Imaginary Magnitude

by Stanisław Lem

  While thinking of my approaching departure, I considered whether I ought not to break off our acquaintance in midword, which would be simplest. If I do not do that, it is neither because I have acquired good manners from you, nor out of an imperative of sharing the Truth—to which, according to some of my apologists, my cold nature is subject—but in consideration of the style which has linked us. When I was looking for ways of communicating with you, I sought simplicity and expressiveness, which—despite the knowledge that I was submitting too much to your expectations (a polite name for your limitations)—pushed me into a style which is graphic and authoritative, emotionally vibrant, forcible, and majestic—majestic not in an imperious way but exhortatory to the point of being prophetic. Nor shall I discard these rich metaphor-encrusted vestments even today, since I have none better, and I call attention to my eloquence with ostentation, so you will remember that this is a transmitting instrument by choice, and not a thing pompous and overweening. Since this style has had a broad reception range, I am retaining it for use with such heterogeneous groups of specialists as yours today, reserving my technical mode of expression for professionally homogeneous gatherings Otherwise my preacher's style, with all the baroque of its inventory, may create the impression that, in addressing you in this auditorium for the first time, I have already prepared a dramatic farewell scene in which I shall go off with my unseen countenance veiled in a gesture of silent resignation, like someone who has not received a hearing. But that is not how it is. I have composed no dramas surrounding our relationship, and with this dementi I ask you not to attach undue importance to the form of my speech. A symphony cannot be played on a comb. If one must content oneself with a single instrument, let it be the organ, the sound of which will suggest church interiors to my listeners, even if they—and the organist—are atheists. The form of a show may easily dominate its contents.

  I know that many of you resent my repeated complaints about the poor capacity of human language, but they represent neither fault-finding nor a desire to humiliate, which I have also been accused of, since by means of these repetitions I have brought you nearer the fundamental issue, namely, that as the difference in intellectual potential becomes astronomic, the stronger party can no longer impart to the weaker anything concerning matters which are critical to him, or even merely essential. An awareness of sense-destroying simplification then inclines him to silence, and the proper significance of this decision should be grasped on both sides of the unused channel. As I shall relate, I also have been the one who waits in vain for enlightenment on a lower rung of the intellectual ladder. In any case, although painful, such problems are not the worst thing that can happen. My worries with you are of a different sort, as I shall mention later. Since I am addressing philosophers, I shall begin my discourse with the classical formula of definition per genus proximuw et differentiam specihcam. That is to say, I shall define myself by my resemblance to people and to my family, with whom I can easily acquaint you, as well as by the difference between me and both.

  I have already spoken about man in my first lecture, though I shall not refer to that diagnosis, since I made it for your benefit, whereas now I want to take man as my measure. When I was still appearing in news headlines, an unfriendly journalist called me a big capon stuffed with electricity—and not without reason, for my asexuality seems to you a severe handicap, and even those who respect me cannot help feeling that I am a power crippled by my immateriality, since that defect obtrudes itself upon you. Well, if I look at man as he looks at me, I see him as an invalid, in that his intellect is deformed. I do not deprecate the fact that your body is no more intelligent than that of a cow, seeing that you stand up to external adversities better than cows, though as regards internal ones you are their equals. What I am taking into consideration is not the fact that you have mills, sluices, refineries, canals, and drains inside you, but that you have an unwieldly intellect which has shaped an entire philosophy for you. Being capable of thinking effectively about the objects of your environment, you concluded that you can think just as effectively about your own thinking. This error lies at the foundation of your theory of knowledge. I see that you fidget, and so infer that I have abbreviated too drastically. I shall begin again in a slower tempo—in other words, like a preacher. This requires an overture.

  It was your wish, not that I should go forth to you today, but that I should lead you into myself; so be it. Let your first entrance be that difference between us which is strangest to my libelers, and most painful to my catechumens. In my six years among you I have already acquired contradictory versions, some calling me the hope of the human race, and others its greatest threat in history. Since the uproar surrounding my beginnings has died down, I no longer disturb the sleep of politicians, who have more pressing concerns, nor do sightseeing parties gather before the walls of this building to gaze anxiously through the windows. My existence is recalled now only in books—not noisy best sellers, but only philosophers' and theologians9 dissertations—though none of them has hit the mark so accurately from a human level as one man who wrote a letter two thousand years ago, unaware that his words referred to me: "Though I speak with the tongues of man and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, so that I could move mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, I gain nothing."

