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More Grist for the Mill of Thought …

The Monster and the Titan: Science, Knowledge, and Gnosis
Author(s): Theodore Roszak
Source: Daedalus, Vol. 103, No. 3, Science and Its Public: The Changing Relationship (Summer, 1974), pp. 17-32
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The Monster and the Titan: Science, Knowledge, and Gnosis

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The title of the book was Frankenstein. The subtitle was The Modern Prometheus.
An inspired moment when Mary Shelley decided that a maker of monsters could nonetheless by a Titan of discovery? one whose research might, in our time, win him the laurels of Nobel. She claimed the story broke upon her in a “waking dream.” It may well have been by benefit of some privileged awareness that one so young fused into a single dramatic image the warring qualities that made Victor Frankenstein both mad doctor and demigod. A girl of only nineteen, but by virtue of that one, rare insight, she joined the ranks of history’s great myth makers. What else but a myth could tell the truth so shrewdly, capturing definitively the full moral tension of this strange intellectual passion we call science? And how darkly prophetic that science, the fairest child of the Enlightenment, should find the classic statement of its myth in a Gothic tale of charnel houses and graveyards, nightmares and bloody murder.
Asked to nominate a worthy successor to Victor Frankenstein’s macabre brainchild, what should we choose from our contemporary inventory of terrors? The bomb? The cyborg? The genetically synthesized android? The behavioral brain washer? The despot computer? Modern science provides us with a surfeit of monsters, does it not?
I realize there are many scientists? perhaps the majority of them? who believe that these and a thousand other perversions of their genius have been laid unjustly at their doorstep. These monsters, they would insist, are the bastards of technology: sins of applied, not pure science. Perhaps it comforts their conscience somewhat to invoke this much muddled division of labor, though I must confess that the line which segregates research from development within the industrial process these days looks to me like one of gossamer fineness, hardly like a moral cordon sanitaire.
I realize, too, that there are some — those who champion a “science for the people” — who believe that mad doctors are an aberration of science that can be wholly charged to the account of military desperados and corporate profiteers. Their enemies are also mine; I write in full recognition of how the wrong-headed power elites of the world corrupt the promise of science. But I fear there are more unholy curiosities at work in their colleagues’ laboratories than capitalism, its war lords, and hucksters can be made the culprits for. Certainly they must share my troubled concern to see the worst excesses of behavioral psychology and reductionist materialism become unquestionable orthodoxies in the socialist societies. I will grant to both these views some measure of validity (less to the first, much

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more to the second). But here and now I have no wish to pursue the issues they raise, because I have another monster in mind that troubles me as much as all the others? one who is nobody’s child but the scientist’s own and whose taming is no political task. I mean an invisible demon who works by subtle poison, not upon the flesh and bone, but upon the spirit. I refer to the monster of meaninglessness. The psychic malaise. The existential void where modern man searches in vain for his soul.
Of course there are few scientists who will readily accept this unlovely charge upon their paternity. The creature I name wears the face of despair; its lineaments are those of spiritual desperation; in its bleak features scientists will see none of their own exhilaration and bouyant morale. They forget with what high hopes and dizzy fascination Victor Frankenstein pursued his research. He too undertook the adventure of discovery with feverish delight, intending to invent a new and superior race of beings, creatures of majesty amid angelic beauty. It was only when his work was done and he stepped back to view it as a whole that its true — and terrifying — character appeared.
The pride of science has always been its great-hearted humanism. What place, one may wonder, is there in the humanist’s philosophy for despair? But there is more than one species of humanism, though the fact is too often brushed over. In the modern West, we have, during the past three centuries, run a dark, downhill course from an early morning humanism to a midnight humanism; from a humanism of celebration to a humanism of resignation. The humanism of celebration? the humanism of Pico and Michelangelo, of Bacon and Newton? stems from an experience of man’s congruency with the divine. But for the humanism of resignation, there is no experience of the divine, only the experience of man’s infinite aloneness. And from that is born a desperate and anxious humanism, one that clings to the human as if it were a raft adrift in an uncharted sea. In that condition of forsakenness, we are not humanists by choice, but by default? humanists because there is nothing else we have the conviction to be, humanists because the only alternative is the nihilist abyss. If I say it is science that has led us from the one humanism to the other, that it is science which has made our universe an unbounded theater of the absurd . . . does that sound like an accusation? Perhaps. But I intend no condemnation, because I believe that, at every step, the intentions of the scientists have been wholly honest and honorable. They have pursued the truth and followed bravely where it took them, even when its destination became the inhuman void. In any case, I say no more than thoughtful scientists have themselves recognized to be true? in some cases with no little pride. Thus, Jacques Monod: By a single stroke [science] claimed to sweep away the tradition of a hundred thousand years, which had become one with human nature itself. It wrote an end to the ancient animist covenant between man and nature, leaving nothing in place of that precious bond but an anxious quest in a frozen universe of solitude.1 Or, as Steven Weinberg puts it elsewhere in this volume: The laws of nature are as impersonal and free of human values as the rules of arithmetic. We didn’t want it to come out this way, but it did. . . . The whole system of the visible stars stands revealed as only a small part of the spiral arm of one of a huge number of galaxies, extending away from us in all directions. Nowhere do we see human value or human meaning.

