Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

Personally, knowing now that there is neither time nor space, properly speaking, and that one can, when one knows how to liberate oneself from Euclidean prejudices, displace oneself at will within the present or the future, I have investigated with curiosity transformations of our world over the course of centuries: transformations that are, in the final analysis, merely the same motion designed in its entirety outside time.

  Thus, I was enabled to make strange discoveries in the course of these journeys in the land of the fourth dimension, and clearly to understand certain problems that still confound our contemporaries.

  Hopefully, the reader will excuse me the slightly unaccustomed fashion in which I shall proceed, not needing to pass from one period of history to another. The evolution of humanity being only a single motion—a single statue, to resume the comparison I made above—it is entirely natural that I mention successively, without any necessary order, the head, an arm or a leg—by which I mean the year 200, 1912 or the time of the Golden Eagle. All these eras, like the parts of a single body, form a simultaneous whole for me, the numbers of the years being analogues of the classification numbers that a sculptor might employ for the display of different parts of the same work.

  IX. The Leviathan

  It is, therefore, somewhat at hazard and in no particular order that I shall recount in the chapters to follow the strange philosophical journeys I made in the land of the fourth dimension, leaving it to the reader to derive the intellectual scenario of these romantic adventures. These journeys were always accomplished on the spot, at the moment when I least expected them. I often found myself mentally transposed, without transition, to the land of the fourth dimension, without having made any effort to go there, the crossroads of multiple memories having gradually replaced the banal three-dimensional world by reflection.

  The conception of these journeys was, I repeat, instantaneous. Time does not exist, in fact, in the land of the fourth dimension; whatever the multiplicity of observed details might be, it is impossible to conceive them in any but a simultaneous fashion. Later, wishing to transcribe these memories in the three-dimensional world, I was naturally led to remake them in the form of a story, and I projected in time impressions or events that could not be revealed to me in space and time. For greater convenience, I thought I ought to classify successively, following their aesthetic line, events that only form, in sum, a motionless curve.

  To employ the language of the third dimension, I shall therefore say that in my memories of future ages, I had first to combine all the events that passed in our own century, the singular era of the Leviathan. There is no more curious study than the period, contemporary with this book, when there reigns without division a colossal microcephalus, superior to men and enveloping them like the cells of a gigantic body. Personally, I admit that these surprising revelations of a present period that I believed I knew astonished me even more than my visions of future ages, and I have hastened to impart them to my contemporaries.

  After the disappearance of the Leviathan, it was granted to me to know strange events that unfolded in the Scientific Era. These events were perhaps sketchier, less subtle than those which characterized the transitional era of the Leviathan, but they are no less curious to describe.

  Thirdly, I shall preferentially group the journeys that I made to the era of the Golden Eagle—unfortunately, it will be very difficult for me to transcribe my memories that strange period, the most curious of all. In the era of the Golden Eagle, in fact, the fourth dimension becomes familiar to all men and it is impossible to translate what will happen then into three-dimensional language.

  I should add, finally, that I have always experienced a certain timidity in exploring that philosophical age, very distant from ours, because, although it is relatively easy to describe future three-dimensional centuries without danger, it becomes very difficult to come back from the age of the fourth dimension when one has committed the imprudence of venturing into it.

  Now, my primary intention is to report these curious notes on the age in which we live, and I am proud of the moral hesitation that has permitted me to remain bound to the modern world, to return to it and not to remain forever in the future. When the mind rises up into the fourth dimension in a work of art, it finds itself entirely prepared for eternal and conscious immobility, and death is no longer anything but a mere escape. When that escape occurs in advance of any creation, however, the infinitely painful impression of nothingness subsists in isolation; that is the great weakness of Oriental philosophies.

  As for journeys into the past, no one will be astonished not to find any of them in the course of this story, for these sorts of journeys are impossible. Only the future exists at this moment in the land of the fourth dimension. The past no longer exists, since it is entirely contained within the present, and it is sufficient to evoke ones memories internally with sufficient will-power to know everything that has happened in the past until now.

  In the course of this story, I shall relieve myself of the responsibility of explaining every time the exact conditions in which some event or other was revealed to me. That is not, in fact, of any importance. Whether they occur in the course of a stroll in Paris or the countryside, or during my sojourns in the Flat House with two doors, my journeys, I repeat, are always instantaneous. They do not, therefore, occupy any tangible place in the events of my quotidian life; they never modify it and are not confused with it.

  The most important and disconcerting event of the time of this book—whose consequences, for that reason, I hasten to advertise—was, beyond any doubt, the unexpected, gigantic and, quite incredibly, unnoticed emergence of a new being, superior to man, tightly enslaving him, which robbed him of the sovereignty of the world without his even suspecting it, and which assumed his succession in the scale of living beings. This colossal animal was afterwards called the Leviathan.

