The malaise of modernity, its cause and cure: a historian of
science vividly diagnoses the familiar Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian
syndrome and convincingly - more or less - prescribes heavy doses
of Gregory Bateson. Berman gets his title from Max Weber and his
analyses of the disenchanted world from all over the lot. Blake
attacked "Single vision & Newton's sleep" (i.e., a frigidly
mechanistic approach to nature), and Berman quotes him. He cites
Jung's rehabilitation of alchemy, and praises alchemists for their
attempt to practice science "erotically," blending the sacred and
the manipulative, unlike the heirs of Descartes who champion
"nonparticipating consciousness" and the fantasy-abstraction of the
value-free, objective observer. Berman enlists the aid of Wilhelm
Reich, R. D. Laing, and others in attacking ego psychology and its
rationalist proponents, from Freud to Rollo May. For any sort of
livable future, Berman argues, the "Idol of the Head," the reified
monster of angst-ridden Western individualism, will have to go.
This "paranoid construct" (Lacan) is the basis of the frenzied
competition, ecological havoc, dehumanized capitalism, and nuclear
madness now harrowing us. And the best bet for a remedy is
Batesonian holism, which doesn't separate fact and value, mind and
body, subject and object; which views nature relationally, stresses
the unconscious, prizes "wisdom, beauty, grace" over "conscious,
empirical control" of matter. Berman is vague about how this humane
epistemology might be translated into politics, but he makes, on
the whole, a very strong case. If none of the components of his
synergistic manifesto is original, he still shapes them and
combines them with powerful lucidity - never drifting into the
sentimentality of counter-cultural dreamers, even faulting Bateson
on a number of issues. Some solid lessons in the history of ideas
together with cogently presented radical cultural criticism:
popularization at a high level. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our
scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its
supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can
know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman
shows how science acquired its controlling position in the
consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic
tradition—destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—which viewed man as a
participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing
that the holistic world view must be revived in some credible form
before we destroy our society and our environment, he explores the
possibilities for a consciousness appropriate to the modern era.
Ecological rather than animistic, this new world view would be
grounded in the real and intimate connection between man and
nature.
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