“Thus, for me, this man is capable of making of himself an absolute abstraction as he forms his judgments on ideas, people and events. He is aware, on the one hand, of that which everything in his life and his personality has led him, leads him to feel, and that which is fully free from such ‘baggage’, for want of a better word. So the subjective-objective opposition, seen in the light of the truth or authenticity of either form of judgment, becomes completely irrelevant, gratuitous for this man. What he does, how he acts, how he makes his choices, is another matter, of course—rather, then, a question of will, about which I confess I know nothing at all!”
Victor raised his eyebrows dramatically and they both laughed. God, it was good to be with this woman when she was tolerant of his speeches. Perhaps the secret had been to have sex first. Which woman isn’t tolerant of a man who remains with her in the hours after he has made love to her well? He supposed that they were glad to find one whose first instinct was not to say cheerio and run off to the pub.
Helen smiled and gave him another pout of encouragement, or so he took its meaning.
“Let me give you an example. It’s poor, but it’s the first one that crosses my mind. It’s from music and from myself. I cannot stand listening to Maria Callas, simply cannot bear her. I even have to turn the radio off when they play her recordings. To me, she sounds not only histrionic—I can pardon that—but I reproach her for performing as though the music were entirely at her service, as if it had been composed in her glory and for her gratification. I have always loved humility in artists—in anybody, actually—and she incarnates, for me, its denial. In music, I love only performers who see themselves as servants of the genius of the composers. So, what do I conclude from this? Do I go around saying, ‘Maria Callas was rubbish, a bad singer’? Absolutely not. All I believe that I am entitled to say from this is, ‘I don’t like Maria Callas for this, that and the other reason, if you care to know, which is probably not the case, my dear Sir or Madam’. My view here is entirely subjective, based uniquely on my personal tastes. Contrary to what one might think, my distaste for her is not ‘reasoned’, let alone reasonable, and it took time to put words to it, even though I always felt it. But, here comes my point: I have another view. I can perfectly well see, concede, accept, that Maria Callas was the greatest diva in the history of opera, with an outstanding, beautiful, expressive, unsurpassed voice, not even to mention her stage presence.” He paused to think.
“And what does all that mean?” asked Helen. “That the meek shall inherit the earth?”
Victor laughed. “No. What it means to me is that the fundamental difference between subjectivity and objectivity is not that between opinion and fact, as some would have us believe. That’s an entirely different question for me. It lies rather in the capacity of the human to be conscious of how and why he comes to his conclusions about anything. In the ‘Callas Case’, as we shall call it, we can see that an entirely lucid man, a conscious man, can with relative ease distinguish which of his thoughts, opinions, ideas are the mere product of his own nature and therefore subjective and those which are the product of pure reason and therefore objective. In this way, he can even be objective about his own subjectivity and consequently make sure that he rather says: ‘I think and feel this and that’, rather than ‘this and that is so.’”
He was now getting carried away …
“Just think, Helen, if everybody, just as a beginning, separated their views in this way! It would radically change the world. A Hutu would say to himself: ‘I hate those bastard Tutsis and would like to go out and kill a few dozen. On the other hand, that’s an entirely subjective feeling which I have inherited from a miserable history of ethnic conflict and the hatred of Tutsis expressed throughout my childhood by my parents. And though I may be jealous of their lighter skin complexion, that’s completely stupid. Objectively, there are good Tutsis and bad Tutsis, just as there are good and bad Hutus, and I can’t for a moment trust my murderous desires because I know that they are only the product of the prejudices of my environment and my past. And one cannot, in any case, resolve such conflicts by more killing, because if all of us were to adopt slaughter as the solution there wouldn’t, eventually, be a Hutu or Tutsi left standing.”
“We’ll all become Voltaireans. That should do it,” said Helen.
