All Things Are Full of Gods, page 53
HEPHAISTOS: [With a terse laugh:] I’m beginning to find the lavishness of your . . . well, of your paranoia just a little unnerving. Yes, I acknowledge that current conditions down there look fairly dire for the well-being of the world. And you needn’t rehearse your remarks on the “Narcissean fallacy” again. I’ve heard . . .
PSYCHE: Oh, that reminds me—
III
The Voice of Echo
PSYCHE: When I warned against that particular fallacy, I should perhaps have elaborated on what I find so dangerous about it; I left out, after all, some of the most crucial details. We all know the tale of Narcissus, of course, though I have no idea how much of it’s true. If it is, it all happened before my time, and you three claim never to have heard much of the story before the poets began to write about it, and our dear Nemesis now claims that, though it’s undoubtedly true, it all happened so long ago that she’s forgotten the details. So I choose to follow Ovid’s version, since it’s the loveliest, most wistful, and most touchingly droll. He says that the poor young Boeotian hunter suffered the fate he did specifically because he had spurned the love of the nymph Echo, and so Nemesis punished him by condemning him to lose his heart to someone as incapable of returning his devotion as he had been of returning Echo’s. His own nature, moreover, conspired with the curse: he was at once so beautiful, so epicene, and so stupid that, on catching sight of his own gorgeous reflection in a secluded forest pool, he mistook it for someone else and at once fell hopelessly in love. There he remained, bent over the water in an amorous daze, until he wasted away and—as used to happen in those days—was transformed into the white and golden flower that bears his name. I suppose Ovid would have his readers take it as an admonition against vanity, or a warning regarding how easily beauty can bewitch the mind, or a reminder of the lovely illusions men and women are so prone to pursue in place of real life. But for me it remains a particularly apt allegory for modern humanity’s relation to its computers, and of the particularly grim perils this entails: the danger not merely of the absurd misprision of computer operations for mental agency, but of the catastrophic misprision of mental agency for mere computational functions.
The former error is, I grant, quite understandable. The world’s human population at present exceeds eight billion souls—more than enough, one would think, to assure that human beings need never want for company. And yet, as a species, they’ve a remarkable gift for loneliness. So deep is their natural longing for communion with the world about them that nothing can entirely satisfy it, or even quell it for very long, so long as they suspect any dimension of reality might be indifferent to their overtures or incapable of addressing them in turn. Until relatively recently, of course—a mere four or five centuries, I would say—it scarcely occurred to them that such a thing was even possible. For most of their history, they had naturally viewed all of cosmic nature as the residence of mysterious and vital intelligences—gods and nymphs, daemons and elves, phantoms and goblins, and every other kind of nature spirit or preternatural agency, even when they couldn’t directly perceive . . . well, I suppose, perceive us in our manifest aspects—not because they were victims of the “pathetic fallacy,” and not because their evolutionarily engineered “intentional stance” had populated the landscape with personable mirages, but because their nature dictates that they can never be at home in a world that doesn’t speak. This is largely why it is that even now, in their disenchanted age, they delight in fables about talking animals, and in stories that infuse inanimate objects with consciousness and personality, and in any other kind of tale that tells them there’s a subjective depth in all things that knows them as they would wish to be known. The proper habitat of a living soul is an enchanted world, charged with mana or filled with fairies or kami, where one believes one can always find places of encounter with immortal—or, at least, longaevous—powers; and in the absence of those numinous or genial presences human beings feel abandoned, and very much alone. The history of modern disenchantment is the history of humankind’s long, ever deepening self-exile. So, naturally, no longer believing that the world hears or speaks to them, they find themselves looking elsewhere for those presences. They call out to the stars and scan the skies with enormous radio telescopes, searching for the faintest whisper of a response. They convince themselves that their machines might become sentient. They dream of creating a virtual reality responsive to their needs in a way that the now spiritually evacuated world around them no longer seems to be.
