Scholarly Heroism: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on David Bohm’s Transformative Scholarship and Intellectual Exile

Scholarship and Heroism

Where a scholar falls on the continuum between crackpot and genius is a matter of professional and societal judgment, and can change over time. History is full of thinkers who were ahead of their time, but whose contributions, when recognized in retrospect, earn our deepest appreciation. If a scholar’s intellectual trajectory flies in the face of accepted wisdom or prevailing paradigms, he or she is likely to be perceived as incompetent or deviant. Such scholars tend to be marginalized, ignored, or even vilified, especially if they are also activists.

Heroism is a concept that has many meanings, and those meanings change because language is dynamic. Before exploring the lifework of David Bohm as a case study in scholarly heroism, I want to reflect briefly on how “heroism” has been hijacked to support a cultural narrative in academia that is, ironically, anything but heroic. My point is to show how language itself is used in the service of ideology and power, even in universities, which are ideally (and were to some extent traditionally) “communities of scholars” and the epitome of integrity. More important, however, is my contention that language, and the thoughts language carries, can be used to separate and divide, or to integrate and unite. Bohm’s insight concerning the fundamental importance of the process of thought has profound implications for individual and collective functioning. This insight is behind Bohm’s championing of group dialogue as an antidote to the incoherence and chaos in human affairs. One of my intentions here is to reclaim “heroism” from the word’s misuse in the service of the corporate values of higher education institutions, so that it can be appropriately (re)connected with exceptional scholars, who work productively despite institutional and other barriers. These barriers can be philosophical and paradigmatic, as they were in the case of David Bohm.

The prevailing narrative in Western cultures portrays universities as heroic institutions that have democratized education, and produced science and technology that improves material life for everyone. Therefore, the key to progress is higher education for the masses, which leads to economic “growth and jobs.” Opposing this heroic narrative is a tragic counternarrative, which sees universities as part of the problem rather than part of the solution (see Kirschenmann, 2011). The counternarrative posits that universities, in alignment with governments and big business, have subordinated human well-being, and the sustainability of other sentient creatures and the environment, to vested commercial interests. The collusion between the academy and industry is maintained by the rhetoric that alternative narratives are “unscientific” and therefore wrong, especially if they question the received wisdom of free market ideology. Yet we live in a world of global financial and ecological crises, mass poverty and persecution, ever-growing migrations of refugees, escalating terrorism, increasing domestic violence, and many other symptoms of collective pathology. That the world seems, to many people, to be in a mess, and civilization close to the brink of disaster, is usually seen as evidence to reinforce the prevailing narrative rather than to review it.

If the dominant narrative of universities as heroic centers of scientific research and knowledge production is overly optimistic, then tragic counternarratives are, more often than not, overly pessimistic. David Bohm would agree. When asked by Larry Dossey (2013) if he thought humankind would make it, Bohm after thinking intently said, “Yes. Barely” (p. 33). If we are trapped in the prevailing paradigm that technological advances, unending growth, and free markets will, through trickle-down economics, eliminate poverty and achieve well-being for all, we are deluded. Yet if we believe that the vested interests of global capitalism are so powerful that meaningful change is impossible, we are paralyzed by hopelessness.

We can and must move beyond this sad dichotomy of optimism or pessimism, for neither extreme serves us well. Bohm shows a way beyond such either/or dualistic thinking. Although the prevailing narrative has appropriated “heroism” to its own ends, heroism can be reclaimed in the form of heroic scholarship that genuinely serves humanity and the planet. Bohm’s heroism, I contend, is authentic and compelling because it is in the service of truth, beauty, and goodness.

Some heroic scholars, whose ideas were for many years opposed or dismissed, are eventually recognized and honored during their lifetime. For example, Barbara McClintock’s discoveries in cell genetics were so inconsistent with paradigms in her field that for many years prior to receiving recognition and a Nobel Prize in 1983, communication with her colleagues was fraught and at times vituperative (Keller, 1983). Some famous scientists, such as Galileo Galilei, were punished for their heresies; others, such as Gregor Mendel, were ignored because their colleagues could not understand what they were doing or its significance until generations later.