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Our universe. The only universe science can comprehend and endorse. “A universe,” Julian Huxley has called it, “of appalling vastness, appalling age, appalling meaninglessness.” But not, for that reason, an uninteresting universe. On the contrary, it is immensely, inexhaustibly interesting. There is no reason, after all, why what is wholly alien to us should not be wholly absorbing. Nor is there any reason why, in such a universe, we should not make up meanings for ourselves? whatever meanings we please and as many as we can imagine. Is this not the favorite preoccupation of modern culture, the intellectual challenge that adds the spice of variety to our lifestyle? We may even decide to regard science itself as the most meaningful way of all to pass the time. All we need remember? if we are to remain scientifically accountable? is that none of these meanings resides in nature. They simply express a subjective peculiarity of our species. They are arbitrary constructions having no point of reference “Out There.” Which is to say: the universe we inhabit? insofar as we let it be the universe science tells us we inhabit — is an in human universe. We share some minute portion of its dead matter, but it shares no portion of our living mind. It is (again to quote Jacques Monod) an “unfeeling immensity, out of which [man] emerged only by chance. . . .” and where “like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world, a world that is deaf to his music, just as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.”
Perhaps not every reader agrees with me that meaninglessness is a monster. If not, then our sensibilities are of a radically different order and we may have to part company from this point forward, for this is not the place to try closing the gap between us. But I believe more than a few scientists have looked out at times upon the “unfeeling immensity” of their universe with some unease. Note Weinberg’s phrase, “We didn’t want it to come out this way. …”
Perhaps not every reader regards the degradation of meaning in nature as a moral issue. But I do. Because meaninglessness breeds despair, and despair, I think, is a secret destroyer of the human spirit, as real and as deadly a menace to our cultural sanity as the misused power of the atoms is to our physical survival. By my lights at least, to kill old gods is as terrible a transgression of conscience as to concoct new babies in a test tube. But even if scientists should agree that their discipline buys its progress at a dear price in existential meaning, what are they to do? Steven Weinberg faces the question squarely in his essay and offers an answer which would, I suspect, be endorsed by many of his colleagues. He tells us that “other modes of knowledge” (the example he gives is aesthetic perception) might be accommodated alongside science in a position of coexistence, but they cannot be given a place within science as part of a radical shift of sensibilities. . . . science cannot change in this way without destroying itself, because however much human values are involved in the scientific process or are affected by the results of scientific research, there is an essential element in science that is cold, objective, and nonhuman. . . . Having committed ourselves to the scientific standard of truth, we have thus been forced, not by our own choosing, away from the rhapsodic sensibility. … In the end, the choice is a moral, or even a religious, one. Having once committed ourselves to look at nature on its own terms, it is something like a point of honor not to flinch at what we see. “The universe,” Weinberg insists, “is what it is.” And science, as the definitive natural philosophy, can have no choice but to tell it like it is, and “not to flinch.”

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One cannot help admiring the candor of such an answer? and grieving a little for the pathos of its resignation. But it is, in any case, a Promethean answer, one that reminds us that the free pursuit of knowledge is, after all, a supreme value, a need of the mind as urgent as the body’s need for food. However much one may upbraid science for having disenchanted our lives, sooner or later one must come to grips with the animating spirit of the discipline, the myth that touches it with an epic grandeur. Call up the monster, and the scientist calls up the Titan. Press the claims of spiritual need, and the scientist presses the claims of mind as, in their own right, a sovereign good.
Any critique of science that challenges the paramount good of knowledge risks becoming a crucifixion of the intellect. If Prometheus is to stop producing monsters, it must not be at the sacrifice of his Titanic virtues. The search for knowledge must be a free adventure; yet is must not choose, in its freedom, to do us harm in body, mind, or spirit. One no sooner states the matter in this way than it seems like an impossible dilemma. We are asking that the mind in search of knowledge should be left wholly free and yet be morally disciplined at the same time. Is this possible?
I believe it is, but only if we recognize that there are styles of knowledge as well as bodies of knowledge. Besides what we know, there is how we know it? how wisely, how gracefully, how life-enhancingly. The life of the mind is a constant dialogue between knowing and being, each shaping the other. This is what makes it possible to raise a question which, at first sight, is apt to appear odd in the extreme. Can we be sure that what science gives us is indeed knowledge?

Plato, Don Juan, and Gnosis

For most Western intellectuals that might seem a preposterous question, since for the better part of three centuries now science has served as the measure of knowledge in our society. But to raise it is only to recall the Platonic tradition, within which our science would have been regarded as an intellectual transaction distinctly beneath the level of knowledge. There is no telling for sure how highly Plato might have rated the spectacular theoretical work of the modern world’s best scientific brains, but I suspect he would have respected it as “information”? a coherent, factually related account of the physical structure and function of things: a clever scheme for “saving the appearances,” as Plato liked to characterize the astronomy of his day. Here we have a demanding and creditable labor of the intellect; but on Plato’s well-known four-step ladder of the mind, science would be placed somewhere between the second and third levels of the hierarchy? above mere uninformed “opinion,” but distinctly below “knowledge.”
Easy enough to dismiss Plato as backward or plain perverse for refusing to rate science any higher on the scale. But how much more interesting to let the mind follow where his gesture takes it when he invites us to look beyond experiment, theory, and mathematical formulation to a higher object of knowledge which he calls “the essential nature of the Good . . . from which everything that is good and right derives its value for us.”
Significantly, when Plato tried to put this object of knowledge into words, his habit, like that of many another mystic, was to enlist the services of myth and

