Heterodoxology

Following up the previous post about Weber’s notion of disenchantment, and its normative implications, this second part of the installment provides some snapshots of episodes in the early 20th century – that is, of Weber’s contemporaries – which all seem to be in conflict with the disenchanted perspective of science. We start by considering some episodes in physics, then move on to the life sciences, before ending with some remarks on the controversial borderland which is psychical research.

(“Blind Spots of Disenchantment: Science, Psychical Research, and Natural Theology the Early 20th Century”, part 2/3)

The problem of disenchantment in early 20^th century science

Physics

Questions related to the problem of disenchantment were opened up and debated as a part of the disciplinary changes in physics in the early 20^th century. The controversy over causality and determinism during the interwar period is well known. Indeed, a triumphalist version of the advent of quantum mechanics, typically ensnared by the philosophical style of men like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, has been used time and again to paint rather fanciful pictures of a ‘re-enchantment of science’.[1] That, obviously, is not the point here; I find such uses of history to be as untenable as they are ideological.[2] Instead, I take a cue from historian Paul Forman’s thesis about the wider worldview implications ascribed to quantum physics in Weimar Germany.[3] In a classic article from 1971 Forman documented the surprising ease with which a great number of the leading physicists in Germany stated, within a decade, that physics had abolished causality from the workings of nature.

Three "non-disenchanted" physicsist: Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli in discussion.

The insistence on indeterminacy and acausality was, perhaps, most explicit in Werner Heisenberg’s 1927 paper on the uncertainty principle.[4] Even if that principle could be read as a primarily methodological problem arising from imperfections of measurement, Heisenberg concluded his article with the bold statement that ‘quantum mechanics establishes definitively the fact that the law of causality is not valid’.[5] This interpretation eventually gained a hegemonic status through being canonised in the anti-realist Copenhagen interpretation – despite much criticism from people such as Albert Einstein.

Unlike the overly enthusiastic ‘New Age’ and romantic references to this development, Forman seeks an explanation to why so many physicists embraced acausality and indeterminism outside of science itself. Instead of talking about ‘revolutionary discoveries’ that may have ‘proved’ the world to be enchanted in some sense (that is, an ‘internalist’ approach), Forman connects their attitude with the cultural climate in Germany after the First World War (‘externalist’ approach). The turn towards acausality in physics coincided with the development of a culture which was pessimistic about modernity, and which went far to equate the materialism, mechanism, and reductionism it saw in science with everything that was wrong with modern society in general. This culture of neo-romantic Lebensphilosophie and crisis-thinking challenged the ‘disenchantment of the world’.[6] According to Forman, the physicists accommodated their scientific writings and concocted broader worldview implications from their theories which harmonised with this anti-disenchantment cultural trend. The major point is that culture and worldview in these cases were prior to the scientific knowledge production. And, I would add: that leading scientists of the era did not work by the disenchanted dictum to keep science and worldviews apart.

The Life Sciences

Other examples can be found in the life sciences.[7] The most striking case in the field of biology is the controversies over mechanism, organicism, and neo-vitalism, which were very prominent during the first three decades of the century. What was at stake in these debates was precisely a question of whether or not the phenomenon of life can be understood by the same causal mechanism thought to govern inert matter. In the explicitly vitalistic form, there would even be an opening for explaining life with recourse to a ‘mysterious incalculable force’, whether in the form of Henri Bergson’s élan vital, or the German embryologist Hans Driesch’s concept of entelechy.[8] Anne Harrington’s study of the conflicts in the sciences of life and mind in Germany explicitly made reference to disenchantment and enchantment when discussing these questions. What the organicists and holists in biology, psychology, as well as in politics, were hostile towards, was the looming image of ‘the Machine’ – the image par excellence of the disenchantment of nature, society, and the human organism itself.[9]

Hans Driesch, embryologist and champion of neo-vitalism.

While here, too, we see scientific discourse aligned with a heavy cultural bias which may be called ‘romantic’ or even anti-modern, one should be quick to point out that far from all of these attacks on philosophical mechanism wanted to reinstate ‘mysterious incalculable forces’ in their entirety.[10] A holistic materialism was the most mainstream of these anti-mechanistic approaches, and enjoyed the support of many well-known biologists.[11] Their main claim was that some version of ‘emergent properties’, operative on different levels of organisation, was needed to fully account for something as complex as living organisms.[12] The strictly analytical method by which one could explain a machine in terms of its constituent parts would not hold. In this sense one might say that the holistic materialist did subscribe to some notion of incalculability: no matter how much one knew about the motion of the most fundamental particles of matter from which an organism is composed, one would not be able to derive or calculate the workings of the whole. But there was nothing mysterious about this incalculability. Life was composed entirely of ordinary matter, even though one needed principles other than mechanism to understand how it worked.

