Science and Disenchantment: Galileo’s Plank and the Shaman’s Pole.
Science and Disenchantment: Galileo’s Plank and the Shaman’s Pole. « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
GALILEO HAD A plank down which he rolled different-sized metal balls. He was questioning Aristotle, according to whom bigger balls should have reached the ground first. But they didn’t. All the balls, whatever their size, arrived at the same time. This was the plank of disenchantment, of measurement and close observation. When the balls reached the bottom of the plank, two thousand years of Aristotelianism died there and then, and ever since, experiment has taken over from scripture. Don’t take anyone’s word for it: Nullius in verba became the motto of the Royal Society later in that century, the seventeeth.
ACCORDING TO MIRCEA Eliade, in shamanistic communities, the shaman’s home has a pole (sometimes a tree) which goes through the roof. During the ceremonies of initiation the shaman climbs to the end of this pole, thus establishing that he has journeyed to the extremities of perception, travelled where the non-initiated members of the community cannot go. He returns with a different level of consciousness, an ability to perceive and heal illness, an awareness of the realm of the spirits. He is now fully initiated.
MUST WE CHOOSE one or the other of these as our axis mundi? We live, it seems, between the pole and the plank; between our continuing wish to be enchanted and our eagerness to disenchant the world through science (to know it as it really is, not as we would wish it to be). The question is put to us daily: which is it to be? But is it possible that the choice is a false one, like being asked to choose your left mental hemisphere or your right? Are we being told we must choose one side of the paper or the other? Maybe the pole and the plank represent complementary aspects of the human condition. Could they both be the expression of fundamental needs?
Why Do We Represent?
To represent the world is to absent ourselves temporarily from it. We cannot be seamlessly situated in the present moment, and also be simultaneously situated so as to create a representation. The creation of a representation requires a separation from that which is represented; we cannot simply merge into the perception. We disengage from the present and absorb ourselves instead in what Max Raphael called ‘the means of figuration’.1 Here then the scientific and the artistic moments share at least one condition of existence: displacement from utter absorption in the sensuous moment.
Were our earliest intellectual acts in fact moments of orientation? Did we have to remove ourselves from the sensuous continuum in order to situate ourselves intellectually in the world? Constellations may well have been the first moment of art and the first moment of science too. At that stage in human history there was no distinction between the two. What is interesting about the constellations is that they are both there and not there. It is our moment of perception, linking up the light of different stars from different times, which creates the constellations; and yet our astronomical charts are still filled with them. These gods, goddesses and mythical hunters populate the heavens. In constellations, the past and the present co-exist; different planes of reality are brought together to form mythic shapes. There is only one single plane upon which these realities co-exist, and that is the plane of perception.