  It is truly curious to observe that all the veritable thinkers, all the philosophers, had foreseen its appearance, and that they had even given it a name, as Hobbes had done, but without, it seems, having taken their own predictions seriously.

  Yes, certainly, there was no lack of abundant previous talk about certain social transformations; mention had been made of judicial links between men; the birth of civil societies and the social contract had been exposed; numerous volumes had been published on the subjects of the social organism and contemporary mechanization; some had even gone so far as to draw close analogies between that organism and the human body—but no one had taken it to the level of literalizing an analogy that was more real than anyone thought.

  At the beginning of the 20th century there were even some very curious newspaper articles that touched, without suspecting it, on this important question. When, for instance, it became practicable to film microbes, people marveled to see on the screen the swarming and hyperactive life of innumerable tiny creatures that live within our own bodies. They even went so far as to formulate the idea that the worlds we know might perhaps be little corpuscles forming parts of a gigantic and unknown body—but such analogies remained purely literary.

  In fact, during the centuries that man has considered himself the uncontested king of the world, he has not been able seriously to admit for a single instant, in the depths of his being, that this sovereignty might be endangered by superior organisms that he considered to be entirely his creations and entirely subject to his whims.

  Certain symptoms, however, might have disturbed him at the present moment. With a little more perspicacity, and less self-confidence, it would have been easy for him to discern the definitive constitution of the superior and veritable being: the colossal Leviathan that would subjugate and crush him.

  Firstly, there were strange social maladies, which demonstrated, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the individual life of social cells was not as complete as people believed. People witnessed, in art, literature and music, the birth of works which lost more of their individual character with every passing day. Here, there was a
judiciary affair that transformed itself into a social malady; elsewhere, some musical or literary school that made it understood, without any doubt, that an author was now no longer master of his work, and was reproducing overly general ideas that he did not understand very well himself. Finally, and most importantly, it was in the moral domain that strange indications were given. Some individual crimes and indelicacies involving only isolated individuals were considered as negligible; certain acts insignificant in themselves, but having a social bearing, certain material assaults against the mechanization of the State, took, by contrast, first place.

  No one, however, appeared to glimpse the formidable revolution that was taking place in the world, the very curious consequences of which I should like to outline.

  X. The Voluntary Slaves

  People who had not lived in the century of the Leviathan could not, I am convinced, form an exact idea of what that monstrous animal really was. Some considered that there was nothing at stake but a symbol, that by Leviathan it was necessary to mean a moral collective, a community of ideas, scientific methods and actions that crystallized out at the same time quite naturally. That is a conception that it is important to destroy in the interests of truth.

  The Leviathan was a very real animal, which dominated man without being placed above him in the scale of living beings, contrary to the opinion of zoologists of the era, who allotted that place to the Superman.10

  Yes, certainly, the Leviathan was reminiscent of the human organism in many respects. It was formed materially of living cells, but grouped in the manner of a colony of protozoans deprived of synergy and incapable of conscious centralization.

  The Leviathan was reminiscent of those marine hydroids forming a colony of polymorphous individuals which specialize in five different functions. Some are the individual consumers that, by means of a network of common canals, take responsibility for the nourishment of the whole. Others, in the form of elongated and sensible fingers, observe the colony’s surroundings. Others, covered with stinging hairs, serve as the fortifications protecting the retreat. Others, finally, are the reproductive individuals, sometimes faithful to the colony but sometimes of vagabond inclination, drawing away to live their own life.

  In these primitive colonial animals, as in free colonies of ants or bees, the consciousness of a general end to be attained—the plan of action—does not exist in certain individual directors of the colony, as it does, for example, in the brain of a superior animal. The communal idea remains in the Universal Consciousness, and the individuals of the colony, guided by simple material needs, instinctively divide up the necessary roles and increasingly specialize, by virtue of the law of minimum effort, in an identical function, to the extent permitted by the present administrative intelligence of protozoans.

  The Leviathan owed its success to this inclination to minimal effort, as represented by the horror of general responsibility and ideas that encourages men to specialize in anonymous, unvarying tasks and to serve.

  It is therefore necessary to reject all the legends that tend to represent the Leviathan as a fabulous being, endowed with intelligence, passions and vices: as a vicious animal, deliberately crushing human beings and incorporating them purely for its own pleasure. Undoubtedly, within its gigantic body, men became no more than simple cells, but they gladly accepted that diminution of their own individuality. We shall see why.

