The Absurd and Science

Perhaps the most beautiful and compelling of all the passages I have encountered in Camus is his critique of the insufficiency of science to resolve the problem of the absurd. It is the ultimate aim of secluarist scientists to reduce the world to a mathematical series of formulas, and they assume that such a reduction is more or less inevitable. They treat the comprehensibility of the world and their materialist philosophy as so self-evident as to defy criticism. Camus, and of course others, have rightly observed that by all objective standards, science always ultimately dissolves not into scientific formulas but into romantic verse:

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

It is intriguing how Camus' despair at the inability of science to resolve the absurd is also vividly poetic. It mirrors the sentiments of Petru Dumitriu as he laments the simultaneously mathematical and incomprehensible universe. But while Camus stops with the lament that he cannot find assurance that the world is his, Dumitriu so embraces the foreignness of the world that, so far from being his, he insists that it must belong to someone else:

For nothing is simple, and the universe is mathematicable, but incomprehensible -- really incomprehensible, and really constructed according to a plan that is not a human one.

The most perfect parallel to Camus' critique of science (at least that I have found) is actually in the work of G. K. Chesterton. Writing well before the birth of absurdism, Chesterton anticipated Camus' observations about science and its inability to adequately give answers to the truly pressing questions of the world. Just as it completely failed to resolve the problem of the absurd, science was totally impotent in the face of the ultimate question: why?

In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears...It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic.

Chesterton goes on with astonishing parallels to Camus and his complaint that science inevitably collapses into poetry:

Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

Just as with Camus, Chesterton himself slips easily into his own rhetorical poetry when speaking about the world. They admit that awed ignorance is the appropriate response to reality and recognize that even science (in its own cold, self-deluded way) will always end at the same place as everyone else: wide-eyed wonder. It certainly raises questions about the whether or not apophatic thinkers have had it right all along; the end of human knowledge is silence before God. More to the point though, this realization should work to resolve the lingering fear that has been created by the false triumphalism of science with reference to religion. Faith has nothing to fear in science because science ultimately has nothing to say to faith. It is itself just a gelid, mechanical mysticism which has had the unfortunate fate of being so convinced by its own facade that it thinks it is somehow above and apart. In truth, science offers only transient answers to transient problems. It crumbles in the face of the absurd, like all human effort.

#200

Because twice makes a tradition, this two hundredth post will be dedicated to ten memorable quotes from the previous hundred entries here.

10) J. W. McGarvey from The Wisdom of J. W. McGarvey who I was excited to find was yet another outspoken proponent of pacifism in the history of the now militaristic Churches of Christ.

I would rather, ten thousand times, be killed for refusing to fight than to fall in battle, or to come home victorious with the blood of my brethren on my hands.

9) Bill Maher from The Wisdom of Bill Maher? Don't ask why I was watching Bill Maher.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but nonviolence was kind of Jesus’ trademark, kind of his big thing. To not follow that part of it is like joining Green Peace and hating whales. There’s interpreting and then there’s just ignoring. It’s just ignoring if you’re for torture, as are more evangelical Christians than any other religion.

8) John of Sinai from Sunday of St. John of Sinai. These entries, and this quote in particular, represent the profound importance to me of Lent and the devotional struggle it entails.

The place of temptation is the place where we find ourselves having to put up a bitter fight against the enemy, and wherever we are not involved in a struggle is surely the place where the enemy is posing as a friend.

7) Gregory Akindynos from The Wisdom of Gregory Akindynos who represents a startling source from which to receive a call to intellectual restraint.

For you should have known not only how to write discourses and devise syllogisms, but also where to do this and who ought to do it and from what motives.

6) Peter of Damascus from Texts on Thanksgiving who revolutionized the way I understood and expressed gratitude toward God.

The purpose of what we say in our prayers is as follows. The thanksgiving is in recognition of our incapacity to offer thanksgiving as we should at this present moment, of our negligence in doing so at other times, and of the fact that the present moment is a gift of God's grace.

5) David Lipscomb from David Lipscomb on Zeal and Giving. In addition to being a wonderful example of the rhetorical genius and force of Lipscomb's teaching, this is still a relevant critique of the fundraising activities of modern churches.

A pure consecrated church will spread by the force of the zeal and devotion of its own members. Only a cold, lukewarm, selfish, unconsecrated church needs other devices to spread it...When the church has not zeal, devotion, self-consecration to cheerfully and gladly do the will of God, it should be taught its duty. If it refuses to do it, it would be a blessing to the world and an honor to God for it to die.

4) Ron Paul from A Memorial Day Salute to Saluting expressing the irony of the uncritical worship offered to American soldiers.

The endless praise offered to those who serve in the military--“thank you for your service” in defending the empire--is a required politically correct salutation to our “universal” soldiers. No, they never say thank you for “defending the empire”; it’s much more decent--it’s thank you for defending our freedoms, our Constitution, and for fighting “them” over there so we don’t’ have to fight them here at home. Though the wars we fight are now unconstitutional, the military is endlessly praised for defending our liberties and Constitution.