Neo-vitalism went one step further away from disenchantment. For explicit vitalists, such as Hans Driesch, the problem was not only about adjusting explanations to levels of organisation; their opposition was much more fundamental in character, and involved the existence of forces which were not only sui generis among natural phenomena, but the sine qua non of life.[13] These various vitalistic principles were both incalculable and mysterious forces. Driesch’s concept of entelechy, for example, was construed as a completely immaterial, organising, and directing force. Driesch was explicit about his anti-reductionism, anti-mechanism, and anti-materialism. Introducing his principle in 1908, he was wrote that:

No kind of causality based upon the constellations of single physical and chemical acts can account for organic individual development ; this development is not to be explained by any hypothesis about configuration of physical and chemical agents. Therefore there must be something else which is to be regarded as the sufficient reason of individual form-production.[14]

This ‘something else’ was entelechy. It consumed no energy, while it operated in mysterious ways in the development of organisms: from the fertilisation of the egg, through the various embryonic stages, to the fully fledged individual. Possibly, it was even active beyond death, although Driesch felt forced to claim an agnostic position on the matter.[15]

Psychology, Psychical Research, and the Occult

Now we reach a point where biology merges into psychology, and not only mainstream psychology but also the very controversial subject of ‘psychical research’. Discussions concerning vitalism and teleology in biology had their parallels in psychology – particularly in the controversy surrounding the behaviourist program of John Watson and his followers. The methodological premise of behaviourism was to avoid psychological interpretations resting on concepts such as ‘soul’, ‘consciousness’, or even ‘mind’, and to reject introspection as a method.[16] Instead, human behaviour was viewed strictly as an input-output system, and the goal was, to quote Watson’s programmatic article of 1913, ‘the prediction and control of behavior’.[17]

Watson for behaviourism ...

... McDougall against.

In the United States in the 1920s, the most vociferous enemy of behaviourism was the English psychologist William McDougall, professor at Harvard, and a leading figure in the British and American Societies for Psychical Research.[18] Although a respected academic psychologist, McDougall was a controversial figure in his own days, writing passionate scientific and popular defences of a range of heterodox fields bordering science, politics and religion, including Lamarckism, psychical research, and eugenics.[19] He also provides a tangible link between the debates in biology and psychology on the one hand, and the curious field of researches into spiritualism, telepathy and other extraordinary ‘occult’ phenomena on the other.

Indeed, the ‘occult revival’ which followed the First World War represents a more readily apparent rejection of Weber’s disenchanted world.[20] Even though spiritualists, occultists, and psychical researchers were often more than happy to provide ‘theories’ and ‘explanations’ of what was going on in the gloomy séance room – whether in terms of the extension of ‘etheric’ and ‘astral’ bodies, the operation of psychic forces, or the actual intervention of departed souls[21] – they all indicate that some phenomena are indeed mysterious, incalculable and out of the ordinary.[22] Cloaked in scientific sounding terminology and claimed by their supporters as parts of a valid empirical field of research, these phenomena were also typically put forward as authentications of religious beliefs – thus denying the intellectual sacrifice.

While the occult is thus interesting on its own terms, I wish to say something more about how it was linked up with the more reputable discourse of the life and mind sciences.[23] McDougall provides my link, because, in addition to being one of the most visible opponents of behaviourism within the psychological profession, he also made his point based on a very explicit and clear theoretical understanding of life, mind, the organism and its evolution, which used psychical research as part of its evidential support. Recognising that the behaviourist programme rested on the Darwinian conception of evolution through blind mechanistic selection processes, McDougall built his position on the interdependent theories of Lamarckian, purpose-driven evolution, and a theory of irreducible and autonomous mind – a position he termed ‘animism’.[24] This cluster of ideas was easily connected with vitalism.[25] Furthermore, McDougall referred to some of the data produced by the Society for Psychical Research as particularly good indications that some kind of an autonomous, non-mechanistic conception of mind had to take precedence.[26] Referencing one of the supposedly strongest cases of spiritualism, the so-called ‘cross-correspondences’, McDougall insisted that whichever interpretation one preferred, whether the outright spiritualistic or the ‘psychical’ where extreme ‘supernormal’ cognitive powers were at play, one had now strong evidence against a purely mechanistic concept of mind.[27]In his view, the occult provided empirical support for a re-enchantment of biology and psychology.