Joseph Agassi and the Various Guises of Magic

Joseph Agassi’s book is a collection of essays that deal with a variety of key philosophical and cultural concepts (such as liberalism, universalism, rationality, etc.). His concise and precise lens focuses on the issues at hand in a way that makes it impossible to write a review of the whole book. I thus focus on his discussions of rationality, magic and proof, as they touch on some of the key civilizational issues the western society faces at the moment.

My initial reaction to Agassi’s work, once I received it for review in anonymous form, was wonder as to why such a text had not already been published more quickly, along with a sense of urgency to include the book in the reading list in my teaching. I have since done so, with key topics from the all-encompassing range of ideas that Agassi discusses in the book resonating in my mind in the context of the applications of philosophy, interpretation of rationality, and the role of magic primarily in psychology and psychotherapy as my current foci of interest. Agassi’s at once brave and wide conceptual and argumentative strokes and surgically precise distinctions make for unique reading in the social sciences today and demand far more than a single commentary to be addressed adequately. This is why I focus here on his views of scientificity and rationality (which he largely equates), on the one hand, and his understanding of magic, on the other.

Agassi starts his discussion of magic by pointing to an account by James Frazer that magic, and by extension what Frazer calls “pseudoscience,” is a conclusion or statement that claims “scientificity,” however one that “does not work.” In other words, Frazer’s view is that “science must work,” and that functionality is the same as truth. Agassi ridicules this position to the extent that he wonders how an intelligent person could possibly subscribe to a pragmatist philosophy which, according to him, equates the truth with practical workability or effectiveness (Agassi 2023, 47–48).

Agassi is well aware of the controversies surrounding the relationship between magic and science, between magical thinking and scientific rationality. He illustrates how magic is seen as that kind of cognition that is not founded on recognized scientific methods and types of evidence. However, it is almost a regularity in the history of science that new insights emerge first as “magic,” as hypotheses arising from intuition combined with a deep, yet insufficiently analyzed, grasp of the evidence, coincidences or continuities of phenomena, only to be established as “proper science” in the course of time, when the substance of the initially “magical” beliefs can be equipped with the instruments and logic of what, at a later stage in the development of rational science, is considered “proper methodology.” Physics is a good example of this trend, and Agassi uses the examples from Newtonian physics: once the hypothesis of “attraction” of the atoms was considered almost magical, however later, when atomic physics provided the idea with a proper methodological foundation and verification, the “magical” name remained. He mentions an argument by Ian Jarvie that magical rituals that used to accompany various otherwise “reasonable” practices (such as sowing rice that included a dance designed to ensure ample crop) are initially simply parts of a single action (sowing of the rice), however once it is “established” that the dancing has nothing to do with success of the sowing, this insight becomes a discovery that two separate actions are at stake: the sowing, and the dance (Agassi 2023, 50).

It seems that in Agassi’s interpretation of magic the truth of the propositions that are expressed magically constantly creeps in. He ingeniously points it out that untrue or incorrect scientific propositions play a key role in our ability to climb out of our epistemically challenging situations: the Newtonian physics, which has been superseded by Einsteinian physics, is in many ways simply wrong and outdated by the lights of Einstein’s physics, however the latter has emerged from a study of the former. It is questionable whether Einsteinian physics would even have been able to be invented if it were not for the now “incorrect” Newtonian physics (Agassi 2023, 39–40). By extension, one may note that even today school curricula include Newtonian physics despite the fact that virtually no scientific research in physics is conducted along the lines of Newtonian theories: the current paradigm is quantum physics. However, Newtonian physics is easier to teach, even though it is “wrong” in many aspects: the strategic purpose behind its teaching is to create a foundation or a steppingstone toward a rejection of some of the key principles of Newtonianism and the adoption of the principles of quantum physics. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, Newtonian physics is a ladder to climb toward Einstein’s physics. Once the climbing is over, the ladder is to be discarded, not carried along.

