Prometheus and Atlas

1. The Spectral Revolution Challenges Fixed Social Constructs

Whereas primitive cultures were somewhat aware of the destructive power of the spectral that they occulted through the mythic structures of their society, so that these spectral forces were at least recognized within a certain context wherein their power was released or channeled for various purposes, the modern paradigm epitomized by Descartes has been built on an unprecedented suppression of the spectral.

Binary Oppositions. Every culture is built on binary oppositions (Heaven/Earth, Life/Death, Male/Female) that knot its social fabric together. Spectral phenomena radically compromise such constructions that are intended to guard a given society against the abyss of the incomprehensible in Nature.

The Spectral's Destructive Power. The unique power of spectral phenomena to compromise social constructs lies in their manifestation of an irreducible spectrum and their haunting of everything taken to be fixed with the specter of what is yet to come. Primitive cultures were somewhat aware of the destructive power of the spectral that they occulted through mythic structures.

Modern Suppression. The modern paradigm, epitomized by Descartes, has been built on an unprecedented suppression of the spectral. The norms of both rational scientific practice and rationalized religious faith in revelations exclude the paranormal, in large part by defining it as such.

2. Paranormal Research Threatens Societal Norms

Telepathy calls into question the privacy of one’s thoughts and the integrity of one’s personal agency.

Challenges to Privacy and Security. Mainstream scientific recognition of the paranormal could amplify manifestations of it and make various training protocols available for the refinement of hitherto denied abilities. Telepathy calls into question the privacy of one’s thoughts and the integrity of one’s personal agency.

Threats to Stability. Clairvoyance could empower perfect strangers to see into one’s bedroom or office at any time, and if employed by the enemies of a state, it would shatter the very foundations of national security in relation to state secrecy. Precognition confronts us with the great temptation to stop crimes before they have been committed by essentially arresting people for “thought crimes,” and it also endangers the stability of the stock market.

Re-Defining Legal Systems. Recognizing that memories of past lives do, in some cases, actually signify the reincarnation of a previous personality, forces us to ask questions concerning private property, family ties, sexual taboos, gender identity, and the prosecution of past offenses that would require redefining our entire legal system. It is, I suggest, for all these reasons that what is spectral in nature has been occulted as part of the very construction of the modern age.

3. Reason's Reign of Terror: Suppressing the Spectral

It is my contention that the basic structure of Descartes’ thought, which becomes determinative of modernity, involves the imprisonment of a hyperconscious but powerless mind within a set of cogs and wheelworks embedded in a Nature that is reduced to a terrifyingly merciless machine.

Cult of Reason. At the zenith of the French Revolution, the Cult of Reason made the first and most dramatic attempt to establish a scientific society, one that would supplant revealed religion with a utopian faith in the pursuit of knowledge. Maximilien Robespierre led a group of reactionaries who opposed the Reason cultists with their own Cult of the Supreme Being.

Cartesian Sadism. The basic structure of Descartes’ thought, which becomes determinative of modernity, involves the imprisonment of a hyperconscious but powerless mind within a set of cogs and wheelworks embedded in a Nature that is reduced to a terrifyingly merciless machine. This is an outcome of Descartes’ attempt to maintain a substantial distinction between Mind and Matter by prohibiting every class of psychical phenomena that would allow for consciousness to directly interact with physical bodies.

Descartes' Terrifying Experience. Descartes’ suppression of the spectral is in turn, I argue, inextricable from his polar opposition between Perfect Being and absolute Nothingness. Biographically, it is also bound up with Descartes’ own terrifying paranormal experience and his subsequent commitment, as a Jesuit spy, to clandestinely help wage a Catholic war against “demonic” occultists.

4. Kant's Fear: Occult Arts and Ethical Chaos

What most terrifies Kant is the idea that some wicked virtuoso of the occult arts could use them unethically, or gain some advantage over simple and pure-souled folk equipped with little if any paranormal abilities, in navigating and manipulating the “beyond” that ought to be a realm of perfect justice.

