Nature loves to hide (Becoming is a secret process).
~ Heraclitus (Guy Davenport translation)
The sciences must all be made poetic. ~ Novalis
If God can become man, he can also become element, stone, plant,
animal. Perhaps there is a continual Redemption in nature. ~ Novalis
If the world is a tree, we are the blossoms. ~ Novalis
Santos-Dumont, the Parisian-Brazilian aviation pioneer and inventor of the airplane, during a sojourn in his native land in 1934, saw federalist planes dropping bombs on rebel troops. He hanged himself later that day. His last words, as reported by an elevator oprerator: "I never thought my invention would cause bloodshed between brothers. What have I done?"
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For Historians to say that A inevitably leads to Z -- for example, that German Romanticism leads inevitably to Reaction, or that Marx leads directly to Stalin -- is to mistake the bitter wisdom of hindsight for a principle of fatality. Such determinism also insults all revolutionary resistance with the implicit charge of futility: -- Since the real Totality is always perfectly inevitable, its enemies are always idiots. Global Capital was inevitable and now its here to stay -- ergo the entire movement of the Social amounts to a sheer waste of time and energy. The ruination of nature was fated, hence all resistance is futile, whether by ignorant savages or perverse eco-terrorists. Nothing's worth doing except that which is done: there can be no different world.
The "Ruination of Nature"
For Christianity nature is fallen, locus of sin and death, while heaven is a city of crystal and metal. For Capital nature is a resource, a pit of raw materials, a form of property. As nature begins to "disappear" in the late eighteenth century, it comes to seem more and more ruined. For some perhaps a Romantic, even a magical ruin (as in the dreams of Renaissance magi and their "love of ruins", grottos, the broken and "grotesque") -- but by others felt simply as useless waste, a wrecked place where no one lives except monsters, vagabonds, animals: the uncanny haunt of ghouls and owls. "Second Nature" meaning culture, or even "Third Nature" meaning Allah knows what precisely, have usurped and erased all wilderness. What remains but mere representation? -- a nostalgia for lost Edens, Arcadias and Golden Ages? -- a ludicrous sentamentality disguised as what? -- as a sacred theory of earth?
The view of Nature as Ruin depends in part (or half-consciously) on the concept of a Cartesian ERGO SUM alone in the universe where everything else is dead matter and "animals have no soul", mere meat machines. But if the human body remains part of nature in nature, then even the most consistent materialist would have to admit that nature is not quite yet dead.
Science, taking over the mythic task of religion, strives to "free" consciousness from all mortal taint. Soon we'll be posthuman enough for cloning, total prosthesis, machinic immortality. But somehow a shred of nature may remain, a plague perhaps, or the great global "accident", blind Nature's revenge, meteors from outer space, etc. -- "you know the score", as William Burroughs used to say.
Taking the long view (and allowing for noble exceptions) science does precisely what State and Capital demand of it: -- make war, make money. "Pure" science is allowed only because it might lead to technologies of death and profit -- and this was just as true for the old alchemists who mutated into Isaac Newton, as for the new physicists who ripped open the structure of matter itself. Even medicine (seemingly the most altruistic of sciences) advances and progresses primarily in order to increase productivity of workers and generate a world of healthy consumers.
Does Capital make death ultimately more profitable than life? No, not exactly, although it may seem so to a citizen of Bhopal / Love Canal / Chernobyl / [Japan ~R.S.]. In effect it might be said that profit equals death, in the sense of Randolph Bournes' quip about war as the health of the state (which incidentally means that "Green Capitalism" is an abject contradiction in terms).
Another science might have been possible. Indeed if we reject fatalism, another science might yet come to be. A new paradigm is always conceivable, and theories now considered defeated, lost, wrong, or absurd, might even (someday) be reconfigured into a paradigmatic pattern, a science for life rather than death. Signs of emergence of such a science are always present -- because science itself wants to deal with truth, and life is true and real. But the emergence is always -- in the long run -- crushed and suppressed by the "inevitable" demands of technology and Capital. It's our tragic fate to know and yet be unable to act.
