Seven Brief Lessons on Magic

Paul Tyson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532690433
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Metafisica filosofica

Is magic real? Could anything be real that can't be quantified or scientifically investigated? Are qualities like love, beauty, and goodness really just about hormones and survival? Are strangely immaterial things, like thought and personhood, fully explainable in scientific terms? Does nature itself have any intrinsic value, mysterious presence, or transcendent horizon? Once we ask these questions, the answer is pretty obvious: of course science can't give us a complete picture of reality. Science is very good at what it is good at, but highly important aspects of human meaning are simply outside of science's knowledge range. So how might we better relate scientific facts to qualitative mysteries? How might we integrate our powerful factual knowledge with wisdom about the higher meaning of things? This book defines magic as the real qualities and mysteries of the world that science just can't grasp. It looks at how we came to put magic in the box of subjective make-believe. It explores how we might get it out of that box and back into our understanding of reality.

Lesson One

We Live in a High Age of Magic

Gandalf, Dumbledore, and Rincewind—to name-drop just a few of the most famous wizards of our times—are far better known to us than our real masters of power and illusion. Harry Potter is world famous, and any reader of Terry Pratchett will have quite a sophisticated theoretical knowledge of Disc World magic. In contrast, very few people know who the main players are in our own mysterious world of high financial alchemy. What actually makes the fabulous world of currency markets and derivative trading fly may as well be a genuine occult mystery to most people (many traders, bankers, treasury officials, and finance ministers included).

We live in an age where we are embedded in skillfully manufactured collective illusions and where our most familiar objects are astonishing technological devices with extraordinary powers, whose inner workings we hardly understand at all. But these devices are not simply wands and portals that give us power and knowledge, they are tools of power to those who provide them to us. Profiling algorithms and information collection are deeply integral to nearly every internet search and every social media interaction we undertake. We have grown accustomed to detailed and pervasive information gathering and intrusive surveillance technologies that both map and steer almost every aspect of our lives. We are like fish in a sea of translucent liquid power: power in the form of the skillful control and distribution of information, of pervasive data gathering, and of psychologically subtle collective choice influence. But we do not see this sea, for we are immersed in it—it is the very medium of our way of life.1

On the one hand, this is all a bit sinister. On the other hand, we love it. We are pretty well addicted to the dazzling seductions of our communication, information, and entertainment technologies: tools that obliterate the normal texture of space and time, that deeply re-fashion pre-social-media ways of relating to others, and that powerfully erode simply “being present” to where we physically are. These technologies refashion our imaginative landscape as well. They give free vent to the enjoyment, projection, and marketing of astonishing fantasies. A manufactured hyper-real world of wishful fantasy is now a mundane part of the way we communicate, relax, and do business. And yet, having been raised by the educational institutions of the modern scientific age, we largely accept the prevailing materialist motherhood truths about what reality is really like. Our educated truths about the real and public world exclude enchantment, deny reality to all spiritual beings and powers, and reject the very possibility that frameworks of transcendent truth structure the immanent contours of ordinary life.

Practically, we live in a world of technological magic. Wonder, illusion, and the harnessing of powers that we do not understand is the wallpaper of our daily lives. Intellectually, however, we adhere to a realism of reductive materialism. Such is the bizarre dissonance entailed in this fantasy-reality relationship that it can be stated the other way around and it is still true. We could say that magical technology now is our cold hard realism, and yet we still “doctrinally” believe in the fantasy realm of meaningless objective facts. Our day-to-day attitude towards the world is one of a flat, instrumental pragmatism, yet at the level of collective imagination, we like to watch movies, play computer games, and read books about enchanted worlds, gods, magical powers, and superhuman beings. Further, we are deeply drawn to shared narratives with a tacitly transcendent horizon to the high and deep things of the human condition: love, purpose, courage, dignity, destiny, and cosmic meaning. And yet we are educated to know the difference between hard and practical facts, and subjective meanings and non-factual “beliefs.”

To put it bluntly, the primary furnishings of our minds uphold an armed barrier between the way we think about the outer world of factual scientific knowledge and practical technological power and the inner world of imagination, meaning, purpose, and value. This barrier is very much tied up with how we use and understand modern science, and rests on the assumed validity of both the supernatural and the anti-magical theories of magic. (More about these modern theories of magic will follow in lesson two.) We are born into a divided cosmos defined by a de-magiced nature on one side and a fantastic or supernatural imaginative magic on the other side, and don’t know anything different. The dissonance between the dry instrumental facts and the wild imaginative meanings native to our life-world seems like an entirely reasonable and realistic situation to us. We don’t want imagination and meaning to win over our “realist” conception of knowledge and power, or the other way around. We are deeply habituated to navigate our lives of practical reality and constructed meaning using the carefully policed border crossings that keep these segregated zones apart. But actually . . . we are not really content with this situation.

We are voracious consumers of magical fantasy stories. We love nature, and sense its magic, and yet we isolate its aesthetic and spiritual value from its practical exploitation and financial significance in ways that may well prove catastrophic to both nature and our own flourishing. We know this is a problem, but we don’t know how to fix it. We are callous pragmatists and romantic dreamers all at the same time. Our collective fantasies, our alternative health and wellbeing shopping habits, and some modern types of religion and spirituality simply can’t get enough magic, and yet our academic knowledge culture has no idea what magic might be other than the immature superstitions of pre-scientific ignorance.

We can’t stop dreaming about magic and cosmic meaning. Re-imagining the Middle Ages is the backdrop for so much of our popular magical fiction. That was a world full of symbolic mythic creatures, a world where wisdom and knowledge were integral, a world where higher knowledge was of essential natures and transcendent realities. To that lost world, the right spoken word had a commanding sympathy with the cosmic Word that ordered all of heaven and earth. But our world is not like that. Or so the sensible scientific realism of our modern academy seems to be telling us.

