The Newtonian Paradigm Shift and the Demise of Transcendent Knowledge

From the Greek philosophers to the era of Newton, literature was considered a superior form of knowledge, with the capacity not only to impose patterns of meaning on the chaotic flood of phenomena but also to grant access to a transcendent reality inaccessible to the senses. Thus, in Ion Plato¹ defined the poet as ‘a light and winged and holy thing’ with ‘the oracular gift’ to connect the world of Shadows or material world, with the world of Ideas or Absolute Logos. The foundation of the Royal Society of London in 1662, with its unprecedented promotion of knowledge of the natural world through observation and experiment, conventionally marks the end of dualistic metaphysics and the rejection of transcendent knowledge. The empiricists believed that all knowledge is derived from experience, gathered either via the five senses or reasoned via the brain or mind, and they rejected the existence of innate knowledge, that is, they denied the validity of intuition, creativity and the capacity to imagine perfect abstract forms, which had been accepted by rationalism from Plato onwards. Thus, while a rationalist such as Descartes would think that the idea of God or perfection and infinity, and knowledge of one’s own existence are innate, empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume would rely exclusively on experience to differentiate between right and wrong and would argue that the lives of individuals are conditioned only by what they are taught. The rejection of innate forms of knowledge provided empiricism with an aura of objectivity that has been vital for the advancement of science, but it also limited its scope to the observation of a reality constituted by independent events and things. In the long run, this limitation set an unprecedented divide between what C.P. Snow famously called ‘the two cultures’ (Rede Lecture, Cambridge, 7 May 1959), as empiricism did not grant any explicative capacity to the spiritual and emotional knowledge transmitted by literature and art. Empiricists also believed that science can be endlessly refined through the improvement of the mechanisms of observation, which were deemed to be invariable and common to all observers.

This reliance on the progressive perfectibility of science developed pari passu with the Newtonian model of physics that assumes a mechanical and predictable universe. This model remained unchallenged until the rise of relativity and quantum mechanics at the turn of the twentieth century, as relativity problematises the results depending on the position of the observer and quantum mechanics reveals matter to be less solid and definable that it appears to the senses. The conflict created by the ensuing model of the universe was theorised by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Reference Kuhn² In this highly controversial book, Kuhn, a physicist and historiographer of science turned philosopher of history, rejected the assumption of the linear progression of scientific knowledge and proposed instead the notion of paradigm shift. He contended that science develops around specific paradigms, or exemplary scientific achievements, that provide a guide for solving some serious puzzles concerning the nature of reality and of human beings, which cannot be explained within the current exemplary framework. Paradigms alternate periods of ‘normal’ consensual development with periods of ‘crisis’ or revolution that open up new ways of perceiving and interpreting phenomena. The most controversial element in this theory was Kuhn’s assertion that there is an element of ‘incommensurability’ in the scientific findings of each historical period so that it is difficult to compare present findings with earlier ones, as the methods, the observational criteria, and even the language employed to describe the phenomena are subject to constant change.

Although paradigmatic revolutions are usually associated with the individual or individuals who first proposed the new exemplary framework, in fact the paradigm shift itself only takes place when a proposal, out of many, is adopted, through consensus, by the community at large. As Vladimir Grof explains,

Paradigm shifts take place, then, at given moments in history and, pace empiricism, they are complex phenomena combining scientific theories and techniques with socio-cultural beliefs and values. The shift of the scientific model should be seen, then, as one salient aspect of a more comprehensive epistemological crisis taking place in all branches of knowledge, including the humanities, and affecting the community’s worldview as a whole. Thus, the very fact that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared in 1962 may be said, as Alexander Bird does, to form part of ‘the political and intellectual revolution’ that was taking place in the 1960s.Reference Bird⁴

