How Do You Think Why?

     “Existential” is a nonce word meaning “concerned with, or arising from, the individual’s perception of the human condition.” The basic feature of the human condition is a foreknowledge of our own mortality and the impermanence of human activities. We normally postpone Sancho Panza’s anxiety, the gut anxiety over death, or deal with it by denial or diversion — like Kingsley Amis’ young man who handled the thought of death by thinking quickly about sex. Denial mythologies are as old as human beings, who from the remote past buried the dead with tools, food and grave goods.
     Death has never been a part of the human inheritance which has been pleasant to contemplate, and all humans, at adolescent or in the middle of a sleepless night, have experienced existential anxiety. But chronic and unrelieved existential anxiety, to be handled simply by acceptance and stoicism, is a direct spin-off of the hard-hat, Newtonian-Cartesian, world view. For a large part of European history, Christianity provided doctrinal comfort, although its reassurance was complicated by some ugly reflections about hell. Pre-Einsteinian science neither proves the idea that mind is an activity of brain and equally perishable with it, nor does it prove the non-existence of a traditional God. But by the end of the nineteenth century (and simply on the basis of a coherent world view which accorded with knowledge), neither disembodied intelligences generally, nor the religio-scientific blend which both Newton and Descartes themselves held, looked in any way evidentially probable. The scientific creed includes one uncompromising moral item: that we follow what the evidence appears to show, regardless of any anxiety or discomfort which the results may present. If we really cannot play constantly with a hard ball, nobody will deny us illogical or undemonstrable convictions, but they are not the same game as science, should not leak into it, and, ideally — as a test of our mental integrity — should not contradict observable fact: they can be tolerated only in gray areas where there is room for doubt or no possibility of direct verification.
     Our personal anxieties should, of course, play no part in the dispassionate business of science. On the other hand, they quite obviously do. Like the old-time sex researchers, who put on the guise of disinterested eunuchs pursuing knowledge, we are kidding nobody.
     A biologist who is also a doctor exhibits (some would say, suffers from) a singularity of his or her own. He or she is occupationally obliged to treat scientists and philosophers as people — a role in which some of them are extremely uncomfortable, having embraced science, propositional logic, or philosophy as a way of dealing impersonally with uncertainty. Although scientific integrity is real, and is maintained by peer pressure, in the field of world models personal motivation shows through. It is part of the unfortunate legacy of religious dualism; world models tend to be designed to hold down the stone we have placed on our existential anxieties. It is not quite cricket to draw attention to this — such considerations only operate as a rule where there is some room for choice, and most of us eventually assent to overwhelming experimental evidence. Einstein disliked quantum logic, because God does not shoot dice. Darwin was apprehensive about the uproar which his theories would produce, and was only persuaded to face the music when Wallace was about to anticipate him.
     A psychopathologist of science would be immensely interested in the story, for example, of "paranormal" phenomena — not as to their reality or significance, but for the effect which the idea of their possible existence has had on intellectually respectable people; it seems unkind to let them go home like that, and the temptation to interpret is overwhelming. Writers on the subject can be divided, not between “sheep” and “goats” (Schmeidler 1958) but between Counterphobics, Deniers, Viscerals, and Arbitrators. They may be categorized by the way they relate to anxiety and by the degree of clarity, openness, and precise reasoning with which they relate to systems breaks.
     Counterphobics have come to terms with a world view which accepts existential anxiety and renounces wishful denial. This process has been psychologically costly, and for them it has an ethical dimension. They know from experience the power of denial mythologies, and combat them; they are also intensely disturbed by systems breaks which might give ground to such mythologies. The position which counterphobics defend today is that of positivist mechanism — they fear that the irrational may return. Until about 150 years ago, counterphobics were of a different order: they feared the rational and the causal, because it might displace the supernatural, in which their world model was then invested.
     Deniers face existential anxiety with less stamina. They look with hope for a systems break, which, since it can hardly now be supernatural, must lie somewhere in science. They are pursuers of spiritualists who converse with deceased relatives. Their writings on speculative matters or philosophy generally, observe the decencies of scientific argument, but there is a tangible soft center. What the counterphobic fears, they encounter with relief. Bad cases end up reading significance into the Great Pyramid, or looking for ancestors from outer space.
     Viscerals in my terminology are those analgesic in the face of death anxieties and life anxieties is the re-creation of a sense of awe. They cultivate the marvelous — unexplained phenomena leave open questions which might, if resolved, give unsettling answers. Unidentified flying objects attract them because they are unidentified. It is the inrush of viscerals, who do not want precise explanations (those might provide answers and suggest some definite world model) which so upset Wheeler (Gardner 1979) in regard to the misuse of quantum formalisms. In medicine we see them as “holistic” quacks. The response of the visceral to any new or old formulation is not that there might, but there must be something in it, and they form not philosophies but intellectual jackdaw’s nests by a process of eclectic accretion.
     Arbitrators are for my money the genuine practitioners of science. Very possibly they owe their capacity for combining judgment with originality to a defense mechanism of another kind — the use of intense interest in the nature and workings of the world to displace any unwelcome consequences which the discovered world may have. For them constant integrative curiosity is ego-syntonic. They do not fear a systems break, and if phenomena of any kind suggest one, then that is intensely interesting. Besides attempting to confirm the phenomena rigorously, they begin to think how and where they might fit the world model if confirmed. They are not preoccupied with possible points of entry for denial would be unreassuring unless it has some basis in an integrated reality; and they have no interest in the diffusely marvelous, only in evidence suggesting that their world model for the time being is possibly incomplete. Whereas deniers and viserals are unconsciously reinforced by reports of sea serpents (because they suggest that “science does not yet know everything” and folklore may prove right), arbitrators are interested in them because they might possibly represent the existence of an unknown genus, which is likely to have an instructively specialized physiology for deep diving. Counterphobics, unless a sea-serpent is actually and ungainsayably caught, are a little disturbed and indignant at the credulity of those who report them. Arbitors are inclined to listen to unconventional ideas or experiences attentively, even a little in advance of hard evidence, simply to see if they could possibly throw light on something. At the edges of any world model, they are the masters of that controlled lunacy which might generate a more comprehensive model.
     Both arbiters and viscerals read science fiction, the first for ideas they can make over, the second because science fiction is their mode. Arbitors wade through the works of quacks and psychotics, exotic philosophy, or oddballs like Paracelsus, looking for pieces of the jigsaw which the quacks and oddballs may not have seen. Jung, of whom I will speak later, was a visceral, but has some claim to be an arbiter: once he got, not a world model, but a glimpse of human intellectual patterning, he became an indefatigable collector from every conceivable source. Because he could not fully integrate what he found into a world model, he has become a favorite with viserals, which is at once a deserved and an undeserved fate….
— Alex Comfort, Reality and Empathy, pp. 160-162.