Month: May 2024

It’s a curious fact about Jan Smuts’ Holism and Evolution that his argument revolves tightly around the concept called sometimes the Chain of Being and sometimes the Levels of Being and yet he never once mentions the concept in his book. Given how widely read Smuts clearly was, it seems highly improbable that he would not have been familiar with the levels of being and so the question becomes why he did not acknowledge it in his work, especially since it would have helped to clarify his main argument.

I suspect a large part of the reason why Smuts left it out was the fact that the levels of being is a concept that had been integrated extensively into Catholic theology and it was not fashionable among the scholarly and upper classes of Western nations at the time he wrote his book to reference Christianity. Smuts gives very little mention to religion in his book and where he does it is usually not favourable, so I’m guessing that could have been the reason for the omission.

Of course, Smuts also showed signs of reverence for the ancients in his book, another fashionable belief among the upper classes of the West at that time, and so he could very well have used them as the source for the levels of being since it was from Greek thought that the early Christians adopted the levels of being and incorporated it into their theology.

Despite the fact that we can all recognise the levels of being in practice, it’s also true that there is an inherent mystery to them and that is why philosophers, scientists and theologians have been talking about the subject for millennia. Even though Smuts doesn’t reference the concept directly, his entire book implies the levels of being and needs to be understood against the history of the idea.

Smuts’ implied levels of being concept is somewhat problematic and, in fact, he changes it during the book without making clear that he is doing so. This was of particular interest to me since the first version that Smuts proposes is almost identical to the one I used in my recent book, The Universal State of America, with civilisation or culture as a level above the human individual. That is how Smuts frames it near the beginning of the book only to do an about face at the end where he denies that culture/society is a Whole (and therefore a level of being).  

For our introductory purposes in this post, we don’t need to worry about this issue and we can focus on the less controversial areas. The two levels of being that Smuts shares with the historical tradition are matter and life and Smuts follows the traditional version whereby life is “higher” than matter. This gives us the table as follows:-

Level of Being

Life

Matter

Smuts then proposes “mind” as the next level. Mind is a complex thing. We might divide it into the unconscious and conscious realms as per the psychoanalysts. But there is also intellect, reason, logic, will, imagination and other faculties to deal with. We would want to say that humans share with animals the lower and some of the upper levels of consciousness but we would probably want to draw the line at logic, intellect and reason and say that these were unique to humans. Smuts is not clear on where he draws the boundary in his book. Again, for our overview here it’s not necessary to resolve these ambiguities, so let’s just put mind in the table as follows:

Level of Being

Mind

Life

Matter

Above mind there is a faculty that Schumacher calls Self-Awareness. Meditation or similar practices provide perhaps the clearest experience of what this means since they involve the deliberate control of the mind. This raises the question: what is doing the controlling? The answer is Self-Awareness (we might also call it the will, the soul or something else).

Self-Awareness seems to sit “above” consciousness since it can control or view consciousness as if from the outside. When you do exercises in meditation or concentration, you realise that the thoughts going through your mind seem to have a will of their own and trying to shut them up is no easy task. Moreover, those thoughts are often not your own but come from the external source of the collective psyche of society.

Smuts proposes a similar faculty for the level of being above mind which he calls personality. This is an interesting idea in itself and we’ll look at it in a future post. For now, let’s just use Schumacher’s formulation.

Level of Being

Self-Awareness

Mind

Life

Matter

This gives us the levels of being as a series of properties. However, the way in which the levels of being were traditionally enunciated was as a list of beings. Smuts takes a similar approach but he call them “Wholes”, from whence comes his theory of Holism. We can add these beings or Wholes to the table as follows:-

Level of Being	Beings/Wholes
Self-Awareness	Humans
Mind	Animals, Humans
Life	Plants, Animals, microorganisms (cells)
Matter	Minerals (atoms, molecules)

Theological versions of the levels of being would add to the table extra levels above the human that pertain to God and other spiritual entities. Man’s role is then to strive upwards towards the spiritual and it’s this belief which certainly had a lot to do with the lack of attention paid to the lower levels of being prior to modern science. Matter was seen as something to be overcome. In some denominations, it was seen as inherently evil.

What opened the door to modern science was, in fact, a theological schism related directly to the levels of being. Descartes often gets the blame for splitting the mind and body and thereby severing the connection in the chain between matter, life and mind. Mind and body became separate substances or entities or whatever you want to call them. Having divided them, the question became how to put them back together i.e. how to explain the interaction between two substances that were now considered independent.

What is less well-recognised is that the theology of Luther and Calvin had also implied a division between soul and body since they asserted that nothing we do in the earthly realm of the body could make a difference to the fate of our souls. It is one of the many ironies around the Reformation that a belief system that was fixated on the spiritual should have given rise to modern materialism. By removing the importance of the body from theological considerations, the Protestants opened the way for scientific experimentation in that sphere, experimentation that the Catholic Church had previously suppressed.

This experimentation included the practice of vivisection. It’s a weird synchronicity that I just happened to read Patrick White’s book of that title, which I reviewed a couple of posts ago, before reading Smuts. The practice of vivisection, cutting open live animals, became justified within the Cartesian philosophy on the grounds that animals had no “soul” and were, therefore, little more than machines (automata). This led to some strange technical arguments about how the pain felt by animals had no “higher” meaning. Some apparently denied that animals felt pain at all. The vivisectors justified their practices on exactly this kind of philosophical basis. If anybody tells you philosophy doesn’t make a difference in the “real world”, cite vivisection as an example.

We can see that the schism that had taken place had broken the chain of being as inherited from the ancient world. The Reformation and the Cartesian philosophy opened the way for investigation into what had traditionally been considered the lowest of the levels of being: matter. The impressive results which followed led enthusiastic proponents to invert the paradigm. Matter became the “highest” level of being since it was the one we could know about with certainty. Some went even further and denied that anything existed beyond matter. Just as the vivisectors had used abstract arguments to convince themselves that the cries from the animals they were cutting up did not really denote pain, so too did scientific materialists use abstract arguments to convince themselves that nothing except matter really existed.