The Roman Inquisition’s condemnation of heliocentrism as heretical and Galileo Galilei’s ensuing decision to recant is one among many examples of deterrence of a scientific paradigm shift backed by incontestable empirical evidence, because its tenets set the crystallised metaphysical beliefs and cultural values of the community into question. Still, given its puzzle-solving character, sooner or later the new scientific paradigm will impose itself over the old one, thus precipitating parallel revolutions in other areas of knowledge. For example, Newton’s laws of motion, together with his law of universal gravitation, fostered the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to demonstrate the existence of a Creator, without the need of revelation. Thus, Newton’s mechanics contributed to the birth of Latitudinarian Anglicanism in the seventeenth century and, a century later, of Leibnitz’s Deism. Hegel’s reliance on reason to gain knowledge of metaphysical and abstract matters and his definition of world history in terms of dialectic progression through empty time towards the ultimate goal of the Spirit’s self-realisation, that is, the achievement of universal reason,⁵ belong in the same paradigmatic constellation as Newton’s mechanical conception of the universe, which is the constellation that gave rise to the period of the Enlightenment. Similarly, the development of the realist novel in the eighteenth century responds to a newly felt need to justify the utility and respectability of literature fostered by the new scientific paradigm. But the eighteenth century also saw the birth of the sentimental novel and the Gothic romance, built on the unbounded display of emotions and passions. The anti-rationalist stance of these two genres was echoed by William Blake in a letter to Thomas Butts (1802) lamenting the spread of ‘Single vision & Newton’s Sleep’ at the cost of the ‘twofold’ vision of the ‘inward eye’ open to nature, the ‘threefold’ vision of dreams and the unconscious, and the ‘fourfold’ vision of poets like himself, with the oracular power to connect the material and the metaphysical worlds by means of the imagination.Reference Blake⁶ Blake’s wholehearted rejection of logic, order and rationality and his defence of a holistic and transcendent form of knowledge combining intuition, feelings, emotions, dreams, and the creative imagination herald the birth of Romanticism and is prefigured by Baroque poetry. As J. Hillis Miller explains in The Disappearance of God,Reference Miller⁷ once rationalism put an end to the possibility of transcendence, God became ‘a Deus absconditus, hidden somewhere behind the silence of infinite spaces’. The spread of Baroque poetry in France, Italy and Spain at this moment in history constitutes ‘the expression of the moment of this separation’:Reference Miller⁷

Miller’s words synthesise the Baroque poets’ struggle to verbalise a collective experience of loss that can only be labelled as traumatic. His description of this struggle in terms of distortion, curving and twisting of natural forms echoes the repetitiveness, fragmentariness and hallucinatory deformations of the images and dreams of traumatised subjects during the process of ‘repetition-compulsion’ or acting out theorised by Freud.Reference Freud⁸ In this sense, Baroque poetry may be said to give symbolic expression to the collective shock provoked by the conflict between the new scientific postulates and older and deep-seated beliefs and values. The Newtonian paradigm shift that brought about the Age of Reason and culminated in the French Revolution, with its demands for equality, liberty and fraternity, was essential for the development of capitalism, industrialisation, secularisation, rationalisation, and the birth of the nation-state, but it also brought about the legitimation of violence and greed unrestrained by moral values after the demise of transcendent knowledge.

As Sandra L. Bloom explains, in order to survive, human beings, like other mammals and birds, must learn to order the world by differentiating and adapting significant events and sensory elements and unifying them into a cognitive whole.Reference Bloom⁹ However, unlike animals, we have the capacity for self-awareness, which involves the perception of our own mortality. The dilemma created by this shocking awareness is solved with the innate human capacity to alter reality by entering ‘different states of consciousness that allow us to maintain separate – and often contradictory – bodies of knowledge’ (Ref. Reference Bloom9, p. 200). Thus, while the dominant hemisphere of the brain allows us to order reality by means of linguistic knowledge, the non-dominant hemisphere of the brain works to gather the non-verbal knowledge that controls such complex sensory-perceptual experiences as emotional behaviour and social interaction (Ref. Reference Bloom9, p. 205). This process of dissociation is a perfectly normal mechanism that allows human beings to carry out mechanical tasks such as driving or knitting while being engaged in solving an intellectual puzzle. But it becomes pathological when it is used as a defence mechanism to cope in the short run with an overwhelming event or situation. When the subject represses the emotions provoked by it and perpetuates the state of dissociation, there is a danger of losing cognitive cohesion, as ‘survival demands that we keep both sides of the contradictory information available just in case we should need it. In that way we know without knowing’ (Ref. Reference Bloom9, p. 202). Literature, like myth and ritual before it, has always fulfilled the function of facilitating the assimilation of potentially traumatic although valuable knowledge through metaphorisation and the imposition of archetypal patterns of meaning that work to attenuate the shock and make the message transmissible to the community.Reference Onega¹⁰

