390
FREDERICK CREWS
One of the common criticisms against Reich was that, instead of repeat–
ing and varying an experiment so as
to
detect any possible source of error,
"as scientists should do," he would trust his findings, as soon as he had
been able to place them in some rational connection, and go on to new
discoveries. What his critics did not know was that in most cases he would
keep his discoveries to himself, sometimes for years, until they led him to
new discoveries, which was his criterion for the validity of a finding .
(p.67)
Reich, in other words, hid his experimental results from the scientific
community while using them as a basis for further inferences, then
taking the latter as confirmation of the former. This combination of
secretiveness and dogmatism constituted a fundamental break with the
empirical spirit - a spirit, we should n.ote, whose cardinal point isn 't
the forming of hypotheses based on observations, but the submitting
of those hypotheses to the fullest scrutiny according to agreed-upon
criteria of adequacy.
The keystone of Reich's science is an unwillingness to be judged
by rational skepticism. That skepticism, because it remains unmoved
by "subjective organ sensations"
(SW,
p. 209), is itself condemned as
a debility of overcivilization. "It is those who feel only very little or
nothing at all," says Boadella, "who need most desperately to deny the
existence of an energy which, once accepted, would make obvious the
fact that their organ sensations were seriously disturbed " (p. 177).
Hence no one outside Reich's circle of believers can be trusted as a critic
of orgonomy. When such intrude s do presume
to
attack Reich, they
are merely displaying their own orgastic deficiency. Only those whose
"own organismic energy can function freely" (Raknes, p. 50) deserve
to be heard, and this free functioning - reachable by inhibited mod–
erns through the one avenue of orgone treatment - produces a new
style of sensuous knowing. Instead of abstractly investigating the world,
the adept lives with the truth as a practical mystic, listening to the "ob–
jectively expressive language" of orgonotic streamings
(RSF,
p. 63n.).
This is not to say, however, that orgonomy makes its claims on a
forthrightly mystical basis. Reich always insisted that he was a strict
materialist who had, to his own satisfaction at least, demonstrated his
propositions. No one ever maintained more adamantly that all phe–
nomena are physical and that all philosophy is illusion; the Blakean
rules Reich detected in the universe were presented as mere inferences
from meter-readings. This double emphasis, at once hortatory and
positivistic, gave Reich a rhetorical advantage over avowedly anti-
