Reviews and Comments

The book is in some aspects historically inaccurate, for example it is simply wrong to equate the position put forwarded by Malleus Maleficarum as the official position of the Church. Since Huxley was writing at a time when the historical studies about the early modern witch hunt hadn't been conducted seriously, it is understandable. Overall Huxley's knowledge in the early modern period is vast, he read extensively the works of Bodin, Bacon, Rayleigh, etc., and he cites them without any effort, he paints a more than vivid picture of the period. This is a strange book, and maybe Huxley's best. It is a book that is actually about everything, the whole of humanity. Written in the style of a fiction, but with extensive commentaries in various fields, ranging from history of demonology to spirituality. With attention to important details, so that, for example, it is better than any history book in teaching people how the legal system worked in the early modern period. With philosophical reflections and comments on spirituality, better than what Huxley has written in his Perennial Philosophy. He also touches upon law, society, politics... all with considerable depth and moreover wisdom. It is written by someone who actually knows the complexity of human phenomena, it is plainly visible, and this is an extreme rare occasion. Friedrich Heer was one, Voegelin was another, and I can hardly think of a fourth, mostly because, I think, genuinely intelligent man (which certainly doesn't include that plethora of scientists and experts, even if they read extensively) rarely are interested in writing about human society. I cannot do justice to this book for now. It is still out of my grasp.

While titled "New Science of [...]" it really isn't new, and from the scattered remarks of the Medievalists who wrote about the ordo of the middle ages, about the animal trials, about how even the swords, the bells, etc. have their proper place in a world permeated by an order that is social and law-like in the sense of human law, from the works of historians of religions, especially in the lineage of Eliade, and from Jung, etc, the view put forwarded by this book can be assembled. Even those who carefully read the book The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis would be able to infer all the basic points of the book, starting from making sense of how the classical hierarchical cosmos could have been comprehended by the people of the bygone ages. Whoever that has read some Tacitus and about folk religion, and is sincere, will grasp what this book has to say. Of course, surprisingly enough, ethnographers and anthropologists really rarely came up with these conclusions. The people that I've mentioned before are medievalists, historians of religion, and literary critics. Shows us what's problematic in anthropology and ethnography, and I guess that's exactly why Sahlins wrote this book, factually incomplete as the first part of a triology, as his Schwanengesang. Even though with some familiarity with ethnography and with some individual thoughts everyone should be able to arrive at what this book is talking about individually, from what I've observed people don't think when they read, so still it's worth a read. Regarding animism and personhood, I'd like to recommend Rane Willerslev's Soul Hunters additionally, since the examples and instances presented in this books is so scattered that it can become confusing and disorienting. This book should be included in the first course of any undergraduate program in anthropology/ethnography/history of religion/history/religious studies/philosophy.

What I'd really like to know is how this hierarchy came into being, and why are they so similar across the world in different culture and religions. Unfortunately this book doesn't offer any explanation. Guess it is still philosophers' work to penetrate the tough subject. It is related to the origin of law, why this particular structure of the great chain of being, maybe the origin of human soul and culture and everything. From the evolutionary origin of consciousness and thought to the fundamental metaphysics with a panpsychic leaning, there seems to be a strand to be grasped which I can't figure out how to trace through.

The point I disagree the most with Wishart is that I don't consider sound per se as interesting, and I don't quite understand why Wishart values perceptual reality this much. There's a burning desire in me to "hear", say, Pontragin duality - and that has nothing to do with any perceptual reality. Let's think about the history of mathematics. Before around the time of Riemann, mathematics was really just about properties of numbers, about finding roots of certain equations, etc. This for me is profoundly boring so that I wasn't interested in mathematics at all when I hadn't learn abstract algebra and didn't know what topology is. Now we more or less know that mathematics is a general science of structure and mechanism, the most general science of abstract synthesis. It now seemingly has nothing to do with number at all - though factually in the deeper levels they're still connected. Similarly, music for me is never about sound per se, or about organization of sounds. It's the most general art of abstract synthesis. What this term "art of abstract synthesis" means I don't know, but for me music is very mathematical and mathematics is very musical. Focusing on sound per se, or on the permutations of sounds, for me is like focusing on numbers per se, or on the algebraic equations. The point, for me, is the landscapes of sounds, the general morphology of these landscapes, and the interaction between the landscapes, and more. This all sound extremely abstract, but I don't know whether there's a better way to put it. Let's start with the most primitive process of abstraction and synthesis (note that synthesis here is not sound synthesis but synthesis in the Kantian sense). For example, the context of additive synthesis is a landscape of sounds. What I want to hear is not a particular synthesized sound, but the very process of additive synthesis, this may be called the "morphology" of the landscape of additive synthesis. Additive synthesis maybe continuously produce individual sounds, and these sounds form a new landscape, the landscape of synthesized sounds. I want to see the morphology of this landscape of synthesized sounds, and I want also to see its morphogenesis - the interaction between the landscape of addtive synthesis and the landscape of synthesized sounds. Once the landscape of synthesized sounds is integrated (or synthesized in the Kantian sense), it might automatically disintegrate, since the structural or "categorical" element can be abstracted from the concrete landscape, and yield something new. I'd like to first get a concrete grasp of this process (a process not in time but in a general logical/conceptual order). This is very similar to how the study of the natural numbers became the study of algebraic equations, and how the study of algebraic equations became the study of mathematical structures such as group and module. I think I'll need to elaborate more on this line of thought. First, clarify terms such as "the art of abstract synthesis", and then etc.