In the nineteenth century the mechanicist paradigm had become normative, providing the technological basis for the industrial revolutions and the rise of the British Empire, with Darwin and Marx adding to the decline of religion as a cultural force. However, even at this stage the impossibility of maintaining the old beliefs and values continued to be registered as traumatic. As Robert P. Purrington notes: ‘The largely nineteenth-century discovery that the story of Genesis is epistemologically equivalent to those found in primitive mythology was as profound a psychic shock as the Copernican displacement of Earth and humanity from the center of creation was to sixteenth-century thinkers’.¹¹ Consequently, rather than evolving towards the extinction of belief in transcendence, ‘[t]he weakened role of religion necessarily led to a search for new foundations, new ways of imagining the world, and for some, the new hope was to be found on science’.¹¹ Thus, an agnostic novelist such as George Eliot would tell F.W.H. Myers during a walk in Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1873, that although God was ‘inconceivable’ and immortality ‘unbelievable’ she firmly believed that ‘Duty [was] peremptory and absolute’.Reference Myers¹² In consonance with this, Eliot will devote her novels to enhance the importance of cultivating the moral character even in the absence of a belief in God, thus transmitting to the community the values of a new secular morality as strict as the religious one. Myers was the co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research, a learned society, founded in 1882, for the purpose of investigating by scientific means the large number of paranormal phenomena that had been affecting all strata of society from the 1850s onwards as a result of the spread of Spiritualism, a religion that had great hold, especially in English-speaking countries, from the 1840s until the 1920s. Since the main postulate of Spiritualism is the belief that the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living, it seems evident that this religion was born out of the sheer need of the first agnostic generations to keep open the avenues of communication between the two worlds. Another example of interest in metaphysical research was the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875, which was to count W.B. Yeats as one of its conspicuous members. The fact that Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1924 points to the continued importance and recognition of a poetry striving for knowledge of the unknown and of that which is beyond what can be known by rational means, well into the twentieth century. Yet another was the spread of Mesmerism, a practice of hypnosis invented by the visionary mid-eighteenth century physician Franz Anton Mesmer, meant to cure patients by provoking altered states of consciousness. The neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot employed Mesmer’s method with patients of hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital, and Freud and Breuer based on it their ‘talking cure’, the first step in the foundation of psychoanalysis.

The alarming increase in diseases of the mind at the end of the nineteenth century points to a generalised loss of cognitive cohesion in the western world, evincing the traumatic component in a patriarchal society ruled by the double standard of morality and the ideology of endless progress. Thus, psychoanalysis may be seen as the response given by medicine to the puzzles set by ‘the pathological private self’ now found to be coexisting with ‘the rational public self, the standard bearer of enlightened political, economic, and intellectual progress that supposedly undergirded nineteenth-century social reform and nation and empire building’.Reference Kohlke and Gutleben¹³ Before this, the proliferation, throughout the Enlightenment period, of the motif of ‘the double’ in the literatures of Britain, Germany and other European countries provides evidence of the prescience of creative writers to detect and represent the psychic dangers of living in a society governed by reason to the exclusion of feelings, emotions and spiritual values. By the time Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1898) was published, the rationality of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum had already reached the solipsism of cogito ergo omnia sum.

Much has been written about the solipsistic ‘inward turn’ conventionally initiated in 1914 with the advent of the First World War and the birth of Modernism. While the war may be seen as the corollary of the international tensions created by the political theology of the sovereign nation-state that justifies political action and motives in terms of friends and enemies, Modernist literature took the struggle to reconnect self and world to its ultimate consequences. As Gabriel Josipovici explains in The World and the Book,Reference Josipovici¹⁴ where the medieval artist created a mimetic art aimed at reproducing ‘the world in his book’ – and it may be added, where the Baroque and Romantic poets struggled to reconnect the broken channel of communication between the two worlds – the Modernist writers turned the medieval proposition upside down, paradoxically succeeding in breaking up the boundaries of their solipsistic prison by turning the ‘book into the world’ (Ref. Reference Josipovici14, p. 309). Jorge Luis Borges will provide the archetypal image of this textual conception of self and world in ‘La biblioteca de Babel’.Reference Borges¹⁵ In this tale, Borges imagines the universe as an all-encompassing and self-begetting ‘total’ library, without beginning or end, containing everything that is thinkable (Ref. Reference Borges15, p. 467). By contrast, Samuel Beckett, incapable getting out of the range of pure subjectivism, will devote his writings to the recording of what was for him the only knowable reality: the inescapability of self-perception. Beckett’s solipsistic conception of self and world was theorised by existentialism, with Albert Camus symbolising the angst and absurdity of a life lived solely for its own sake, without meaning or reward, in the mythical figure of Sisyphus.Reference Camus¹⁶

