Autumn X-XI. Cosmogony and Brave New World

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn IX. Scientific positivism

X. Cosmogony

It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the unknown. In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words? It may be that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind, from him who in the world’s dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an image of the Lord of Life, to him who, in the dusking twighlight of the last age, shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have learnt the wherefore of his being. The prophets, and martyrs, their noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure of heart whose life was a vision of the living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was in a world to come, the victims of injustice who cried to the Judge Supreme -- all gone down into silence, and the globe that bare them circling dead and cold through soundless space. The most tragic aspect of such a tragedy is that it is not unthinkable. The soul revolts, but dare not see in this revolt the assurance of its higher destiny. Viewing our life thus, is it not easier to believe that the tragedy is played with no spectator? And of a truth, of a truth, what spectator can there be? The day may come when, to all who live, the Name of Names will be but an empty symbol, rejected by reason and by faith. Yet the tragedy will be played on.

It is not, I say, unthinkable; but that is not the same thing as to declare that life has no meaning beyond the sense it bears to human intelligence. The intelligence itself rejects such a supposition; in my case, with impatience and scorn. No theory of the world which ever came to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the possibility of an explanation which would set my mind at rest is to me inconceivable; no whit the less am I convinced that there is a Reason of the All; one which transcends my understanding, one no glimmer of which will ever touch my apprehension; a Reason which must imply a creative power, and therefore, even whilst a necessity of my thought, is by the same criticized into nothing. A like antimony with that which affects our conception of the infinite in time and space. Whether the rational processes have reached their final development, who shall say? Perhaps what seem to us the impassable limits of thought are but the conditions of a yet early stage in the history of man. Those who make them a proof of a “future state” must necessarily suppose gradations in that futurity; does the savage, scarce risen above the brute, enter upon the same “new life” as the man of highest civilization? Such gropings of the mind certify our ignorance: the strange thing is that they can be held by any one to demonstrate that our ignorance is final knowledge.

XI. Brave New World

Yet that, perhaps, will be the mind of coming man; if not the final attainment of his intellectual progress, at all events a long period of self-satisfaction, assumed as finality. We talk of the “ever aspiring soul”; we take for granted that if one religion passes away, another must arise. But what if man presently find himself without spiritual needs? Such modification of his being cannot be deemed impossible; many signs of our life to-day seems to point towards it. If the habits of thought favoured by physical science do but sink deep enough, and no vast calamity come to check mankind in its advance to material contentment, the age of true positivism may arise... the word supernatural will have no sense; superstition will be a dimly understood trait for the early race; and where now we perceive an appalling Mystery, everything will be lucid and serene as a geometric demonstration. Such an epoch of Reason might be the happiest the world could know. Indeed, it would either be that, or it would never come about at all. For suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic; and, remembering this, one cannot count very surely upon the rationalist millennium.

Alpha.

Wow. This really is Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. And you can see Settembrini arguing for, and Naphta against, this idea in The Magic Mountain. And that “suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic” is why Settembrini is so wary of Hans’ reverence for death and illness. But this also brings up the question of why I’ve always been so interested in cosmogony? You can’t get much more healthy and free of suffering and sorrow then I’ve been. I can’t explain it except to say I was apparently born that way.

Here Gissing seems to me to set the stage for both Brave New World and The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. Both the Gissing, and this quote from Heinrich Heine (from Faust by Goethe, The Norton Critical Edition, page 564)...

...with [the "historical"] Faust ends the medieval religious era, and there begins the modern, critical era of science. It is indeed very significant that at precisely the time when by public belief Faust lived, the Reformation began, and that he himself is supposed to have founded the art which secures for knowledge a victory over faith, namely the printing press; an art, however, which also robbed us of the Catholic peace of mind and plunged us into doubt and revolutions -- or, as someone else would put it, finally delivered us into the hands of the devil. But no, knowledge, the understanding of things through the intellect, science gives us at last the pleasures of which religious faith, Catholic Christianity, has cheated us for so long; we apprehend that men are called not only to a heavenly but also to an earthly equality; the political brotherhood preached to us by philosophy is more beneficial to us than the purely spiritual brotherhood which Christianity has procured for us....

...set the stage for The Magic Mountain. All these books are really about the same thing. And Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, would trace this trend toward positivism, an emphasis on the scientific and on this world rather than the next, back to Socrates. But of all these writers, only Nietzsche really seems to have any confidence in the ultimate success of this trend. (Insert syphilis joke here)

Next: Autumn XII. Death and dying.

Spring VIII. Nature and society + special moments

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: VII. Roots of philosophy

The early coming of spring in this happy Devon gladdens my heart. I think with chill discomfort of those parts of England where the primrose shivers beneath a sky of threat rather than of solace. Honest winter, snow-clad and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not un-cordially, but that long deferment of the calendar’s promise, that weeping gloom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honour of May -- how often has it robbed me of heart and hope. Here, scarce have I assured myself that the last leaf has fallen, scarce have I watched the glistening of hoar-frost upon the evergreens, when a breath from the west thrills me with anticipation of bud and bloom. Even under this grey-billowing sky, which tells that February is still in rule: --

Mild winds shake the elder brake,

And the wandering herdsmen know

That the whitethorn soon will blow.

