All Things Are Full of Gods, page 52
PSYCHE: [After several seconds of silence:] Do they really vanish, do you think—all those conscious creatures who come into being, live for a time, and then die? Does anything simply vanish? How do you know that all things aren’t in a sense stored up in the infinite, or that this life isn’t only a prelude to a greater reality, or that the history of life in time isn’t also the story of something being prepared for eternity? I certainly don’t think of death as the end of anything other than one episode within the living soul’s greater story. And, anyway, what would infinite moral intelligence be like, and from what vantage would we be able to judge its purposes? Surely we’re not talking about some large psychological subject somewhere out there in the beyond; it’s vastly more unimaginable than that. I don’t know what to say, Phaesty. Alas, you’re asking religious questions, and none of us is competent to discuss those. We’re not theologians, we’re merely gods—to paraphrase you. I, no less than you, have no trust in dogma or creedal authority, and so here I have nothing to rely on but what I take to be reasonable intuitions and a few ambiguous signs I sometimes think I see in the patterns of cosmic existence . . . not to mention a few spiritual experiences . . . perhaps.
HEPHAISTOS: It’s almost always only “perhaps.” I’ve no room for that “perhaps” in my heart. The suffering of the innocent suffices for me to make all such considerations worthless.
PSYCHE: Again, I’ve no real answer for you. I applaud your moral indignation—to be honest, it explains a great many things to me about your general view of reality that I might not have suspected—but to a considerable degree I’m oddly immune to it as well. At one time, I would have felt the force of your protest more acutely; but, as I live on, I find myself more susceptible to a sense of the grandeur and sublimity of the mysteries we’ve been discussing and less susceptible to aggrieved alarm at cosmic suffering. Not that I take it in stride. I suppose, though, that something in me tells me that that grandeur indicates something original and ultimate in a way that the sufferings of the current age don’t. But I don’t understand entirely why I feel that way. Of course, all those religions you disdain for their more terroristic teachings—and, I assure you, so do I—also say that something’s gone wrong, or at least hasn’t yet gone entirely right . . . that the world is broken or fallen, or appears to us only through veils of illusion, or hasn’t yet become fully what it is to become. I have to say, this often enough seems credible to me; at times, in fact, it almost seems obvious; but, if it’s so, it’s a truth that can be expressed only in the dream-images of myth and spiritual allegory and religious experience. But, again, I don’t have any theological convictions; and, really, I don’t need any. I don’t know how to judge the infinite. I certainly don’t know how to calculate the value—weighed out in blood and pain and injustice—of whatever knowledge or wisdom or beauty or love created beings might gain through the trials of existence in the world below; I simply trust that there’s something greater for all of them beyond those trials. Still, when I consider the incomprehensible vastness of it all, I find myself naturally assuming that the power that creates life—the infinite act of mind in which all things exist—is forging souls in the fires of nature, and I can’t help but believe it’s all to a good end, more beautiful than gods or mortals can imagine. In all of it something divine, I believe, is coming to manifestation—to utterance—and being prepared for . . . what is yet to be.
HEPHAISTOS: Well, then, everything’s all right. I can’t wait.
PSYCHE: Mock if you wish. All I can say is that it’s very much a matter of personal temperament. It’s up to you whether you trust in the mysteries of mind and life and language—their miraculous strangeness, which seems always to promise the revelation of a greater meaning, or to adumbrate a higher reality, a world beyond the world we know—or whether you close yourself off against those experiences. I suppose it must all seem a mite quixotic to a rugged realist like you, accustomed to the foundry and the furnace and the ringing blows of hammers.
HEPHAISTOS: Listen as keenly as I might, I certainly can’t hear the promise you apparently hear.
PSYCHE: I most definitely do hear it, as far as I can tell. To me, all of existence is a realm of positively eloquent communication. All of reality is the manifestation of that infinite reason that dwells in God; all of it’s composed of signs and symbols, through which infinite mind is always speaking to us . . . and inviting us to respond. But what does that matter in the end? None of this alters my arguments of the past several days; whether you share my . . . my faith, I suppose, or not, you’ve lost this argument on the actual points of logic. Whatever the moral nature of the divine, the reality of the divine still declares itself in all things. And, you know, I don’t accept your pretense that you regard all the matters we’ve been discussing as far too mysterious for reason to penetrate. You began this debate as the voice of flinty rationalism, and you can’t now simply retreat into postmodern relativism just as the curtain’s about to be rung down. That play’s not on the board.
