Tales of Power and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I've reviewed this book elsewhere, but what I really wanted to talk about was something that Daniel Noel touched upon in 'Seeing Castaneda'.

Reading the latest buzz on Castaneda, he seems pretty much totally discredited as an anthropologist.

However, as an observer or conjurer of human perception and sensibility, he is everything that he said he was. Obviously, given the historical references to his life, the man approached what we consider a cult figure, complete with women who followed him around, something we can easily follow in his books. You might say that he took advantage of his celebrity status and worked back and forth between his books and his followers much as an artist would work with his patrons and audience to popularize himself and his work.

What is fascinating about this approach is that it is self-consistent with the arts of manipulation written about in his books. Furthermore, if we take the incongruency of his writings with what we might call reality or everyday reality, and look at the way society relentlessly renders such incongruencies as superficial or otherwise unworthy of notice, we find even more self-consistency.

Castaneda the faker managed to fake a great many people out for six years. That he is essentially discredited at this time is to miss the whole point of his success at exactly what he claims he was taught by Don Juan. He truly turned writing into an 'act of sorcery' , creating a semiplausible account that was actually taken as the real thing for quite awhile. You might call it nothing more than a 'beautiful hoax' on the level of a fake Vermeer or Piltdown Man, except that Castaneda went much further, actually pointing out what he was doing by having Don Juan point out what he was doing to Carlos.

Which brings us to the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. How strange to find almost exactly the permutation of reality that Carlos writes about in a series of essays on scientific experimentation. Now, in no way would I suggest that Kuhn, a scientific historian, is mystical in his approach to the history of science. On the contrary, he exudes careful discernment between the subtleties of concepts he maps out, from paradigms to scientific data. And though he's been accused of being a relativist, I think it would be more accurate to say he's doing something akin to phenomenology here: writing down what he's observed and putting it together as a theory, or thesis.

But these two writers, now both departed, have given us two sides of a golden coin, so to speak. Because what they are dealing with is how humans apprehend reality. And this is quantum behavior, wave action that they are discussing, although they don't know it.