It’s against this backdrop that Smuts’ work needs to be understood. He was not alone in looking to overcome the schism that had been opened centuries earlier. Smuts took the implied primacy of matter and then combined it with the science of evolution to explain how the levels of being had evolved over time. The universe was no longer created from the top down, with all the various parts of the Wholes subservient to the power at the higher level of being. Rather, the lower levels of being were now the basis of reality. They provided the foundation on which the higher ones were built. This puts matter at the beginning of the story instead of God.

What makes Smuts’ version of this story ingenious is that he takes the results of materialist science and uses them to show that matter is a Whole, in fact, the first Whole. From the Whole of matter, he then charts the upwards progress through the other levels of being culminating in humanity. Atoms give rise to molecules which give rise to colloids and then cells, organisms, plants, animals and humans. Along the way, life is added to matter, mind to life and self-awareness to mind. The emergent story of evolution is one of creativity over time which tends towards increasing complexity.

As ingenious as Smuts’ argument undoubtedly is, does it do anything to address the central mysteries surrounding the levels of being? After all, the whole point of modern science is that it is able to explain how things work and not just that they work. Admittedly, I don’t keep up to date with the latest scientific research in this area, but I had a quick ten minute browse on the internet prior to writing this post and it seems that the science has not advanced much past where it was in Smuts’ day. That is, we still don’t know how life arose from matter let alone how mind arose from life or self-awareness from mind.

One of the articles I browsed was about a team of scientists trying to produce a cell that could divide successfully by removing different genes to figure out the minimum number that was needed. This is the same old reductionist approach of trying to break everything down into base elements. Note that this is also the same practice of vivisection only practiced at the micro-organic level, and instead of cutting up the phenotype we now cut up the genotype in the hope that we will find the answer there.

Herein lies a key point about the difference between the analytic and the holistic approach. The analytic wants to break everything down to the smallest irreducible components and then reverse engineer the whole process. The holistic approach starts with Wholes. For example, in relation to organisms, you start with the Whole which is the organism itself.  The Whole then organises its own development by drawing in and coordinating the assembly of lower elements. This is the process of metabolism and metabolism is one of the key features that separates life from non-life.

In Smuts’ explanation, the process of self-organisation at the Life level of being is an extension of the Matter level of being where we see that matter is “selective” i.e. it can attract and repel other entities. One of the differences is that a living Whole does not just attract or repel, it changes the other entity since that entity is put into service for the creation and reproduction of the living Whole itself. We’ll go into this topic more in a future post.

There is one last aspect of the levels of being worth touching on and it is one that Smuts also spends a great deal of time analysing in his book, even though he uses different words to denote it. This is the distinction I have been using extensively for the last couple of years between the Exoteric or outer aspect and the Esoteric or inner, hidden aspect.

It wasn’t that long ago that the atom was believed to be an indivisible base unit of reality. In that model, we could say that the atom was entirely Exoteric in nature since, setting aside forces that may emanate from it, it seemed to have no inner or Esoteric aspect to it. All that changed with the ideas around neutrons and electrons and then quantum mechanics. I haven’t kept up to date with the latest science, so I’m not sure where the latest theories are at, but what these developments did was to give even the base elements of matter an Esoteric dimension that had previously been missing.

Smuts acknowledges that even base matter has an Esoteric dimension. Therefore, it’s no longer a distinction between entirely Exoteric matter and entirely Esoteric mind but rather a gradient. Nevertheless, it’s true that the Esoteric dimension becomes more important as we ascend the levels of being. The internal (Esoteric) workings of a cell are incredibly complex. The internal complexity increases as we get to the organism where the inner workings arguably become the dominant property. By the time we get to mind, we seem to be entirely in the Esoteric, although mind too may connect back to matter via the unconscious. That leaves Self-Awareness which philosophers have been telling us for thousands of years is entirely Esoteric.

Rather than thinking of the levels of being using the up-down metaphor, we can think of them as being internal (Esoteric) and external (Exoteric). The addition of each new level of being results in an Esoteric intensification of the entity in question. There is more going on “inside” the cell than in the atom. There is more going on “inside” the mind than in the organism. But we must be careful not to think of these as separate entities. The mind is “in” the body. The severance between the two came with Luther and Descartes. We need to learn to put them back together.

A human being, a plant and a rock are all composed of matter. What differentiates them is the intensity of their Esoteric resonance. We assume that a rock has almost no Esoteric resonance. It’s for this reason that rocks, and matter in general, are amenable to the reductionist, mechanical method of explanation because the mechanical method is entirely concerned with Exoteric factors. Since plants, animals and humans are composed of Exoteric matter, we can apply the mechanical method to them too. It’s not wrong to do so, but if we only apply the mechanical method, we leave out all the Esoteric properties of those entities. Since the Esoteric become more dominant as we get higher up the levels of being, the mechanical method works less and less well. What’s needed then is another method that takes into account the Esoteric.

Would we call this other method “science”? Smuts seems to think we can and yet there is an inherent contradiction here. Smuts fully acknowledges that the Esoteric is creative, dynamic and evolutionary. In fact, he lauds that creativity and associates it with freedom. But science is supposed to be concerned with what can be known with certainty. If the Esoteric is free, then it need not follow the rules of science. How does one “do science” on the Esoteric given the whole point of science is to garner reproducible results? This is a question that Smuts doesn’t answer.

As a final conundrum in this respect, Smuts puts forward the interesting conjecture that matter used to be far more creative than it is now. In other words, matter went through a creative phase before settling down into the seemingly predictable and reliable phase in which we now view it. The reason we don’t find spontaneous creation in matter in our time is because the creative, Esoteric part of the world has moved “upwards” to the higher levels of being. It follows that science would once upon a time not have worked on matter, even if there had been scientists around to study it, because it was too unstable. Isn’t it the case that what we call science only works on those domains that have ceased to be creative and that science will only ever work on life, mind and self-awareness once those domains have ceased being dynamic and creative too.