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allegory, or to warn how much must be left unsaid. “There is no writing of mine about these matters,” he tells us in the Seventh Epistle in a passage that might be a description of the Zen Buddhist Satori, “nor will there ever be one. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the sub ject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soil and straightaway nourishes itself.” No doubt, at first glance, such an elusive conception of knowledge is bound to seem objectionable to many scientists. But in light of all that Michael Polanyi has written about the “personal knowledge” and the “tacit that Michael Polanyi has written about the “personal knowledge” and the “tacit dimension” involved in science, Plato’s remarks should not seem wholly alien. Plato dimension” involved in science, Plato’s remarks should not seem wholly alien. Plato is reminding us of those subtleties that can only be conveyed between person and person at some nonverbal level; to force such insights into words or into a formal pedagogy would be to destroy them. If we are to learn them at all, there is no way around intimate association with a guru who can alone make sure that each realization is sensibly adapted to the time, and the place, and the person. So too in science, as in every craft and art. Is not much that is essential to the study left to be learned from one’s master by way of nuance and hint, personal taste and emotional texture? And does this not include the most important matters of all: the spirit of the enterprise, the choice of a problem deemed worth studying, the instinctive sense of what is and what is not a reputable scientific approach to any subject, the decision as to when a hypothesis has been sufficiently demonstrated to merit publication? How much of all this is taught by the glint in the eye or the inflection in the voice, by subtle ridicule or the merest gesture of approval? Even the exact sciences could not do without their elements of taste and intuitive judgment, talents which students learn by doing or from the living example before them.
Plato is, of course, pushing the uses of reticence much further. He contends that, if only the tacit dimension of instruction between guru and student is exploited to its fullest, we can find our way to a knowledge, properly so-called, which grasps the nature and the value of things as a whole, and so raises us to a level at which intellect and conscience become one and inseparable in the act of knowing. “Without that knowledge,” he insists, “to know everything else, however well, would be of no value to us, just as it is of no use to possess anything without getting the good of it.”
Again, I suspect that Plato is not so far removed in his pursuit from a familiar scientific experience, one which comes in the wake of any significant discovery. It is the sense that, over and above what the particular discovery in question has shown to be factually so, this activity of the mind has proved itself good; it has, as a human project, elevated us to a level of supremely satisfying existence. One has not only found out something correct (perhaps that is the least of it, in the long run) but one has been something worth being. It is an experience many people have known, at least fleetingly, in their work as artists, craftsmen, teachers, athletes, doctors, etc. We might call it “an experience of excellence,” and let it go at that. But what Plato wished to do was to isolate that experience as an object of knowledge, and to treat it, not as the by-product of some other, lesser activity, but as a goal in its own right. He wished to know the Good in itself which we only seem to brush against now and again in passing as we move from one occasional task to another. Nothing in modern science would have appalled Plato more than the way in which a professional scientific paper seeks, in the name of objectivity, to depersonalize itself to the point of

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leaving out all reference to that “experience of excellence” — that fleeting glimpse of the higher Good. For, I believe Plato would have objected, if no such experience was there, then the work was not worth doing; and if it was, then why leave it out, since it must surely be the whole meaning and value of science? Once you omit that, you have nothing left except . . . information.
If I invoke Plato here, it is not because I wish to endorse his theory of knowledge, but only to use him as a convenient point of departure. I recognize the logical blemishes that have dogged his epistemology through the centuries — and regard many of them as unanswerable within the framework Plato erected for his work. He is, however, the most renowned philosophical spokesman for a style of knowledge which is far older than formal philosophy; in his work we confront a knowledge which is far older than formal philosophy; in his work we confront a visionary tradition which runs through nearly every culture, civilized and primitive. visionary tradition which runs through nearly every culture, civilized and primitive. The prime value of Plato? so it has always seemed to me? lies not so much in the intellectual territory he occupied and surveyed, as in his stubborn determination to keep open a passage through which the mind might cross over from philosophy to ecstasy; from intellect to illumination. His dialogues stand on the border of a trans rational sensibility whose charm seems a constant feature of human culture — a sensibility perhaps as old as the mind itself, and yet as contemporary as the latest bestseller list. Recall what the Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan calls himself in Carlos Casteneda’s recent popular reports: “a man of knowledge.” And, for all the differences of personal style and lore that part the two men, the old sorcerer means knowledge in exactly the way Plato meant it, as an ecstatic insight into the purpose and place of human existence in the universe, a glimpse of the eternal.
What both Plato the philosopher and Don Juan the sorcerer seek as knowledge is precisely that meaningfulness of things which science has been unable to find as an “objective” feature of nature. To follow where such a conception of knowledge takes us is not to denigrate the value or fascination of information. It is to be neither antiscientific nor antirational. It leads us not to an either/or choice, but to a recognition of priorities within an integrated philosophical context. Information can be exciting to collect; it can be urgently useful: a tool for our survival. But it is not the same as the knowledge we take with us into the crises of life. Where ethical decision, death, suffering, failure confront us, or in those moments when the awesome vastness of nature presses in upon us, making us seem frail and transient, what the mind cries out for is the meaning of things, the purpose they teach, the enduring significance they give our existence. And that, I take it, is Plato’s knowledge of the Good.
To call this another kind of knowledge may seem a convenient compromise or a generous concession. But I submit that either as compromise or concession, this policy of Cartesian apartheid is treacherous. At best, it asks for the sort of schizophrenic coexistence that divides the personality cruelly between fact and feeling. At worst, it is the first step toward denying the “other knowledge” any status as knowledge at all? toward considering it a sort of irrational spasm devoid of any claim to truth or reality, perhaps an infantile weakness of the ego that is only forgivable because it is so universally human. At that point we are not far from treating the need for meaning as a purely subjective question for which there is no objective answer? as an unfortunate behavioral trait which we leave psychologists or brain physiologists to stake out for investigation. Once it ceases to be the basis for knowledge, it may finish as an occasion for therapy.

