Even knowledge seems to be known only in coming to be known – or known again in recollection. Knowledge – such as my knowing that such-and-such has taken place – does not cut much presence as a state, stored in waiting for the call that may never come. In short, sense as stasis does not, well, make sense any more than a consciousness that has come to a halt. Even so, it is stasis that is sought. A false stasis often tempts us: completed thoughts are too readily satisfied with themselves, with their local arrivals. The full stop that is supposed to mark something completed in thought, should really unpack itself to an encircling horizon.
For the broadest living daylight, it is necessary to return to the flesh and blood knower and the Relative Subject. Scaling up the puzzle of the sense-making animal tends to freeze the passage from question to answer, so that clue and solution are gathered up into, for example, equations, which lacks for example a beginning and an end. E = mc2 could just as well be mc2 = E. There is a tendency within our explanation of the physical world to converge on something static, such as an algebraic matrix. This stasis – which is not due simply to the fact that a Theory of Everything encompasses a totality that cannot, by definition be added to – is at odds with the intrinsic dynamism of meaning.
If the completion of sense-making is impossible, even self-contradictory, and the very idea of absolute cognitive progress lacks criteria beyond the compromised ones relating to the advance of the welfare and ambitions of humanity, every age must be equidistant from the goal of rounding off the sense of the world. When sense-making comes to an end, therefore, it is not because we have arrived at complete comprehension of our condition and the world in which we pass our lives. It is because our sense-making has been terminated by bodily extinction.
For secular thought, the Word that is made flesh is fated to interruption before it can complete its own sentence. Lacking the hope of resurrection and the full illumination of an after-life, we unbelievers must live with the knowledge that our extraordinary capacity for comprehending the world is an incomplete mitigation of our helplessness, and of the darkness that surrounds our light, of the ignorance that bounds our knowledge and of the senselessness that delimits the sense we make of things.
Coda
It is necessary to combine recognition of our contingency, our finitude, and our containment in the world with an ambition of transcendence, however limited may be our success in achieving it.
Thomas Nagel1
One might say that the history of thought could be summarized in these words: It is absurd by what it seeks, great by what it finds.
Paul Valéry2
It is time to conclude our inquiry into the sense-making animal, our endeavour to understand or (if that is too ambitious) to see a little more clearly the fact that we are able at least in part to comprehend the universe and that we seem to progress to ever higher or more complete levels of comprehension. This becomes all the more extraordinary as cognitive advance enlarges the scale of its own object. We have always been pin-pricks in a world that out-sizes us many-fold but the billions of light years that now routinely populate our conversations have reduced us proportionately. It is even more remarkable, given that we cannot get ourselves out of the way as the necessary subjects of knowledge and, as Nagel puts it, “our ambitions of transcendence” have to be combined “with recognition of our contingency, our finitude, and our containment in the world”. The very idea of total understanding is inescapably absurd but the history of thought it has prompted is “great by what it finds”.
We have always been smaller than what we know: if we are great in virtue of our knowledge, we are minute in the light of that knowledge. This is evident, at the level of perception, in our visual field, where we are located at the centre of a space given all at once that may exceed many-thousand-fold the volume occupied by our bodies. The widening, encircling horizon shrinks us to a mustard grain. Vision is the metaphor of knowledge – and for good reasons. Knowledge is mediated awareness: I can access that object over there without being in direct contact with it. This asymmetry liberates us from the equality of action and reaction that is evident in touch, where I am pressed by that which I palpate. The inequality of the seer and the seen empowers the seers even at the cost of their feeling dwarfed by the vastness of the visual field. That I can be aware of more than I am, or could fill, or even could engage with, is the acceptable price of a mode of awareness that exposes us to things to which it is not itself directly exposed.
A visual field being an incomplete revelation – objects are too distant, are puzzling, are half-hidden – awakens the possibility of further sense to be made. I can see that there are things I cannot see. Like more advanced forms of knowledge, sight comes with insight (the word is not accidental) into its own limitations. Vision is, as we have said, the most “epistemic” of the senses.
All of which goes some way to explaining the prevalence of vision and light as metaphors of cognitive advance and intelligibility (touched on in the Appendix to Chapter 2). “Illumination”, “outlook”, “enlightenment”, “glimmers” of understanding and “flashes” of insight, critical “reflection” – these are just a few of the terms revealing our sense of the close relationship between vision and cognition. Traditional mythological understanding of Logos is rich in metaphors of light. As the first intimation of transcendence, prefiguring “thatter”, “Light” according to Sir Thomas Browne “is the shadow of God”.3 The distinctive feature of eternity is lux aeterna. God incarnate as Jesus Christ is “The light of the world”.4 Conversely, failure of understanding, or a limit to knowledge, is captured by metaphors of darkness.5 Limits to Logos – ignorance and death – are also imaged in darkness, with death being endless night. Temporary vehicles of Logos, we arc through the light, before we dip down into the dark.