“But leaving Hutus and Tutsis aside, even the quality of our daily lives would improve, don’t you think? Aren’t even the simplest conflicts caused by our inability to tear ourselves away from our subjectivity? By our blindness not to the other man’s point of view, that’s neither here nor there, but in the denial of our singular possibility for consciousness, our refusal to see and admit where our own views come from. Our rejection of our own capacity for objectivity, in short?”
“Well, I’m all for reforming the human race,” said Helen. “But to turn your logic on its head, your notion of objectivity seems impossible to me. It too is tainted by all that you are, your life, your past, by your subjectivity and by your unconscious mind.”
“But I haven’t got an unconscious mind!” said Victor in exasperation. “I’m not sure that such a thing even exists!”
The cat was out of the bag. Helen slowly raised herself from the bed, slipped on her knickers, dress and shoes and, without a word, left the bedroom and the house. Victor let her go without a word.
“I’m all for reforming the human race,” he said out loud in a silly female voice. “It’s reforming itself, my girl. Without your help!”
Threatening a Parrot
“So, what’s new this morning, Yorick?”
The bird did a little shuffle on its perch and turned attentively towards him.
“You’ve been practising, I hope, in my absence?”
“God is dead,” said Yorick cheerfully. “God is dead. God is dead.”
“Yes, yes, good chap, very well said,” Victor interrupted him. “But I was rather thinking about our second axiom … It’s been a good week now since we launched it. No? Want a kick start? A little hint?”
Yorick made a silly squeaking sound and flapped his wings excitedly, evidently happy at Victor’s presence.
“Come on, come: all is …,” said Victor as clearly as he could. “All is. All IS …”
“All is,” repeated Yorick finally. And again, “All is,” this time more gutturally than before, as though he were experimenting with his voice range.
“Bravo! All is … All is … All is what, Yorick?”
“All is.”
“So, surely you haven’t forgotten already?”
“All is … bollocks,” cried Yorick in a high pitched squeak.
Victor laughed. “That well may be so, my friend. But it’s not what I’ve taught you.”
“All is bollocks,” repeated Yorick obtusely.
“I can take you back to the shop if you want? It’s not too late, you know. You can sit in their filthy cage shouting ‘Bollocks!’ for the rest of your days if you like.”
Victor was astonished to find that he was irritated. How very stupid of me, he thought. Threatening a parrot! And one who was clearly trying to do his best.
He collected himself, sighing, and said slowly and kindly, his face only a few inches from Yorick’s: “All is provisional. All is provisional. All … is … pro-vi-sion-al. All … is … pro-vi-sion-al.”
Yorick stared into Victor’s eyes. He looks slightly sullen, thought Victor. Maybe he detected my annoyance? That really won’t do. I’ve heard a hundred times now about how these African greys appreciate affection and approval; how they will simply stop trying to learn if they sense rebuke and lack of love. How they even become physically sick without proper psychical care.
“I’m sorry, Yorick,” declared Victor. “I’ll be more gentle. It can’t be much fun sitting there on your perch with some stupid old man shouting “All is, all is, all is …” in your face!”
“All is pro-vi-sion-al,” declared Yorick grandly.
“Yessssss!” cried
Victor, clenching and jabbing his fist in triumph. “Yorick, you’re the king!”
Victor was ecstatic. It had been a damn difficult business, all things considered, getting here. Lesson after lesson, day after day repeating, repeating the same words, a thousand times. But how gratifying now. Very little worth having comes without real effort, thought Victor. That’s exquisitely trite, he laughed to himself, but no less true because of that. Though he baulked at public triteness, he felt very much at ease with it in the privacy of his own mind. It’s hard enough, after all, identifying ideas which are absolutely true without depriving oneself of their benefit on the grounds of their banality.
Escaping the Psychopaths
Helen called him two days later.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
That’s magnanimous, thought Victor, though he protested: “No, no, not at all. It’s absolutely my fault. I know that I can be a pain, go overboard a bit when I get talking”.
“Yes, that’s true,” replied Helen, immediately deflating the goodwill induced by her apology.
“Fuck,” said Victor under his breath.