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My purpose here is to call” back to mind the traditional style of knowledge for which the nature of things was as much a reservoir of meanings as of facts — a style of knowledge which science is now aggressively replacing in every society on earth. Let us call this knowledge “gnosis,” borrowing the word not to designate a second and separate kind of knowledge, but an older and larger kind of knowledge from which our style of knowledge derives by way of a sudden and startling transformation of the sensibilities over the past three centuries. My contention is that this process of derivation has been spiritually impoverishing and psychically distorting. It has resulted in a narrowing of our full human potentialities and has left us — especially in science? with a diminished Titanism that falsely borrows upon the myth it champions. When the modern Prometheus reaches for knowledge, it is not the torch of gnosis he brings back or even searches for, but the many candles of information. Yet not a million of those candles will equal the light of that torch, for these are fires of a different order.

Augmentative Knowledge

I will not try to characterize gnosis here as an “alternative cognitive system” in any programmatic way — as if to offer a new methodology or curriculum. Rather, I want to speak of gnosis as a. different sense of what knowledge is than science provides. When we search for knowledge, it is a certain texture of intelligibility we first and most decisively seek, a feeling in the mind that tells us, “Yes, here is what we are looking for. This has meaning and significance to it.” Though it may work well below the level of deliberate awareness, this touchstone of the mind is what makes the persuasive difference in our thinking. Indeed, science itself arose in just this way, when men of Galileo’s generation came to feel, with an uncanny spontaneity, that to know was to measure, that all else was subjective and unreal, a realm of “secondary qualities.”
In the broadest sense, gnosis is augmentative knowledge, in contrast to the reductive knowledge characteristic of the sciences. It is a hospitality of the mind that allows the object of study to expand itself and become as much as it might become, with no attempt to restrict or delimit. Gnosis invites every object to swell with personal implications, to become special, wondrous, perhaps a turning point in one’s life, “a moment of truth.” Paul Tillich has called gnosis “knowledge by participation … as intimate as the relation between husband and wife.” Gnosis, he tells us, “is not the knowledge resulting from analytic and synthetic research. It is the knowledge of union and salvation, existential knowledge in contrast to scientific knowledge.”

It is the guiding principle of gnosis that only augmentative knowledge is adequate to its object. As long as we, at our most open and sensitive, feel there is something left over or left out of any account we give of any object, we have fallen short of gnosis. Gnosis is that nagging whisper at the edge of the mind which tells us, whenever we seek completeness of understanding or pretend to premature comprehension, “not yet. . . not quite.” It is our immediate awareness, often at a level deeper than intellect, that we seem not to have done justice to the object — not because there remains quantitatively more of the object to be investigated, but because its essential quality still eludes us.

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I speak here of the experience many people have known when faced with some brutally reductionist explanation of human conduct. We feel the explanation “reduces” precisely because it leaves out so much of what we spontaneously know about humanness from inside our own experience. We look at the behaviorist’s model and we know — as immediately as our eye would know that a circle is not a square — that this is not us. It may not even be an important part or piece of us, but only a degraded figment. Even if such knowledge “worked” — in the sense that it allowed others to manipulate our conduct as precisely as an engineer can manipulate mechanical and electrical forms of energy — would we not still protest that knowing how to dangle us like a puppet on a string is not knowing us at all? Might we not insist that such “knowledge” works in the very opposite direction — that it is an ignorant, insulting violation of our nature? As Abraham Maslow once observed of his own experience in behavioral psychology: “When I can predict what a person will do under certain circumstances, this person tends to re sent it. . . . He tends to feel dominated, controlled, outwitted.”2 Between sent it. . . . He tends to feel dominated, controlled, outwitted.”2 Between “knowing” and “knowing how” there can be a fearful discord — like Bach being “knowing” and “knowing how” there can be a fearful discord — like Bach being played on skillets and soup kettles: more mockery than music.
That discord shows up readily enough when we ourselves are the specimens un der study. In that case, the standard of adequacy is provided by the object of investigation. We can speak for ourselves and fend off the assault upon our dignity. But what about the nonhuman objects of the world? Does it make any sense to say that our scientific knowledge of them may be qualitatively inadequate?
To answer that question, let us begin with a familiar comparison: that between art and science. The coincidence of the two fields has been observed many times, especially in so far as they share a common fascination for form and structure in nature. Yet, while there is an overlap, it is, from the scientist’s point of view, an overlap of interest only, not of intellectual competence. Both art and science find an aesthetic aspect in nature (though of course many scientists have done significant research without pausing over that aspect). But for the scientist, the aesthetic appearance is a surface; knowledge stands behind that surface in some underlying mechanism or activity requiring analysis. What the artist sees is not regarded by science as knowledge of what is in the object as one of its constituent properties. Instead, what preoccupies the artist is called “beauty” (though often it would better be understood as awe, conceivably mixed with fear, anxiety, dread). Beauty is, for science, a sort of subjective supplement to knowledge, a decoration the mind supplies before or after the act of cognition, and which can or even ought to be omitted from professional publication. Aesthetic fascination may attract us to the object; it may later help flavor popularized accounts of research. From the scientist’s viewpoint, however, only further study (dissection, deep analysis, comparison, experiment, measurement) allows us to find out something about the object, something demonstrable, predictive, useful. Compared to such hard fact, the artist’s perception is merely dumb wonder, which, apparently, artists have not the intellectual rigor to go beyond. Jacob Bronowski has, for example, referred to the artist’s response to nature as “a strangled, unformed and unfounded experience.” But, he goes on, “science is a base for [that experience] which constantly renews the experience and gives it a coherent meaning.”3
If this were not the supposition, we might imagine an entire specialization in