Among those who do act, the scientists and warriors, many believe (for the most part sincerely) that they're serving progress and democracy. In their secret hearts perhaps some know they serve Death, but they do it anyway because they're nihilists, cynically greedy for big budgets and Nobel prizes. A few fanatics actually hate body, hate Earth, hate trees -- and serve as shills for politicians and corporations. In general most people find all this normal. Only a few awake -- but are blocked from action.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a sort of three-way scientific paradigm war was waged in England and Europe. The contenders were, first: Cartesianism -- which denied action at a distance and tried to explain gravity by a corpuscular theory that reduced the universe to a clock-like mechanismset in motion by "God"; second, Hermeticism, the ancient science of the micro / macrocosm, which believed firmly in action at a distance but failed to explain gravity -- and (even worse) failed to achieve the transmutation of lead into gold, which at least would have secured for it the enthusiastic support of State and Capital; and, third, the school of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, culminating in the Royal Society -- and the Industrial Revolution.
This scheme is vastly oversimplified of course. The actual history of "the triumph of modern science" is far more complex than the usual triumphalist version. We know for example that some of the very founders of modern science were closet Hermeticists. Bacon's New Atalantis exhibits strong Rosicrucian tendencies. Erasmus Darwin, Boyle, Priestly, Benjamin Franklin, and most nototriously, Isaac Newton, all immersed themselves in occult studies. Newton devoted millions of words to alchemy but never published a single one of them. William Blake, who skewered Newton's dead, "Urizenic" rationalism, had no idea that Newton was an alchemist. I've always suspected that Newton simply stole the idea of gravity as action at a distance (an invisible force) from Hermeticism. Amazingly, the math worked. The Royal Society suppressed its own Hermetic origins and (especially after 1688) adhered to the new bourgeois monarchy, emergent capitalism, and Enlightenment rationalism. The spooky nature of Newtonian gravity still bothers some scientists, who persist in looking for corpuscular "gravitations". But the Newtonians won the paradigm war and "Newton's Sleep" (as Blake called it) still dims the eyes with which we perceive and experience reality, despite the new spookiness of relativity and quantum paradoxes.
Admittedly this historical sketch is very rough, and offered with some trepidation. The whole story of the paradigm war remains quite murky, in part because a great deal of research is still being written from a History of Science p.o.v. deeply infected with triumphalism. True, it's no longer fashionable to sneer at the alchemists or write as if everyone in the Past were stupid. But alchemy and hermeticism in general are still viewed in the light of modern science as failed precursors. The central hermetic doctrine of the "ensouled universe" receives no credence or even sympathy in academia -- and very little grant money goes to magicians.
Therefore I offer only a tentative hypothesis. It appears that both the Cartesians and the Newtonians happily agreed in their eagerness to discard and deride the central thesis of the hermetic paradigm, the idea of the living Earth. Descartes envisioned only "dead matter", Newton used the concept of invisible but material forces; and their followers turned their back on any "sacred theory of earth", banishing not only God from their clockwork oranges but even life itself. As Novalis put it, under the hands of these scientists "friendly nature died, living behind only dead, quivering remnants". These loveless scientists see nature as sick or even dead, and their search for truth leads only to "her sickroom, her charnel-house".
Goethe, too, attacked the kind of science that bases itself on death -- the butterfly pinned under glass or dissected rather than the butterfly living and moving. In his great work on the morphology of plants he founded a new branch of botany. Or rather, perhaps not quite "new." Brilliant as it was, it had predecessors. In some sense it was in fact based on hermeticism and especially on Paracelcus, the great sixteenth century alchemist. German adherents of Naturphilosophie, and such independent thinkers as Goethe, or indeed Novalis (who was trained as a scientist and professional mining engineer), might really be seen as neo-hermeticists, steeped in Paracelsus, Jakob Boehme, and the Rosicrucian literature. We might call this whole complex or weltanschauung, "Romantic Science".