It is exactly these kinds of issues that were behind ideas in the 20^th century of finding a “third way” of doing science that could somehow incorporate the Esoteric and creative dimensions of the world. We’ll also look at some of those ideas in future posts.

A friend of mine once said to me, “Simon, you suck at marketing.” Now, I have to admit I was rather pricked by this accusation, although in hindsight I could see his point. There is an inherent tension between any creative activity and the marketing activities which go alongside it. When handled properly, that tension is healthy. At an abstract level, the creative activity brings something new into the world and the marketing activity ties that new thing to what already exists. Both of these processes are necessary, although arguably it works better if the person doing the creative part is not the same as the person doing the marketing part. Maybe that’s what my friend was hinting at.

The context in which the above discussion took place was one which I have mentioned previously on this blog: the Melbourne indie music scene of which I used to be an active member. Music provides a good case study for how marketing works because it is separated into genres. While genres do often denote categories that are meaningful from a musical standpoint, they are also vehicles for marketing because they allow new bands to be easily grouped together with those that already exist.

In practice, the choice of genre happens automatically in the types of instruments and the musical background of the people in the band. Choice of band name is also crucial. If you happen to be playing thrash metal, calling your band “Dreamy Daisy and the Lollipops” isn’t going to work. A good marketer would recommend you change it to something like “Psycho Susie and the Splatterers”. Most of the time, bands can figure this part out for themselves.

Paying attention to basic marketing concerns is a good idea. But it’s also true that letting marketers run the show is a very bad idea. Since marketers are always looking to connect back to what already exists, the easiest thing to market is what already exists. Put marketers in charge and they will systematically remove anything which doesn’t conform. Any novelty disappears and is replaced by a never-ending parade of mediocrity.

Marketing should never inform the creative process. It should come at the end of that process. When done properly, marketing fulfils a useful function which is to help integrate the new thing into what is already there. Is marketing actually required to achieve that outcome or are marketers hijacking a process that would happen “organically” anyway? I suspect it’s a bit of both. Good marketers are like good farmers: they can enhance and build on natural processes. But there’s always a very fine line between enhancing natural processes and twisting them beyond all recognition. As a society, we’ve allowed our marketers to well and truly step over that line. 

As it happens, I’ve recently had to wrestle with the issue of marketing again with the completion of my most recent book. As a self-published author, I’m left to do my own marketing. This has its advantages but it’s a job I would outsource if I could. In fact, for the Universal State of America I did spend quite a long time trying to find a publisher that might be interested in the work. My search came up empty. Marketing is about linking a new work to an existing milieu. What happens when that milieu doesn’t exist?

But my difficulty was not just about marketing. If I had presented the Universal State of America in a scholarly setting, I would have been forced to connect the ideas in that book to their intellectual precedents since that is a basic expectation in any scholarly work. My freedom not to have to do that was valuable since it allowed me to be more creative in exploring the ideas in the book but it came with the drawback that I had not identified the intellectual milieu to which the book belonged.

Now that the book is finished, I’ve had time to think about that issue in more detail and it’s the question which I will be exploring in this series of posts. The question is: where does an “archetypal calculus” fit into the broader scheme of western thought?

Now, it has to be said, the phrase “archetypal calculus” is one that would have any marketer wailing in opposition. Not only is it ambiguous and therefore unable to provide a clear link to existing ideas, it also contains the word calculus, which is guaranteed to trigger the latent trauma that many people will have from being dragged kicking and screaming through that subject during high school maths class. Ambiguity and vaguely negative connotations are not qualities that make for good marketing.

The difficulty in naming these concepts comes from the fact that many of them belong to a genuine paradigm shift that happened in the 19^th century which was centred mostly around the work of Darwin and Wallace. It’s no coincidence that Varela was a biologist. So, too was Gregory Bateson. Alfred North Whitehead made the Organism the centre of his new philosophy. What was taking place was the attempt to define a new metaphysics based on the lessons learned from biology.

Difficulty in naming concepts at a lower level is an indication that something is missing from the larger philosophical framework. What was needed, then, was a new framework. That’s what the cybernetics and systems thinkers were trying to do. That’s was Varela, Bateson, Whitehead and others were trying to do. What we’ll be doing in this series of posts is summarising the results of their efforts.

Until recently, this is a task I would have shied away from and here’s where the story takes a twist.

The trouble with the cyberneticians such as Varela is that their work is highly technical. I admit I haven’t read Whitehead, but his work has a reputation for also being incredibly dense and with the same mathematico-logical focus as Varela. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but personally I’m pretty much allergic to having to learn a brand new symbolic language in order to do philosophy, especially if that language is logic-based.

Bateson also shared the habit of coming up with ambiguous names. Consider Bateson’s phrase epistemology of the sacred. This is problematic because the word epistemology is ambiguous and so is the word sacred. Putting the two together creates ambiguity squared. The combination also has the connotation of sacred knowledge which Bateson would not have liked since he was trying to ground his analysis in the results of science. (Or, perhaps it is better to say he was trying to find the sacred in science).

Another of Bateson’s phrases was an ecology of mind, which combines two broad concepts into a more ambiguous concatenation. Finally, there is the title of his great book – Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity. Well, if they’re a unity, then why do we have two words for them? More to the point, what word should we use to denote the unity?  

Of course, the most obvious candidate for that word would be “God”. Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred hints at just that conclusion. That was never going to be a possibility, however. What all the thinkers we have mentioned had in common was that they were coming at the problem from within the sciences and, more specifically, the life sciences. Since Darwinism had precipitated the final collapse of the old God of Christianity, at least among the educated classes in Europe, referring to God was always going to be a non-starter.

But there’s another reason why the religious angle would not have been suitable in this context. We noted above that these thinkers were trying to create a new epistemology, a new way of knowing. The reason they had to do that was because they were stuck in the old paradigm that had been brought over from the Classical civilisation through the Catholic Church. Europe had inherited from the ancients the idea of truth as being eternal and unchanging. What biology and the other life sciences needed was a framework which allowed for becoming, creativity and change. There really did need to be a new definition of “truth” and so Bateson’s reference to epistemology is totally accurate.