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science devoted to studying the nature poets and painters: biologists sprinkling their research with quotations from Wordsworth or Goethe . . . neophyte botanists taking required courses in landscape painting . . . astronomers drawing hypotheses from Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” . . . theoretical physicists pondering the bizarre conceptions of time and space one finds in the serial tone row, cubism,
constructivism, or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Of course, nothing forbids scientists from wandering into these exotic realms, but what curriculum requires that they do so?
From the viewpoint of gnosis, however, what artists find in nature is decidedly knowledge of the object, indeed knowledge of a uniquely valuable kind. It is not repeatable or quantitative, nor is it open to experimentation or utilitarian application. It is usually not logically articulable; that is why special languages of sound, color, line, texture, metaphor and symbol have been invented to carry the message, in much the same way that mathematics has been developed as the special language of objective consciousness. But that message is as much knowledge as when, in addition to knowing your chemical composition, I discern that you are noble or base, lovable or vicious. So artists discover the communicative mood and quality that attach to form, color, sound, image. They teach us those qualities, and quality that attach to form, color, sound, image. They teach us those qualities, and these become an inseparable part of our total response to the world. these become an inseparable part of our total response to the world.
Of course, these qualities can be screened out if our interest is directed to something less than the whole, but this does not mean the sensuous and aesthetic qualities are not really there as a constituent property of the world — a property that is being artfully displayed to us. Would it not, in fact, be truer to our experience to conceive of the world about us as a theater, rather than as a mechanism or a randomized aggregation of events? It is surely striking how often science quite naturally presents its discoveries as if it were unfolding a spectacle before us, thus borrowing heavily on sensibilities that have been educated by the dramatists and story-tellers. All cosmology is talked about in this way, and even a good deal of high energy physics and molecular biology. Everything we have lately discovered about the evolution of stars is, quite spontaneously, cast in the mode of biography: birth, youth, maturity, senility, death, and at last the mysterious transformation into an afterlife called “the black hole.” Or, take the classic example of aesthetic perception in science. Can there be any doubt that much of the cogency of Darwin’s theory of natural selection stemmed from the pure drama of the idea? Natural selection was presented as a billion-year-long epic of struggle, tragic disasters, lucky escapes, triumph, ingenious survival. Behind the sensibility to which Darwin’s theory appealed lay three generations of Romantic art which had pioneered the perception of strife, dynamism, and unfolding process in nature. Behind Darwin stand Byron’s Manfred, Goethe’s Faust, Constable’s cloud-swept landscapes, Beethoven’s tempestuous quartets and sonatas. All this became an
integral part of the Darwinian insight. I doubt there is anyone who does not still bring to the study of evolution this Romantic taste for effortful growth, conflict, and self-realization. The qualities are not only in the idea, but also in the phenomenon. It is not that these dramatic qualities have been “read” into nature by us, but rather that nature has read them into us and now summons them forth by the spectacle of evolution we find displayed around us.
We should by now be well aware of the price we pay for regarding aesthetic quality as arbitrary and purely subjective rather than as a real property of the

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object. Such a view opens the way to that brutishness which feels licensed to devastate the environment on the grounds that beauty is only “a matter of taste.” And since one person’s taste is as good as another’s, who is to say — as a matter of fact — that the hard cash of a strip mine counts for less than the grandeur of an un touched mountain? Is such barbarism to be “blamed” on science? Obviously not in any direct way. But it is deeply rooted in a scientized reality principle that treats quantities as objective knowledge and qualities as a matter of subjective preference.