3) Katharine Hepburn (as Eleanor of Aquitaine) from The Lion in Winter offering a popular audience the kind of thinking that could revolutionize the world if it ever took hold.

How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war. Not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it, like syphilis, inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little? That's how peace begins.

2) Panayiotis Nellas from Christ and True Ontology. Nellas gives so much meat to theological thinking; this is only an example.

Man finds his existence and being in Christ. Before and outside Christ, his being is a being-unto-Christ. And when it is not oriented towards Christ--when, to be more precise, it is defined in freedom and consciousness independently of Christ--then it is a being-unto-death, as Heidegger called it, quite correctly according to his own perspective. United with Christ, the iconic biological being of man becomes a true being-in-Christ. In Christ, man finds his true ontological content.

1) Petru Dumitriu from The Wisdom of Petru Dumitriu. Having first encountered Dumitriu over two years ago and too quickly abandoned him out of necessity, his word have nevertheless haunted me. They echo my own acute awareness of the absurdity of everything especially God and existence, all the while being expressed in faith.

Finally, to reduce all these questions to one: how can one love God when he obviously does not exist? And -- putting the same question in a different way -- how can one love human beings, when they are as they are, and when there is no God?

The Wisdom of Petru Dumitriu

I started reading Petru Dimitriu's To the Unknown God close to two years ago, but I set it aside to take up course readings. I have yet to pick it up again. What I read, however, was extraordinarily thought provoking, and I know I have referenced his thinking here before. Dumitriu was a Romanian thinker who witnessed the atrocities of communism behind the Iron Curtain first hand and fled to tell the tale. He had a remarkable life which showed through in his remarkable corpus of writings. In Uknown God, he struggles with the problem of evil, not from the position of constructing a theodicy but from the outpouring of deep personal anguish. Here are some quotes which struck me at the time and which I recorded from the portion I read:

Finally, to reduce all these questions to one: how can one love God when he obviously does not exist? And -- putting the same question in a different way -- how can one love human beings, when they are as they are, and when there is no God?

Ever since I reached the age of reason I have been holding a conversation with an unknown and perhaps nonexistent interlocutor. If there is no one listening to me, no one answering me, and if at the other end of this inexhaustible one-way communication there is not one living soul, then I have been cheated, and it has bee the biggest cheat in a life that has known plenty of them: a cheat that is the crowning proof of the nothingness, of the non-value, of the absolute destitution of my existence. The question must be propounded as implacably as possible. No pity for God: it is for him to have pity on us.

Except that spilt blood is never impure, and the hands that spill the blood are never pure.

After assassination and sadistic crime, what I detest most in this world is rape, that rape which is always the violation of someone's will. Women are not its only victims: for one sexual rape, there are a hundred non-sexual ones.

All those who hang themselves in the cells are Jesus Christ on the cross. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken us? But to our cry of distress he could reply: why have you forsaken each other? I granted you forgetfulness of suffering and forgetfulness of offences: why do you use this gift to forget your sins? Is it just so that you need not repent, that you need not learn from your experiences, and ever repeat them?

Then who are we to judge God? I am saying that we must take upon ourselves a part of Evil, but I am not attempting to justify God. Evil is more mysterious, more vast. It is our work; but we are not our own work.

Unlike politics, religion has freed itself from human sacrifices.

Nevertheless, I see what I see, and that is that the universe of living things is permeated with suffering, and that even the spectacle of that suffering is suffering. I cannot carry on my conversation with God and ignore the constituent suffering of life.

For nothing is simple, and the universe is mathematicable, but incomprehensible -- really incomprehensible, and really constructed according to a plan that is not a human one.

A Contrast in Attitudes

I was reading Petru Dumitriu's To the Unknown God some time ago, and in it he painted a vivid picture of life in communist Romania. The economic conditions there were such that dismissal from one's job was essentially a death sentence. Dumitriu comments on the loss of several people close to him from suicide and even admits to having toyed with the idea himself. Stories like that provide a stark contrast in attitudes when compared to what seems to be the American attitude in the face of difficult economic times. Though things in America right now are by no means comparable to the destitution of Soviet Romania, I do not think it is a mere coincidence that in this time of financial decline that there is an increase in unemployment related violence. I have in mind the two very publicized cases of Amy Bishop and Nathaniel Brown, two university employees who did not handle even the prospect of potential unemployment well. Unlike their historical Romanian counterpart, Bishop and Brown did not fall into a state of depressed resignation leading to their own suicides. Instead, imbued with a since of indignant entitlement they lashed out at those "responsible" for their troubles. It's shocking the way the modern Western mind works. "My livelihood is more important than your life." How demented must we be as a people to allow a thought like that to creep into our minds?