HEPHAISTOS: You’re mixing your “play” metaphors a little promiscuously there, my dear.
PSYCHE: If you’ve lost the debate—and we at least seem to agree on that—then it’s not because every theory of mind and life and language is equally indefensible; it’s because the modern reductionist story you chose to defend is manifestly wrong, and manifestly inferior to the . . . well, as you say, the commonsense or “folk” view that all those realities are precisely what they appear to be, and that they provide evidence for precisely what they seem to provide evidence for. Physicalism, metaphysical naturalism, materialism—call it what you like—it’s simply false. It doesn’t work. Since, however, you’ve as much as admitted that you’re more committed to what you want to affirm than to what you have warrant to believe, it scarcely matters. So, as we’re waxing confessional now, may I tell you what I find intolerable—what I fear above all?
HEPHAISTOS: I’d be grateful if you would.
II
Mechanism and Nihilism
PSYCHE: I fear—I dread—a nihilistic narrative reaching its ineluctable nihilistic terminus. Whatever else modernity is, good and bad alike, it’s most definitely also the project of a fully realized nihilism, in the most neutral philosophical sense of that term: the belief that there’s no eternal scale or realm or horizon of meaning and moral verity, and that instead the will in each of us stands before a universe devoid of any intrinsic structure of moral truths, and is now at liberty to create or destroy values as it chooses. No doubt, in its dawn, this reduction of lived existence to the dialectic between an objectively meaningless cosmos and a subjectively self-creating will must have felt like a kind of emancipation; but it has always also been the metaphysical accomplice of a project of setting loose the will to power, now unencumbered by any sense of anything inviolable or sacred, or any sense of the self’s dependency upon a higher order of truth. It was inevitable, really, that in time the mechanistic method should mutate into—or, perhaps, be revealed as—a metaphysics as well, and an ideology, and a program not merely for investigating nature as if it were a machine, but also for actually transforming the world—nature, but also culture, politics, economics, and everything else—into a machine. Thus the insane intellectual ethos of absolute reduction: of the dissolution of reality into principles of impersonal force and function, the systematic stripping away of the whole rational, vital, sensuous semantics of life from our picture of the “really real,” as though all of them were nothing more than an impasto of epiphenomenal conventions concealing the real nature of things. And what a strange animosity toward the real world of experience it all requires of us. It must now be reduced to the ghostly syntax of the purely impalpable, imperceptible, lifeless, mindless realm of the quantitative. And mind must be reduced to the bare syntax of a functional system for processing stimulus into behavior, operating through a neural technology, denuded of the semantics of real qualitative experience, intentionality, consciousness, unified subjectivity, rational thought, and immediate intuition. And life must be reduced to a bare genetic syntax of determinate traits constructed upon a purely chemical platform, so that in the end life proves to be nothing more than a somewhat more elaborate modality of death—inert matter with ideas above its station, so to speak. And language must be reduced to the functionalist syntax of a mechanical system for processing data and converting stimulus into behavior, to which the apparent semantics of communication and communion has been applied as a mere system of manipulable user-illusions. The fullness of reality and of awareness and of life must be dissolved into a collection of spectral paradigms, inhabiting a phantom order of the real, where the rose is not red, or alive, or known to any intending conscious mind, or loved in the light of its eternal value as something good and true and beautiful.
None of this is truly rational. None of it’s an enlightened or enlightening view of reality. None of it’s logically warranted, or even logically defensible. None of it conforms to any reality that could actually exist in any possible frame of being. It’s pure ideology dissembling itself as scientific realism; it’s the will to power wrapping itself in the stolen garments of disinterested reason. It’s also pure insanity. Systematic disenchantment is, as it turns out, a mad and destructive delusion, which sees everything as machinery and so makes everything into a machine—a delusion that sees everything as already dead, and then contrives with boundless ingenuity and ease of conscience to prove the point by progressively killing the world. It’s all a cruel alienation from life . . . the very death of nature . . . of the soul.
HEPHAISTOS: You’re growing just a little apocalyptic, you know. Is this really all you see in the—and forgive me for using the traditional term—the Enlightenment?