The Spectrum of Gnosis

Now to push the point a little further. If art overlaps science at one wing, it overlaps visionary religion at the other. If artists have found the cool beauty of orderly structure in nature, they have also found there the burning presence of the sacred. For some artists, as for the Deist scientists of Newton’s day, God’s imprint has appeared in the rhythmic cycles and stately regularities of nature. For other artists –Trahern, Blake, Keats, Hopkins — the divine grandeur of the world appears all at once, in an ecstatic flash, a jolt, a “high.” Here we find the artist becoming seer and prophet. For such sensibilities, a burning bush, a storm-battered mountain top can be, by the sheer awesomeness of the event, an immediate encounter with the divine. the divine.
To know God from the order of things is a deduction, a shaky one perhaps in To know God from the order of things is a deduction, a shaky one perhaps in the eyes of skeptical logicians, but at least remotely scientific in character. To know God from the power of the moment is an epiphany, a knowledge that takes us a long way from scientific respectability. Yet here is where gnosis mounts to its heights, becoming knowledge willingly obedient to the discipline of the sacred. It does not close itself to the epiphanies life offers by regarding them as “merely subjective.” Rather, it allows, it invites experience to expand and become all that it can. After all, if Galileo was right to call those men fools who refused to view the moon through a telescope, what shall we say of those who refuse Blake’s invitation to see eternity in a grain of sand? Gnosis seeks to integrate these moments of ecstatic wonder; it regards them as an advance upon reality, and by far the most exciting advance the mind has undertaken. For here is the reality that gives transcendent meaning to our lives.
Perhaps the best way to summarize what I have said so far is to conceive of the mind as a spectrum of possibilities, all of which properly blend into one another — unless we insist on erecting barriers across the natural flow of our experience. At one end, we have the hard, bright lights of science; here we find information. In the center we have the sensuous hues of art; here we find the aesthetic shape of the world. At the far end, we have the dark, shadowy tones of religious experience, shading off into wave lengths beyond all perception; here we find meaning. Science is properly part of this spectrum. But gnosis is the whole spectrum. If, in the past, gnosis has been more heavily weighted on the side of meaning than information, it should not be difficult to understand why. Our ancestors saw fit to put first things first. Before they felt the need to know how fire burns or how seeds germinate, they needed to know the place and purpose of their own strange

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existence in the universe. And this they found generously offered to them in the nature of things. Yet, I know of no visionary tradition that has ever refused to agree that natural objects possess a structure and function worthy of study. Certainly none of these traditions has been as adamantly closed to the technical level of knowledge as our science has been closed to gnosis. Plato may have wanted the mind to rise to a level of ecstatic illumination, but he never said there was no such thing as information or that its pursuit was a sign of madness or intellectual in competence. Similarly, the alchemists may have sought their spiritual regeneration in natural phenomena, but they never refused to examine the way nature works. Undeniably, where gnosis becomes our standard of knowledge, science and technology proceed at a much slower rate than the wild pace we accept (or suffer with) as normal. This is not to say, however, that gnosis is without its practical aspect, but rather that its sense of practicality ’embraces spirit as well as body, the need for psychic as much as for physical sustenance.
The most familiar examples we have of culture dominated by gnosis are in the world’s primitive and pagan societies. Many of these societies have been capable of inventing agrarian and hunting technologies every bit as ingenious as the machine technics of modern times. But, in stark contrast to the culture of urban industrialism, their technology blended at every step with poetic insight and the worship of the elements. The tools and routines of daily life normally participated in the religious sensibility of the society, functioning as symbols of life’s higher in the religious sensibility of the society, functioning as symbols of life’s higher significance. From the viewpoint of the modern West, such a culture may look like a hodge-podge of wholly unrelated factors. In This reality, it is an ideal expression of gnosis, for it expresses a unitary vision bringing together art, religion, science, and technics. Our habit, in dealing with such cultures, is to interpret their technics as lucky accidents and their aesthetic-religious context as an encumbrance. But by at least one critical standard, these “underdeveloped” cultures have proved more technically successful than our own may. They have endured, in some cases a hundred times longer than urban industrialism may yet endure. Surely that is some measure of how well a culture understands its place in nature.
Most of the world’s mystic and occult traditions have been worked up from the gnosis of primitive and pagan cultures. At bottom, these traditions are sophisticated, speculative adaptations of the old folk religions, which preserve in some form their antique wisdom and modes of experience. Behind the Cabbala and Hermeticism, we can still see the shadowy forms of ritual magic and fertility rites, symbols of a sacred continuum binding man to nature and prescribing value. In all these mystic traditions, to know the real is to know the good, the beautiful, and the sacred at the same time.
This is not to say that all who followed these traditions achieved gnosis. The human mind goes wrong in many ways. It can go mad with ecstasies as well as with logic. Discriminating among the levels and directives of transrational experience is a project in its own right — one I do not even touch upon here, for the discussion would be far too premature at this point. There are disciplines of the visionary mind as well as of the rational intellect, as anyone will know who has done more than scratch the surface of the great mystic traditions. All I stress here is the difference between a taste for gnosis and a taste for knowledge whose visionary overtones have been systematically stilled as a supposed “distortion” of reality.

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The Visionary Origins of Science

