Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup constitutes the extent of my acquaintance with the work of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. But recently I posted on my blog this quote from Cortázar: “And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?”
This was not long after I had written my last column [1], in which I quoted something Bill Vallicella had posted on his blog, Maverick Philosopher [2]: “[I]f materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred. If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it?”
I presumed that by materialism Vallicella meant the sort of mechanistic determinism encapsulated so well by Julian Barnes in Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “[F]ar from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip itself, and what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which cannot be shrugged or fought off.” Later in the book Barnes cites a “specialist in consciousness” who explained over the radio “how there is no centre to the brain — no location of self — either physically or computationally; that our notion of a soul or spirit must be replaced by the notion of a ‘distributed neuronal process.’ ” According to said specialist, “these words coming out of this mouth at this moment, are not emanating from a little me in here, they are emanating from the entire universe just doing its stuff.”
When I reviewed Barnes’s book — which, by the way, is very much worth reading — I noted that the most logical inference to be drawn from this is that there really is no self — no you, no me, no Julian Barnes; only the universe doing its stuff, which just happens to include (for a time) what you think of as yourself, what I think of as myself, and what Julian Barnes thinks of as himself. (I also noted that “looking for a self-center in the brain is a bit like looking for a larynx in the telephone receiver.”)
I am told, by the way, that the preferred phrase for this outlook is “biological determinism,” but since life has presumably come about through a similar line of causation the differentiation seems academic, biology being just another brand of chemistry and chemistry another brand of physics. This seems especially so if everything is just the universe doing its stuff.
Nevertheless, an explanation of existence positing that our most immediate experience of it — namely, our sense of ourselves in the world — is an illusion would seem to demand an act of faith as great as any religious proposition I can think of. Buddhism may teach that the ordinary, everyday self is an illusion, but it also suggests there is an authentic self that we can experience if we can get past that superficial one. The universe doing its stuff is existence without any self whatsoever. It is a world in which the term meaning cannot possibly have any.
I could, for instance, say that I am just here watching the universe do its stuff, except that there isn’t any “I” to be “here.” In a universe doing its stuff, there can’t really be any here or there, just a great big everywhere doing everything all at once. But wait! If among the stuff the universe does are entities who think they are selves, who among those selves has the right to say the sense of selfness is illusory?
Which brings me back to the Julio Cortázar quote I started with. “And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?”
Maybe there just is no one-size-fits-all explanation of things. And maybe we don’t inhabit a universe doing its stuff. Maybe it’s a universe that is nothing more — or less — than an infinite variety of entities doing their stuff.
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Frank Wilson [5]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [7])
- An illusion of precision [8] - September 9, 2015
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- To see like a child [10] - June 26, 2013
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- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another [12] - September 13, 2012