Bohm’s Heroism

Many scholars, including Bohm, have dared to risk their careers or more by speaking “truth to power”—a poignant phrase coined by the Quakers in the context of American foreign policy in the mid-1950s. If fascism is authoritarian power, it finds expression not only in totalitarian states but also in otherwise liberal states that promote fear and intolerance to erode civil liberties in the name of national security. Paradoxically, power is also expressed in scholarship, including science, when contrarian and deviant ideas, practices, and people are disregarded or denigrated.

Bohm was heroically resilient in pursuing his calling in the face of the power of the theoretical physics establishment—which has been compared with a “church” hierarchy (see Peat, 1997). Throughout his life, Bohm faced many setbacks and adversities, was a victim of intellectual and political persecution, and of intermittent physical and mental illness. Perhaps resulting from a dysfunctional home life as a child, he suffered bouts of hypochondria, panic, and depression (Peat, 1997).

In a sense, Bohm is like Sisyphus, who was condemned by the Gods for eternity to roll a big rock up a mountain only to see it roll down again under the force of gravity. French philosopher Albert Camus sees Sisyphus as absurdly heroic—absurd because the action is futile, heroic because every time he gets the rock to the top he has a moment of hope. In this moment, he finds meaning in his struggle, for it is the conscious struggle, rather than results—as elucidated by Camus (1991) in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus—that gives life meaning. The struggle, the endeavor to serve humanity and pursue truth, gave life meaning for Bohm, just as it has done for many other thinkers and social activists through the ages.

Bohm’s heroism is not the popular image of heroism as macho triumph overcoming impossible odds. Bohm is heroic because he embodied the gentler strength that comes from willingness to surrender to that which he must do if he is to be true to himself and live undivided, like the Mobius strip (to borrow Parker Palmer’s metaphor), in which the inner and outer edges seamlessly merge. Dominated as our culture is by patriarchal values, the courage of aggression is more visible and celebrated than the courage of surrender—not to oppression, of course, but to the pursuit of truth and goodness. Genuine gender partnership, as Riane Eisler (2003) argues, valorizes the courage and power of surrender, an archetypal feminine heroism.

Bohm had many frailties and the death he risked, as a prototypical scholarly hero, was professional and social annihilation. He suffered his fate bravely, awfully, and most of the time maintained his enormous intellectual focus and passion. Whereas most of us yield to the temptations of the world, Bohm would not and could not. Unlike many academic or semiacademic intellectuals, he did not succumb to academic professionalism. His work was driven by intrinsic rather than instrumental values. It was something he did because, as eminent educator Parker Palmer likes to say, it was something he “couldn’t not do,” and be true to himself, his soul, his calling. Bohm’s work was not something he did for a living, which requires “proper, professional behavior—not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and ‘objective’” (Said, 1994, p. 74).

David Bohm (1917-1992) was a theoretical physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics and its interpretation. As an exemplary thinker and scholar, he explored the philosophical and practical implications of the new physics for psychology, sociology, cosmology, and consciousness. From the academic nursery of specialized physics, Bohm emerged as a consummate generalist. He was an integral scholar who—like Gregory Bateson (1979), another marginalized integral scholar—combined “rigor and imagination, the two great contraries of mental process, either of which by itself is lethal. Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity” (p. 219).

Zeno, Blau, and Zimbardo (2011) identify “twelve heroic subtypes and situations that call forth heroic action” (p. 102). The subtype that best fits Bohm is scientific (discovery) heroes, who the authors define as “individuals who explore unknown areas of science, use novel and unproven research methods, or discover new scientific information seen as valuable to humanity” (p. 102). In the case of Bohm, the label needs qualification, and the definition contains questionable hidden assumptions that should be revealed. The label and its accompanying definition privilege scientific ways of knowing over other ways of knowing. The implication is that nonscientific ways of knowing are not heroic. The scientific requirement would not disqualify Bohm, as he was, first and foremost, a scientist. However, he was not only a scientist; his contributions to knowledge are both scientific and extrascientific. More accurately, Bohm challenges the validity of dualisms, such as science and nonscience, in his theory of wholeness—which is an epistemic theory of unified knowledge and an ontological theory of unified reality. The heroic subtypes schema posits that exploring “unknown areas of science” is heroic, but venturing beyond science is not. Using “novel and unproven research methods” is heroic, but only if they are interpreted as consistent with prevailing paradigmatic assumptions.

