The Supernatural (2)

When we speak of the supernatural, we are speaking quite simply of all that which refuses to be known in the scientific sense—all that which refuses to come out of hiding and become a fact.

The category of factual knowledge, is not ahistorical. It was brought into being in significant part by a methodology which, during the 17th and 18th centuries, began to generate and consolidate this type of knowledge, to give it the definite cumulative systematic character that it now has. That methodology, which we now call science of course, was originally called natural philosophy, because it was the philosophical study of the nature. The supernatural, then, is that which will not submit to this methodology, and therefore cannot be known on its terms.

The supernatural differs from the unknown and the unexplained, in that the latter categories contain things which may someday be known or explained, swept up in the continual progressive accumulation of knowledge, but the supernatural contains that which can never be known or explained, because it will not allow itself to be subjected to that methodology. Many people no longer believe this category exists. Or, rather, they believe this category contains nothing, that it is an empty set. They are free to believe this, but we should remember that the reasons for this belief cannot be scientific ones, because, by definition, science cannot bear on the existence or non-existence of things in this category.

We are so used to thinking that science has debunked the supernatural that the point I am making will not go down easily. But it is an analytic point, it is true by definition.

The issue has gotten somewhat confused by the fact that, between the late 19th and mid 20th century, efforts were made to apply scientific methods to the study of ghosts and other “supernatural” phenomena. But had such efforts proved successful, this would not in fact have provided evidence for the supernatural; rather, it would have proved that the objects of these studies (ghosts, or whatever they were) were not in fact supernatural. If you can detect and measure a ghost—by its electromagnetic disturbance or what have you—then your ghost is part of the larger system of physical phenomena (a.k.a. “nature”). In that case your ghost is not supernatural, it’s natural.

It may appear that I am switching between two uses of the term supernatural: one, a strictly etymological one, referring to systems of knowledge and so forth; the other a folk term, referring to ghosts, demons, elves, and so forth. I am myself (as always) only feeling my way confusedly through these ideas, but my instinct is that these two definitions cannot be separated—that should ghosts (or elves, or etc.) ever become subject to scientific knowing, they would immediately cease to feel supernatural; they would lose all the qualities (charm, spookiness, etc.) that that category is meant to embody.

At this juncture several thoughts press themselves upon me, further confusing and entangling the subject:

1. The charm and spookiness that I am imputing to the category of the supernatural were clearly properties of science itself up until about half a century ago. Who could doubt, looking at the representations of science in mid- and early-20th century popular culture, that science at that time appeared mysterious, spooky, exciting? The darkness of night, daughter of chaos, with her panoply of stars in a vast untamed void—was this not the very realm of science, the mystery it set out to explore? Apparently, then, in the past fifty years, our feelings about science have undergone a radical change. I am not saying that science itself has changed—though perhaps it has—but the meaning of science in the popular imagination, the force that it exerts on our understanding of ourselves and our position in the world, has changed completely. Presumably, this change cannot be understood without reference to marketing and commercialization, but it is still a change that attaches itself to, that accumulates around, that makes use of science.
2. This category of the supernatural that I keep invoking is difficult to separate from that of the fantastical, the unreal. If the supernatural is that which refuses to be known, to be caught and trapped and domesticated by our systems of knowledge, it also seems to be that which refuses to conform to our sense of reality, which refuses to agree to the terms on which we distinguish the literal from the figurative, the actual from the imaginary. But by saying this I do not mean to “return” the supernatural to the realm of the imaginary where we are used to and comfortable finding it. What I wish to do is point out the degree to which our imagination has been annexed from reality. It seems to me very clear, from the science fiction of fifty and a hundred years ago, that people were perviously very ready to imagine that the literal world held mystery and wonder wholly commensurate with the capacity of their imaginations. One of the defining characteristics of the contemporary world, then, is the degree to which almost any act of wild imagination appears puerile and escapist.
3. I do not think it is an accident that the category of the supernatural, as we imagine it, consists almost wholly of beings with at least some degree of sentience and volition. They are all beings that act like they are alive, though in many cases, we are told, they are precisely dead. This life-like quality is essential, because anything which is passive, which stays put, which behaves according to general principles, must eventually be caught in the net of factual knowledge. Only that which generates within its own being an impulse, a cause, whose prior causes are not discernible, has any hope of escape. That which follows a pattern can be studied; so only that which has volition, which can choose forever to break its pattern can escape.
4. But the deadness of these beings is perhaps equally significant. By placing them beyond death, we place them within a realm in which, in a much more radical sense, nothing can be known. For death is the moment at which the knowable and the unknowable diverge. And death is also the event that forces us back into our individuality and back through the other end of that individuality into, well, whatever lies back there. That is, death is the fact that renders all schemes of accumulative knowledge finally irrelevant.