The Postmodernist Turn and the Trauma Paradigm

The existentialist despair of the period between the two world wars echoes the rising political, ideological and cultural tensions and the class and racial struggles that will culminate in the collapse of the British Empire, the birth of the USSR, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War, making evident the need of ‘a rethinking and putting into question [of] the bases of our western modes of thinking’.Reference Hutcheon¹⁷ This epistemological crisis brought about a change of sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, characterised, as Jean-François Lyotard famously argued in The Postmodern Condition,Reference Lyotard¹⁸ by a generalised loss of faith in humanist values and the widespread demands for engagement and commitment by the new pacifist, anti-militarist, feminist and ‘green’ political options then emerging. Although their interests were diverse and even antagonistic, these new ideological factions shared a sustained critique of totalising ‘master narratives’ that greatly contributed to opening up new spaces for the expression of the ideologies of the political, sexual, ethnical and religious margins of patriarchy.

The fragmentary, polycentric, multicultural and chaotically arranged conception of society now emerging, parallels the shift from the notion of a single expanding universe to that of multiple worlds inhabiting different dimensions in the time-space continuum, postulated by superstring theory. The central idea of quantum mechanics (and general systems theory) is that things exist through their relationships and that everything is connected, so that every component of a system has the potential to affect all the other components. This means that things in nature occur simultaneously on multiple scales and belong in open systems with the potential to change the organisation as a whole. This idea is complemented by the geometry of fractals postulated by chaos theory. As a figure that has the capacity to generate infinite variations and forms out of a basic geometric structure, the fractal offers an infinitely flexible model for the ordering of the complex reality of the multiverse and, by extension, of our globalised yet infinitely diverse, multicultural society. Similarly, the idea of the arrow of time pointing towards the future, sanctioned by Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics, which granted scientific validity to the Hegelian and Biblical notions of world history, is now replaced by Einstein’s notion of space-time continuum in a relativistic universe. An early example of incorporation of these scientific tenets is Walter Benjamin’s model of history in terms of constellations and catastrophes through Messianic time.Reference Benjamin¹⁹ He devised it in the aftermath of the Holocaust as an alternative to the Enlightenment ideology of progress, the excess of which had abutted in Nazism. More recently, Michael Rothberg has compared Benjamin’s anti-linear and relational notion of constellation to the ‘montage’ of the categories of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, which he finds in ‘traumatic realism’.Reference Rothberg²⁰ Traumatic realism is a literary genre aimed at representing the Holocaust, which deploys the characteristic anti-linearity, hybridity and excessiveness of contemporary trauma narratives in general.Reference Onega and Ganteau²¹

The proliferation of trauma narratives from the 1990s onwards points to our present generation as the inheritor of the psychic shocks of the generations that survived the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other atrocious armed conflicts of our recent past. We have also inherited the collective traumas of colonialism and imperialism, and the traumas inherent in the process of decolonisation, which has not completely come to an end yet. The last few years have been pinpointed by the upsurge of massive popular demonstrations demanding the end of totalitarian regimes in the Arab world, which are being forcefully repressed and instantaneously transmitted by the media. In our globalised age, we are direct witnesses to all sorts of traumatic events just as they are taking place. We have all seen in real time the effects of the terrorist attacks of New York and Washington, Madrid, and London, and the effects of natural disasters such as the destruction of Louisiana by hurricane Katrina, or the earthquakes and typhoons of Haiti and the Philippines. And every day we are shattered by detailed news about the physical and psychical violence exerted on children, women, the old, the poor, or the members of religious, racial and sexual minorities all over the world, thus adding to our perception that we are dominated by ‘the trauma paradigm’.Reference Luckhurst²² As usual, creative writers have been the first to adapt their works to meet the social demand of giving voice to these traumas and facilitating their assimilation, but their effects are so overwhelming that they have also forced the academia and the scientific community to reconsider their attitude to affective and imaginative knowledge.

The Ethical Turn and the Shift towards Holistic Knowledge

In the 1980s, the scepticism and relativism propounded by extreme postmodernist thinkers and certain uses of deconstruction, together with the generalised perception that, for all our technological sophistication, we are still driven by the ancestral elementary forces of violence and greed, brought about an ‘ethical turn’ in the fields of literary theory and philosophy, aimed at assessing the ethical values ruling artistic and social relations. Central to this ethical turn was Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of alterity, with its demand that we make an ethical move away from the I towards the ‘absolute Other’, instead of attempting to transform ‘the Other into the Same’.Reference Levinas^23, Reference Levinas²⁴ This demand produces a crisis of identity as its sets our ego into question and confronts it with that which escapes our cognitive powers. The achievement of this ethical goal depends on our capacity for abnegation and the fostering of affects such as love and empathy.Reference Levinas²⁵