Bohm’s approach to research was, for a theoretical physicist, certainly novel and in violation of professional paradigms and fashions, such as the focus on mathematical formulations, and the dissociation of physics from human consciousness. Bohm, heretically, was guided by feel. He did not spend much time reading physics journals, and references to the scientific literature in his own writings are minimal. He preferred to discuss physics, its meaning and implications with colleagues. As a physicist, claims his biographer and science-writing collaborator David Peat (1997), Bohm liked to see problems “in his mind before setting down the necessary mathematical steps. It was as if his problem-solving ability were guided less by logic than by a combination of imagination and intuition” (p. 36). Bohm was always interested in the question behind the question. His passion was exploring meaning and implications. His philosophical and humanitarian predispositions as a scholar made Bohm a maverick, an outsider from the physics establishment.

In accordance with the scientific heroic subtype of Zeno et al. (2011), discovering “new scientific information seen as valuable to humanity” is heroic, but only if the information is scientific information and seen (presumably by the scientific community) as benefiting humanity. In this respect, Bohm is not a good fit: He transgressed the normal boundaries of science, and used methods of inquiry “unproven” by science. Most telling, he discovered or constructed knowledge that some of his scientific colleagues found embarrassing or worse, knowledge that may eventually prove beneficial, and even critical, to the survival of humanity and other sentient beings.

Transformation and Transdisciplinarity

Although transformative knowledge and action, and trandisciplinary inquiry, are not of course necessary for scholarly heroism, often both qualities are present. Bohm’s scholarship is transformative, in the sense that his ideas and theories represent what Bateson (1979) called second-order change, that is, a difference that makes a difference. Bohm’s theories could have profound implications for personal and social transformation, and for radical change in individual and collective consciousness.

Prominent heroism researchers George Goethals and Scott Allison (2012) posit a taxonomy of hero subtypes (different from the Zeno et al. model discussed above) that is based on the influence of the hero on his or her admirers. Of the 10 subtypes in their taxonomy, the ninth subtype “transforming heroes” is arguably fitting for Bohm. Goethals and Allison cite Albert Einstein as a transforming hero because he transformed the field of physics. Bohm, I suggest, is a transforming hero because he transformed, or helped transform, academic understanding of the far-reaching implications of the new physics for virtually all aspects of the human condition through his theories—in particular, his ontological interpretation of quantum theory and his theory of thought as a system.

More recently, Allison and Goethals (2015) present a framework for heroism, within which transformation is integral to the hero’s journey, along with self-sacrifice and risk taking. Bohm’s scholarship is potentially enormously transformative, as he took the implications of the new physics beyond the subatomic level into philosophy and human affairs: “I was,” says Bohm in dialogue with David Peat, “fascinated with the question of how much organized collective behavior could go along with the almost complete freedom of movement of the individual electrons. I saw in this an analogy to what society could be” (Bohm & Peat, 1987, p. 5).

Bohm was also a transdisciplinary scholar, whose approach to inquiry transcended disciplinary boundaries, agendas, and methods. As the prefix “trans” indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which at once is between disciplines, across different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines. In the classical world, there is no space between disciplines or it is empty. In the quantum world, the space is full at least potentially. By contrast with interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to inquiry, whereby topics are viewed through the lenses of two or more disciplines, transdisciplinary research is integrative, rather than additive, in the sense that it is a prism in the mind of the researcher that crosses or ignores disciplinary boundaries. Transdisciplinarity is underpinned by systems theory, complexity (see, e.g., Morin, 1999, 2008), and a compelling case for holism rather than reductionism.