PSYCHE: Oh, no, of course not. Don’t talk in historical abstractions. I believe in the freedom of the mind, I detest dogmatism, I despise arbitrary authority. God bless the Enlightenment. But not everything we associate with that term is actually enlightening, is it? We’re all prone to confuse the genuinely rational with the merely rationalistic—which is, after all, just another species of dogmatism. And fundamentalisms—religious and irreligious alike—are very much an invention of the modern temperament, aren’t they? I don’t pine for the premodern world as such, believe me. I certainly don’t look back fondly from this divine perch of ours toward the political or religious absolutisms of earlier centuries, or to any of the tyrannies and brutalities that have marked every epoch of human culture, no matter what divine warrant they may have claimed for themselves. But I retain the right to defend the forsaken wisdoms of the past and to denounce the cruelest follies of the present, and to insist that the modern West—the “developed world,” that is, which invented modernity and which continues to impose its ideologies and values on other cultures through sheer brute economic and military power—deceives itself in thinking that its mastery over nature is evidence of a true understanding of reality in its essence. There’s considerable truth, no doubt, in the early modern dictum that knowledge is power; but that doesn’t mean that power is necessarily knowledge.
As for the Enlightenment project . . . well, after all, every age incubates evils peculiar to itself. I contend only that the greatest political, social, and administrative evils of the late modern age have all too often been motivated and rationalized by this view of life as a kind of machinery, and of human nature as a kind of technology—a biological, psychological, genetic, social, political, economic, and even ethnic technology—to be manipulated and perfected. In a sense, those evils were all but inevitable once that prejudice had been absorbed by a whole culture. If you see human beings as essentially machines, then you’ll in all likelihood feel little compunction about trying to correct what you take to be their malfunctions or defects of design. You won’t even recoil from the thought that the machine might need to be redesigned altogether—purged of operational inefficiencies or superfluous parts. Again, I’m not trying to idealize the more distant past. Before the age of mechanism, the structures of institutional power, both secular and sacred, were just as oppressive, and often more so; they simply claimed jurisdiction and wielded authority over bodies and minds in the name of different principles. Even so, there’s a special kind of license implicit in an incapacity for astonishment or reverent incertitude before the mysteries of the soul and of nature; and mechanistic thinking is, to a great extent, a training in just such an incapacity. Certain kinds of despotism and barbarity are impossible so long as a culture in general believes that nature possesses an integrity at once organic, moral, and spiritual, upon which one must not trespass. No such constraints inhibit the project of fixing a defective machine; there’s nothing sacred in the realm of mechanism; there are only functional efficiencies and inefficiencies—redundancies and superfluities. So many very special savageries and superstitions and practical evils follow from this uniquely modern form of “rationalism”: everything from “scientific” race-theory and eugenics, to mandated sterilizations and surgical and chemical interventions intended to correct perceived malfunctions of the brain, to social Darwinism and the “iron law of wages,” to death-camps and gulags. It was the age of the machine that made possible the racialist ideologies that reduced humanity to a biological technology to be perfected through elimination of the “defective,” and the collectivist ideologies that reduced humanity to an economic and social technology in need of radical reconstruction at the level of all civil, commercial, and cultural relations. And it was the age of the machine that, in the fullness of time, gave rise to market economies of absolutely omnivorous appetite and ambition.
HEPHAISTOS: Oh, this is rhetorical hyperbole on a scale I’d never have imagined you capable of. No metaphysics by itself drives human beings to commit atrocities, and no age has been conspicuously better than any other in that regard. Atrocities are simply a perennial human pastime.
PSYCHE: I didn’t say that mechanistic metaphysics produced the Third Reich, or anything like that; and I’ve clearly said that every age is capable of its own kinds of barbarity. All I said—or all I meant to convey, at any rate—was that the prevailing metaphysics of any given epoch, however tacit, determines which evils can be perpetrated in the name of higher principles, without violations of conscience, according to rationales supposedly grounded in the very nature of reality. The metaphysics of mechanism produced an understanding of nature and of function, of organism and of mental agency, that simply made it acceptable to trespass upon spheres of human existence that had previously been seen as sacrosanct. And I repeat: the way the most truly and impeccably modern persons see reality—and the way the great majority of truly modern peoples live in relation to the world about them—is a form of madness that will, if it can’t be arrested in its rampage through history and nature, destroy itself and the world. The machine, as the governing logic of a social and cultural order, seeks to vanquish nature and spirit alike—to vanquish life—and it seems destined to succeed.
