These two examples show how dangerous it is to try to impose symbolic order and meaning upon the world before you really understand what the world is like. Nevertheless, we shall always do this because it is very difficult for human beings to tolerate the mysterious as such—what theologian Rudolph Otto calls the Mysterium tremendum of the world. It is so terrible and inexplicable that he has always had to put up a smoke screen of symbols between it and himself. In one of its functions, it may be said that language is a device for taking mysteriousness out of mystery. We have always done this, and unquestionably in future times historians will see that we are still doing it, perhaps not as flagrantly as the Aztecs or the Greeks did it, but probably very badly.
This tendency to impose premature order and meaning upon the universe is illustrated in the culture of the Middle Ages. As the great French historian of medieval art, Emile Mâle, points out, in the Middle Ages the idea of a thing was always more real than the thing itself. The study of things for their own sake held no meaning for thoughtful men. The task for the student of nature was to discover the eternal truth which God would have each thing express. We may now ask ourselves what were the eternal truths expressed by individual things in the Middle Ages: They were not generalizations based upon the humble observation of facts; medieval scholars were simply not interested in the humble observation of facts. They were only interested in illustrating in the external world something that they had read either in the scriptures or in the Greek philosophers whom they regarded as authorities.
We may say that the proper relationship between words and things had been reversed during the whole of the Middle Ages. The proper relationship, I presume, is that words should be regarded as arbitrary symbols standing for things. But the men of the Middle Ages looked at it the other way around. They regarded things as being illustrations of some general abstract principle to be found in Aristotle or in some part of the scriptures. As one reads medieval literature, one begins by being highly entertained by the extraordinary phenomenon of allegorical botany, of parables in natural history, of astronomy which tells fortunes.
But in a very short while—certainly I speak for myself—one becomes terribly oppressed by the awful humanization of nature. One has a sense of being boxed into a world where everything has a suffocating feeling of humanity instead of being other than humanity. To use a phrase of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the medieval world is one where everything ‘wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell’. It was only when this reversal of the relationship between words and things was changed, as a result of the new interest in science, that we entered a world where nature is refreshingly other than in the all too human world.
In our own time, we find that all the most horrifying aspects of contemporary life have arisen precisely from this wrong relationship between symbols and words. All the totalitarian tyrannies of our time have been based upon the wrong relationship of things and words; words have not been regarded by them as symbols arbitrarily standing for things, but things have been regarded as illustrations of words.
Take, for example, the whole Nazi racial doctrine. This would have been impossible if individual Jews and gipsies had been regarded as what they were—each of them a separate human personality. But they were not so regarded. Instead each of these persons was reduced to being merely the illustration of a pejorative label; the word ‘Jew’ or the word ‘gipsy’ was regarded as a category. And the individual humans, who were of course the only realities, were assimilated to this category; they were made to be merely illustrations of a bad category, which as such could be exterminated with a perfectly good conscience. What was being exterminated was not really a human being; it was merely the illustration of an idea.
We see the same thing under the Communist regimes, where individual human beings are lumped together merely as illustrations of capitalism, imperialism, cannibalistic bourgeoisie, and so on, and as such are regarded as something sub-human which it is permissible to destroy. There is no doubt at all that this tendency is one of the most dangerous which we have to face. It is one of the highest prices we have to pay for the inestimable benefit of language. We are forced to accept—because we accept the grammar and syntax of our language—the idea that whole classes of real individual things are in fact merely the expressions of some diabolic principle.
After all, one can say that wars can really only be fought if the purely human individuals engaged in them are disregarded and the opposite side is simply equated with the concretization of a bad abstraction. This is in fact what all war propaganda is: it is making people on our side believe that people on the other side are merely the concretization of very bad abstractions. I think the democratic countries don’t go quite as far in this as the other ones have done, but it remains an appalling danger.
Now let us consider the dangers on an intellectual level of having a wrong form of order and meaning in the world. A few years ago I became very interested in the history of what used to be called ‘animal magnetism’ and was later called ‘hypnosis’. When one examines the history of this very strange subject during the nineteenth century, one is flabbergasted by the attitude of official medicine, and, to some extent, of official science in general, towards the subject. Because the Victorian Weltanschauung had taken a certain form and the urge to order and meaning had stressed the fact that material objects were somehow much more real than psychological events, it was quite impossible for most medical men to behave in any kind of scientific or even rational way towards the phenomena of animal magnetism and hypnosis.
The whole theory of hypnotic anaesthesia was fully developed by James Esdaile in 1846, before the invention of chloroform and ether, and before the invention of aseptic surgery and antiseptics. Not only was Esdaile able to perform a great number of major operations which had never been performed before, he was able to reduce the death rate following surgery, which was then 29 per cent, to 5 per cent. One would have thought that the medical profession would have sat up and taken notice, but all that Esdaile got for his pains was to be hounded out of the profession, called a quack and a charlatan, and forbidden to practise at all.
It is extraordinary that the recently published textbook of Dr Milton Marmor, the anaesthesiologist at Cedars of Lebanon in Los Angeles, really just takes up where Esdaile left off 113 years ago, that simply from pure professional and academic dislike of unfamiliar ideas, this immensely valuable procedure was allowed to remain completely or virtually unexplored for more than a century. This wasn’t merely a malignancy; the members of the medical profession who persecuted Esdaile and his followers were completely the prisoners of their system of order and meaning, which had been developed in the past century or two, and they could not escape from it.
Undoubtedly the future will show that there are plenty of semantic prisons in which we are confined today which do not permit us to think straight about all kinds of very important subjects. It will undoubtedly be clear to the historians a hundred years from now, but it is not clear to us what these prisons are. We can only be quite sure that there are plenty of them.
The end