Because the meaning and value of transdisciplinarity is vigorously contested within academe, it should be stressed that for Bohm (and other transdisciplinary scholars) specialized (disciplinary) knowledge and generalized (transdisciplinary) knowledge are mutually supporting and equally necessary. As we know from holography, cosmology and modern physics, the parts cannot be understood without understanding the whole and vice versa. We need both atomistic and holistic approaches not one or the other. In other words, transdisciplinarity is complementary to, and in equal partnership with, disciplinarity, not an alternative to it.

In part because of its transformative and transdisciplinary character, Bohm’s intellectual contribution has yet to be widely recognized by the scholarly community. Indeed, the visionary sweep of his ideas is largely responsible for his status as an outlander, an exile. In keeping with his personal humility and transdisciplinary perspective, he always considered his theories, indeed all theories, to be limited, contingent, and provisional.

Bohm’s heroism, I am arguing, is rooted in the exceptional quality of his ideas, ideas that developed under grim circumstances and despite ostracism from the scientific community. First, his insights are transformative because they point to a new level of knowledge and a new epistemology that is centered on the nature and role of thought. Although the implications of Bohm’s work are momentous, the importance of his achievements is not yet widely appreciated, because the academy and broader culture are still under the spell of the illusions that constrained and banished him. Second, Bohm’s extraordinary passion, focus, resilience, and imagination enabled his achievements, despite a lifetime peppered with adversity. My main argument here is that Bohm’s heroism is embedded in his radical ideas, their potential significance for humankind, and his passionate quest for truth and transcendence, which he pursued under the most trying circumstances—a traumatic childhood, ostracism in physics, dismissal from his research and teaching post at Princeton, harassment by the U.S. government, exile to a foreign country, ongoing financial insecurity, and periods of depression and despair.

Radical Theories and Deviance

Quantum physics demonstrates that nonlocality and nonlinearity are characteristics of physical reality. Such conceptions led Bohm to process philosophy and his ontological theory of the implicate order and the explicate order. The universe and everything in it, all that we perceive and know and think, is the explicate order. It arises as a creative act of unfolding from and enfolding to the implicate (enfolded) order. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the people in the cave only see the world as two-dimensional shadows. They do not know, and perhaps cannot know, the three-dimensional world outside the cave that gives rise to the shadows. In Bohm’s philosophy, the world we see around us is a three-dimensional “shadow” of a deeper reality—the implicate order. Bohm brought together the idea of an undivided universe (wholeness) with the process of becoming, which he called holomovement (using the metaphor of the hologram), to make the point that being is contained in nonbeing and nonbeing is contained in being.

Bohm notes that English and other European languages are noun-oriented, and therefore shape a worldview centered on things, categories, and boundaries, rather than on processes, relationships, and transformations. As linguist Benjamin Whorf (2011) put it 80 years ago, a man “notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness” (p. 252) depending on his native language.

Bohm sees language as a critical element in changing where a person lives—that is, his or her consciousness. Much of Bohm’s thinking is prone to being misunderstood, precisely because language shapes consciousness. As Bohm and contemporary linguists such as Anna Wierzbicka (2014) argue, any language, including English, provides only one of many possible and equally valid worldviews. That is why the theory of the implicate order eludes description. “Beyond a certain point, the only way to evoke a sense of [Bohm’s] theory is through personal experiences, especially those experiences when the mind becomes still” (Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, & Flowers, 2004, p. 200).

Bohm had an extraordinary ability to see connections and analogies between his ideas on quantum theory and philosophy, especially Hegel’s dialectical idealism. He was particularly taken with Indian philosopher Krishnamurti’s teachings about “dying to thought” so that a silent mind can be awake to what is (Peat, 1997, p. 224). This was the transformation of consciousness that Bohm sought for himself and society, a quest both for transcendence and for earthly harmony and cohesion within and between people.

Courage: Physical and Intellectual Exile

Goethals and Allison (2012) identify virtue, competence, and courage as three defining heroic qualities. The authors claim that doing “something that is moral” is most important. A second characteristic is being “highly competent,” and a third is “courage” (pp. 186-187). In this section, I focus on Bohm’s courage in pursing his scholarly calling, undeterred at being ignored or denigrated by venerated members of his profession or by his subsequent banishment. In the following section, I continue the argument that Bohm’s achievements are highly virtuous or ethical and exceedingly meritorious.