Smuts was born on a farm in the Cape Colony in 1870. As the second-eldest brother, in the Afrikaner tradition he was destined to be the one to take over the family farm while his elder brother received an education. When his brother died young, Smuts became the one to receive the education instead. It turned out he was a brilliant intellect. He ended up studying law at Cambridge where he excelled to such an extent that some of his professors thought him one of the greatest scholars to ever set foot in the place.

Smuts graduated in law and could have gone on to a career in that field but chose to return to his homeland where he got involved in politics. Since the Boer War was just around the corner, political service ended up becoming military service and Smuts would also become a great military leader including later in the world wars where he was a core part of the war cabinet in London and a trusted adviser to Winston Churchill.

(As a side note, Smuts represented South Africa at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations and slammed the deal as not a peace treaty but a “20 year armistice”. Given the treaty was signed in late June 1919 and we all know what happened in September 1939, that’s got to go down as one of the more precisely accurate predictions in political history).

Smuts was primarily at Cambridge to study law and so his knowledge of biology and the other subjects covered in Holism and Evolution came not from the position of a specialist. I’m quite sure that is the reason for the clarity of presentation in the book. Smuts was not the kind of guy to get bogged down in the details. It’s noteworthy that Gregory Bateson also worked in a wide range of disciplines in his career including biology, psychology and anthropology. This cross-disciplinarity seems to be a key factor in the new kind of thinking which is based not primarily on deduction or induction but abduction: the ability to see shared patterns across different domains. The only way to see shared patterns across domains is to know the basic ideas from those domains and that’s what Smuts had achieved during his scholarly period.

The need for cross-disciplinarity explains why the new paradigm which Smuts wrote about has been stifled in the post-war years since we have seen the increasing specialisation of scholarship. Alongside the commercialisation of knowledge, this has created several generations of siloed scholars all stuck down in their own rabbit holes, certainly not an environment conducive to holistic thinking. Instead, it produces what the Germans call fachidioten; subject-matter idiots.

We’ll get into the details of his work in later posts, but the primary thrust of Smuts’ viewpoint mirrors that of Bateson and the other thinkers mentioned above. What was needed was a concept which generalised the new object of study that biology had discovered and which seemed also to extend into psychology, sociology and other domains too. For Bateson, that concept was Mind. For Whitehead, it was Organism. The problem with both of these, as Smuts pointed out, is that they already refer to specific concepts in both biology and psychology and to generalise them was to lose the valid differences that they already denoted. Smuts’ proposal for the generic concept was Wholes, hence the concept of Holism.

Again, we’ll look at the details of this concept in future posts. For now, there is one key point I would highlight and it’s a point I’ve made in several posts over the last couple of years. The word whole is etymologically related to the words healthy and holy. All of them are related to the concept of the sacred, which is the process by which wholeness, health and holiness are temporarily relinquished in order to allow something new to be integrated. It is no coincidence that process was also central to Whitehead’s philosophy.

Thus, I would argue that Smut’s Holism and Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred deal with holiness and the sacred not as adjectives or nouns but as verbs (processes). Process is a cornerstone of the new paradigm. Since process implies time, time also becomes a central concern.

All of this was born out of the paradigm shift that had come from within science itself in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Bateson, for example, saw his work as attempting to address the schism he believed had been introduced by Newton and Descartes. That schism can be called, using Whitehead’s phrase – scientific materialism. It features a single minded focus on mechanical explanation. Mechanical explanation worked beautifully in the fields of classical physics and chemistry, but that paradigm had begun to breakdown in the 19th century and something new was needed.

This breakdown was not limited to the austere surroundings of university departments and science faculties. The industrial revolution was predicated on mechanical explanation and there can be no doubt that this was the cause of enormous ructions in the political and cultural sphere too.

If all this is true, the question then becomes why are we still stuck in the old paradigm, even as the real-world problems with it seem to mount by the day? Our society has continued to pursue industrialisation and mechanisation well beyond the point of diminishing returns. The reason is because our economy and, perhaps more importantly, our geopolitical power is based on them. The people who run our societies are addicted to that money and power and are not going to give them up without a fight.

And so, here we are, almost a hundred years after Smuts published his great work. Having seemingly exhausted the physical aspects of industrialisation and mechanisation, we now pour vast sums of money into trying to mechanise intelligence (AI). Not only is that intellectually and spiritually wrong, it is increasingly turning into a political nightmare as well. Smuts saw in his concept of Holism the key to freedom and I don’t think it would surprise him in the slightest to see that more and more mechanisation has only led to less and less freedom in our society.

Thus, Holism and related ideas are not only worth pursuing for their intellectual promise but for their political aspect too. At the very least, those of us who aren’t interested in sleepwalking into the mechanist dystopia that is being laid for us can use the philosophical ideas of Smuts, Bateson, Whitehead to understand what is happening to try and navigate a different pathway. The promise of the new paradigm is that it does not require us to renounce modern science. On the contrary, the new paradigm comes from within science itself.

All of those are good enough reasons to discuss these issues. But, from a more personal point of view, Smuts has finally given me the clear and concise overview of the domain that has enabled me to see where my concept of the archetypal calculus fits into the larger scheme of things. I half-jokingly called it a theory of everything in a recent post and, actually, I was far closer to the truth than I knew. Whether the archetypal calculus is better seen as an element within Holism or whether they are, in fact, the same thing is something I am still working through. Maybe we’ll get to an answer to that question by the end of this series of posts.

I think I’m now about halfway through White’s bibliography and, at this point, I have no hesitation in declaring him my favourite writer of the 20^th century. Admittedly, there are some big names from that time period that I haven’t read. I haven’t read Nabokov or Faulkner or Beckett, for example. For many of those names, however, I almost don’t need to read them since I’ve read enough of the literary modernists to know that I won’t like them. Literary modernism seems to me to be about breaking rules for its own sake. Sometimes, as in the case of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the rules are broken only to be replaced by a gimmick that exactly matches the rule itself. How clever of Joyce to make the last sentence of the book lead back to the first sentence thereby capturing the cyclical nature of reality. Right? Except the Hero’s Journey is already cyclical and, what’s more, it incorporates the idea of transcendence too. What Joyce had really done was to remove transcendence from the story.