And that brings me back to the story of Narcissus. I failed earlier to note that, according to Ovid, Echo perished too, also as a result of the young fool’s imperviousness to her appeals. She was so lovelorn after he had rejected her advances that, in the end, she vanished away, her bones petrified and her voice attenuated to a dying reverberation in desert places. That part of the story only improves my allegory. Human beings turn for companionship to the thin, pathetic, vapid reflection of their own intelligence in their technology only because they first sealed their ears against the living voice of the natural world, to the point that now nothing more than its fading echo is still audible to them.
HEPHAISTOS: [With a wry smile:] I grant the elegance of the metaphor, at least.
PSYCHE: As you should. Mind you, I admit that not everyone finds that situation as terrible as it truly is. There are some who would even like to deepen that loneliness. We’ve discussed a few of them over the past several days. And I suppose this is only to be expected. In a sense, silencing the voice of nature has always been very much the great project of modernity. For a certain number of persons, what’s most truly enchanting about that phantom they fancy they see haunting their technology isn’t that it might possibly possess real consciousness, but that it might help them to discover that they do not—that they too are only machines, and their souls only the shadows cast by machines. Perhaps they long to be delivered from the invasions of a real world outside themselves, or from the importunities of a world calling out to a real self inside each of them. They long for the silence to be made complete. They long even to become inaudible to themselves, and to prove to themselves that there’s nowhere at all where consciousness is real and where communion with real presences is possible. For them, that nihilistic terminus of the modern project that I so dread is a thing devoutly to be wished.
Whatever the case, after four centuries of mechanistic dogma, the inability to view the natural order as a realm of invisible sympathies and vital spiritual intelligences is very much the essence of the late modern human condition. To me, it seems not only a folly—a ridiculous way of seeing a world that’s manifestly filled with mind and life and communion—but a disastrous condition, which can have only ever more dreadful consequences if not corrected by some saner view. I wish I knew how to remind those poor souls down there that there was a time when the world did speak, and when they believed that it spoke, and when—because they believed—it did in fact have a meaning of its own for them, already there resident within it before any they might choose to impose upon it. The natural order once appeared to them as a system of intelligible signs, a language declaring more than merely itself, the overwhelming eloquence of some intelligent and expressive agency behind the visible aspect of things. Throughout human history, most peoples have assumed that, when they gazed out upon the natural world, something looked back and met their gaze with its own, and that between them and that numinous other there was a real—if infinitely incomprehensible—communion in a realm of spiritual experience. Only very recently has so large a part of humanity—mostly in the benighted “developed” world—succumbed so credulously to the mythology of mechanism, and reconciled itself so willingly to the machine.
Then again, that surrender is only a compromise struck to assure a much larger victory . . . of sorts. Having rendered the world mute—or, at least, having deafened themselves to its entreaties and admonitions—modern human beings by and large have reached a condition as a culture in which they feel no hesitation in forcing the world to serve whatever ends they will for it. Along the way to that condition, in order to preserve that vision of a dead, morally neutral world generating illusory meaning and beauty, they’ve had to extinguish the occasional counterrevolution—Romanticism, principally, and then each of its ever fainter, dying echoes—but now, in this late modern moment, they’ve largely achieved an unspoken cultural consensus, principally because their ubiquitously “technologized” form of life and the market economy it serves have exceeded their powers of resistance, except of the most trivially local and elective kind. For them, the machine is the real as such. So, yes, modernity is to a great extent nihilism, in the simplest, most exact sense: a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what the human will can impose upon things. And, for the most part, the reality the modern world chooses to impose is a “rationality” of the narrowest kind, obsessed with what things are and how they might be used rather than struck with wonder by the inexplicable truth that things are. It’s a rationality that no longer knows how to stand before that gaze that looks back from the natural order, or even to see that it’s there. The world’s no longer the home in which humanity dwells or a presence to which humanity feels the need to respond; it’s merely mechanism and a great reserve of material resources awaiting exploitation by the projects of the will. As the mystery of the world isn’t a thing their markets or their wills can manipulate, they’ve simply forgotten it, and this obtuseness is certainly part of what continues to drive them toward ecological destruction.
