The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman Page B

precisely in

the act of identification, and this identification is as much sensual

as it is intellectual. It is a totality of experience: the "sensuous

intellect," if the reader can imagine such a thing. We have so lost

the ability to make this identification that we are left today with

only two experiences that consist of participating consciousness: lust

and anxiety. As I make love to my partner, as I immerse myself in her

body, I become increasingly "lost." At the moment of orgasm, I am the

act; there is no longer an "I" who experiences it. Panic has a similar

momentum, for if sufficiently terrified I cannot separate myself from

what is happening to me. In the psychotic (or mystic) episode, my skin

has no boundary. I am out of my mind, I have become my environment. The

essence of original participation is the feeling , the bodily perception,

that there stands behind the phenomena a "represented" that is of the

same nature as me -- 'mana,' God, the world spirit, and so on.13 This

notion, that subject and Object, self and other, man and environment,

are ultimately identical, is the holistic world view.
     
     
Of course, we sometimes experience participation in less intense forms,

although sexual desire and panic remain the best examples. In truth --

and we shall treat this in detail in Chapter 5 -- participation is the

rule rather than the exception for modern man, although he is (unlike his

premodern counterpart) largely unconscious of it. Thus as I wrote the

first few pages of this chapter, down to this page, at least, I was so

absorbed in what I was doing that I had no sense of myself at all. The

same experience happens to me at a movie, a concert, or on a tennis

court. Nevertheless, the consciousness of official culture dictates my

"recognition" that I am not, and can never be, my experiences. Whereas

my premodern counterpart felt, and saw, that he was his experiences --

that his consciousness was not some special, independent consciousness --

I classify my own participation as some form of "recreation," and see

reality in terms of the inspection and evaluation Plato hoped men would

achieve. I thus see myself as an island, whereas my medieval or ancient

predecessor saw himself more like an embryo. And although there is no

going back to the womb, we can at least appreciate how comforting and

meaningful such a state of mind, and view of reality, truly was.
     
     
But was this view at all real? Weren't my predecessors simply living

in the same world as I am, but somehow conceptualizing it differently

(i.e., incorrectly)? Doesn't the subject/object dichotomy represent a

distinct advance in human knowledge over this primitive, even orgiastic

identification of self and other? These questions, which are all

essentially asking the same thing, are the ones most crucial to the

history of consciousness, and require closer scrutiny. For there are only

two possibilities here. Either original participation, which was the basic

mode of human cognition (despite the gradual attenuation of that mode)

down to the late sixteenth century, was an elaborate self-deception; or

original participation really did exist, was an actual fact.14 We shall

try to decide between these two alternatives by means of an analysis of

the paradigm science of participation, alchemy.
     
     
If the standard history textbooks are to be believed, alchemy was the

attempt to find a chemical substance that, when added to lead, transformed

it into gold. Alternatively, it was the attempt to prepare a liquid,

the 'elixir vitae,' that would prolong human life indefinitely. Since

neither of these goals is attainable, the entire alchemical enterprise is

dismissed as a nonsensical episode (more than two thousand five hundred

years) in the history of science, a venture that could be viewed as tragic

were it not so silly in content. At most, modern science concedes that

the alchemists did, in the pursuit of their spurious