I have been thinking of those early years of mine in London, when the seasons passed over me unobserved, when I seldom turned a glance toward the heavens, and felt no hardship in the imprisonment of boundless streets. It is strange now to remember that for some six or seven years I never looked upon a meadow, never traveled even so far as to the tree-bordered suburbs. I was battling for dear life; on most days I could not feel certain that in a week’s time I should have food and shelter. It would happen, to be sure, that in hot noons of August my thoughts wandered to the sea; but so impossible was the gratification of such desire that it never greatly troubled me... I remember afternoons of languor, when books were a weariness, and no thought could be squeezed out of the drowsy brain; then would I betake myself to one of the parks, and find refreshment without any enjoyable sense of change. Heavens, how I laboured in those days! And how far I was from thinking of myself as a subject for compassion! That came later, when my health had begun to suffer from excess of toil, from bad air, bad food, and many miseries; then awoke the maddening desire for countryside and sea-beach -- and for other things yet more remote... Sound sleep (often in places I now dread to think of) sent me fresh to the battle each morning, my breakfast, sometimes, no more than a slice of bread and a cup of water. As human happiness goes, I am not sure I was not then happy.

Most men who go through a hard time in their youth are supported by companionship... Of my position, the peculiarity was that I never belonged to any cluster... The truth is that I have never learnt to regard myself as a “member of society.” For me, there have always been two entities -- myself and the world, and the normal relation between these two has been hostile. Am I not still a lonely man, as far as ever from forming part of the social order?

This, of which I once was scornfully proud, seems to me now, if not a calamity, something I would not choose if life were to live again.

Alpha.

One of the things I like best about Henry Ryecroft is that he is even more of an anti-social misanthrope than I am. I find myself thinking I tire of, and eventually avoid, the people I meet because they are mostly so much younger. That it is a conflict of generations. But then I remember I’m not much better pleased with the “friends” I’ve known for decades.

Society and friendship can be a wonderful thing, but it is often more wonderful in theory or in expectation than in reality.  One of the mixed blessings of belonging to an online community is that you learn how many people’s lives are racked by depression or anxiety. As a person who enjoys “fixing” or solving problems, I find people who are overwhelmingly depressed or anxious for no particular reason very frustrating. And since, in the long run, we are all alone anyway, I prefer Ryecroft’s peaceful isolation to the doubtful consolations of friendship.

And suppose you do achieve that perfect connection with another person. It is a wonderful thing, I don't know that anything is better, but what if you then lose that connection. Joyce Carol Oates was devastated by the death of her first husband who had been, I think she would have said, the better part of her self. Within a year she had found a new "better part of her self," and had moved on.

It puzzles me how few (male) characters in fiction achieve or even seek this sort of a connection. Faust (Goethe) is all about the Eternal-Feminine but seems to care very little about actual women. I could say the same for the male protagonists of The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq and for Bernard Marx in Brave New World. Marcel, in In Search of Lost Time, while usually consumed by a very particular sort of fetish that (in the novel) focuses on one female or another, is at least interested in women and ends up in some sort of a relationship with Gilbert. Christopher Tietjens, in Parade's End, for all his other failings, does form a connection with Valentine.

I try to tell my young online friends that, in the long run, and in the end, you are on your own, but I don't press it because no one wants to hear that, and in some cases I will be wrong... at least for a time.

Beta.

This section also reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Proust -- favorite because it resonates so well with my own feelings. Frustratingly, I can’t find the passage (although I’m almost certain it's in the 2nd volume).

Imagine the perfect quote here. Perhaps a taste of madeleine with a splash of tisane will help you with this. Adopt a French accent in your mind. You are a young, hyper-sensitive, young man on your first holiday at the beach in Brittany. You are overwhelmed by an aesthetic feeling as you contemplate some transitory view. You long to share this moment with another person but then you realize that if you had company the moment would quite possibly be ruined. You would be too involved in conversation to fully attend to the marvel before you (especially if your company was in any way connected to the Guermantes dynasty). The extent to which you were engaged with your friend would necessitate a compensatory disengagement from the very thing you wish to share. And it would be even worse if your friend was in a “mood,” and utterly impossible if your friend was the Baron.

The longing to share special moments with people close to you is so often spoiled, even when such a person is at hand, by our inability to comprehend another’s experience. Their experience of our “special moment” is not the same as ours. At best it may be a sort of translation. Worse, our “special moment” may be undermined by the mere presence of the other person.

Art -- painting, photography, literature, film, even music -- may be a better attempt to share those special moments with others. Within art we can control their experience and curate their impressions. We can try to bring to the experience the emotion we feel.

For Proust, in this passage, you need to keep in mind the character’s youth and delicate health; for Ryecroft, his lifetime of travail and his surprising respite and new found sense of peace.

And it gets worse... If our special moment is based on the evidence of our senses, as it most probably is, we have to consider the very real possibility that our friend does not perceive the world quite the way we do. Synesthesia is, in itself, freakish enough, but once you are aware of it you have to think that Synesthetes only know they are Synesthetes because their condition is so extreme. If it was less extreme, who would know? Just recently I took an online color test and discovered I can distinguish fewer colors than is normal. I'm not color blind, but where I see a shade of blue or red or green, most people can distinguish several shades of that color. I can't imagine any way this detracts from my life, but it does mean that I see the world slightly differently than others do.

If what I know as "red" is what other's know as "blue" is an entirely different question and one no one can answer.

Here's a fascinating passage from The God Delusion that Richard Dawkins really should contemplate some more:

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data -- a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of world model from a walking, a climbing or a swimming animal... I've speculated, in The Blind Watchmaker and elsewhere, that bats may 'see' colour with their ears. The world-model that a bat needs, in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects, must surely be similar to the model that a swallow needs in order to perform much the same task... Once again, the perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues -- what philosophers call qualia -- have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality...

Next: Spring IX. Independence, forsooth!