Benjamin Cordry

Sins and Sensibility

The world, scandalous sensationalist that it is, makes no sense. We have fragments of formerly sensible nonsense – detached flotsam and jetsam islanding subcultures in delusions of intelligibility. But, for the self-styled intellectually responsible types, there isn’t even a refuge of satisfying nonsense anymore. Reality is nothing if not intransigent to our attempts at sensibilizing it.

There’s a great deal of leftover nonsense out there in what some people believe. Think, for example, of how popular the occult is. Astrology, tarot, palm reading, witchcraft: these flourish despite hailing from an understanding of nature long since coffined by natural science. The zodiacal constellations are nothing more than optical illusions generated by fussioning balls of plasma, hydrogen, and helium. The actual arrangements of the stars are nothing like what the nights sky offers the eye. And yet, astrology probably has far more adherents now than ever before. Astrology thrives in our cybernetic jungle of ideas, propagating itself through substrates unchained for use by the scientific thinking that should have undermined it; little has done more for the advancement of fashionable untruth than solid state physics.

Popular religion too is almost entirely nonsense. It offers a worldview that would sensibilize everything (if by nothing specific than by that universal solvent: the mysterious ways of God) and comfort us in the face of death: the world is a place of testing and growth after which we shall find fitting, eternal fulfillment. Religion holds the soul sacred and holy (and wholly away from the hands of scientists). And yet, belief in the afterlife ought to be as dead as alchemy. Science has despiritualized life as much as chemistry. There simply is no soul. For centuries the soul was life’s entelechy. It was an active force that differentiated a living being from a corpse; an energy that animated the inert matter into a functional, active unity. It was clearly an insensible something as there was no sensible compositional difference between a fresh corpse and a living body; both are amalgams of fluid, tissue, muscle, bone, and organ. Modern medicine exorcised the soul. The difference between a corpse and a living body is not a soul but rather a multitude of biochemical and physiological processes. Descartes exiled the soul from the body and reduced its function to consciousness. However, this idea offered no enduring safe haven. The evidence that consciousness is a brain activity is simply overwhelming: consciousness is changed by changing brain activity, brain structures, and brain chemistry. There is no refuge for the soul. One can make for it a home in the transcendent, but there is nothing there for it to do there if it plays no role causing life or consciousness. Once we see that life and consciousness are products of material activity, there isn’t anything left for the soul to “explain”. Like ether, caloric, phlogiston, and the philosopher’s stone, the soul subsists merely as a fossil of once useful ideas.

While the above ideas were once plausible, we now lack even sensible nonsense. Take the two super-narratives, monotheism and materialism: neither really works. Monotheism attempts to make sense of the world as the product of an infinite person. This was once a respectable matter of faith. But, faith has let us down. There was always the problem of why it is that such a more-than-competent deity would make such a less-than-satisfactory world; however, now faith appears to have been falsified. For example, we know that the account of creation given in Genesis is false. Empirical reality doesn’t just pose a philosophic question anymore; it refutes many faith-based propositions. For some believers it is a mere exercise of intellectual acumen to save faith; we de-literalize it, de-Biblicize it, de-anthropomorphize it and maybe pluralize, scientize and mytholize it as well. But ideas watched as they launch forth from our own hands are theories, not faiths. Faith lives off its other-worldly authority which holds it above the individual as directing rather than directed. Once one is knowingly playing the game of saving faith, one’s faith is already lost.

Materialism purports to encompass reality by a theory of causally interacting, spatio-temporal objects. It is confident of the progress of science towards the truth. But the history of science belies this. The leitmotif of science is the replacement of one theory by another. There is little reason to expect that physics in two centuries will be much like physics today; as there have been profound theoretical revolutions in the past so too there are likely to be profound revolutions in the future. This is not to deny scientific progress; scientific theories are increasingly accurate, increasingly useful, increasingly comprehensive, and increasingly fruitful. However, we don’t seem to be narrowing in on some fixed truth about the nature of reality. Not even the terms of the investigation are fixed (string theory, for example, provides a whole new language in which to describe matter).

So far as the nonsense of materialism is concerned, this history is somewhat beside the point. Materialism hardly encompasses us. We have perspectives on the world; we have beliefs, projects, feelings, dreams, ideals, and relationships. These are bound together with our sense of being or having a self. I am no thing, I am me. Materialism takes us to be some kind of object; we are, for it, an assemblage of selfless stuffs. The materialist loses the sense of “I”. In a jumble of particles there simply is no self; no electron is an “I” and neither is any commune of particles. Materialism vanishes us. Some might find this plausible or even comforting. But, who really are these they who would transmogrify us into whatses? Re-animating soul/body dualism (Cartesian or otherwise) doesn’t help here – that too turns the self into an object, just a really weird object.

The world does not make sense. Not any more.