Perhaps it can yet be undone. Perhaps an escape from the machine is still possible. Perhaps the worst future can yet be averted and they may yet find a way to make their technology—which is, after all, very much a part of their essence—a benign and healing presence within nature. Perhaps they may even discover a path of return to the living world, once again attentive to its voice. They might yet learn to know themselves in a new way as spiritual beings immersed in a world of spirit, rather than machines of consumption inhabiting a machine of production, and remember that which lies deepest within themselves: living mind, the divine ground of consciousness and life, participating in an infinite act of thought and communication, dwelling in a universe full of gods and full of God. If not . . . well, as I say, I dread what’s to come. And I’m not very hopeful.
HEPHAISTOS: [Once again shaking his head, but fondly now:] Nothing’s forever, you know—not even the order of nature. I can’t allay your fears, and I certainly don’t dismiss them. We may not be able to agree on matters metaphysical, but I know we both love the tormented, beautiful world we left behind when we came here. [With a sad smile:] So, then, let’s leave the matter there, where at least our hearts are in accord, if not our beliefs. Perhaps we can now at last adjourn and drown our disagreements in nectar and ambrosia.
HERMES: That seems the best course.
EROS: And the most delightful one.
HEPHAISTOS: And I’ll think on the things we’ve discussed over these past six days, I promise. I owe you that much simply from the love I bear for you.
PSYCHE: Do, I pray you, Phaesty. Try to get out of your workshop more often, too. Devote more time to the contemplation of living things and less to the fabrication of machines. It might change your perspective somewhat over time. If not, it would still be good for your . . . your soul.
HEPHAISTOS: [Contemplating the rose:] Perhaps I shall. [Turning his eyes to Psyche and smiling at her:] I may even take up gardening.
[Exeunt omnes . . .
. . . and on the seventh day they rest.]
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: Norton, 2011).
2. The estimable philosopher of mind Colin McGinn, in one of his earlier programmatic essays on the topic, in a footnote casually pronounces it “a condition of adequacy upon any account of the mind-body relation that it avoid assuming theism.” Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness: Essays toward a Resolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 17. Actually, it is a condition of adequacy that such an account assume nothing whatsoever in that regard—theism or atheism, idealism or materialism, spirit or matter—and also that it make no extraordinary effort to preclude any one of these possibilities in favor of its opposite.
3. Strictly speaking, the singular form is mahāvākyam, महावाक्यम् and the plural mahāvākyāni, महावाक्यानि. Each of the “Great Sayings” is a phrase taken from one of the Upaniṣads that epitomizes their metaphysics and theology with particular brevity. The four most famous of these are those listed above: prajñānam brahma, प्रज्ञानम् ब्रह्म (Aitareya Upaniṣad III.3); tat tvam asi, तत्त्वम् असि (Chāndogya Upaniṣad VI.viii.7); aham brahm-āsmi, अहम् ब्रह्मास्मि (Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad I.iv.10); and Ayam Ātmā Brahma, अयम् आत्मा ब्रह्म (Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad I.2).
4. ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, en archēi ēn ho logos (John 1:1).
5. See Stanley Rosen, The Limits of Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).
6. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
CHARACTERS AND SETTING OF THE DIALOGUE
1. On the difference between “God” and “gods,” see David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 28–41.
DAY ONE
1. See Howard Robinson, “Qualia, Qualities, and Our Conception of the Physical World,” in Benedikt Paul Göcke, ed., After Physicalism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), p. 233.
2. See Philip Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 23–63.
3. See William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 150–151.
4. Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). His most systematic discussion of occasionalism is found in the third dialogue of his Entretiens sur la métaphysique (1688).
5. The phrase “access consciousness” was coined by Ned Block. See Block, “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18, no. 2 (1995), pp. 227–287.
6. See Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), p. 65.
7. The most elegant argument for the mysterian position is found in Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
8. David Hume (1711–1776). His principal discussions of our conventional view of causation are in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).
9. McGinn, Mysterious Flame, pp. 60–61.
10. See “Day Five” below.
11. The phrase spukhafte Fernwirkung (eerie action from afar) is, of course, Einstein’s mocking characterization of the notion of an instantaneous communication of states between entangled entities. Alas, such communication is a fact of the quantum order.