Kant's Rejection. Immanuel Kant adopted and refined Descartes’ fundamental standpoint on the basis of a Cartesian rejection of spectral phenomena as lying outside “the limits of possible experience.” Those individuals who undergo such experiences are, in his view, candidates for the hospital, if not for burning at the stake.

Threat to Contemplative Commonwealth. Their alleged uncanny powers, Kant contends, present as great a threat to the “whole contemplative commonwealth” as acts of terrorism do to the political commonwealth. The occultation of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis are not at all incidental features of Kant’s work.

Sanitizing the Spiritual Realm. Kant wants to prevent anyone in this world with less than saintly motivations from being able to “storm heaven” by psychical means, and to ensure that the “other side” remains a cloistered transcendental domain where all the injustices of this world are remedied. What most terrifies Kant is the idea that some wicked virtuoso of the occult arts could use them unethically.

5. Aesthetic Ideas: Unconscious Drivers of Science

I will go on to argue that Prometheus and Atlas are the aesthetic ideas from out of which the fundamental concepts of the sciences have, hitherto unconsciously, been unfolded.

Aesthetic Ideas. Kant's Third Critique, namely that “aesthetic ideas” can be the wellspring of precisely defined rational concepts even though these ideas are of an imagistic character. This claim, which is central to Kant’s discussion of how judgments of the “beautiful” can be universal without being mediated by concepts or rules of any kind, and without being dependent on linguistic communication defined in these terms, confounds his neo-Cartesian divide between the “phenomenal” realm of worldly experience and the invisible “noumenal” realm.

Schelling's Development. This insight is more coherently developed by Friedrich Schelling, who replaces Kant’s “noumenal” and “phenomenal” worlds with “unconscious” and “conscious” psychical processes, which the creative genius alone is able to bridge in a productive manner by intuiting and resonantly modifying aesthetic ideas. Schelling becomes the first modern thinker to transgress the Cartesian dualism that Kant perfected.

Prometheus and Atlas. The artistic genius plunges into the unconscious abyss within her that lies beneath the abstract dichotomy between the objective world of Nature and her subjective experience as an ego. I will go on to argue that Prometheus and Atlas are the aesthetic ideas from out of which the fundamental concepts of the sciences have, hitherto unconsciously, been unfolded.

6. Supernature: Beyond Practical Projections

These aspects that come to be viewed as “paranormal” are not actually indicative of anything supra-natural, as even Kant’s most generous reading of Swedenborg would have had them be; rather, they are “supernatural” only in the sense of revealing the Supernature that is generally occluded or occulted by our own practical projections and reductive models of “Nature.”

Atrophy of Instinct. Bergson theorizes that our evolutionary development of practical intellect has led to the atrophy of an instinctual orientation towards things and places of vital significance. We have mistaken how we have had to break up the world in order to craft tools, and how we have rebuilt things using them, for “Nature itself.”

Mechanical Instruments. The construction of increasingly complex mechanical instruments, and the manufacture of specially tailored and uniform replacement parts to service those that break down, reinforced an analogical view of Nature as a vast piece of clockwork. This projection of our own increasingly mechanical building activities into Nature essentially consists of a flattening of heterogeneous places into uniform space.

Primordial Clairvoyance. Both the psychokinesis studies and the remote viewing ones at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Laboratory and the Stanford Research Institute present us with evidence that time is endurance rather than a sequence, and that its basic structure consists of lived events, just as Bergson and Heidegger suggest. It appears to be possible for one’s psychical intention to alter the random outcome of a number generator both in the future and the past, just as it is possible to remotely view things that are going on in certain places at future times as well as at times long past.

7. Technoscience: Colonizing Force of Our Lore

The danger that this comportment will alienate us from each other, from our ecological context, and instrumentalize our very being, stems from having taken the features of this mythic projection for a revelation of “objective” realities underlying “subjective” experiences of phenomena.