“But what’s actually the matter with you? It’s as though your head had cracked open and you were picking out pieces of your brain and examining them for sense. Subjectivity, objectivity, consciousness, the unconscious, reason, human mutants … You’ll be talking soon about truth and beauty.”
If only she knew, he thought.
“Are you having a metaphysical crisis, or what?”
“Is this a professional call?” Victor retorted sharply, losing patience and regretting it instantly.
He could almost hear her resisting the urge to hang up on him.
“Well, if you like. But then it will start costing you huge sums of money—I’m very expensive—and you can’t sleep with me any longer.”
He laughed. “Oh yes, I’ve heard about the great ethical and moral purity of your fellow tradesmen and how, unlike the rest of us, they scrupulously separate their feelings and desires and their business … sorry, practice.”
“Well, that’s certainly our code and I would guess that it is generally respected.”
“I’m not quite sure, though, to be completely honest with you, why you so easily lose patience with my ramblings, when you put up with those of any Tom, Dick or Harriet who will pay you to listen.”
“Well, it’s precisely because I spend my whole day listening to people speaking of their woes and dark urges that I hope for a little respite, some idle chitchat, perhaps, from you. How else can I relax from my work?”
“That’s fair enough, you’re right of course. It’s not that I even need an audience. I’m just seeking to be closer to you and thus to speak about the things which are closest to my heart.” That was quite a confession, he thought. Was it true? He put it on one side of his mind for a check on its truthfulness at a later moment.
“I wouldn’t want you to stop, really,” said Helen in a sweet, conciliatory voice. “I was just tired that day and a little on edge about a couple of psychopaths I’d seen one after the other. Appalling people in every way. It really got me down.”
“Three psychopaths in a row is a bit much!” joked Victor. “But I’m not really touched in the head …”
“Let me be the judge of that, my dear,” Helen broke in.
He laughed. “Fair enough.”
After a little more badinage, they hung up, with the promise that they would see each other at the weekend.
Well, it’s good we’re back on track, thought Victor. It’s true, I don’t think sufficiently about how things look from her perspective. I know I’m egocentric. Thinking so much about oneself doesn’t give a lot of time and space to grasp other people’s viewpoints, but I will try harder.
Truth and beauty, she had jested. Yes indeed. He would most likely have to deal with those things too. Perhaps separately. Unlike the poet, he didn’t see the parallel, but who knows what might emerge from actually giving thought to it? He had already made headway with the idea of truth, he thought. My goodness this is fun!
A Sea of Blood
Victor had once met a Russian air force general, a man famous for punching his subordinates in the face (which Victor subsequently learned was not unusual in the Russian military services), who spoke only in incomprehensible riddles, to him at least.
“Three cuckoos flew past the bell tower at midnight,” said the general when Victor, at an embassy cocktail party, had asked him for his views on the development of democracy in Russia. The square-jawed giant, a former boxing champion, had then fixed his steely eyes defiantly on Victor’s eyes and had not so much as blinked. Around them, one or two people had nodded gravely; others, including himself, had smiled knowingly. To this day, Victor still wondered whether the general had simply been mocking him, which was a frequent fate of curious and naive foreigners in that ambiguous land, or whether there had actually been a sense to his words.
The general had humored him for ten minutes or so with a handful of meaningless proverbs and metaphors and had then turned his heels and left the party to spread his wisdom and, presumably, bombs, in Transnistria, if Victor remembered rightly.
Victor thought about this brief encounter as he read about the general’s death in a helicopter crash the previous day. Aside from details of the accident and an account of his military career, the newspaper article quoted some of his more celebrated—and more sensible—pronouncements. One of them struck Victor as hard as the general’s fist must have felt: “If you don’t tell the truth,” the general had said, “you can end up with a pile of bodies in a sea of blood.”