Our science, having cut itself adrift from gnosis, contents itself to move along the behavioral surface of the real — measuring, comparing, systematizing, but never penetrating to the visionary possibilities of experience. Its very standard of knowledge is a rejection of gnosis, any trace of whose presence is regarded as a subjective taint. Yet, ironically, the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was in large part launched by men whose thought was significantly colored by lingering elements of gnosis in our culture, most of which survived in various subterranean occult streams. Copernicus very nearly resorted to pagan sun worship as a means of supporting his heliocentric theory, the sheer aesthetic beauty of which seems to have been as persuasive for him as its mathematical precision. Kepler’s astronomy emerges from a search for the Pythagorean music of the spheres. Newton was a life-long alchemist and student of Jacob Boehme. The scholarship on early science finds more and more hidden continuities between the scientific revolution and the occult currents of the Renaissance. Frances Yates has gone so far as to suggest that science only flourished in those societies where there had been a strong, free influx of Hermetic and Cabbalistic studies.4 From this origin came the number magic and nature mysticism which were to be assimilated into science as we know it. These historical links have yet to be fully traced, but certainly the key paradigm of “law — that mysterious sense of natural right order without which early science could never have gotten off the ground — carried with it in the thinking of early physicists unmistakable moral and theological reverberations. It was the concept of universal law that made the and theological reverberations. It was the concept of universal law that made the study of nature as a celebration of the grandeur of God compatible with the Chris study of nature as a celebration of the grandeur of God compatible with the Christian doctrine.
What this confabulation with occult tradition suggests is that many lively minds of the seventeenth century, including some founding fathers of modern science, looked forward to seeing the New Philosophy become a true gnosis, possibly to replace the rigid, decaying dogmatism of Christianity. The trouble was that their exciting new approach to nature progressively screened out the very dimension of consciousness in which gnosis can alone take root: visionary insight. In seeking to externalize gnosis by raising it to a wholly articulate and mathematical level of expression, the New Philosophers left behind the mystic and meditative disciplines which might have taught them that introspective silence and transcendent
symbolism are necessary media of gnosis. It was as if someone had invented an ingenious musical instrument with which he hoped to replace the full orchestra, with the result that thereafter all orchestral music had to be scaled down to the capacities of his instrument. And once that had been done, he and his audience began to lose their ear for the harmonies and overtones that only the orchestra can achieve. Quantification is just such an instrument of severely reduced resonance.
There is a haunting and troubling strangeness about this interval in our history. One might almost believe that perverse forces which baffle the understanding were at work beneath the surface of events turning science into something that did not square with the personalities of its creators. What was it, for example, that inspired Descartes to regard mathematics as the new key to nature? An “angel of truth” who appeared to him in a series of numinous dreams on three successive nights. But in his writing, he never once mentions the epistemological status of dreams or

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visionary experience. Instead, he turns his back on all that is not strict logic, opting for a philosophy of knowledge wholly subordinated to geometrical precision. Yet that philosophy purchases its apparent simplicity by an appalling brutalization of the very existential subtleties and psychic complexities that are the living substance of Descartes’ own autobiography. Newton, a man of stormy psychological depths, spent a major portion of his life in theological and alchemical speculation; but all this he carefully edited from his natural philosophy and his public life. He even allowed himself to be talked out of attending the meetings of occult societies in London, lest he damage his reputation as a scientist. Arthur Koestler is not wide of the mark in calling the early scientists “sleepwalkers,” men who unwittingly led our society into a universe whose eventual godlessness they might well have rejected vehemently.
This much of the problem stands out prominently enough: the mystic disciplines, on which gnosis depends, have never been as highly refined and widely practiced in the West as in the oriental cultures. In large part, they have suffered neglect because they cut across the doctrinal grain of conventional Christianity with its insistent emphasis on historicity and dogmatic theology. (I often think that few positivists realize how great a debt they owe to the peculiarly one-dimensional religious psychology of mainstream Christianity; its literalism and verbal rigidities paved the way for the secular skepticism of the religion’s deadliest critics.) Still, in the Hermetic, Cabbalistic, Neo-Platonic, and alchemical schools of the Renaissance, at least a promising foundation existed for the building of a true gnosis. In these currents of thought we find an appreciation of myth, symbol, meditative stillness, and rhapsodic intellect that might, with maturity, have matched the finest flights of Tantric or Taoist mysticism. matched the finest flights of Tantric or Taoist mysticism.
But if these elements were mixed with early science in many exotic com But if these elements were mixed with early science in many exotic combinations, they were soon enough filtered out as violations of that strict objectivity which is the distinguishing feature of the Western scientific sensibility. It was Galileo’s quantitative austerity and Descartes’ dualism that carried the day with science, casting out of nature everything that was not matter in motion mathematically expressed. Here was the crucial point at which scientific knowledge ceased to be gnosis. Value, quality, soul, spirit, animist communion were all ruthlessly cut away from scientific thought like so much excess fat. What remained was the world-machine? sleek, dead, and alien. However much physics has, in our time, modified the mechanistic imagery of its classical period, the impersonality of the Newtonian world view continues to dominate the scientist’s vision of nature. The models and metaphors of science may alter, but the sensibility of the discipline remains what it was. Since the quantum revolution, modern physics has ceased to be mechanistic, but it has scarcely become in any sense “mystical.” The telling fact is that both in style and content it serves today as an ideal foundation for molecular biology and behavioral psychology, sciences which have of late become as mechanistic as the crudest reductionism of the seventeenth century. Almost universally these days, biologists regard the cell as a “chemical factory” run by “information-transfer” technology. And, at the same time, the arch-behaviorist B. F. Skinner suggests that since physics only began to make progress when it “stopped personifying things,” psychology is not apt to gain a firm scientific footing until it likewise purges itself of “careless references to purpose” and ceases

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“to trace behavior to states of mind, feelings, traits of character, human nature, and so on”5?meaning, one gathers, that the way forward for psychology is to stop personifying people . . . and to begin mechanizing them.

