Nostalgia for the Absolute Read online

  The critiques of truth which I referred to earlier, the anguish being caused by these kinds of debates, have today caused a very powerful nostalgia for innocence in the politics of the young. We are told on every hand that we ought to abandon ’pure research’, that we should dismantle what is called the academic prison house, that we can put the Cartesian brain to pasture while instinct plays. We are told by scientists now very much in vogue that our Western affliction with the truth is indeed an affliction. As I understand the theory, it has something to do with the fact that we have mainly used the left half of our brain, the verbal, the Greek half, the ambitious, the dominating, the mastering half. In that neglected right half lies love, intuition, mercy, the more ancient, organic ways of experiencing the world and not taking it by the throat. We are urged to give up the proud image of homo sapiens—man the knower, man the hunter after knowledge—and to go over to that enchanting vision—homo ludens, which means, quite simply, man, the player of games, man the relaxed, the intuitive, the pastoral being. Not the research for the illusory, for the possibly destructive fact, but the quest for self, for identity, for community—these, we are urged, matter supremely if we are not to commit literal social suicide. Perhaps—and this is being said by men of great integrity—perhaps there can be low-energy alternative technologies, recyling, conservation, a kind of attempt to undo those rapacities, those suicidal savageries of the industrial revolution, to which we referred in relation to Lévi-Strauss. If there can be what is called an alternative technology, why not an alternative logic, an alternative mode of thought and feeling? Before he was a hunter and killer, man was a gatherer of berries just on the edge of the Garden of Eden.

  To this I would very tentatively give the following answers. I do not think it will work. On the most brutal, empirical level, we have no example in history (short of the massive military or wartime destruction) of a complex economic and technological system backtracking to a more simple, primitive level of survival. Yes, it can be done individually. We all, I think, in the universities now have a former colleague or student somewhere planting his own organic food, living in a cabin in the forest, trying to educate his family far from school. Individually it might just work. Socially, I think, it is moonshine.

  Secondly, and more important, it goes against the history of our cortex, of the brain as we in the West have used it. In our cortex, the pursuit of truth is, I believe, fatally imprinted—and I know that when I’m using the word imprint, I am borrowing a problematic metaphor. Imprinted, I think, through diet, climate, economic margins, which first triggered the innate potentiality of those miraculous and dangerous human beings, the ancient Greeks, into a great and continuous explosion of genius.

  If I am at all right, we are going to continue to ask questions over and over again. The German philosopher, Heidegger, puts it well. He says, questions are the piety, the prayer, of human thought. I am trying to put it a little more brutally. We, in the West, are an animal built to ask questions and to try and get answers regardless of the cost.

  We will not institutionalize human innocence. We may try, locally, here or there. We may try to deal more carefully with the environment. We may try to avoid some of the brutal wastage, some of the truly inane inhumanities and cruelties towards animals, towards less privileged human beings, which mark even the great years of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This surely must be.

  But at the really important end of the stick, we are a fairly cruel carnivore built to move forward, and built to move over and against obstacles. In fact, the obstacle magnetically draws us. There is something central in us which prefers difficulty, which goes for the tangled question. At the higher end, this is because the most gifted, the most energetic, among us have long known— without perhaps articulating this knowledge—that the truth is more complex than man’s needs, that it may in fact be wholly extraneous and even inimical to these needs. Let me try and explain that.

  It was a deeply optimistic belief, held by classical Greek thought and certainly by rationalism in Europe, that the truth was somehow a friend to man, that whatever you discovered would finally benefit the species. It might take a very long time. Much of research clearly had nothing to do with immediate economic or social benefits. But wait long enough, think hard enough, be disinterested enough in your pursuit, and between you and the truth which you had discovered there will be a profound harmony. I wonder whether this is so, or whether this was itself our greatest romantic illusion? I have a kind of picture of the truth waiting in ambush round a corner for man to come near—and then getting ready to club him on the head. In the three examples I’ve given—and there are many more—we may get a rather terrifying picture of a universe which was in no way built for our comfort, for our survival, let alone for our economic and social progress on this tiny Earth.

  We are told today by the champions of ecology that we are guests on this Earth. This is undoubtedly the case. And we are surely guests in a very vast and incomprehensibly powerful universe whose facts, whose relations, were not tailored to our size or our needs. Yet it is the eminent dignity of our species to go after truth disinterestedly. And there is no disinterestedness greater than that which risks and perhaps sacrifices human survival.

  The truth, I believe, does have a future; whether man does is much less clear. But I cannot help having a hunch as to which of the two is the more important.

  The CBC Massey Lectures Series

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