Exactly. The exact point. How could it be better said? That’s precisely where not only lies but inexactitudes lead, reflected Victor. Piles of bodies. That’s why I have to get to the bottom of this truth business. He again thought with loathing of how blithely everyone employed—when it suited them, which was often—this notion that truth came in three dozen colors and varieties, depending on one’s personal prejudices and perspectives and origins, one’s ‘culture’, the lie of the land, the time of day, the position of the moon, perhaps.
“Bollocks,” as Yorick might say. Victor was aware, as a start, that some things—taste, for example—escaped any theory about truth, any test of veracity. Of that much he was sure. “Blue is the most beautiful color.” There was nothing whatsoever to say about this statement in terms of truth or falsity. There must be many more examples. They all seemed only to be related to the senses: this perfume is more fragrant than that one; lamb is more delicious than beef; this landscape is more breathtaking than the other; the human voice in song is a finer sound than the violin. These matters could not be debated. Everyone took responsibility for his or her appreciation and there was no more discussion to be had. And, in theory, no wars to be declared about it and not even someone who deserved a punch in the face.
But what else, wondered Victor? He took a random idea: “Communism is the best political system for mankind.” He didn’t agree with that for a moment, of course, but the claim had seduced hundreds of millions of people at one time or another, so it was worth examining. Now, was it true or false as a statement? First, said Victor to himself, it’s necessary to define how you measure “best” in this contention. One might agree, for example, that a political system could be judged according to its capacity to ensure, through its economic development strategies, a reasonable standard of living (and thus education, health services, housing and so on) for the maximum number of people. Taking into account, of course, the natural resources available to the state and the possibilities, climatic, for example, of agricultural cultivation. Efficiency, in short, in creating wealth with the means available. Well, if that were the main criterion, communism had historically failed, economically and politically, as a system. In the early 1930s, several million Russians, Ukrainians and Kazakhs had actually starved to death (the estimated number varies widely, Victor had learnt, since the demographers who found in the 1937 Soviet cens
us that the population had diminished by eight millions were ordered arrested and executed by Stalin for their troubles; their figures had then been ‘corrected’). And the daily lot of the average Soviet citizen had also been a notorious struggle to find sustenance.
Victor, who had spent three years in Moscow in the dying days of the empire, suddenly recalled his favorite food shortage joke: A man looking to buy sausage goes into a department store and takes the stairs to the second floor. All the shelves are empty. He asks an assistant: “What, no sausage?” “No, no,” replies the woman. “This floor is no bread. No sausage is the fourth.”
Anyhow, where was he going with his demonstration, before he lost track?
“Perhaps, my dear Sir, you object that the ability of a political system to create wealth is not sufficient as a test of its success,” he said out loud to an imaginary opponent, a bald man with a beard sitting in the corner of the room. Looks uncannily like Freud, he thought. “We can agree on that. It’s important, but far from all. Between enlightened men, we would also doubtless need to agree on a rough measure for a system’s ability to satisfy the citizen’s desire and need for, can we say, freedom? I hope that we can agree, my dear Sir, that this desire exists? I ask because in the course of my diplomatic career I have met not only dictators and authoritarian leaders and their satraps and sidekicks who have contended this desire was an illusion, a retarded westerner’s cultural prejudice or misunderstanding, but also heads of state and foreign ministers of democracies who have concurred with them, for political convenience, often, but also sometimes from conviction based on half-baked theories about cultural differences. These unsavory actors in repressive regimes, echoed by the more malleable and weak-minded democrats, have claimed to my face that people have to be ‘ready’ for freedom—to choose who will rule them, most importantly—and that this day of readiness can be really very, very far away. It’s complete nonsense, of course, as I would hope that the recent revolts in several Arab countries have shown. The people finally chucked this bankrupt rhetoric out of the window, as they knew they should have done a long time before. They were very well aware that the leaders of their nasty regimes were simply lying in the hope that no one would notice, least of all our slaves of realpolitik, while in the meantime topping up their Swiss bank accounts, and they got what was coming to them.
Homo Conscius Page 10