Through A Glass Clearly

In Stanislaw Lem’s, (1921–2006), novel ‘Solaris’ a scientist, named Kelvin, joins an expedition to a planet, named Solaris, that has an unstable orbit, perhaps due to its mysterious, seemingly organic and evolved ocean, although it only looks like an ocean, but, whatever it is, it can interact with the human astronauts. It is able to generate physical beings, (‘Phi-creatures’), that it derives from each of the crew member’s pasts. The Phi-creature that Kelvin encounters is his wife, Rheya, who committed suicide when he left her ten years earlier, the guilt concerning which has never left him. (This proves to be an astute plot device. ‘Guilt’, as Anthony Burgess, (1917–1993), noted, is ‘creation’s true dynamo’).

The novel takes epistemology as one of its themes, the limitations of human knowledge and understanding. The ocean reaches out and interacts with the crew members, probing their minds through the Phi-creatures, but despite all their scientific probing in return, it remains an unfathomable mystery.

At the end of the novel, after Rheya had been ‘taken care of’ (whatever that means) by one of the crew members, Kelvin separates himself from his colleagues to descend to the planet below:

‘On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…
Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past’.

A faith in cruel miracles, an intriguing thought… ‘faith’, and mysticism, (suggested by the notion of ‘cruel miracles’), tend to be denigrated within scientific, and certain philosophical, circles. Of faith, Richard Dawkins, (1941 — ), said: ‘Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence’. And, on mysticism, Carl Sagan, (1934–1996), said: ‘Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being’. Both wrong, in my view, but we need to ask, what is ‘faith’? What is ‘mysticism’?

Faith, it might be supposed, is belief in something that we cannot know to be true. This was Immanuel Kant’s view, as he famously declared that he had ‘destroyed knowledge in order to make room fo faith’, (destroying knowledge, by which he means, destroying theoretical arguments that supposedly support religious doctrines).

We may be certain in our faith, and we may be certain in our knowledge, but faith takes on the form of a conviction, rather than of a persuasion, a commitment that by its very nature has a subjective quality.

This is because, according to Kant: ‘Belief yields a conviction that is not communicable (because of its subjective ground)’. Faith fulfils a need of practical reason, which differs from theoretical reason, the latter being a movement of the intellect (hopefully towards knowledge), the former being a ‘free assent’, (i.e., practical reason, reason not about what is, but about what we ought to do. Kant is talking about ‘moral faith’ here, as opposed to what he calls ‘historical’ or ‘ecclesiastical faith’, actual religious traditions and their doctrines. e.g., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, the doctrines of which are objects of ‘historical faith’. To be fair to Dawkins (much as it pains me to do so), he may have a point if he has in mind ‘historical faith’). Therefore, according to Kant, there is a certainty to (moral) faith, as there is to knowledge, but the difference is that though we can have a moral certainty, we cannot have a moral certainty that there is a God.

Thomas Wizenmann, (1759–1787), objected that Kant’s notion of religious assent was a mere mix of self-deception and wishful thinking, akin to a man very much in love who is in a deluded state concerning his beloved’s supposed beauty. As William Shakespeare, (1564–1616), put it:

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,

Love can transpose to form and dignity.

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

(‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Act 1, Scene 1).

Similarly, Wizenmann claims, a Kantian religious assent is a transference by stealth of our own, personally subjective, wants into objective assertions.

