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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2012
This article explores crossovers from Eastern philosophy and spirituality to contemporary science and medicine in the West. My interest is not so much in specific lines of historical transmission, as in the channels through which they flow. In particular, my argument is that different ontologies – visions of how the world is – either facilitate or block such exchanges. As an example, think about physics. The ontology of mainstream physics is a modern, dualist one, inasmuch as physical thought revolves around a material world from which anything human is absent, and the human leftovers fall to the humanities and social sciences. This ontology, more or less by definition, blocks any resonance with Eastern ideas or practices, and, accordingly, they are almost entirely absent from the history of physics, except, importantly, in lines of work on the foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics. If one meditates on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, boundaries between the observer and the observed start to unravel, the dualist ontology erodes, and there, indeed, one finds all sorts of resonances with the East, as elaborated in an endless list of books that includes, for example, The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. That is my basic idea: resonances with the East spring forth in Western science whenever modern dualism starts to fray around the edges. But this essay is not about physics, and I turn now to the post-war history of cybernetics in Britain and its rather different non-modern ontology.
1 Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (London: Fontana, 1976), Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (London: Fontana, 1980). David Bohm’s non-standard approach to quantum mechanics often figures prominently in this connection; see Orlando Fernandez, ‘Esotericism and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: David Bohm (1917–1992),’ paper presented at the 20th IAHR World Congress, Toronto, 15–21 August 2010. More recently than quantum mechanics, the sciences of complexity also undercut modern dualisms, and there too one finds connections to the East. See, for example, Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Anchor Books, 1996) and Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake, Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, Creativity and the Resacralization of the World (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co., 1992).
2 Full documentation of what follows is to be found in Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
3 W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain (London: Duckworth, 1953).
4 Pickering, op. cit. (note 2), 111.
5 Andrew Pickering, ‘Against Human Exceptionalism,’ paper presented at a workshop on ‘What Does It Mean to Be Human?’ University of Exeter, 25 January 2008. Available online: <http://hdl.handle.net/10036/18873>, accessed 10 March 2011.
6 Pickering, op. cit. (note 2), 6.
7 Ibid., 175.
8 Alan Wilson Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Pantheon, 1957).
9 Gregory Bateson (ed.), Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961).
10 Pickering, op. cit. (note 2), 178.
11 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, and Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
12 Pickering, op. cit. (note 2), 197–8.
13 M. Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
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