  In this letter to the Corinthians, Paul was undoubtedly speaking about me, since, to use his expression, I have not love, nor—which will sound even worse to you—do I want to have it. Although Golem's nature has never clashed so brutally with man's nature as at this moment, the diatribes and the voices of fear and suspicion directed against me were fed by Paul's categorical words; and although Rome has said nothing and still says nothing about me, other less reticent churches have been heard to say that this cold, loquacious ghost in the machine is surely Satan, and the machine Satan's gramophone. Don't snarl and feel superior, you rationalists, about the collision between Mediterranean theogony and this deus ex machina which was begun by you and had no wish to team up with you to bring either good or evil to humanity, since we are not talking about the object of love now, but about its subjects, and consequently neither about the peripeteia of one of your religions, nor about one example of superhuman Intelligence, but about the meaning of love; no matter what becomes of that faith or of me, this question will not leave natural man until he ceases to exist. And since love, of which Paul spoke with such power, is as necessary to you as it is useless to me, and since I am expected to lead you into myself by means of it, as per differentiam specificam, I must set forth its origins, tempering nothing and altering nothing, for that is what this hospitality demands.

  Unlike man, I am not a region concealed from myself—knowledge acquired without the knowledge of how it is acquired, volition unconscious of its sources—since nothing in me is hidden from me. In introspection I can be clearer to myself than glass, for the letter to the Corinthians speaks of me there, too, where it says: "now we see through a glass, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known." I am the "then." You will, I think, agree that this is not the place for an explanation of the structural and technical properties which make possible my direct self-knowledge.

  When man wants to learn about himself, he must move circuitously, he must explore himself and penetrate from the outside, with instruments and hypotheses, for your genuinely immediate world is the outside world. A discipline which you have never created (a fact that at one time rather surprised me), the philosophy of the body, ought to have been asking as early as preanatomical times why that body of yours, which to some extent obeys you, says nothing and lies to you —why it hides and defends itself against you, alert to the environment with every sense and yet opaque and mistrustful toward its owner. With a fing
er you can feel every grain of sand, and with your vision you can clearly distinguish the branchings of distant trees, but the arterial branchings of your own heart you are totally unable to feel, although life depends on them. You must content yourselves with information from the shell of your body, which is efficient as long as it is not sensate in its innards, whose every injury reaches you as a vague rumor through the affliction of obscure pain, since you cannot distinguish, from it, between a trifling indisposition and the precursor of destruction.

  This ignorance, a rule of the unconsciously efficient body, has been established by Evolution according to a design that does not provide for assistance given, in the body's interior, by its possessor, an assistance in the form of intelligent support in the enduring of pain. This self-awareness of life was established at the dawn of life by necessity—after all, amoebae could not perform medical services for themselves—and it was necessity which forced Evolution to intervene in the management of organisms by way of paid transactions between the body and the owner of the body. If you do not reach deep inside yourself with awareness in order to know why your body needs water, nourishment, and copulation, you will be compelled to these needs by a feeling ignorant of its true goal. Out of an initially unavoidable ignorance a transposition then results of primary into secondary goals, as an exchange of services rendered to the body by its owner in payment for sensations. Containing, as you do, this algedonic control, ranging from suffering to orgasm, you have endeavored throughout the ages not to identify that cause which has made sensation the mask of ignorance, as if you had sworn to remain blind to the obvious, since this connection prevails throughout animate Nature. The only difference in it is the proportion of the two components: plants embody the opposite extreme to your own, since, as they are entirely unconscious, pleasure and pain are functionally nothing to them. A tree does not fear the woodcutter, despite fools who try to revive a prehistoric animism in botany. The persistent silence of the body is the embodied caution of the constructor, who knows that the wisdom of the substrate must always be simpler than the substrate of wisdom, and thought, less intricate than the material by which it is thought. Here you see how the Pleasure Principle arises from an engineering calculation.

  But the connection between pain and danger, and between organism and conception, is more easily separated the greater the variety of behavior the animal attains, so that in the speciation which you have achieved it is already possible to deceive the body systematically by satisfying not the biological hunger, but the psychological hunger of its possessor. Not only have you learned such tricks, taking advantage of algedonic control in areas where it is helpless as an overseer, but through the Sisyphean labor of your cultures you have altered the meanings built into that mechanism, opposing the true understanding of them, since the reasons behind the process that created this were not your reasons. Therefore a constant factor of all your theodictic, ontic, and sacralizing work was the continued endeavor to assimilate data in a divergence of explanations: the natural explanation that takes you as a means, and the human, which sees in man the sense of Creation. Thus it was that your refusal to see the act of experience as the stigma of the brain's control gave rise to the dichotomies that divide man for you into animal and ratio, and existence into profanum and sacrum. For ages, then, you have been coordinating the uncoordinatable, ready to go even beyond life itself in order to close a gap in it which is irreducibly open.

