and life engendered by the Industrial Revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century. According to Weber at least part of this disenchantment was the product of scientific progress, and while this was but a small part of the general rationalization of the era, it was without doubt the most important part.⁵ For Weber the industrialization of labor was the inevitable result of scientific rationalization. Unfortunately this rationalization does not produce an expanded, general “knowledge of the conditions under which one lives,”⁶ rather it leaches meaning, significance, and mystery from life—in the process etiolating the possibility of experiencing the marvelous—prioritizing only instrumental reason and its industrial handmaiden, technology. As with Laplace, Huxley, and Dawkins, everything is inevitably reduced to the order of calculation: “It means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.”⁷

Weber realized that “this ‘progress,’ to which science belongs as a link and motive force,” leads finally to a kind of defeated resignation and the existential loss of what formerly connected us to the world and to each other. In the early twenty-first century the motive force behind disenchantment has changed its modus operandi from early industrial capitalism to the late “liquid capitalism” of a globalized corporatism, but we are certainly no less severed from experiencing our cosmic inheritance, our inalienable right to become enchanted again.

The Physics of Transfigured Light is not, however, some sort of polemic or program of action by which we may regain the sense of the marvelous or of our lost enchantment. It is rather a foray or initial exploration, an adventure of ideas to try and discover the “pattern that connects” what many might regard as entirely separate pursuits: the sciences, philosophy, and ancient knowledge. It is my hope that readers of this work will find herein some signposts that may help them take this adventure to farther shores than I have been able to reach, and to thus herald the beginning of an entirely new manner of perceiving and experiencing our world.