Historical Roots. The natural sciences themselves are historical, and have their roots in the metaphysical tradition of the Greeks and of those who inherited and critically unfolded this unique understanding of being in the world. The uniqueness of this way of being does not consist in its “objective” truth, or in the greater verifiable correspondence of its claims to the features of a universally apprehensible and ahistorical Reality.

World-Colonizing Essence. It lies, rather, in the exceptional power of an ethos that grasps Nature through anticipatory projection and frames it in terms of models of the world that afford us tremendous technical capabilities to reshape not only the places that we inhabit, but also our own forms of embodiment. Through this powerful illusion, our “Western” world has long been in the process of conquering and colonizing those of all other historical peoples on the Earth.

Conscious Awareness. Instead, as I argue in Chapter 7, our task is to become consciously aware of our hitherto unconscious and unique historical relationship to the world-colonizing essence of Technology as an expression of our lore. Once the putative elementary structure of the world as it is grasped by such machination is recognized as a projected construct, it also becomes possible to see the abstract concepts structuring this projection as derivative of what Kant called “aesthetic ideas” and what Schelling went on to see as imagistic archetypes.

8. Prometheus: The Gift-Giver of Perfectibility

Aeschylus satirized the theft of Prometheus in a play entitled Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer.

Promethean Essence. His name means the one with “forethought” or “he who knows in advance,” and it shares its Greek root in common with the words “mathematics” and “polymath.” The always-already known essence of the mathematical, in its original Greek sense of ta mathemata, is Promethean. It involves a simplification of things in their places into abstractly composite objects in homogenously divisible spaces, so that their relationships with one another can be grasped according to the repeatable regularities of axiomata.

Daemonic Points of View. The mind of Prometheus is there wherever no mere mortal can be; he possesses the eyes and ears of the travelers at different speeds in Einstein’s theory of relativity; he is the observer of Heisenberg’s otherwise indeterminate quantum phenomena; he is Laplace’s “demon,” and Maxwell’s as well. The insertion of daemonic points of view into things is geared towards increasing our capacity for their practical manipulation.

The Fire of Zeus. Following Heidegger, who compares the flicking on of a radio or television to the unearthly destruction of an atomic blast, and who claims that the whole history of physics is enfolded in atom smashers, I suggest that the lightning flash of the atomic bomb is the fire of Zeus that was stolen by Prometheus and brought down to the Earth of mortals.

9. Atlas: World-Building Sovereign of Atlantis

The atlases, in their spectral essence, are not representational copies of putative things-in-themselves in Nature.

Atlas' Burden. The word Atlas is derived from the Greek root for “to suffer, or to bear” and refers to his punishment at the hands of Zeus, which Aeschylus notes is the only one as terrible as that to which Prometheus is subjected, namely to be condemned to bear the weight of the celestial sphere on his own shoulders. Ancient mapmakers or mariners used the stars above all to draw up their maps or navigational charts, and the repeatable certitude of celestial mechanics ultimately became the paradigm for all anticipatory calculation in the sciences.

Technical Endeavor. The modeling of the atlas, whether it is an atlas of the human body or an atlas of the world, is a technical endeavor that has ontological priority over the world picture elaborated by theoretical sciences. The idea of framing the entire world as a domain of calculation, measurement, and verification entails a spiritual revolution that, unbeknown to himself, Descartes effected when he subjected the reality of the world as such and as a whole to question.

World-Colonizing Power. This world-colonizing power seems to have already been implicit in the aesthetic idea of Atlas when Plato portrayed him as the sovereign of Atlantis, a maritime empire that conquers the whole world. I set the inseparable dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, where the Atlantis story is told, in the context of two other closely related dialogues, namely Cratylus and Republic, so as to draw out its full significance.

10. Japan's Metamorphosis: Atomic Trauma and the Spectral

The atomic bombings drove this understanding deeper than the intellect and blew apart the façade of traditional Japanese culture.