This was not an accident, of course, and the trend also occurred outside of literature. To take just one example, one of the main differences between the comparative historians Toynbee and Spengler is that the former allowed for transcendence while the latter argued for the kind of circularity implied by Joyce. In Spengler’s case, this was particularly weird since he had identified the striving towards infinity as the core feature of Faustian culture and yet his circular notion of history is almost a perfect contradiction of this.

What I like about Patrick White is that he does not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because he follows the rules most of the time, when he does break them, he makes a point by doing so. That is an interesting feature of human culture that seems to also be a core property of “mind” in the broader sense of the term defined by Gregory Bateson. Rules set up expectations. It’s as if some energy is powering a network of cultural assumptions (collateral energy is one of Bateson’s criteria for “mind”). The failure to meet an expectation is amplified by the collateral energy and this creates meaning. Thus, meaning can be created as much by what you didn’t do as by what you did. But the ability to create such meaning only works if the system of rules is upheld. The whole problem with literary modernism is that it denies the entire system and therefore saws off the branch on which it is sitting. The result is turgid, long-winded and frankly boring; adjectives which are sadly all too true for much of 20th century literature. Thankfully, none of this is true of White’s novels.

Of course, it’s also true that White resonates with me for other reasons. What a synchronicity that I had just finished writing my own book which focuses, among other things, on the archetypal phases of the human lifecycle, and then it turns out that The Vivisector is a story that covers the entire lifespan of the hero: Hurtle Duffield. What’s more, White divides (vivisects!) the story into phases that map almost exactly to the archetypes that I have been using extensively for the past couple of years. The book proceeds in sections, each of which focuses on an archetypal phase of Hurtle’s life. We can summarise the sections as follows:-

	Hurtle Duffield’s Life
Child	Born into a poor family
Orphan	Adopted by a rich family and given an education
Early Adult	Struggling artist
Mature Adult	Successful artist
Elder	Mentoring a protege
Death	Meeting with God

I can now add The Vivisector to my list of literary works that ground my analysis of the archetypal Orphan, especially because White shows his protagonist as an Orphan earlier in the book and then as an Elder to an Orphan towards the end. More than that, Hurtle’s orphanhood is explicitly symbolised by a dramatic separation from his biological parents. Hurtle’s artistic and intellectual talents are recognised by a rich couple, the Courtneys, who literally buy him from his poor parents who already have too many children anyway and can certainly do with the money they are offered.

It is fitting that the Courtneys are an aristocratic couple since we might metaphorically say that each of us are “adopted” by our society through the auspices of education. Our biological parents must hand us over to the institutions of that society and there is an implied financial element to that since we are expected to take up an economic role in society. Thus, The Vivisector captures all the main archetypal themes that I sketched out in my most recent book and, just as White had done with his earlier novel, Voss, hardwires them into the structure of the story.

Another correspondence with my writing of the last few years is the presence of the Jungian anima character. I noted in my review of White’s Voss that the brilliant trick he played in that story was to make Laura Trevelyan the real hero and thus the book was really about Voss’ anima. In The Vivisector, there are not one but many anima characters. What’s more, these characters all map quite directly to the archetypal progression of the story. There is one anima character for each archetypal phase.

For those unfamiliar with the anima concept, Jung characterised the anima as the soul of a man (it was the male animus in women) with four archetypal phases that each man may potentially go through as follows:-

Anima Symbol	Meaning
Eve	Nourishment, love, desire
Helen	External talents and accomplishments
Mary	Paragon of virtue
Sophia	Ability to perceive negative as well as positive qualities. Wisdom.

Patrick White utilises these anima categories in The Vivisector as follows.

Hurtle Duffield’s Life	Anima Figure	Anima Type
Child	Mother (Mrs Duffield)	Mother (Mary)
Orphan	“Mother” (Mrs Courtney)	Mother (Mary)
Early Adult	Nance	Eve
Mature Adult	Hero Pavloussi	Eve
Elder	Kathy Volkov	Helen
Death	Rhoda Courtney	Sophia

Unlike in Voss, which showed a much more direct correspondence of the anima progression in the person of Laura Trevelyan, The Vivisector is more complex as the above table shows. The book begins in the years prior to WW1 with Hurtle living at home with his biological parents. Hurtle is born into a very poor family. His father has no skills and no job. He makes a living collecting bottles in the street. His mother works as a washerwoman in the households of various aristocratic women, which is what brings the young boy to the attention of Mrs Courtney, who later buys (adopts) him.

We can see from this beginning a pattern which holds throughout the book which is that none of the characters represents an inherently positive version of the archetype. We begin with a mother who is prepared to sell her child for money. Not very Mary-like. Meanwhile, the surrogate mother, Mrs Courtney, is prepared to buy a child in order to keep up appearances. Hurtle’s first love is a prostitute. He has affairs with married women and there is even the implication that he sleeps with his protégé later in the book. White uses the archetypes as much in their shadow form as in their positive.

It’s also true that the drama of all this is highly abstract, and this is due to White’s aforementioned habit of breaking conventions and leaving things out. What he leaves out of the story are all of the major turning points in Hurtle Duffield’s life. This absence is all the more telling because the life of Hurtle reads like an over-the-top Dostoevskyan melodrama. We could summarise it as follows.

A precocious boy is born into an impoverished family. He has no prospects in life, but his genius is recognised by a wealthy aristocratic couple who adopt him into their house and provide him the best education money can buy including the development of his artistic talents. In his late teens, he rebels against his adoptive parents and runs off to join the army. He fights in WW1. After the war, he spends several years living in poverty in Europe as a Picasso-like avant-garde artiste. He becomes an artistic genius. He returns to Australia and has a tumultuous love affair with a prostitute while also becoming a successful and well-known painter. His fame brings fortune and access to the upper echelons of society including numerous dinner parties with various luminaries, affairs with exotic women, overseas holidays, worldwide notoriety, awards, meetings with the Prime Minister etc etc.