The above arguments open up room for an array of methodological questions to which Agassi speaks only partially in this relatively brief volume. They include issues of the workability, or functionality, of beliefs that cannot be supported by scientific methodology, including those that we could describe as magical. For example, medicine does not offer an explanation for the “miraculous” recoveries from advanced cancers without a treatment prescribed by science other than saying that is might be the effect of a “placebo,” in other words of belief in the possibility of recovery. However, using the word “placebo” is question-begging, for labelling something that a particular science (in this case, medicine) cannot explain does not offer an insight either into the limitations of the methodology of that science, or into the way the “placebo” actually works. According to Frazer’s argument, quoted by Agassi, in such cases “placebo” would be real science, while medicine would be “pseudoscience.” The problem of scientificity has, of course, been resolved much more successfully by Edmund Gettier with his infamous argument that knowledge is “true justified belief,” where both the truth (or workability, or success of a hypothesis when tested in reality) and the appropriate procedure whereby one has arrived at that belief (scientific or some other epistemically accepted method) are relevant for considering something knowledge. Thus, a belief that something bad will happen if one walks under a ladder or a black cat crosses one’s path, even if turns out to be true, namely if subsequently something bad really happens, would not be considered knowledge, because the procedure of acquisition of that belief is not epistemically acceptable (Gettier 1963).

However, going back to the issue of workability or functionality in everyday reality, by pointing to Frazer’s argument, Agassi poignantly addresses much of the present “new age” culture, which, due to its focus on the actual validity of beliefs (their ability to produce changes in reality), question the methodological foundations of the very distinction between science and magic. By extension, this also involves questioning the a priori greater value of science than that of magic: if magic works, even in situations where science does not, then how justified is it to simply assume that this is so because science has not yet got around to gathering evidence which would definitely “scientifically explain” something that, at present, science cannot explain? The argument that science will definitely, in the future, offer an explanation of what it cannot explain at present, or that it ought to be able to do so in principle, is what Jacques Lacan calls “university discourse”: the uncritical assumption that if an authority (an institution or discipline) cannot answer a particular epistemic demand, this is because that authority has not got round to doing so, has not managed to sufficiently develop (along its inherently reliable methodological lines), and will, most certainly, be able to satisfy that epistemic demand in the future (Parker 2001). One of the valid arguments of the new age is that this very assumption that keeps science above magic is deeply unscientific and uncritical, which, it seems to me, is so obvious that no further argument is needed to support the claim.

The distinction between magic and scientificity in Agassi is crucial for psychotherapy and philotherapy: the truth in psychotherapy lies not in the realm of epistemology, or finding out the actual facts of a case, but rather in ethics, in the normative surroundings of an event or experience, where the normative nature and meaning of the event or relationship shape the person’s ability to adequately emotionally metabolize that experience: “[…] psychiatry and psychology, to which psychic troubles belong as general problems in human life, inevitably have to enter the fields of morals and ethics, and therefore are unscientific by definition” (Verhaeghe 2008, 101), or “[l]earning and knowledge belong to science, truth lurks in the field of ethics” (Verhaeghe 2008, 64). ¹

If knowledge and truth are not the same, it appears that the “new age” culture, as Agassi calls it, seeks the truth and places a lesser emphasis on knowledge. This, in a sense, is a culture of magic, where what matters is really what actually works in the world, what is helpful. In other words, things appear to conform to a reverse of Frazer’s argument that Agassi discusses: magic is concerned exclusively with the truth, regardless of the methodological characteristics of science, while science is primarily preoccupied with methodology and procedural validity, although this often causes it to actually miss the truth and be ineffective where magic might be effective. On the psychotherapeutic (and, by extension, philotherapeutic) level, the “new age” culture (and I do not mean “new age” in a derogatory manner at all) was championed by Carl Jung, a physician whose early obsession with science and knowledge had turned into an obsession with the truth regardless of the boundaries of scientific “knowledge” (Jung 2009, 233). In the infamous Red Book, whose publication he forbade, and which was published only recently by a decision of the trust governing his legacy, Jung explicitly confronts common scientific knowledge with “knowledge of the heart,” which can only be attained by mercy of “Spirit of the Depth,” and which offers answers about life that cannot, nor do they need to, stand up to the scrutiny of any scientific method (Jung 2009, 233). He thus points to a crucial element in his version of psychoanalytic self-therapy, namely that he had come to make life decisions based on his dreams as insights into the subconscious realities that his waking mind could not access. This same practice is known historically as a magical one: from relying directly on dreams, to producing hallucinogenic states that resemble dreams by the use of various substances, people throughout large swaths of history have sought truths that go beyond the rational. They sought “knowledge of the heart.” While Agassi does not go as far in his book as to advocate this type of understanding of the truth, he usefully dissects the concepts of rationality pertinent to science and the truth in a way that points toward a more adventurous and possibly more productive understanding of the truth in philotherapy, accepted by both the Lacanian psychoanalysts (including Verhaeghe) and by Jung and the Jungian tradition.