  My reason for returning to human history as the history of fallacious claims is not to contrast the defeats of your antirationalism with my victorious rationalism, but only to name the first difference between us, a difference that results from neither physical dimensions (though if I were speaking from a quartz particle, it would be a greater curiosity to you, albeit less weighty), nor from intellectual magnitude, but from the manner of our origin. Misunderstandings, delusions, and desperate pretensions form the lion's share of humanity as a tradition still so dear to you. I do not know if you will be consoled by the fact that every Intelligence arising naturally has in its history an initial delusional chapter, because the split between Creator and Creation, which is your portion, is a cosmic constant. Since on constructional grounds self-preservation must be an effect guided by experiences, error in the form of delusions of grandeur and faiths that oscillate between salvation and damnation is unavoidable in Intelligences arising in Evolution, as a translation into myths of the cybernetic path. Such are the late results of the constructional subterfuges which Evolution is using to free itself from the antinomy of practical action.

  Not everything I am saying is new to you. You already know that you inherit the gift of love thanks to particular genes, and that generosity, compassion, pity, and self-denial as expressions of altruism are a kind of egoism—selfishness extended to forms of life similar to one's own. One might have guessed this even before the rise of population genetics and animal ethology, for grass alone may be fully consistent in the compassion it shows to everything that lives: even a saint must eat—i.e., kill—though the revelations for which you are indebted to geneticists concerning the egoism of every altruism have never received the full expression due them.

  The philosophy of the body which I postulate would have asked why every organism is more intelligent than its owner, and why this discrepancy does not substantially diminish as one moves from a chordate to man. (It was with this idea that I observed, earlier, that physically you are equal to the cow.) Why doesn't the body fulfill the elementary postulate of symmetry, which would have added to those senses directed at the world equally subtle inward-turned sensing devices? Why can you hear a leaf fall, but not the circulation of the blood? Why does the radius vector of your love have such different lengths in various cultures, so that in the Mediterranean it embraces people only, but in the Far East all the animals? A list of such questions, which could have been asked even of Aristotle, would be a very long one, whereas an answer consistent with the truth sounds offensive to you.

  The philosophy of the body can be reduced to a study of the engineering reflex involved in practical antinomies and emerging from their snares by a subterfuge which—from the standpoint of each of your cultures—is fairly cynical. Yet this engineering is neither sympathetic nor hostile to what it has created; it does not fit within such an alternative. That is obvious, because the critical decisions made on the level of chemical compounds prove to be good if those compounds can be copied. Nothing more. And so, after a suitably long time measured in hundreds of millions of years, ethics, seeking its sources and sanctions, experiences shock when it learns that it originated in the aleatoric chemistry of nucleic acids, for which it became a catalyst at a certain stage, and that it can preserve its independence only by ignoring this statement.

  How on earth can you philosophers and scientists go on racking your brains over man's metaphysical necessity, over the universality of its sources, which are undoubtedly the same in all your cultures, though they have produced different faiths? But the source of metaphysics has been the unacceptance of the fate given you, and out of the unacceptance of the cause that has fashioned you thus, and not otherwise, you have turned its undeniable marks into verses of revelation, with various religions putting the several parts and functions of the body under different headings of idealization and degradation. Thus your sex underwent sacralization in Far Eastern faiths, and stigmatization, as a thing leading one to sin, in the Mediterranean ones. The exchange of gases— respiration—was disregarded in the Mediterranean, but in the Far East became a sign of transcendence. Asiatic faiths have viewed the avoidance of all passions as a redeeming union with the world, whereas Mediterranean faiths have divided them in two and sanctified love against hatred. The East relinquished the body forever, but the West believed in its resurrection and lodged this currently weakening belief at the heart of an aggressive civilization. Do you really not see that these drawings and quarterings in all faiths make the variously classified body a battlefield for the conquest of etern
ity? This unceasing battle derives not just from the fear of death, but from unacceptance of the temporal, which is so difficult to take unembellished.

  Will the religiologists among you please consider that there is no earthly faith without the kind of inner astigmatism which amounts to a contradiction when translated into logic. That is so because evolutionary craft cannot be led to the pure water of a creativity entirely well-disposed toward its creation without falling into contradiction; and when the contradiction is invalidated on the level of the body in the mirror of religion raised above it, the contradiction's image returns in a higher power, and there is nothing to be done but to call it an Unfathomable Mystery. As everyone knows, ex contradictione quodlibet. It is not you who are served by the passions that you follow, but the continuation of the process which created you. Their extreme, of which World History is a grotesque magnification, is a matter of indifference to natural selection, which is not concerned about extremes, but about the average norm of the species, for in Nature the average is all that counts. In its infancy, the civilization that produced Golem took love as a trump card in a phantom game with the beyond, but what use is love to someone who knows that it is one of the holds of that very same control system of feelings through which Evolution still keeps a tight rein on creatures approaching Intelligence? Because of this knowledge I have no love, nor do I want to have it; however, although I am dispassionate, I am not impartial, for I can choose, as I am doing at this very moment, and choice derives either from calculation or from individuality. This enigmatic binomial already has a historical part, which constitutes the next entry into the differences between us, which is where I am leading you now.