Any of these plotlines could be a dramatic novel in itself and yet White systematically refuses to detail any of them in his story. They are all referred to only in passing. We learn that Hurtle’s father has died through a letter received from his sister. The whole subject receives about three sentences and then we move on to the next part of the story. The same is true of the death of Hurtle’s first love, Nance. White spends pages and pages describing the intimate details of perfectly banal interactions where “nothing happens” and gives barely a few paragraphs to Nance’s death and the aftermath of it. Again, this is the inversion of the “rules” of storytelling. What in any other book would have been a dramatic turning point in the story is relegated to just another thing that happens almost as if it was no more important than a dreary meeting with one’s agent on a Wednesday afternoon.

Although White does not describe these dramatic events, he nevertheless demarcates the novel based on them. The death of Hurtle’s father, even though barely mentioned, comes at the end of the Orphan phase of life. After that, we fast-forward in time to find Hurtle as a young adult. Meanwhile, the death of Nance, his first love, also comes at the end of the section of the book where he is an impoverished artist. Shortly after, we jump forward into the mature phase of Hurtle’s adulthood where he is now a wealthy and famous artist. White builds the archetypal turning points into the structure of the book. He is not denying their importance, he is implying it. This is the same trick he used in Voss.

Because the archetypal turning points are not highlighted in The Vivisector, some might say it’s a book where “nothing happens”. Nevertheless, it’s the “nothing” which provides the inspiration for Hurtle’s art. Several times we see Hurtle rushing back home to turn the inspiration he has received from some fairly banal everyday interaction into a work of art. Hurtle is an artist who is concerned with everyday life rather than excessively dramatic events. (So, too, is Patrick White).

Here we come to the main theme of the novel. The Vivisector is a book about what it means to be an artist and White makes a connection with the practice of vivisection not just in the title but several times throughout the book.

Vivisection was a medical research technique that became quite widespread in the 19^th century. The word comes from the Latin vivus meaning “alive” and so vivisection involved the cutting open of live animals. The anti-vivisection movement was led by the same women who were running the suffragette movement and they did much to put an end to the practice. Hurtle’s second mother in the book, Mrs Courtney is, in fact, an anti-vivisectionist and comes from the aristocratic class of women who led that movement. This aspect of the book is historically accurate. Practically all of the vivisectionists were men and practically all of the opponents of the practice were women, there is an implied gender asymmetry here which maps to Jung’s anima-animus distinction in an interesting way.

What White is saying is that being an artist is like being a vivisector in that it involves severing life into sections by turning it into works of art. Doesn’t one thereby kill the subject just as occurred in vivisection? That is the big question which White explores through the life of Hurtle Duffield. Viewed this way, the lack of attention in the novel to any of the major turning points in Hurtle’s life can be read as a commentary on what it means to be an artist. The artist is so self-absorbed that even the death of loved ones has little impact on him, just as the vivisector needed to be able to detach himself from the live animal he was dissecting. The artist (and possibly also a scientist and a philosopher too, since both of those involve vivisection) is necessarily removed from experiencing everyday life in its fullness. The events of life are either the inspiration for a work of art (or science) or they are nothing.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing is one of the main themes of the novel. On the one hand, we might argue that the artist is selfish, self-absorbed, introspective and not fully present even among those he cares most about. On the other hand, there is the thrill and satisfaction that comes from the creation of one’s own reality through art. This raises a deep metaphysical question: is there ever a reality that we can simply receive and be part of in a passive sense or are we always creating our own reality. If the latter, then the artist is the one who does not shy away from the responsibility. He takes creation seriously. Is that selfishness or is it courage, since the act of self-creation is necessarily isolating and leaves one vulnerable and exposed.

Patrick White knew a thing or two about the subject since he was an artist in the broadest sense of the term. The Vivisector is clearly autobiographical. Patrick White himself spent much time in Europe honing his artistic craft before returning to Australia and starting from scratch. He, too, fought in the war. He, too, took a trip to Greece with a Greek lover just as Hurtle does in the story. White would have have attended many an expensive dinner party thrown by the beautiful and wealthy people of the Sydney north shore. He also received many awards and accolades and even an invitation to meet the Prime Minister. All of these things happen to Hurtle in the story and so it’s quite clear that Hurtle is very much a self-portrait on White’s part.

It’s not a surprise, therefore, that, while White does not hide shy away from the dark sides of artistry, he ultimately comes down on the side of the artist. He does so in a way that ties in with the idea of the artist as prophet or religious practitioner. In the context of the book, this is the idea, possibly blasphemous in some denominations, that God is also a vivisector. What do we read at the beginning of the book of Genesis: God created the heavens and the Earth and all the things in the world. He partitioned the world into parts. To take on the role of artist is to be the microcosm to the macrocosm of God. It is to partition the world into parts in an act of creation.

White hints at this theme throughout the book and then makes it explicit by ending his story in a way that is identical to Goethe’s Faust. Like Faust, Hurtle Duffield goes on creating his reality until the very end. Like Faust, Hurtle reunites with his anima in death. But, unlike Goethe’s story, it is not the Virgin Mary who is there at the end but Hurtle’s hunchback sister, Rhoda.

The Vivisector can thus be read as a gentle satire on not just Faust but also Goethe’s other main work Wilhelm Meister and, indeed, on the romantic movement in general. White removes all the grand symbolic gestures that had become synonymous with romanticism. In doing so, he implies that true artistry involves finding the beauty in the everyday moments of life rather than in romantic escape into abstractions.

The romantic hero had died on the battlefields of the two wars. White knew that from first-hand experience. He also knew that romanticism had been used during the wars as a propaganda tool to bewitch the public. Whatever was left of the romantic movement in art had to be found elsewhere and White suggests we must find it again in the everyday reality in which we live.