Notwithstanding its dependence on the flesh of which it is made and in which it is embedded, therefore, vision is the primordial, ubiquitous source of transcendence, the means of our escape from the confines of our body, our passage from subjectivity and selfhood to objective knowledge. It lights up a world to be made sense of, enabling hesitation between what is presented and what is understood, the gap in which inquiry becomes possible. The mystery of the sense-making, as opposed to the merely sentient, creature begins here.6
There is an obvious rival candidate in the other major telereceptor – hearing – which also brings with it the sense of “more sense to come”. However, hearing is patchy and intermittent and does not create the basis for a continuous field, for a world in which other items are located. The importance of hearing in the extension of sense-making, beyond episodes of “Wazzat?”, as sounds are traced to their sources, is a relatively recent development – with the movement of language to centre-stage in human experience of a world they have jointly created within the natural world. Even then, vision does not concede hegemony to hearing, and additionally reasserts itself through written symbols7 and ever more ubiquitous images.
The present inquiry has been a continuation of a lifelong humanist project to see humankind more clearly, not through the darkened glass of religion or of the equally darkened glass of a reductive naturalism. Both approaches disparage humanity. Religious doctrine sees us as fallen creatures and as infinitely less than the God Who created us. Seen through the lens of naturalistic secular thought, we are unrisen creatures, defined by the putative biological processes and needs that forged the species of primates to which we belong.
The vision of us as “risen” will seem self-flattering. Worse, it might seem cruelly sentimental given how human beings have treated each other in the past, and continue to treat each other in the present. If we are “risen” our cognitive ascent has not been matched by ethical advance. A species that commits bloodshed, torture, enslavement, and unjust incarceration on the scale we continue to see, that espouses a political order that moralises making the world safe for the rich and intolerable for the poor, where public, workplace, and domestic life is often character
ized by bullying, is not to be judged, even less defined, solely by its extraordinary cognitive achievements. The spectacular collective development of our understanding – which has involved cooperation on a scale and of a form not before seen in or imagined by any other sentient creatures – has produced technology that often serves brutal or degrading ends. From the large-scale horrors of weapons and communications systems that make savagery more efficient, to the small-scale shallowness, petty-mindedness or smuttiness of the internet, the fruits of our shared genius have frequently been subordinated to ends unworthy of us.
Against this, however, we should acknowledge that technology has on balance been put to good uses, that the behaviour of humans seems overall to be improving8 and that our cognitive advance has contributed largely to a global increase in average life, health, and comfort expectancy. We take the civic order of the world – even where admittedly, it means, even in advanced democratic societies, that the odds are stacked against many who live in them – too much for granted.
In his essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses T. S. Eliot spoke of “the futility and anarchy of contemporary life”9 expressing a view that has been standard among critics of modernity for over a century. We could, however, talk with equal justification of the over-charged meanings and intricate, tightly controlled order of modern and postmodern life. The seething mass of shared and opposed senses of daily existence is nothing short of a miracle, irrespective of whether it enables people to flourish or fail, to enjoy their lives or simply suffer their existence. (The question of how well-qualified anyone is to make such observations will be set aside).10
And yes, we often use the gift of life and free time, made possible by technology rooted in science, to pursue narrow appetites and obsessions, to expand our portfolio of pointless possessions, and to be preoccupied by trivia energized by jealousies, prejudices, and hatreds founded on reactions fuelled by primitive takes on our small parts of the world. But … but ….
Yes, there is no clear point of arrival for humanity’s cognitive advance and our individual participation in the collective sense is limited in our often narrow daily round, and cut short as our lives reach their term. Our personal trajectory – the very fact it is explicit and bespoke in some aspects of the direction it takes – depends on the impersonal mechanisms of our largely mindless bodies, and our end will typically result from processes that in all probability are not meant. We are more likely to die of a material cause than for a meaningful one; or of an efficient rather than for a final cause.
And yet … the mystery of the sense-making animal goes deeper than our moral failings, our shallowness and our cognitive limitations. For that which makes us capable of failing morally and living shallowly is not seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom. In the opening sentence of his magnum opus, Derek Parfit declares that “We are the animal that can both understand and respond to reasons”.11 This is true so far as it goes; but reasons are not there in advance, waiting to be harvested and acted upon. Our cognitive distinction, therefore, lies not in merely understanding and responding to reasons but in observing, extracting, imagining, inventing, in short, sensing that there are or might be reasons in the world in which we find and locate ourselves or that there ought or must be. This is the primordial intuition that has, in some difficult to characterize sense, opened the way to the universe dimly awakening to its own nature in the human mind.
