12.01.08

More on the thinker J.G. Bennett

Posted in Booknotes, New Age at 3:56 pm by nemo

James on More on Reinventing The Sacred

James said,
December 1, 2008 at 2:03 pm · I haven’t read Bennett, but from what I gather the main value of his work is that it gives a sense of what a psychology of the future (i.e. beyond reductionist and spiritual fallacies) might look like even if one can’t take the specifics of his work seriously. Would you say that Bennett is out of Wilber’s league? Maybe this is like asking someone to compare the skills of two garbagemen.

Bennett’s work was something from long ago, for me, the period of the seventies, when his book was published, or completed. I went to a lot of trouble to forget him! But recently it has seemed as if I was too harsh, or that at least the history of his approach deserves a place, in the history of universal systems, from Hegel onward. Reading Kauffman makes me realize that current science even in its future paradigm shifts isn’t going to really get straight on man.

Often you understand people much later, it’s a lot to digest, starting with General Relativity. Perhaps Bennett’s day will come. One reason I reconsidered his work is that, without being unkind, it seems to me that the work of Wilbur hasn’t done the job, or has bottomed out as too plastic. Wilbur, despite the resemblance of the two, can hardly get anywhere near Bennett who, just at the point of kaluza/klein theory in General Relativity physics in the twenties and thirties, popped out of the wordwork with a theme of five-dimensional physics. Such supersmart people are often subtly incompetent in other ways, and Bennett somehow compromised the whole point of being ‘smart’ by doing some stupid things in his system.
More generally the sheer breadth of Bennett’s work recommends it, until you realize that something went awry with his immense project, next to the corruption created by proximity to Gurdjieff. I have discussed this at The Gurdjieff Con several times.
The point is that current scentific psychology appears incapable of producing a serious account of man. So-called spiritual psychologies are seldom much better, but at least they deal with the real human animal.
In this situation Bennett made a classic gesture: adopt the universal scheme of Samkhya naturalism (materialism) and revive the brilliance of that early precursor to Buddhism. The cogency of this approach still shines through the confusions of the final version of Bennett’s work (book, The Dramatic Universe), which has many other things weaved in to disguise the source, it seems.
This kind of effort is significant because it adopts an ancient tactic to bypass the futile spiritual/material division. Materialist, or naturalistic, Samkhya to the rescue! The result lets some air into the window and you get a sense, a bird’s eye view of the immense complexity of the human psychological framework and the dangers of the arising of a reductionist science culture that systematically deprives man of all his potential in the deep psychology of his ‘higher’ selves. It is not surprising a revolt against science should commence, not only among fundamentalists. Can’t science do any better?

Anyway, the jury is out on Bennett. I am critical because his supporters (cf. the yahoo group ‘deeper_d’, from which I am banned, typical) are incapable of doing him justice due to the very unthinking allegiance to his system that they are already making almost doctrinal, and confused with the sufistic corpus, from which Bennett was completely independent, despite all his pious efforts in that milieu. But that criticism actually starts to uncover the ingenuity of his whole system, despite the unfortunate lapses, and wrong metaphysical temptations.

It should be noted that he was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer who gave him the ingenious idea of interpreting the ancient samkhya in terms of an idea of the ‘will’.
So in the final analysis we are back at Kant/Schopenhauer, unable to penetrate the noumenal limits on our knowledge.
Bennett gives us nonetheless an interesting attempt to survey the whole psychology of man that is not riddled with religious metaphysics. But he ends up with a metaphysics of his own, and the problems with what he called it, ‘systematics’. More on that some other time.
But his basic scheme was based on the idea that ‘time, eternity, and hyparxis’, that is, three dimensions of time, were needed to describe the human mind, and that, however, outlandish at first sight, is not so different from what is implicit in Kant/Schopenhauer, although they won’t say so.
On that basis Bennett’s work has some exciting moments, science fiction perhaps, and in broad strokes, forget his system, it is pretty hard to say he is wrong. The mind’s relation to the timeless is something that science forbids, categorically, but the result is the failure to grasp human psychology of which we are complaining.

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