HEPHAISTOS: The machine?
PSYCHE: [With a gently melancholy smile:] Isn’t that how it looks from our comfortable vantage here in the Intermundia? Doesn’t it seem as if the world down there—among the prosperous nations, but also increasingly everywhere—is becoming a single, ubiquitous machine: limitlessly various and yet deadeningly uniform, an incessant engine of material production and consumption and stupefying spectacle, a vast cybernetic system—at once technological, social, ideological, commercial, cultural, and economic—for generating ever newer factitious material desires, and for sustaining a virtual order of purely economic relations, and for integrating humanity into itself ever more inextricably . . . by fragmenting societies and psychologies and attention spans with its ceaseless torrents of vapid exhortations to acquisition? It seems so obvious that it’s almost a banality to call attention to it. It’s a reality that confines the better part of social life to a very specific set of commercial functions and that’s already succeeded in converting all of nature into little more than a reserve of material resources to be exploited . . . with, of course, increasingly devastating results.
HEPHAISTOS: True enough, but you make it sound as if a handful of ideas that took root in the Western mind in early modernity is to be blamed for every evil of the present; and I suppose the implication of that would be that a physicalist or metaphysically naturalist view of mind or life is therefore to be eschewed just on moral grounds. But, of course, the imperative doesn’t actually follow from the historical claim, and the claim itself is much too simplistic for someone of your intelligence. Surely you know that history—cultural, material, ideological, what have you—is a far more complicated thing. Tempora et mores and all that: things change; new circumstances arise for countless reasons; contingencies vie with necessities for the future—the fortuitous with the inevitable, the concrete with the abstract—and what emerges is as much accident as fate. Trying to explain the present entirely as the dialectical issue of this or that single idea or constellation of ideas—this or that local cultural development or metaphysical commitment—verges on the nonsensical.
PSYCHE: Oh, Phaesty, as I said, I’m confessing my fears—nothing more. And the only grand claim I’m making is that how human beings see their world determines to some very great degree how they’ll treat the world . . . and one another . . . and themselves, I suppose. As for the grand historical narrative, I admit I’m speaking in vast and misty generalities. It’s impossible to say which came first—the ideological revolution or the evolution of new material conditions. I expect it was neither, and they were really two sides of a single, indivisible cultural process. There’s no point wondering whether it was the rise of the mechanical philosophy or the rise of any number of early modern economic, political, social, and ideological developments that progressively transformed humanity’s vision of the world into one of pure material efficiency, and so inaugurated the great cultural project of bringing the world into conformity with that vision. Whatever the case, what gradually emerged was a great and relentless machine of power, production, and consumption. Those who created the machine built better than they knew. At most, they grasped a very paltry part of its design, and couldn’t possibly have imagined the immensity or exquisite intricacy it would assume—its grandiosities and subtleties, its ruthlessness and delicacy. Certainly, they couldn’t have foreseen how rapidly and inexorably it would come to alter the very frame of reality, from the world’s most unfathomable foundations to its most inaccessible heights. What began, principally in the seventeenth century, as a dim intuition that nature might be reimagined as a mechanism, the better to penetrate its secrets and marshal its forces, soon became the practical reality of an immeasurably multifarious technology that would relentlessly consume nature in order to enlarge and perpetuate itself. And, far from requiring the connivance of any calculating intellect, this process became more systematic and intricate the more it broke free from anyone’s conscious intentions. At some, probably very early point, at any rate, it definitely escaped human control. This process, moreover, has accelerated beyond all calculation in the virtual age. And of course, naturally, those poor creatures down there began at some crucial juncture to forget the difference between the living and the mechanical, and to imagine that the machine had been there from the first, and that it had even built itself, first from proteins and nucleic acids and cells and then, in time, from silicon and circuitry and software. At least, I can’t help but think that it was always essential to this history that humanity should come to think of the cosmos as just another kind of machinery, and of mind as only one of its local functions—that the great shadow of the machine should spread out and cast itself over the entirety of nature and spirit, that is, until the better part of humanity would come to believe itself and its world to be, by their very nature, only mechanistic processes within a universal and inescapable cybernetic system.