I will end with an image that in part prompted this book. If you approach the Greek island of Patmos, said to be the home of St John of the Apocalypse, the first thing you will see is a cluster of wind turbines. They are rarely still. Their somersaulting vanes are turning the mindless energy of the wind into usable electricity that will illuminate and warm the houses of the islanders and power the countless gadgets they employ to make their lives more comfortable and to connect their means with their ends. This technological miracle is a late consequence of the transformation of the many dialects of the air – whistling canyons, threshing trees, calling birds – into articulate speech.
The turbines are Logos at work on the island where St John’s namesake12 preached his doctrine of the Four Last Things. Between the wind blowing across the island and the world in which the wind has been transformed into power subordinated to human purposes there necessarily intervened the Word, the transformation of the air, in the lexical turbine of the human throat, into meanings shared and transformed, driving the journey of humanity to its present distance from the natural world.
The itinerary of the Logos has been extraordinarily complex, with many false leads, moments of inspiration and delusions, illuminations and occlusions, discord and concord, dissent and consensus, quarrels, bloodshed, and acts of extraordinary goodness and evil. The most consequential step has been the gradual separation of Logos from the Mythos of the kind St John transmitted. While this is traditionally seen to have been emancipating and as having liberated the pursuit of sense from a disabling respect for the constraints of authoritarian traditions of understanding, it has also separated sense-making from something absolutely profound, something that we, aware of our mortality, cannot do without: an idea as deep as the fact that we have finite lives, and that the sense we make of them is provisional and incomplete; an idea as profound as the mystery of our human being and the unimaginable fact that it is an augenblick in eternity; that this profound sense “That I am!” – which was the remote prompt of this present inquiry – lights something that is true only for a short time.13 The idea is, of course, that of God – for which there is no adequate secular replacement.
We cannot embrace Mythos to order. We do, however, need to reawaken the sense of the depths for which it once stood and its acknowledgement of the mystery of the sense-making animal, evident in every nook and cranny of our shared world of ideas and praxis. The world we endeavour to make sense of is unimaginably greater than we are and, even within the candle-lit parish of our days, has a complexity that should constantly astound us. The future of Logos – of the interwoven senses we make of the natural and human world and the sense they make of us – will be central to the evolving future of humanity and may even be a determinant of whether, or for how long, we have a future. The sense-making animal will continue to see horizons not as encircling limits but as a promise of an open, a beyond where the presently unimaginable will be imagined, conceived, and brought into the fold of coherent sense.
For the present, we have to settle for the elusive joy of the realization That I am, That it is, That “that” is. This is where I began fifty or more years ago – and where I must end, albeit in the knowledge that the world I shall in due course leave has much unfinished – and in the light of the foregoing inquiry probably unfinishable – business of understanding.
Notes
PREFACE
1.
Recently I came across an extraordinary passage in a memoir by a fellow doctor, the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh: “I ran fully clothed into the sea and stood with the waves lapping about my knees, soaking my school uniform. As I stood there, I was suddenly struck by an overwhelming awareness of myself and of my own consciousness. It was like looking into a bottomless well, or seeing myself between a pair of parallel mirrors, and I was terrified” (Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery, 130). This struck me as the other side of the “that” revelation.
2.
“Thus in all men, as soon as their reason has become ripe for speculation, there has always existed and will continue to exist some kind of metaphysics” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 56).
3.
His reference to “that sense of arbitrariness which the objective self feels at being someone in particular” (215) rings a carillon of bells with me.
4.
Santayana, “Introduction” to The Works of Spinoza, vii.
5.
Beckett, Worstward Ho.
OVERTURE
1.
Einstein, “Physics and Reality”, 351.
2.
I owe this phrase
to Karl Friston’s “The Mathematics of Mind-Time”.
3.
The inconceivable size of the universe is engagingly discussed by Michael Strauss in “Our Universe is too vast for even the most imaginative sci-fi”. In passing, he cites astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson’s observation that “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you”. You bet. According to Martin Rees, we can see out to 13 billion light years – or 78 billion trillion miles (“Conversation with Martin Rees”).
4.
Quine, From Stimulus to Science, 16. Quine famously asserted that “philosophy of science is philosophy enough” in “Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory”, 446.
5
As Einstein said: “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking” (“Physics and Reality”, 349). He was echoing the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (to be discussed in Chapter 4). Mach’s empiricism had a huge influence on Einstein’s early thinking. Einstein later distanced himself from the anti-realism according to which Mach regarded “atoms”, “electrons” and other entities as mere constructs defined by the experiences they most parsimoniously made sense of. The anti-realism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics rather disgusted him. As David Bodanis notes, Einstein insisted “that all underlying reality was clear, exact and understandable” (Einstein’s Greatest Mistake, 332).
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