The Spirit-Seer and the Final Authority

I. The Engineer Who Saw Angels

Emanuel Swedenborg was one of the most capable technicians of his day. In 1716 Charles XII made him an assessor on the Swedish Board of Mines, the authority that supervised pits, smelting works and ores. As a young man he listed in a letter everything he meant to invent: a flying machine, a ship that could travel under water with its crew, new pumps and locks. He wrote on metallurgy, astronomy and the brain.

In the mid-1740s, in his mid-fifties, his visions began. From then on he wrote about heaven and hell, about conversations with angels and the dead, in thick Latin volumes printed anonymously. The same mind that had calculated pumps now described the architecture of the hereafter with the same thoroughness.

Whether Swedenborg saw what he described, I leave open. I do not argue about esotericism or theology. What interests me is something else: that one man was both, inventor and spirit-seer, and that he can show what connects the two and what separates them.

II. Kant Examines a Spirit-Seer

On 19 July 1759 Stockholm was burning. That evening Swedenborg was in Gothenburg, some four hundred kilometres away, and is said to have described the course of the fire to the guests at a gathering while it was happening. The story spread across Europe and reached a young philosopher in Königsberg who looked into it: Immanuel Kant.

In 1766 Kant wrote a strange book, anonymous and full of mockery, of himself as well: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. He does not simply declare Swedenborg mad. He asks a more uncomfortable question: how does the spirit-seer differ from the metaphysician who builds worlds out of pure concepts that no experience can test? His answer lies in the sentence of Aristotle he quotes: awake, we share one world; dreaming, each has his own.

That is the criterion this essay is about. Not whether someone sees something others do not see, but whether he is willing to bring it into the common world and have it tested there.

III. The Same Gift, a Different Final Authority

I decided at thirteen to become an inventor, and I know how a solution announces itself. I occupy myself with a problem long and consciously, often for weeks. Then, usually after waking and with a delay, it is suddenly there: not in every detail, but as a principle, as an image of something that does not yet exist. I find the details fairly quickly afterwards.

Seen from outside, this hardly differs from a vision. In 1890 Kekulé recounted that he had seen the benzene ring in a half-sleep as a snake biting its own tail. Nikola Tesla wrote that he saw his machines running complete before him before he built them. Inventors and spirit-seers draw from the same source: an intuition that sees more than is there.

The difference comes afterwards. The inventor must carry his image over into reality, and there sits an authority that can be neither impressed nor persuaded: physics. After the Challenger disaster in 1986, Richard Feynman wrote: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

The spirit-seer only has to convince people, and in doing so he has almost no limits to observe, often not even those of logic. “For with God nothing shall be impossible,” says the Gospel of Luke. As faith, that is a comfort. As an argument, it is a licence against every objection.

IV. Where the Final Authority Is Sought

People look for a final authority, a place where the dispute ends and someone else bears the responsibility. Max Weber described the two places where they find it. One is charismatic authority: the extraordinary gift of an individual who sees what others do not. The other is legal, bureaucratic authority: the institution with its offices, rules and procedures.

With the seer, people look for meaning, warmth and immediacy. They pay for it with his arbitrariness. With the institution, they look for security and permanence. They pay for it with its coldness and with the few who entrench themselves in it and manage the visions for profit.

V. The Vision Becomes a Church, and the Church Burns the Seers

The two forms pass into each other. Weber called it the routinisation of charisma: the seer dies, his followers need order, and the vision becomes an institution. Even Swedenborg became a church; a few years after his death followers in London founded the “New Church”.

The institution then decides about the next seers, and it does so by its own measure. Hildegard of Bingen was lucky: around 1147/48 Pope Eugene III had her visions examined and approved them. The institution took the seer in. Jakob Böhme was unlucky: in 1613 the chief pastor of Görlitz obtained a ban on writing against the shoemaker who had seen God flash in the gleam of a pewter vessel. Joan of Arc was burned in 1431 by a church court because of her voices and canonised in 1920 by the same church. First the seer is destroyed, then appropriated.