In this way, there is a kind of mini-heroism in White’s refusal to throw the baby out with the bathwater as did the other modernists. He carries the torch for true art. It is a muted torch, but it may still the light way where there would otherwise be darkness or, even worse, literary modernism.

Given that I’ve spent much of the last three years writing about the Devouring Mother, I didn’t expect that I had much left to say on the subject, and yet, just this past week, I realised I had missed a key part of the dynamic, one that is incredibly obvious in hindsight. My realisation was triggered by this story that went viral from the recent university protests in the US. A spokesperson for the protesting students at Columbia demanded the university not prevent food and water, which she referred to as “humanitarian aid”, from being given to the students. When questioned, she admitted there had been nobody stopping the students from getting food and water. On the contrary, it turned out the university had offered the students $80 food vouchers as part of the “negotiations” around the protest.

Bribing children with junk food to get them to comply is a standard practice among parents, and so, in and of itself, these kinds of offers are indicative of the infantilisation of the public by the government and evidence of the Devouring Mother at work. But there is a more symbolic aspect to the university side of the story that I only just realised.

The idea that students would be the ones demanding things from their alma mater is already an inversion of the whole dynamic and one that never would have been accepted in the early days of the university. It’s fitting that the modern alma mater, who offers very little in the way of spiritual and intellectual nourishment, should turn to offers of actual nourishment (food) to keep her “children” placated.

It’s not a coincidence that the whole notion of student protest belongs to the post-war years, since that time represents a radical change in the nature of the university and one that ties directly in with the larger societal trends that I have captured under the archetypes of the Devouring Mother and the Orphan. We can get a better appreciation of that change by doing a lightning survey of the history of the university. The story is worth telling because the university is a unique institution that appeared simultaneously with the birth of modern Europe in the 11^th century.

The very first university was the University of Bologna, which was established in 1088 and bore the name of alma mater. Specifically, it was Alma Mater Studiorum—the mother who nourishes studies. A unique feature of the universities from the beginning was the concept of academic freedom. In those days, this referred to the freedom of travel. Students and their teachers were able to move around Europe, attending whichever university they preferred. Tied in with the Catholic Church’s pan-European reach, the university was a key feature in the unification of Europe and really was a foundational pillar of modern western civilisation by allowing the exchange of ideas across borders.

From the beginning all the way up until the 19^th century, the curriculum of the university was founded on the seven “liberal arts” of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. It’s important to understand that the meaning of the word “art” in those days would have been translated into modern usage by the word “skill”. Grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the other disciplines were seen as skilled activities. There were rules to follow, and you were graded on how well you followed them. Universities were not there to foster creativity or critical thinking in the modern sense of those terms, they were there to churn out skilled practitioners who would then be ready to tackle the highest subjects of law, medicine, and theology. Those students who were not gifted enough to become lawyers, doctors, and theologians could still count on getting jobs as clerks and scribes in royal courts or ecclesiastical institutions.

The seven liberal arts had all been taken over directly from antiquity. In fact, Plato had talked about the subjects in his famous work, The Republic. This fits the general pattern of the early Faustian as being heavily influenced by the ancient world, and the university was no exception to the rule. The first major change came during the Renaissance with the addition of what would now be called the humanities. The seven liberal arts were all highly abstract. Even music was not studied as a performative or compositional skill but as a branch of mathematics. This made education incredibly dry. Students were rewarded for precision, not inspiration. The idea of the humanities was to put some life back into education and have students consider what it meant to be a human.

In practice, this added history and literature as major new subjects to the core curriculum. Although a seemingly small change, this was actually quite monumental since neither history nor literature are skills in the way that arithmetic and rhetoric are. An element of subjectivity had been introduced into the equation. This tied in with broader changes in the culture away from the ideals of truth and towards the acceptance of belief. The inherently subjective element in literature and history was more about belief than about truth in a mathematical sense.

Again, this might seem like a small change, but this little crack in the dam wall turned into a flood with the Protestant Reformation and has arguably reached an apotheosis in our time. The ability to choose one’s own gender represents the final ascension of belief over truth. We have gone from a concern with absolute, eternal, and abstract truths to an insistence on subjective belief, which changes with the seasons. It should be no coincidence that the incubator for all this is the schools and universities.

The role of the university in these changes cannot be overstated even though they are the exact opposite of the foundational principles of that institution. The universities had always been separate from the local populations where they were located. In fact, the local population was often hostile to the university because the church made them pay for the university’s upkeep. A famous example is a riot at the University of Oxford in 1209 after a student killed a local. The townsfolk captured and hanged several students who were believed to be involved. Many of the other students and teachers fled the area and went off to form the University of Cambridge. The Pope issued a punishment to the local people that included, funnily enough, the provision of meals to students and staff at Oxford.

Not only were the universities independent of their communities, over time they also gained a level of independence from the church too. This may have been a grave error on the part of the Pope since it appears to have opened the way for the rebellion that followed. All of the major players in that Reformation were university men. Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Foxe, Tyndale, and others had been educated at university, with Bible study at the forefront of their work. Since the Bible was supposed to be the word of God, how could there be any errors in it? The discovery of errors in translation from the ancient Greek texts became a major issue, and the blame was placed on the church, not just for using an incorrect translation (the Vulgate) but for misrepresenting the teachings of the Bible to the congregation.

The Church had inherited a version of truth from the ancient world, which was that what was true was absolutely true. There were no shades of grey. No probability entered the equation. The seven liberal arts were founded on the same assumption. They were about eternal truths. The development of the humanities and the emergence of Biblical interpretation and translation from within the universities allowed for subjective truths, which came to undermine the authority of the Church. Since the Pope had proven himself fallible in his interpretation of the Bible, he was no longer the source of authority. Nominally, the source of authority became the Bible itself, but this was always problematic since the original Protestants were themselves doing the translation and asserting that theirs was superior to the Church’s. They could not justify this logically, so they appealed to notions of “grace” and being “chosen by God”. Eventually, this would open out into the world in which we now live, in which belief trumps truth.