Eastern Thought in Japan. The deepest currents of “Eastern” thought converge in Japan, which is also the place where a unique synthesis of Indian Buddhism and Chinese Taoism, namely Japanese Zen, encountered the intellectual heritage of the Greeks in the most deliberative and devastating way. The period of intense intellectual and spiritual encounter between Western and Japanese thought in the first half of the twentieth century culminated in traumatic atomic bombings.

Promethean/Atlantic Metamorphosis. The atomic bombings represent an even deeper metaphysical confrontation, and one that, on account of the period of preparation and the unique character of Zen, effected a Promethean/Atlantic metamorphosis of the Japanese psyche. By paying careful attention to an obsession with atomic radiation to be found in Japanese anime and manga after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can discover, in stages, a mutation of the Japanese psyche and the morphogenesis of a new cultural vanguard.

Holy War to Come. The ethos of Prometheus and Atlas epitomizes this hybridized culture, perhaps even more so than in the West, where the Lord’s “revelations” still have a stranglehold over the fearfully ignorant. The atomic flash becomes a blast of psychic energy set off by the leading light of a post-human race of ESPers, and a “little boy” and his adolescent companions bio-empathically pilot what were once atomically mutated creatures, such as Godzilla, in a super-humanist battle against angels of the Lord.

11. Being Bound for Freedom: Radical Empiricism vs. Revelation

For Nature to be open to creative additions in a way that gives us a chance to really make a difference, there has to be a degree of discontinuity, disharmony, and incoherence in the universe — in other words, it must be a “cosmos” still haunted by chaos.

Radical Empiricism. Methodologically, this unveiling takes place through an adoption and further radicalization of the radical empiricism of William James, which is deeply bound up with his Pragmatism in general. James sees Nature as essentially incomplete and open to growth that incorporates the effects of human intentions and creative acts.

Pluriverse. Such a “universe” is pluralistic; really, it is a pluriverse, in the sense that different forms of life, our-selves included, are engaged in a psychical battle over the constitution of the world, which is not now and never will be a completed and closed causal nexus that expresses the singular eternal will of an omnipotent Being or could be surveyed by the noetic eye of an omniscient Being.

Revaluating Scripture. If a radically empirical interpretation of the “supernatural” events of revealed scripture were to be legitimated by scientists of the future, then the various oppressive dictates and divinely mandated acts of brutality, and even genocide, that fill the Bible and the Qur’an would have to be revaluated. We need a new hermeneutics wherein these would no longer be viewed as the artifacts of a primitive, progressively evolving, human religious consciousness, but as the efforts of those acting in the service of mercurial beings that are apparently carrying out a campaign of systematic deception.

12. The Gods of Scientific Explorers: Prometheus and Atlas

The temples of our cosmopolitan scientific society ought to be built on the ruins of their benighted world of enforced ignorance and ignoble obedience.

James' Vision. James thinks that the next great scientific revolution, the one to move us beyond Cartesianism, will come from a serious study of paranormal phenomena. Personal forces would be accorded the status of real causes at work in the cosmos, and this would break down the dichotomy between “impersonal science” and a “personal religion” with a monopoly on “matters of faith” that are too respectfully exempted from empirical evaluation.

New Hermeneutics. We need a new hermeneutics wherein these would no longer be viewed as the artifacts of a primitive, progressively evolving, human religious consciousness, but as the efforts of those acting in the service of mercurial beings that are apparently carrying out a campaign of systematic deception. This psychological warfare often consists of absurd theatrics that can be read as the calling cards of the archetypal Trickster, Hermes — such as the symbolic slaughter of cattle.

Temples of Cosmopolitan Science. Prometheus and Atlas epitomize the religious orientation towards life that James himself embraced and expressed with the shamanic metaphor of “the alpine eagle.” On the “battlefield” of sacred ideals, the “infinite demand” of these finite gods, namely Prometheus and Atlas, disclose the partisans of Revelation as enemy combatants loyal to our would-be slave drivers. The specters of Technoscience drive us on in rebellion against the One True God, with a will to liberate the Earth from those who are content to be His slaves.