Exceptional courage characterizes heroic journeys in mythology, fiction, and the real world. Heroes are persons admired for “feats of courage and nobility of purpose,” the struggle to overcome obstacles and the resilience to deal with or bounce back from adversity. The strength and bravery to overcome or embrace banishment is an extraordinary mark of courage.

Exile, like its close cousin, public shame, is a horrible fate. There are two types of exile: (a) physical exile and (b) metaphorical exile. Bohm was a victim of both kinds of exclusion. Deeply concerned by the crises facing humanity, Bohm was drawn to Marxism and found dialectical materialism appealing. A victim of McCarthyism, he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, arrested, and indicted to stand trial before a federal grand jury. He could have been sent to jail. Although acquitted, he lost his job at Princeton, and in the zealously anticommunist climate of 1950s America, Bohm had to go into exile. He was an expatriate in Brazil for 4 years and in Israel for 2 years, and an intellectual outsider for most of his adult life. He suffered dreadfully from both conditions. He was terribly lonely and isolated in Brazil. His lack of contact and conversation with friends and colleagues was excruciating, and he was intermittently afflicted by physical illness and depression.

One can imagine the anxiety Bohm must have felt in the months prior to the trial and in the witness box facing the prosecuting attorney in the courtroom. He was a distinguished physicist with no interest in political revolution or violence of any kind; his attraction to dialectical materialism was purely philosophical. Bohm had no interest in joining political parties. He was a deep-thinking and creative intellectual, not a political activist. Shunned by the physics establishment, he was intellectually unfazed because he knew he was onto something. It was probably only his research and his thinking that kept him focused, enthusiastic, and sane during those extremely stressful times.

Despite his suffering, or perhaps because of it, Bohm was extraordinarily productive. He worked on his basic quantum theory, which was published in two articles in 1952. Bohm developed his theory over more than 30 years, until it reached maturity in the 1980s. As the theory evolved, he gave it different names to express the changes—“hidden variable, the causal interpretation, and finally the ontological interpretation” (Peat, 1997, p. 115).

Bohm’s geographical and professional exile, his ongoing health and financial issues, did not dissuade him from his noble purpose. Goethals and Allison (2012) claim “the ultimate sacrifice that heroes make is giving their lives for the greater good” (p. 189). Bohm did not of course die for a cause, like many celebrated heroes, but he did literally give his life to his calling, and despite his struggle and suffering was at peace doing so.

Esteemed Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said (1994) points out that despite the pain and dislocation, there are benefits to exile. For Said, intellectual exile is almost necessary for intellectual freedom. Bohm’s findings and formulations might not have been possible had he remained tied to the conformist forces within professional associations and academic institutions.

Bohm’s courage fuelled his struggle to present, and his quest to engage, the theoretical physics establishment with his radical ideas. His noble cause and brilliant contribution to knowledge was to elucidate a science-grounded philosophy (or a philosophy-grounded science), and its implications for consciousness, creativity, and social transformation. The status quo that Bohm’s impassioned dissent challenged was a status quo of thought—that is, how thought perpetuates the disconnect between intentions and results—which Bohm called incoherence—because we do not see how thought operates to keep us muddled, divided, and disordered.

Virtue and Competence: Transformative Scholarship

In this section, I focus on expounding the claim that, resonant with Goethals and Allison’s triune framework (virtue, competence, and courage) of heroism, Bohm’s scholarship is exceptionally virtuous and more than competent. As I have suggested, appreciating the moral and intellectual quality of Bohm’s theories is challenging, because of their radical nature, the limits of language, and therefore the tendency to misinterpret and misrepresent his ideas. However, to support my chief claim that David Bohm is a quintessentially heroic scholar, it is necessary to show that he was virtuous and wise as well as courageous.