Trauma studies, memory studies and ecocriticism are some of the critical currents that stemmed in the last two decades out of the confluence of the trauma paradigm with the ethical turn. These currents share a strong interdisciplinary character, combining elements of history, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, human geography, and/or space studies, among others. The rise of trauma studies goes back to the mid-1990s, when former members of the Yale School of Deconstruction realised that they needed new critical tools to assess the increasing number of testimonial writings about the Holocaust then emerging. From this, trauma theory has developed within the related contexts of postmodernism and postcolonialism. Critics such as Anne Whitehead,Reference Whitehead²⁶ Roger Luckhurst,Reference Luckhurst²² Pierre Nora,Reference Nora²⁷ and Andreas HuyssenReference Huyssen²⁸ concur in asserting that postmodernism and trauma literature share the same attitude towards history as ‘grand narrative’ and the same tendency to take formal experimentation to the limit as a way to draw attention to the complexity of memory. An important recent attempt to combine the insights of trauma and memory studies with postcolonial theory is Michael Rothberg’s proposal, in Multidirectional Memory,Reference Rothberg²⁹ that we establish the relations between Holocaust memory and the memory of decolonisation by giving a ‘multidirectional’ orientation to our understanding of the collective traumas affecting Europe, North America, the Caribbean and North Africa through a half century of shared cultural production.

Also related to this interdisciplinary axis is the post-Freudian theory of affects, coined by Silvan Tomkins in the 1950s and further developed by feminism, queer theory and trauma studies.Reference Tomkins³⁰ The study of affects as an alternative to Freudian drives provides a new epistemological framework from which to counteract the pernicious effects of personal and collective traumas. This theory is complementary to the theory of resilience, a strand of psychoanalysis inaugurated by Boris Cyrulnik,Reference Cyrulnik³¹ which proposes to study the innate human ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune, instead of trauma. Resilience is intimately linked to narrative, as the creation of either resilience or trauma depends on the kind of narrative we tell ourselves, on the meaning we ascribe to events. To achieve complete resilience, however, attention must be paid not only to individual or even communal resilience, but also to ecological resilience, a task that ecocriticism has been carrying out since the mid-1990s. This trend, inaugurated by Gregory Bateson,Reference Bateson³² has been developed by Peter Finke into a wide-ranging, transdisciplinary project for an evolutionary cultural ecology that defines society in terms of ‘cultural ecosystems’ with their own evolutionary processes involving physical as well as psychic energy. Human beings are considered cultural beings with the imaginative and emotional capacity to create complex landscapes of the mind and to establish the interpersonal forms of communication that make up their own cultural ecosystem.Reference Finke³³ Yet another related trend is that developed by literary and cultural critics such as Eve K. SedgwickReference Sedgwick³⁴ or Sara Ahmed,Reference Ahmed³⁵ who have moved beyond the human/non-human dualism of emotions to the articulation of an ‘ethics of flourishing’Reference Cuomo³⁶ that challenges hierarchical definitions of affects in favour of a more equalitarian and respectful position towards animals, nature and inanimate objects. They argue that only by acknowledging that certain types of human violence are necessarily bound up with the systematic mistreatment of non-human communities can we surpass univocal and hegemonic epistemologies.

The growing importance of interdisciplinary trends like these points to the future of academic knowledge as multidirectional, multiperspectival and informed by the ethical demand that we transform the self-centred and greedy individual subject produced by the ideology of progress into a loving and empathic, relational subject in harmony with nature and with other human beings, irrespective of race, class and gender. This goal presupposes a holistic and teleological position that is consonant with recent developments in physics and neuroscience. Thus, physicist Paul Davies, in The Cosmic Blueprint,Reference Davies³⁷ compares the capacity of matter and energy to create ever-more complex and harmonious forms to the organic evolution of the components of living organisms. His view of the behaviour of matter and energy after the big bang (backed by the mathematical theory of fractals) shows contemporary physics recuperating Aristotle’s notions of ‘entelechy’ (a force propelling one to self-fulfilment) and ‘teleology’ (or final causation) (Ref. Reference Davies37, pp. 6–7). As Davis himself acknowledges, ‘Aristotelian finalism and teleology later found its way into Christian theology, and even today forms the basis of Western religious thought’ (Ref. Reference Davies37, p. 7). Needless to say, they also informed, among others, the ‘All and the One’ philosophy of Renaissance magi like Paracelsus, and the Romantic poets’ concept of organic growth. Writer Jeanette Winterson offers her own version of these parallelisms in Gut Symmetries,Reference Winterson³⁸ a novel that develops on the juxtaposition of a set of ‘symmetries’ covering ‘from the Greeks to the Grand Unified Theories of modern physics (GUTs)’ (dust-cover).

