David Bohm

In 1971-72 Peat spent a sabbatical year with David Bohm, and Roger Penrose, at Birkbeck College, the University of London. Since that time Peat and Bohm kept in regular contact until Bohm's death in 1992.

David Bohm

Together they wrote Science, Order and Creativity and were working on a second book The Order Between and Beyond. Certain of Bohm's ideas, such as the Implicate Order and Active Information have been influential upon Peat's thinking. Peat's own efforts have been towards absorbing, or digesting, these ideas and attempting to build with them from within the context of his own particular world-view. It goes without says that, unlike the approach Bohm, Peat's way of working is far from being comprehensive, unified and all-embracing. In fact it is much closer to a cubist sculpture than to an integrated painting seen from a single view-point - see, for example, Logic.

Following Bohm's death, Peat wrote a biography Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm. This was generally well received, although some reviews saw in Bohm a certain gullibility or naivety in what they felt to be his early uncritical acceptance of Marxism and later the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. A new edition of the biography, published in paperback, contains letters not previously available to Peat, that show Bohm was not uncritical of Krishnamurti.

Within the biography Peat also revealed the depression that had dogged Bohm at various times in his life, and particularly in his last years. While some felt that such detail was unnecessary or even harmful to the reputation of an exceptional man, Peat believed it was part and parcel of Bohm's inherent creativity and, as such, is of wider interest than pertaining to the life of one man. In particular, Peat has been intrigued by Bohm as the archetype of a physicist living towards the end of the twentieth century, one concerned about wholeness and what could perhaps be described as the transcendent. He believe that a serious psychological study of Bohm, possibly from a Jungian perspective, would be of value in commenting upon the nature of our own times.

Related Pages: | Language & Linguistics |

Books:
Science, Order and Creativity
Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm

Essays:
Active Information, Meaning and Form
Alchemical Transformation: Consciousness and Matter, Form and Information
Catalogue Essays for David Andrew
David Bohm, Paul Cezanne and Creativity
Nature Morte: Inscape, Perception and Thought
Non-locality in Nature and Cognition
The Role of Language in Science
"That Obscure Object of Desire"
Bohm-Biederman Correspondence
Interview with Bohm

Contact F. David Peat