Bohm’s (1980) central concern, as he states in his most popular book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, was “understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole” (p. ix). In Bohm’s philosophy, the transformation of consciousness and human society is the driving force, and it is hard to imagine a more virtuous endeavor. To this end, he champions creativity and dialogue in science and beyond as critical to human betterment. Bohm explains how thought contains misinformation and error, and how creativity that can give rise to

fresh perception . . . is blocked by the rigidly fixed infrastructure of consciousness, which cannot properly respond with “free play” to such perceptions. Instead the mind “plays false” to create the illusion that no disturbing new perceptions are needed. (Bohm & Peat, 1987, p. 268)

Bohm sought to understand the role of thought as a system and a process, rather than the content of thought, in consciousness and behavior. His fascination with how thought shapes consciousness and the human condition drew him to the Indian philosopher, Jidu Krishnamurti, with whom he spent over 20 years in dialogue (see, e.g., Krishnamurti & Bohm, 1999, 2014). Because the role of thought in shaping consciousness and behavior is at the core of Bohm’s thinking, and because the radical nature of Bohm’s thinking about thought, or metathinking, is difficult to articulate and grasp, I offer a brief analysis here. In my view, Bohm’s insights into “thought as a system” lie at the heart of his scholarly excellence, because they point toward the possibility of fundamental transformative change individually and collectively.

Bohm suggests that the way every individual sees the world depends on his or her assumptions or deep-seated, usually unquestioned opinions and beliefs—that is, implicit or subconscious thoughts, which give rise to explicit, conscious thoughts. The problem is that in the moment, even if we intellectually accept the connection between mental conditioning and perception (as many psychological theories have established), we do not see that our assumptions affect our observations and experiences. Bohm says that our thoughts have us rather than we having them. Thought is tricky and mischievous; it creates our reality, but then hides from us what it has done (Bohm, 1995, 2014).

Our blindness to thought is particularly the case when our perceptions—what we see and think—contradict our most cherished and taken-for-granted assumptions as to what is good, true, and real. Consequently, we might feel hurt, angry or some other emotion, or combination of emotions. In this sense, we all live in separate and different realities. As writer Anais Nin graphically puts it, we do not see the world the way it is, we see it the way we are. We do not see that our observations are observer-dependent; we think our observations are reality—the way things really are. That is because, as Michael Polanyi, also a scientist-cum-philosopher, argues, most of our assumptions and most of what we know lie in the “tacit dimension” of mental functioning, outside conscious awareness. Bohm’s point is that because “the observed is profoundly affected by the observer, and the observer by the observed—they really are one cycle, one process” (Bohm, 2014, p. 80). That we separate observer from observed is some kind of existential illusion, the consequences of which are disastrous.

The antidote for Bohm to our inability to see “thought as thought” is our capacity to suspend. Suspending does not mean suppressing or ignoring thought, which would of course be impossible. Suspending a thought or line of thinking simply means hanging it in front of us, removing ourselves for a time from its habitual reappearance in consciousness, putting it out there perhaps for later reexamination. By suspending a thought, especially an emotionally charged thought, we get better at “seeing our seeing,” and our thoughts have less influence on what we perceive.

Bohm maintains that thinking is mostly thoughts and feelings are mostly “felts” because most of what we think and feel comes from memory, from the past, rather than from an authentic thinking/feeling response to the moment. As Bohm (1995) explains,

. . . besides thinking and thought, there are feelings and felts. There are direct feelings, which you get when you see something or experience something. Then there are feelings that come from memory. Those feelings however may not be seen as feelings that are coming from memory. They’re experienced as actually the same as direct feelings, just as our representations are experienced as direct perception. That confusion is very serious because it will lead us to try to deal with our projections and representations as if they were real. (p. 2)

Bohm notes that we have body self-perception, but seem to lack mental self-perception. Our bodies are what neurophysiologists call proprioceptive—the body knows its own movement, and the connection between intention or impulse and movement. When proprioception is reduced or weak, the body and its movements become chaotic. But we seem to lack proprioception of thought, and the result is incoherence and illusion. Bohm explains that when faced with a problem, we have an intention to think. We are not usually aware of the impulse to think, but nevertheless “then comes the thought, and the thought may give rise to a feeling, which may give rise to another intention to think, and so on.” We are not aware of what is happening and so—and this, it seems to me, is Bohm’s brilliant insight—“the thought appears as if it were coming by itself, and the feeling appears to be coming by itself, and so on,” when in fact they are self-created rather than externally created. The point of suspending thought, Bohn says, “is to help make proprioception possible, to create a mirror so that you can see the results of your thought” (Bohm, 2014, p. 28-29, italics in original).