Winterson’s juxtaposition of scientific and transcendent knowledge echoes the present Dalai Lama’s comparison, in The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (2005),³⁹ of the Buddhist conception of reality with that of quantum mechanics. After reflecting that ‘[t]he paradoxical nature of reality [is] revealed both in the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness and modern physics’ (Ref. 39, p. 69), the Dalai Lama goes on to recommend scientists to think of the big bang ‘less as a starting point than a point of thermodynamic instability [with] room for a more nuanced and complex understanding of the cosmic event’ (Ref. 39, p. 85). His recognition of visionary knowledge is echoed by neurologist Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist.Reference Lehrer⁴⁰ In the ‘Prelude’, Lehrer explains that, while doing lab research, he was stricken by the realisation that Marcel Proust’s ‘meandering prose’ in Swann’s Way had predicted his own experiments. This insight led him to demonstrate that the artists living in ‘the age of anxiety’ (Ref. Reference Lehrer40, p. x) had responded to the reductionist scientific view that ‘[l]ife was just chemistry and chemistry was just physics’ (Ref. Reference Lehrer40, p. xi) by discovering ‘truths about the human mind—real, tangible truths—that science is only now rediscovering’ (Ref. Reference Lehrer40, p. ix, emphasis in original). Lehrer’s words echo novelist John Fowles’ definition of art as ‘a human shorthand of knowledge, [....] the expression of truths too complex for science to express’.Reference Fowles⁴¹ Lehrer closes the book urging the development of ‘a fourth culture’ that ‘will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities’ (Ref. Reference Lehrer40, p. 196).

This demand parallels the increasing dissatisfaction, in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, with B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism (‘The First Force’) and Freudian psychoanalysis (‘The Second Force’) as adequate approaches to the psyche, which led to the formulation of humanist psychology (‘The Third Force’) in Detroit in the 1950s. Based on phenomenology, existentialism and Levinasian philosophy, humanist psychology proposes a holistic approach to the human being that takes into consideration the full range of human experience and pays special attention to such phenomena as creativity, free will, and human potential. Soon after the foundation of the Association for Humanist Psychology in 1961, Abraham Maslow, Vladimir Grof and others went on to formulate the principles of transpersonal psychology (‘The Fourth Force’), a holistic approach meant to complement the study of feelings and emotions with the spiritual dimension of the psyche. As Grof explains, this new ‘comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states, cosmic consciousness, psychedelic experiences, trance phenomena, creativity, and religious, artistic and scientific inspiration’ (Ref. Reference Grof3, p. 13).

Transpersonal psychology constitutes the most far-reaching attempt so far to recuperate the holistic and transcendent ‘fourfold’ vision of Blake’s poets/prophets. Still, the best way to assess the cognitive value of visionary knowledge would be to listen to what the contemporary writers themselves suggest about the direction we should take to move beyond the trauma paradigm. Given the restrictions of space, I will provide a single example. In 2007, Jeanette Winterson predicted a dreadful end for the earth in The Stone Gods, an exuberant, baroque dystopia representing the deeply diseased, terminal condition of our polluted, overexploited and globalised planet, existing in a remote corner of the multiverse. But she also offered an alternative to this impending apocalypse by offering the notion of ‘potentiality’ to solve the scientific contradiction between randomness and determinism. As Spike, the Robo sapiens, tells Billie, the protagonist: ‘This is a quantum universe … neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene’.Reference Winterson⁴² This call for intervention is a call to assume an ethical position and imagine into being a world ruled by love for the Other and for nature as a life-enhancing alternative to our violent, greedy and traumatised world.Reference Onega⁴³ As Spike puts it with reference to the dropping of the atomic bomb: ‘What happened did happen, but not before it was so powerful an idea that it took shape and form and ripped through the thin skin that separates potential from event’ (Ref. Reference Winterson42, p. 181). Spike’s reflection provides a clear example of the value of imaginative knowledge even in the absence of a belief in transcendence, for if it is the idea that has the capacity to create the event, and not the other way round, we must accept full responsibility for the awe-inspiring shape our world has taken and work hard to improve it, and ourselves, by complementing rational with affective and imaginative knowledge.