Abstract
In modern times, Western philosophy eschews any metaphysical or occult references to invisible reality as being culturally obsolete. Modern culture now privileges language that reflects our unshakeable allegiance to materialism in which the things of the world no longer have any depth of meaning. This chapter compares two modern cultural approaches to invisible reality emerging in the late 20th century in response to the growing world-wide crisis of meaninglessness. The first approach gathers many different methodologies under the umbrella term The New Materialism. The second approach focusses on initiatory experiences once known as Spiritual Emergency. Both approaches are moving us towards a new understanding of matter, based on the reality of the invisible. Throughout the chapter, the author will italicise words such as “invisible,” “life,” “alive,” “alien,” “ether,” “spatial,” “virtual,” “fluid,” and “absence” in order to refer to a new kind of fluid, living, invisible matter that we are bringing to language in modern times.
TopIntroduction
The hypothesis of this book states that:
The cultural failure to respect the invisible is the source of most of our existing problems. For example, the air and ideas are invisible, but humans continue to pollute the air and the shared mental field of ideas with malicious abandon. The latest pandemic has reminded us that we share the air with each other and with uncountable organisms—viruses, etc., that exhibit their own powerful “sentience”. Their sentience exists on a continuum of scales that range from quanta, to molecules and cells, to biological systems, and to galaxies.
This chapter is an attempt to show that a wide cultural movement is underway to once again “respect the invisible” under the ontological conditions of modernity, and to learn how to think it. For example, a recent article by Nordmann argues for the invisible based on the historical Kantian distinction:
Noumena are distinct from phenomena. While the latter are the things as they appear to us and as we experience them, the noumena are the philosophically infamous and mysterious things-in-themselves. (Nordmann, 2005, p. 1)
Nordmann discusses the noumenal character of nanotechnology, in terms of size (“nano”=10-9 m.). Such tiny magnitudes of extension “are retreating from human access, perception, and control, and thus assume the character of … uncanny otherness [my italics]” (Nordman, 2005, p. 1). In other words, the author is thinking a level of matter that remains perceptibly inscrutable to us, beyond our control, somehow alive (uncanny otherness) and determinative. He is thinking a new kind of living matter that lies beyond the appearances yet influences our lives!
He goes on to further characterise this matter:
Its elusive character can be characterized … as a medium that structures human action without being present in experience as a structuring device—somewhat like blood in our bodies or money in our economies. (Nordman, 2005, p. 6)
Nordmann thus is one contributor to a world-wide movement seeking to think matter or things-in-themselves in a way that overcomes the subject-object disjunction that is crippling civilisation. This cultural movement, now spread across many disciplines, has been gathered together conveniently under one broad banner called New Materialism (Sanzo, 2018).
TopBackground
There is now almost universal recognition across disciplines that our present crisis, or impending catastrophe, is a consequence of the psychological distance we each feel from everything else in the material world, including other human beings (Tarnas, 2010). There are many ways to describe this distance, of course, but there is general agreement that we began to feel it most acutely during the 18th-19th centuries, after two or three thousand years of gradual withdrawal of our participation with matter, or nature, resulting finally in the “loss of an enchanted world” (Barfield, 1988). Spirit and matter had fallen completely apart as categories of experience and matter was increasingly privileged over spirit. The things of the world became mere objects without any inherent meaning! The metaphysical world was now completely overcome with the rise of nihilism (Kaufman, 1968). The end of the metaphysical world was felt as isolated, conscious subjects set against the rest of the inert and meaningless material world (Barfield, 1987).
This historical development in consciousness/world has led to the global crisis that we are now facing (Neumann, 1973). In response, sensing that the loss of the invisible has effectively disconnected us from all other living things, including other human beings, Western culture has turned, within the scope of various disciplines, to the work of bridging the gap to the invisible, in theoretical discourse at least, if not in actual experience. These efforts are seeking logically or phenomenologically a prior ground to the given appearances of the world (Dreyfus, 2019). This move gives rise to fresh questions such as: What gives rise to the appearances? Can we describe the appearing of the appearances? What makes them possible in the first place? Is there a reality prior to the appearances that we cannot reach with the reflective mind—a material reality invisible to the senses?
Key Terms in this Chapter
The Invisible: Best understood in this chapter analogously to the “invisibility” of music or speech when heard, or images “seen” when dreamed. This is a negative reality, unlike atoms which can be measured or seen indirectly via proxy. Materialists talk only about positivised invisibles (like visible matter only we can’t see it). This materialist habit must be seen through.
Consciousness/World: These terms are kept together in conformance with the knowledge that consciousness and the real appearances of the world are polarities. When one transforms, so does the other.
Initiation: A time-honoured cultural practice aimed at orienting the initiate to her “greater being” by exposing her to invisible ( negative ) realities at the threshold, as described in the case of Black Elk.
Threshold: This negative reality is now being approached materialistically (i.e., positivised ) by the hard sciences, asking, for example, “where” does quantum reality become cosmological reality, or existential phenomenology which is now asking how something comes to be in the first place. The term is also a way of approaching the 20 th century problematic of language and reality. We can experience the threshold in the hypnogogic state, for example, when we are awake yet subject to the negative reality of dream phenomena.