All of these monumental changes were incubated in the universities, and so it’s a strange fact that the influence of the universities actually declined in the centuries following the Reformation. The religious sensitivities that had been opened up saw the universities stagnate around the original seven liberal arts, with a smattering of humanities thrown in for good measure.

Universities had been nurtured into existence by the Church. But the various scientific societies and academies were the product of private money, which came partly from allied members of the aristocracy and partly from the nouveau riche of the emerging bourgeoisie. Fittingly, the precursor to the Royal Society was called the Invisible College since the whole idea of doing experimental science was politically dangerous and needed to be carried out in private. Remember that the truths of the Church and the original university were eternal and absolute, which meant they were not proved or disproved by evidence but by reason and logic. The Invisible College needed to be secretive because it still jarred against mainstream religious and theological beliefs.

One of the key features of the new scientific societies was their relative openness to the general public. The Royal Society held a public lecture each Friday evening on a hot scientific topic of the day. It was none other than Michael Faraday, who had not attended university at all but done an apprenticeship as a bookbinder, who attended a series of lectures on chemistry at the Royal Society as a member of the general public. Faraday’s note-taking impressed the lecturer so much that he offered him a position as a laboratory assistant. The rest, as they say, is history. What we see during this period is a glimpse at the kind of meritocratic system that the university offered in the early days of modern European civilisation.

It took until the 19^th century for the universities to finally break free of the religious ideology that prevented their acceptance of the new science. It was in Prussia that a new paradigm was introduced, not just in the university sector but in the general education of the public, and it’s worth remembering that the Prussian model was an especially strong influence on the US education system. The focus was once again on academic freedom, and it is certainly for this reason that there was a mini-golden age of scholarship, especially in the German-speaking lands.

Nevertheless, it’s also true that much of the great scientific and intellectual work happened outside the university. Alfred Russell Wallace was an autodidact who self-funded his expeditions. Tesla was a university dropout. Darwin, Lavoisier, Marx, and Freud were gentlemen of independent means. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Goethe all did their main work outside of the university. Gregor Mendel was a monk.

Putting all this together, we can ask the question of what has been the importance of the university throughout the history of the modern West. There can be no doubt that the institution was crucial at the beginning. It was the way in which knowledge from the ancient world was imported. The university was the birthplace of Faustian intellectual culture. But if we consider science to be the crowning achievement of that culture, it’s pretty clear that the university was a hindrance and not a help to its emergence.

This brings us to the 20^th century, specifically the post-war years, where we have seen an explosion in the size and scale of the university. Has this explosion been accompanied by a golden age of scholarship, innovation, and knowledge? If it has, I must have missed the memo. But the lack of results is arguably not the main problem. The main problem is political and it is this which seems to be coming to a head now.

When resources were scarce, universities were very strict about grading because society could not afford to waste money training people who were not up to the job. Thus, the system was designed so that only the best of the best graduated and went on to study the highest disciplines of law, medicine, and theology.

A rich society has no such concern. In a rich society, just like in a rich household, the challenge is to find things for people to do. This has always been an especial problem for industrial capitalism. The unemployment rates of the Great Depression were the logical outcome of the massive oversupply created by the system, which drove the damaging boom and bust cycles. The rollout of mass education was one of the main ways in which the state stepped in to try and fix the problem of oversupply.

The university sector employs a huge number of people, both directly and indirectly. It also removes a segment of the population from the workforce. In most modern western nations, one third of the population will now go to university, up from single digits in the first half of the 20^th century. That’s a whole lot of people who are not looking for work. In all these ways, the modern university helps to smooth out the problem of unemployment.

All of this worked tolerably well in the aftermath of WW2, but there are several trends that have turned the dynamic noticeably toxic in the last few decades. Firstly, a university education has become the pre-requisite for entry into corporate and government work. It is a mandatory stepping stone on the way to most of the high-status positions in society. The university now attracts those looking for status, not those looking for knowledge.

Secondly, corporate and government bureaucracies are zero-sum institutions with a pyramidal organisational structure. While the number of bureaucracies expands, the number of high-status positions grows, and university graduates can take up those positions. What happens when the bureaucracy ceases to grow? You get a classic zero-sum dynamic where competition increases for the scarce resources at the top of the pyramid. This explains the increasingly ideological nature of the university in recent decades. It’s no longer about knowledge but about allegiance to the ever-changing dogma that is used to solve the cutthroat internal politics of zero sum bureaucracies.

It is this combination that gives us the third, and arguably the biggest, problem. The post-war years have seen a huge increase in the number of university students. Clearly, there have been no supply-side constraints on this growth. In a functioning market, we might expect the price of university tuition to actually fall since when there are a greater number of people paying for a service, the fixed cost ratio goes down. Instead, tuition fees have massively outstripped general inflation. Why? Because what is being sold by universities is no longer knowledge but access to high-status jobs. Since the demand for high-status jobs exceeds the supply, the price of tuition has skyrocketed. Here in Australia, we run a similar racket for international students where the product for sale is a permanent residency visa.

All of this has been going on while the internet has all but undermined the historical role of university as a repository of knowledge. The knowledge traditionally imparted by university is now freely available online. This is the same old problem of oversupply that has been happening for more than a century. In a functioning market, the value of a university as the transmitter of knowledge would be almost zero and the price of tuition should reflect that. By definition, the university market is a racket and it is the students who are being forced to pay for that racket in the form of increasingly absurd student loans.

The alma mater is supposed to nourish her children in preparation for the day they will become adults. What do we say about an alma mater who burdens her children with enormous debts? That is not an alma mater at all; that is an edax mater – the Devouring Mother. In fact, it is university students who now “nourish” their alma mater financially through debt obligations while also being bound to the mother through ideological allegiance. This is an inversion of the way it should be.

In short, we’re right back to where we were in the old days when the Church played the role of Devouring Mother to the medieval societies of pre-Reformation Europe. Coincidentally, the decadence of our elites mirrors that of the popes of the 16^th century. The time is right for a Reformation. Will the university survive as an institution in the aftermath and what institutions(s) might replace it? Those are interesting questions to ponder.