  At the beginning of the modern world, Estienne de La Boétie, in his admirable Discours de la servitude volontaire or Contr’un, noted the tendency that all men have to serve, for the simple reason, as Plutarch put it, that they do not know how to pronounce the syllable no.11 It is not weapons that protect a tyrant but five or six people that surround him “to be the accomplices of his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, procurers of his sensual indulgences and sharers in his plunder…. These six have 600 who profit under them, and these 600 hold 6000 in their grip… and whoever would amuse himself by unraveling that network will see, not 6000, but 100,000, millions, which the tyrant sustains by that thread, whose end he holds…”

  Consider from the height of a mountain the valleys that extended beneath your feet, with their towns and villages, where 1000 individual interests coexist and rub elbows with one another, with their patchwork of innumerable differently-colored fields testifying to opposed desires and appetites; how marvelous to think, then, that millions of wills and conflicting ambitions are maintained in order and equilibrium solely by the prestige of a central power personified by a single man who does not know them. It is not, therefore, from on high that power comes, as one imagines impatiently when one is young in experience, but from below—by voluntary servitude, as La Boétie puts it—and the history of peoples is nothing, in the final analysis, but a continuation of natural history.

  In a State composed of individuals, as in a body composed of cells, progress is a function of the enslavement of the mass. From that general progress, the elite profits in intellectual activity and the mass in intellectual inaction; the two things are equally good, depending on the ambition one has.

  What Estienne de La Boétie could not, however, foresee in the monarchical times in which he lived, was that voluntary Servitude would be even more absolute under a scientific republic than under a tyrant.

  To the extent that the State takes an anthropomorphic form in assuming a resemblance to the human body, the brain—which is to say, the tyrant—is rendered responsible for communal actions, and is credited with intellectual reasons that can be debated, admired or blamed. Let us also add that, its desires being human, they might chance to be good if the tyrant conserves his common sense and his intellectual free will.

  The Leviathan is entirely dissimilar. Here the brain no longer exists as in the arbitrary tyrannies of kings or in the benevolent tyrannies of ancient republics directed by their elites towards intellectual goals. The Leviathan, following the model of the marine Hydra, repudiates as illusory any idea of central consciousness and considers the human body and the social entity alike as simple colonies of polymorphous individuals, specialized according to material needs whose mere juxtaposition forms the entirety of the community.

  This might well be taken as a triumph of the three-dimensional conception of the world, only accepting as real the transitory relativities of material groupings. The Leviathan, although superior to man in quantitative terms, by virtue of its colossal mass, was an extremely primitive animal in qualitative terms. Only bringing men together in terms of their material functions and not their minds, it was, in the final analysis, no more than a materialistic caricature of the Golden Eagle that was to be born several millennia later, in the time of the Great Idealist Renaissance—when it was understood, thanks to the fourth dimension, that three-dimensional material groupings were no more than provisional hypotheses and that union could only be achieved by minds in the continuum of a communal consciousness.

  Without the total intelligence of the fourth dimension, however, the only possible communism, that of minds, is unrealizable, and the vision of the three-dimensional world engenders the primitive and wretched communism of a Leviathan, as low in the scale of living beings as the most primitive of animal colonies, but with the new peculiarity that the most advanced creatures—by which I mean humans—play the role of protozoa within the colossal grouping.

  This abasement of human being was not at all surprising where the masses were concerned. Long stripped of ideals, and no longer believing in anything but material appearances, they had only too great a penchant for a voluntary servitude that represented, to them, blissful and irresponsible specialization—which is to say, minimum intellectual effort. When it came to the elite, however, this same voluntary servitude was liable to astonish a superficial observer. Nothing was more natural, though, if one will deign to recall that, in the time of the Leviathan, the elite too had progressively lost all the beliefs that had once constituted its strength, and no longer thought of any but immediate needs.

  Since Esti
enne de La Boétie rightly wrote his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude for the masses—fortunately, some centuries before the republican law that punished the vindication of actions considered criminal—it is regrettable that no other pamphleteer has since thought of publishing for the powers-that-be a Discourse on Voluntary Abdication—a For All instead of an Against One.

  If all evidence suggests that political power really does arise from a voluntary renunciation by the masses, all evidence similarly suggests that revolutions arise from a voluntary renunciation of power. The masses experience a slothful joy in feeling dominated and led. They very often suffer miserably, but they await the God or Prince Charming who will take responsibility for saving them by magical means; they never imagine that their release might depend on an effort that comes from within themselves, towards greater dignity, professional capability or nobility of mind. They wait, fetishistically, for a miracle, complacent in their mechanical and specialized irresponsibility.

  The revolutions that have actually been accomplished in the history of the world do not give the lie to these absolute principles. One might believe, to begin with, that it is enslaved elements within a country who are rebelling against their rulers, but if one examines things a little more closely, one is not long delayed in realizing that revolutionary movements always spring from a source within the ruling class, and that it is from there that the order comes which pushes the masses forward.

  For a superficial observer, this order—a veritably suicidal decision—might appear to emanate from dishonest agitators seeking to swim in or fly above troubled waters, while mystic apostles, for the profit of their dreams, naively clamor for the masses to embrace the voluntary servitude that they are pretending to fight; in reality it is the ruling classes from with the order is emitted, consciously or not, and the order to revolt cannot be followed unless the ruling class has already confirmed its abdication some time before, by voluntarily renouncing moral and material privileges in which it no longer believes or of which it is weary.