I believe that today's ecological resistance cannot afford to ignore its own sources in a vain attempt to reconcile itself with the Totality and scientific apotheosis of Global Capital. Romantic Science is literally a sine qua non for the resistance to ecological disintegration. I would like to argue the case (tho' I'd be hard put to prove it) that the "new" scientific paradigm we're looking for to replace the dead-matter / material-force scientific world-view of Enlightenment / State / Capital, can best be found in the perennial but underground tradition of hermetic-Romantic science. Something very much like a manifesto for this movement can still be gleaned from The Disciples at Sais by Novalis, a.k.a. Count Friedrich von Hardenberg.
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Everything divine has a history; can it be that nature, the one totality by which
man can measure himself, should not be bound together in a history, or -- and
this is the same thing -- that it should have no spirit? Nature would not be nature
if it had no spirit, it would not be the unique counterpart to mankind, not the
indispensable answer to the mysterious question, or the question to this never-
ending answer. (85)
What is the flame that is manifested everywhere? A fervent embrace, whose sweet
fruits fall like sensuous dew. Water, first-born child of airy fusions, cannot deny
its voluptuous origin and reveals itself an element of love, and of its mixture with
divine omnipotence on earth. Not without truth have ancient sages sought the
origin of things in water, and indeed, they spoke of a water more exalted than the
sea and well water. A water in which only primal fluidity is manifested, as it is
manifested in liquid metal, therefore should men always revere it as divine. How
few up to now have immersed themselves in the mysteries of fluidity, and there are
some in whose drunken soul this surmise of the highest enjoyment and the highest
life has never awakened. In thirst this world soul is revealed, this immense
longing for liquefaction. The intoxicated feel only too well the celestial delight of
the liquid element, and ultimately all pleasant sensations are multiform flowings
and stirrings of those primal waters in us. (103-105)
Within us there lies a mysterious force that tends in all directions, spreading from
a center hidden in infinite depths. If wondrous nature, the nature of the senses and
the nature that is not of the senses, surrounds us, we believe this force to be an
attraction of nature, an effect of our sympathy with her. (28)
A man born blind cannot learn to see, though you may speak to him forever of
colors and lights and distant shapes. No one will fathom nature, who does not, as
though spontaneously, recognize and distinguish nature everywhere, who does not
with an inborn creative joy, a rich and fervent kinship with all things, mingle with
all of nature's creatures through the medium of feeling, who does not feel his way
into them. (109)
The thinking man returns to the original function of his existence, to creative
contemplation, to the point, where knowledge and creation were united in a
wondrous mutual tie, to that creative moment of true enjoyment, of inward self-
conception. If he immerses himself completely in the contemplation of this
primeval phenomenon, the history of the creation of nature unfolds before him in
newly emerging times and spaces like a tale that never ends, and the fixed point
that crystallizes in the infinite fluid becomes for him a new revelation of the
genius of love, a new bond between the Thou and the I. A meticulous account of
this inward universal history is the true theory of nature. The relations within his
thought world and its harmony with the universe will give rise to a philosophical
system that will be the faithful picture and formula of the universe. (93)
Happy I call this son, this darling of nature, whom she permits to behold her in
her duality, as a power that engenders and bears, and in her unity, as an endless,
everlasting marriage. His life will be a plenitude of all pleasures, a voluptuous
chain, and his religion will be the real, the true naturalism. (111)
From ~ The Disciples at Sais: A Sacred Theory of Earth, by Peter Lamborn Wilson
In the book ~ Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, pgs. 9-13, 14, 15, 22-25
By ~ Peter Lamborn Wilson, Christopher Bamford and Kevin Townley
Novalis quotes from his work, The Disciples at Sais