Agassi and Jarvie suggest a balanced view of degrees of impairment of rationality and autonomy in the mentally ill in terms of the various styles of rationality (Agassi and Jarvie 1987, Pt. 3). This, at least by my lights, suggests that the different styles can ideally be negotiated into a functional common language, so that the treatment of the mentally ill would be a language game consisting of such negotiation of identity, reception of reality, and the various levels of emotional and other personal transactions with significant others. If the language game of a mentally ill person is a linguistic style, this has ramifications for autonomy and responsibility that allow a firm positing of the concept of moral evil that is not tampered by a psychiatric diagnosis (Fatić 2022). But is not such a language game close to magic? Why should we not consider magic a style of rationality in itself, rather than a distinct type of practice that, with subsequent rationalization and verification, might achieve rational credentials, as in the scientific proof of previously magical ideas or conclusions?

Having said all of the above, I find Agassi’s actual view of magic as opposed to religion unconvincing. He states: “Take animal sacrifice. We transfer our sins to the animal and punish them for our sins by slaughtering them. This is magic” (Agassi 2023, 49). Neither is it true that we “punish” animals for our sins when we sacrifice them (the meaning of sacrifice is to “give up” something for the good, and in the case of animals it was giving up a source of food to please the god or gods), nor is this magic at all. In fact, the sacrifice of animals was part of religions, more than magical rituals. Magic is a focus on the truth regardless of the dominant paradigm of rationality. Religion, on the other hand, is the cultivation of a relationship with god with a view of improving one’s life, and the differences between religions, apart from the difference of the deities one is faithful to, consist of the different portrayals of the personality of the deities and of the different goals set as self-improvement. At least in the Judeo-Christian religions, sacrifice is a key element of self-development: the very metaphor of Jacob’s ladder in the Old Testament, where the ladder reaches all the way to the Heaven and one climbs it with a hope of reaching out to God, as a matter of normative living of one’s life, reflects this understanding of self-development (Genesis 28:12; John 1:51). Climbing the ladder, which Jacob dreams of and Jesus points to in the New Testament, suggests climbing out of one’s self, transcending one’s present condition in ways that can be described as magical, and that are accompanied by a “magical feeling” that Agassi occasionally refers to: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see Heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” Are these words magic? According to Agassi, indeed they are. However, are they true, and what is it that allows us to take a position on their truthfulness? In at least one sense the metaphor is certainly true, if it is seen as describing a way to a higher morality and the normative standard to follow (the true faith). More importantly, is there any other way to convey this moral message that is not “magical,” but rather “scientific,” or “rational”? Are there not so many moral messages whose understanding and acceptance with the appropriate moral emotions that drive our actions that are essentially magical (thus not translatable, verifiable, or describable in “rational” or scientific terms), whilst at the same time equipped with a particular truth of what Jung called “knowledge of the heart,” without which so much of our “rationality” would lose hold of our experiential reality?

It seems to me that the philotherapy as the therapeutic application of philosophy rests both on magical and rational foundations, and that to deprive it of magic as a sui generis articulation of the very helping relationship would make it fundamentally ineffective despite any and all of the epistemic or rational benefits it might otherwise offer the client. After all, it is the magic of the relationship, the organic bond, the wonder and miracle of change despite the rational expectations, that defines success in philotherapy. It is a magical exercise as much as it is a rational process.

Agassi’s discussion of the matter is highly promising for a better understanding of the therapeutic facets of philosophy and of the very modal logical grounds for psychotherapy. His text is indispensable for modern learning about philosophical practice in its various guises, ranging from its therapeutic to its use in practical politics and the understanding of the link that Agassi never mentions explicitly, but refers to implicitly throughout his book, namely the link between the ideological and broader normative foundations of society and the prospect of self-development.