The Encyclopedia Britannica notes that A. J. Ayer’s 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic was “one of the bestselling works of serious twentieth-century philosophy.” This is a book of famously deflationary philosophy that defines everything as meaningless if it cannot pass muster under a rigorously empirical and logical reductionism. Leaving to one side the ironic fact that the truth claims of Ayer’s own logical positivism did not pass this muster themselves, it needs to be pointed out that even a breakaway best seller in “serious twentieth-century philosophy” does not sell many books. I could not find it (or any other book of “serious philosophy”) listed when searching around for bestselling books of the twentieth century. What I did find was fantasy writers: the “over 100 million copies sold” category was dominated by Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling (over 500 million books have now been sold in her Harry Potter series). And when it comes to all-time best sellers, the Bible is estimated to have had around 5 billion copies sold and distributed to date. So, whatever our academy is telling us about knowledge and reason, fantasy and religion are far more interesting to people than “serious” modern philosophy is.

When you look at book sales, you might surmise that Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling are far more important to us than the philosophers and theologians of our times. Clearly, our fantasy writers speak to us. Could it be that even our pragmatic consumer society has a deep hunger for visions of a meaningful cosmos, for high quests, for some living magical dimension to everyday reality? Could it be that fantasy scratches a basic human itch that our “serious philosophy” does not even seem to know about? Could it even be that magic has not actually left us? Might magic be planning an escape from behind the great wall that the modern divided cosmos has erected so as to contain it within merely subjective personal fantasy?

To sum this first lesson up, there are four quite distinct senses in which we, today, do indeed live in a high age of magic.

Firstly, magic is what causes us to delight in and intellectually explore the world, in a state of wonder. This is, I think, a perennial feature of the human condition. Beauty, love, goodness, truth: every time we experience these qualitative encounters with others and the world, we taste a quality of life, of experience, and of thought that is magical. As this cannot be obliterated from the experience of being human: all ages must be ages of magic.

Secondly, magic is inextricably located within our socially experienced, meaningful view of reality. This is interesting. Sociologists of knowledge understand that all human conceptions of reality are socially constructed.2 This does not mean that there is no such thing as reality existing independently of socially situated and practiced visions of reality, it only means that the only visions of reality that we ever have are socially situated. This is—according to thinkers like Johann Georg Hamann—a deeply magical feature of the human experience of meaning. I make sense of the world through the language, idioms, education, relationships, imaginative landscapes, practices, narratives, histories, hopes and fears of the social world into which I am born.3 Meaning itself is this richly contextual and deeply human feature of our experience of the world. Yet it is not only the human world that shapes our meaning, the natural world’s interaction with the human world equally shapes our meanings and our understanding of reality. There is a creative partnership between human interpretation and the meaningful world that is amazing, indeed magical. Even so, we modern people don’t tend to think about our conception of reality as magical. If we think about it at all, we tend to think of a realistic understanding of nature as the exact opposite of the magical. But, for reasons we shall unpack as we go, that assumption is a cultural blind spot. That we have a meaningful understanding of reality itself is, inescapably, magical, and this reality is intrinsically in a state of unfolding and ongoing imaginative play. In a decidedly cheeky way, this is what that brilliant and irritating postmodernist Jacques Derrida pointed out. For actually, a reductive scientistic anti-magical view of reality is magical to the extent that it projects a meaning (of no meaning) onto reality. Ironically, even the anti-magical vision of starkly factual realism is an enchanted story of meaning.

Thirdly—though this gives the term “magic” a meaning that I am not really comfortable with—magic has a social meaning connected with power in a manner that is usually contrasted with “religion.” Here, at least schematically, religion entails submission of one’s life to a higher power, but magic entails the manipulation of the minds and lives of others for one’s own ends. Without getting into interesting arguments about whether or how you can differentiate magic from religion (or, in this “power” sense, science), clearly a magician is a figure of power. Further, the magician’s instrumental powers comes from arcane yet fundamental knowledge. If one sort of magic is the magician’s casting of illusions and the use of subtle power to manipulate and control both nature and the lives of others, then our age of commercially and governmentally applied information and communication technologies situates us squarely within a very sophisticated age of magic. But obviously we live in an age of good magic as well. The positive wonders of our power over nature—particularly in medical science—has realized healing and public health in measures totally unattainable in pre-scientific ages. And even where science is a very knowledge-is-power type of enterprise, and carefully concerned with objective facts, it is also inescapably a human enterprise. Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge beautifully notices the manner in which scientific discovery is always an integrative process where the internal pole of socially situated human meaning and the external pole of observed nature are in continual dialogue with each other.4

Fourthly, a pervasive background feature of our worldview is the incoherent collage of all four of the West’s deep historically embedded theories of magic. Of course, the dominant social theories of magic assumed by our actual way of life are the supernatural theory (for people with sensibilities more or less aligned with modern Western religion) and the anti-magic theory (for post-religious agnostics and atheists). Yet, via suitably Westernized forms of Eastern philosophy, some resurgence of animist magic, integrated, often enough, with scientistic atheism, is rather fashionable. But when it comes to Platonist magic, this lives primarily in the realm of fantasy. Here the giants of twentieth-century fantasy—Lewis and Tolkien—were conscious advocates of the imaginative recovery of the Platonist sensibility. While Rowling is probably less consciously aware of her metaphysical commitments than the two fantasy-writing Oxford Dons were, she is still deeply intuitively Platonist in the stories she tells, thoug...