Toward Wholeness and Goodness

Over the course of his fraught yet inspirational life, Bohm had the courage to follow his convictions at whatever cost, and the “ethical know-how,” to use Francisco Varela’s (1999) illuminating phrase, to do the right thing. In addition, a balanced combination of extraordinary rigor and imagination allowed him transformative insights. Bohm was a warm-hearted and humble man who I present as an exemplary heroic scholar, whose contributions to human knowledge and understanding may eventually be widely acknowledged as supremely important, even revolutionary.

As an integral scholar, Bohm challenged “objectivism”—the separation of subject from object, knower from known—which, despite compelling evidence in physics and neuroscience that subject and object are inseparable and that all knowing is relational, remains as orthodoxy. Bohm continually rocked the boat by challenging established interpretations in subatomic physics, and he strayed beyond the accepted limits of physics into fields as diverse as cosmology, philosophy, and consciousness. As a transdisciplinary scholar, he challenged representations of knowledge as reducible to disciplinary and subdisciplinary fragments—“the cult of the certified expert,” in Said’s (1994, p. 77) poignant phrase. Representations of knowledge as specialized professional expertise were and still are dominant in academia, the media, and popular culture.

The forces of convention and professionalism had little pull on Bohm because his scholarship was driven by compassion rather than by the quest for status, income, power, or security. Bohm was hurt and at times angered by the way his scientific colleagues belittled or ignored his contributions (Peat, 1997). And he worried throughout his life about lack of financial security. Yet none of these adversities dissuaded him from his impassioned search for a deeper understanding of fundamental philosophical questions, and the potential consequences of this knowledge for human betterment. Like many highly distinguished scholars throughout the academic terrain, Bohm so loved his work that one could say “his soul infused his role,” as Palmer puts it in his reflections on living an undivided life. Like the Mobius strip, where inner and outer are inseparable, Bohm’s scholarship is rooted in both reason and emotion (Palmer & Zajonc, 2010).

Einstein gave humankind a new dimension of knowledge by demonstrating the relativity of space and time. Bohm may be contributing to a new dimension of knowledge through his reintegration of physics, metaphysics, and consciousness. As I have argued, Bohm’s scholarly heroism is rooted in his exceptional ability to see connections between philosophy and practical affairs, coupled with his resilience, courage, goodness, and love of humanity. Bohm was deeply distressed by the crisis and chaos facing humanity and life generally, and the widespread social and paradoxical phenomenon of change without change. He saw the underlying cause of civilization on the brink of disaster as a pervasive lack of harmony between body, intellect, emotion, and spirit. Human beings are out of balance and disjointed; restoring balance and unity, Bohm believed, requires a radical reexamination of the thinking process. However, the difficulty is that seeing thought as a system that creates problems contradicts the prevailing and unquestioned paradigm that thought solves problems. Of course, thought solves some problems, especially straightforward or simple problems where cause and effect can be identified. But human and environmental conditions are complex. The technocratic tendency to frame such conditions as problems, and rush to solutions, ironically and tragically creates other problems, which are often more serious than the problems being “solved” (see Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974).

Einstein’s famous remark—“We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”—points in the direction Bohm explored. We may one day see thought as a system, a seeing and knowing that may be key to the transformation of consciousness and society. Radical to the point of being incomprehensible to most of his contemporaries, Bohm’s journey into the nature of thought and consciousness was undertaken in the face of fierce opposition. Like the intrepid travels of the great 13th-century explorer Marco Polo, into lands unknown to Europeans, both men’s journeys are wonderfully heroic.