Dostoevsky thought this cycle through to the end in 1880. In his legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Christ returns to Seville, and the church that invokes him has him arrested. The Inquisitor explains why: people do not want the freedom he brought them. They want miracle, mystery and authority, and they are grateful when someone takes the burden of freedom from them.

VI. The Inventor between Vision and Office

The inventor stands, by the structure of things, as a seer before institutions: companies, universities, professional associations, experts, patent offices. They decide whether his vision is valid, and they often decide before reality has spoken.

I experienced this in an example I still find instructive. For my polygon process, the profession, represented by Professor Weck, demanded a proof: with its different kinematics, my process had to generate the same profiles as Musyl’s older process. I showed this with a simulation. That was considered too simple. What was accepted was the proof by Uwe Schönwandt, who derived the same result with about as many integrals as Musyl’s foundational paper. The institution did not check whether something was true, but whether it appeared in the form it was used to.

The way I invent is in effect forbidden in companies and institutes. Anyone who lives with a problem for a few weeks without showing a result, and above all neglects his normal duties, finds his position increasingly difficult there, even if the same way of working has succeeded before. The pressure destroys the incubation and with it the inventor’s intuition. The institution needs presentable and verifiable interim results. Intuition mostly supplies none.

At the end of 1987 I concluded a licence agreement with Heckler & Koch. At the time it was my only offer; the alternative would have been failure with a mountain of debt. The two machines for SKF were built and delivered, late and with many quarrels. In the end I sat between all the chairs and terminated the contract because the seemingly powerful company MAHO wanted to come in. Half a year later MAHO was finished as well. From then on I was considered burned in the industry. What developed further from the process in machine-tool building developed without me, and my name hardly appears in it.

The bitterest experience, though, is a different one. Every inventor knows the carousel of thought: a good approach, but one goes round in circles, and the longer it lasts, the tighter the loop becomes. It can be broken almost only by conversation. But whom does one talk to? I have seen ideas flow away through a chain of trust and later reappear as “parallel developments” with almost identical patent rights. So the circle closes that the church demonstrated with its seers: first the seer is burned, then his vision is taken over.

VII. The Authority That Does Not Play Along

Against all this I have an authority that is neither person nor institution. In 1983 I first built the three-spindle process on a used conventional machine, coupled purely mechanically. This “infernal machine” was unsuitable for series production, but it proved that the process works. Since 1991 two machines at SKF have been using this process to produce cages for roller bearings, without problems, for more than thirty years.

Physics never believed me and never distrusted me. It tested. That is the only final authority I trust, because it has no interests.

Science would at best be the institution that organises this testing. In 1942 Robert K. Merton called it “organised scepticism”. It is the only institution whose rules provide for its own refutation. When it takes its rules seriously, it deserves trust. When it becomes a guild that checks forms instead of truths, it becomes a church in lab coats.

VIII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: many inventors have experienced physics not as a judge but as an excuse. Whoever fails with his invention can always blame the institutions, and some inventors are more spirit-seers than they know. History is full of perpetual-motion builders who saw themselves as misunderstood geniuses. That is true. But the objection does not touch the inventor who has built his machine and lets it run.

The second objection: without institutions there would be no testing. A single inventor can deceive himself, and experts, standards committees and journals protect society from charlatans. That is true as well. The only question is whether the institution itself is tested, or whether it makes itself the final authority.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that institutions, on average, recognise new inventions more reliably than the reality to which one exposes them.

IX. The Question

The question is not whether someone sees something that does not yet exist. Inventors and spirit-seers both do that. Nor is the question whether one seeks the final authority in the seer or in the institution. Both usurp power as soon as they escape every test: the seer with “I have seen it”, the institution with “We have decided”.

The question is whether one brings one’s vision into the common world and exposes it there to a test one does not control oneself.

Swedenborg never built his flying machine. His angels he did not have to build.