The Suppression of Gnosis

Why has science taken this course toward ever more aggressive depersonalization? Perhaps the myth of Dr. Frankenstein suggests an answer? a tragic answer. Where did the doctor’s great project go wrong? Not in his intentions, which were beneficent, but in the dangerous haste and egotistic myopia with which he pursued his goal. It is both a beautiful and a terrible aspect of our humanity, this capacity to be carried away by an idea. For all the best reasons, Victor Frankenstein wished to create a new and improved human type. What he knew was the secret of his creature’s physical assemblage; he knew how to manipulate the material parts of nature to achieve an astonishing result. What he did not know was the secret of personality in nature. Yet he raced ahead, eager to play God, without knowing God’s most divine mystery. So he created something that was soulless. And when that monstrous thing appealed to him for the one gift that might redeem it from monstrosity, Frankenstein discovered to his horror that, for all his genius, it was not within him to provide that gift. Nothing in his science comprehended it. The gift was love. The doctor knew everything there was to know about his creature — except how to love it as a person.
To find the cultural meaning of modern science, for “Frankenstein’s monster,” read ” nature-at-large” as we in the modern West experience it.
In the early days of the scientific revolution, Robert Boyle, convinced of the “excellency” of the new “mechanical hypothesis,” insisted that nature, if it was to be mastered, must be treated like an “engine” or an “admirably contrived automaton.” His argument prophetically relegated to the dustbin every lingering effort to personify nature, even by remote metaphor.

The veneration, wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God. For many have not only looked upon it as an impossible thing to compass, but as something impious to attempt, the removing of those boundaries which nature seems to have put and settled among her productions; and whilst they look upon her as such a venerable thing, some make a kind of scruple of conscience to endeavor so to emulate her works as to excel them.

Here was a deliberate effort — and by a devout Christian believer? to cut science off from every trace of Hermetic or alchemical influence, from every connection with animist sympathy and visionary tradition. Boyle — like Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, and Hobbes — realized that herein lay the promise of material power. From that point on, it became permissible for the scientist to admire the mechanical intricacy of nature, but not to love it as a living presence endowed with soul and reflecting a higher order of reality. A machine can be studied zealously, but it cannot be loved. By virtue of that change of sensibilities — which may of course have transpired at a subliminal level of consciousness — the New Philosophy could lay claim to power (at least short-term manipulative power) but it had lost the anima mundi, which, as an object of love, belongs only to gnosis.
Still, from time to time, something of the spirit of gnosis intrudes itself into

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scientific thought, if only as a passing reflection upon some aspect of design in nature which hints that there is indeed something more to be known than conventional research can reveal. Science is not without such moments. But they appear only as autobiographical minutiae along the margins of “knowledge,” modest confessions of faith, personal eccentricities, a bit of sub-professional self-indulgence on the part of established great names. These ethical, aesthetic, and visionary aspects have long since become human interest sideshows of science, the sort of anecdotal material that never makes it into the textbooks or the standard curriculum, except perhaps as a whimsical footnote. And yet, have scientists never noticed how the lay public hangs upon these professions of wonder and ultimate belief, seemingly drawn to them with even more fascination then to the great discoveries? If people want more from science than fact and theory, it is because there lingers on in all of us the need for gnosis. We want to know the meaning of our existence, and we want that meaning to en noble our lives in a way that makes an enduring difference in the universe. We want that meaning not out of childish weakness of mind, but because we sense in the depths of us that it is there, a truth that belongs to us and completes our condition. And we know that others have found it, and that it has seized them with an intoxication we envy. It is precisely at this point?where we turn to our scientists for a clue to our destiny– that they have indeed a Promethean role to perform, as has every artist, sage, and seer. If people license the scientist’s unrestricted pursuit of knowledge as a good in its own right, it is because they hope to see the scientists yet discharge that role; they hope to find gnosis in the scientist’s knowledge. To the extent that scientists refuse that role, to the extent that their conception of what science is prevents them from seeking to join knowledge to wisdom, they are confessing that science is not gnosis, but something far less. And to that extent they forfeit – deservedly — the trust and allegiance of their society.
Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Cyclops, Dr. Caligari, Dr. Strangelove. The scientist who does not face up to the warning in this persistent folklore of mad doctors is himself the worst enemy of science. In these images of our popular culture resides a legitimate public fear of the scientist’s stripped-down, depersonalized conception of knowledge — a fear that our scientists, well-intentioned and decent men and women all, will go on being titans who create monsters.
What is a monster? The child of knowledge without gnosis, of power without spiritual intelligence.
The reason one despairs of discussing “alternative cognitive systems” with scientists is that scientists inevitably want an alternative system to do exactly what science already does to produce predictive, manipulative information about the structure and function of nature — only perhaps to do so more prolifically and more rapidly. What they fail to understand is that no amount of information on earth would have taught Victor Frankenstein how to redeem his flawed creation from monstrosity.
But there is, in the Hermetic tradition we have left far behind us, a myth which teaches how nature may, by meditation, prayer, and sacrifice, be magically transmuted into the living presence of the divine. That was the object of the

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alchemist’s Great Work, a labor of the spirit undertaken in love whose purpose was the mutual perfection of the macrocosm, which is the universe, and the microcosm, which is the human soul.

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze
At once the Soul of each and God of all?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

References

1. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 172.
2. Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 42.
3. J. Bronowsky, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 95.
4. Frances Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972). See also P. M. Rattansi, “The Social Interpretation of Science in the Seventeenth Century,” Science and Society 1600-1900 (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
5. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1971), pp. 5-7.
6. Robert Boyle, “A Free Inquiry into the Received Notion of Nature,” Works (1744), Ch. IV, p. 363.