Deflating the “God’s-eye view from nowhere that sees everything”. Written 10-18-23.
“But then came the law of the father and its resolution of the problem of objectivity, a problem solved by always already absent referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and the endless play of signifiers. Who wouldn’t grow up warped?” -Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”
In my opinion, Donna Haraway is one of the most important philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Her work has been brilliant, disruptive, and inspiring, which I consider to be a winning combination in a philosopher and, in my further opinion, no single work of hers is more important than “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (Donna Haraway, 1988). In this work she eviscerates the dominant view in the sciences that it is possible or even desirable for any field of study and knowledge production (even the physical sciences) to occupy a truly objective and universal epistemological position. She calls this veneer the sciences paint their activities with the “god trick”, which is characterized by pretending to have a “God’s-eye view” that “sees everything from nowhere”. And it is this “god trick” that we must also eviscerate in our field, in magick, if we wish to make sense of how magick is actually done in the world we actually live in by the sort of being we actually are.
How does knowledge actually exist? Our JTB definition of knowledge (justified true belief) makes it clear that only one category of being can possess knowledge: minds. Minds, and only minds, believe things, thus minds, and only minds, can possess knowledge.
What sort of thing is a mind? Well, there are disembodied minds, generally called “spirits”, and there are embodied minds, like those possessed by humans and other animals. But notably all minds, even the disembodied minds of spirits, are particular, by which I mean they are themselves and not just amorphous, undefined beings. Spirits have names, histories, thoughts, beliefs, preferences, and projects, just like every other kind of mind of which we are aware. And the minds of spirits are also temporally defined, just like the embodied minds of which we are aware…they exist in space-time. Buer is not currently here, and if I want Buer to be here, I have to evoke them, and if they appear, they are here now, and weren’t here before. Thus Buer is a temporal being, or at least Buer can only interact with us in a temporal manner because we are temporal beings. Either case is, for us, the same. Deities also seem, by definition, to be present through their bailiwicks as well as when especially invoked (i.e. when the Moon is risen, the various lunar deities are present and active, even without being invoked), and elementals are present within their elements (i.e. when you look into a bonfire with astral vision, you will probably see salamanders or the equivalent), but these are both special cases of the same idea: the necessarily particular and situated nature of all minds.
All the sorts of minds that we know of directly exist in particular ways and at particular places and times. They possess particular properties, exist within particular relations, and engage in particular actions when we encounter them. It may be the case that there is an universal, transcendental, and absolute deity which is eternal in the sense that it exists outside space-time (which I, in fact, do believe to be the case), but because every other kind of being we know of, including ourselves, is particular, immanent, and temporal, all interactions we would have with such an absolute divine being would still be similarly particular, immanent, and temporal. The Prophet Moses had a particular conversation at a particular place and time, and a particular bush and no other burned for a particular duration, even if the deity he spoke with is actually eternal and transcendent. Thus, for all intents and purposes, all minds of which we are aware are either particular, immanent, and temporal or are forced to behave as though they are in order to interact with the world as we know it.
Now, what does it mean to be a particular, immanent, and temporal mind? It means that we exist as situated beings. All of us exist at a particular place and time, exist as a particular sort of being with particular properties, and lay at the nexus of a number of particular relations. All of our abilities to perceive are from a particular perspective, all of the things we perceive are particular things, and our ability to interpret what we perceive is based on particular prior experiences. All of our actions and experiences, including the experiments and technologies of scientists and mages alike, only have meaning within a particular historical, cultural, and temporal framework.
So what does this mean for knowledge? It means that all knowledge is produced from within a paradigm and by situated beings that exist at a nexus of relations. It means that science’s claim to objectivity is not just false, but impossible. The “God trick” is an illusion, a sleight-of-mind we pulled on ourselves out of a desperate anxiety about exactly how situated and idiosyncratic we really are, and it must be abandoned. And magick is exactly the right sort of field of study to abandon it.
Why is this? Because we mages are naturally idiosyncratic and situated in our endeavors, driven by “resonances” (more on this concept in the section of this work on “Resonance”) more than systematic or ratiocinative processes. A young person comes across a symbol (e.g. a pentagram) and somehow it seems to stand out against the rest of the world around it. The young person looks more closely, fascination builds, and they find themselves looking at the pentagram more and more. They start doing research, tracing the symbol through the various systems of magick and mysticism throughout the ages, and all the time they have a feeling of urgency, a feeling of “this means something, something important”. They are led by this particular and idiosyncratic feeling of meaning and urgency from one book and website to another, finding particular and idiosyncratic writers and particular and idiosyncratic traditions that also seem to stand out from the others, to mean something. And so they do…for them. That young person has found their way to magick, following a trail of breadcrumbs that will lead them to their first rituals and spells, and everything about it was particular and idiosyncratic, and thus situated in an inescapably particular and idiosyncratic nexus of relations. This is how knowledge really works.
And since this is how knowledge really works, the attempts by science, especially the physical sciences, to look at the world from a “God’s-eye view from nowhere that sees everywhere and everything” are doomed to fail. They are fundamentally wrong-headed. The closest any paradigm or theory within a paradigm can hope to get to objectivity is empirical adequacy, and even that empirical adequacy will always be from a particular and situated perspective.
So, dearly beloved friends and colleagues within the occult community, abandon your science-envy and embrace your situated and particular perspectives, because not only are they a better strategy for producing, possessing, and using knowledge, but they are the only perspectives to which we ever actually have access. We are necessarily situated beings, and thus our knowledge is also necessarily situated. We have no need to “fall in line” behind one paradigm or theory in order to enjoy progress in the field of magick. We must merely work sincerely and consistently towards that progress together.
To that end, the next section of this work will focus on how we are to choose between different paradigms of belief so that we may guide our necessarily idiosyncratic responses to the resonances we experience with reason as best we can.
Works Cited:
Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, (Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn, 1988, pp. 575-599)