Kant responded that the needs of practical reason are not a matter of predilections or psychological preferences, like desire, (we all vary in our desires), but rather they arise ‘from an objective determining ground of the will’, and the highest good is an object of faith as it is ‘an a priori necessary object of our will and inseparably bound up with the moral law’. There is no argument we can adduce to prove that we are bound by the moral law, but we have a personal awareness of being bound by it from our first-person awareness of our own purposive activity. And yet, Wizenmann has a point, assent implies commitment, and commitment has its own subjective quality.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), on the other hand, rejected Kant’s separation of faith and knowledge, and considered it inadmissable that particular doctrines should be accepted on authority, whether that of the church or the state, and faith was not to be conceived as in opposition to reason or conceptual thinking. All doctrines, if they are accepted, have to be attested by our own personal own insight.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, (1743–1819), had argued for a ‘mortal leap’ of faith to clear the gulf between philosophical cognition and religious truth, (which may sound familiar, though it is my understanding that Søren Kierkegaard, (1813–1855), never used the expression ‘leap of faith’, but I am not a Kierkegaard scholar, if there is someone who is and is reading this I would appreciate any enlightenment concerning this matter). Hegel saw Jacobi’s conception of faith (i.e., unmediated knowledge) as giving to faith a very meagre content, as opposed to, say, Christian faith, which was not an acceptance of something as true, but originally was a confidence in the divine. Hegel wrote: ‘Faith in the divine is possible only because there is in the believer himself a divine element, which rediscovers itself, its own nature, in the object of its faith… The intermediate state between, on the one hand, the darkness, remoteness from the divine, captivity to actuality, and, on the other hand, one’s own wholly divine life, a confidence in oneself, is faith in the divine; faith is the presentiment, the cognition, of the divine and the longing for unification with it’.

If there is one thing I have learnt from Hegel it is this: any cognitive state necessarily is as complex and mediated as its object. The objects of faith are certainly complex, and, contrary to Jacobi, mediated. And the complex mediations of Hegel’s own philosophy present, (at least Hegel himself certainly thought so), the best possible reconciling of the putative conflicting demands of faith: satisfying the individual’s right to rationally assess and endorse the views that he or she is required to adopt in their lives.

Which brings us back to Kelvin and his gnoseological crises (as Lem explains elsewhere, we are ‘imperfect machines for gaining knowledge’). Having confronted the unfathomable, Kelvin, rational scientist though he may be, experiences a spiritual, apocalyptic vision that includes an extra, transformative element, namely, love. Love, (like guilt had done, but is now over-shadowed by love), provides him with great creative strengths, but, interestingly, first he is cynical about it, then he sees it as a source of hope. He will remain on Solaris, nurtured by his memories of Rheya, in a state of psychological equilibrium, hoping for nothing, but living in expectation, neither optimist nor pessimist, with a faith in cruel miracles, i.e., faith, in its original meaning, a trust and confidence, in this case a confidence in ourselves, despite our limitations, a faith that is necessary if we are to evolve toward a higher level of existence.

Which brings us to ‘mysticism’. It may be supposed that mysticism is concerned with our experiences of the transcendent, a world ‘beyond’, supposedly postulated by faith. ‘Mysticism’, according to Wilhelm Reich, (1897–1957), ‘means, in the literal sense, a change of sensory impressions and organ sensations into something unreal and beyond this world’. But that is exactly what mysticism cannot be, for ‘transcendent’ means beyond human experience, so if we had experience of the transcendent, a world ‘beyond’, it would not be transcendent. Mysticism is rather concerned with our experience of the unfathomable, of the universe in its infinity, one might say, (it is sometimes said that the human mind, being finite, can have no comprehension of the notion of ‘infinity’, but that is to use the notion, of ‘infinity’, to claim that it is a notion of which we can have no comprehension, i.e., this is self-contradictory).

Jacobi insisted on a connection between mysticism and that which is unknowable, but the notion of the unknowable is also self-contradictory. The unknowable is something which the human mind is incapable of knowing, something totally outside any conceivable human knowledge, something from which we are completely cut off because of the nature of our mental processes. But all our knowledge is conceptual, to have knowledge of something is to apply suitable concepts to it, and existence is a concept, so to say that the unknowable exists is to apply a concept to the unknowable, i.e., it is to have knowledge of the unknowable, but this is impossible.

As Hegel said: ‘For the concealment of a secret, or ignorance, but consists in the self knowing itself to be one with the divine being or that this is therefore needed’. Mysticism is here concerned with our intuitions concerning the unfathomable, which may be supposed to be a revisionary sense of mysticism, except that is to be found in St. Paul, for whom Jesus Christ was God as a secret out in the open, if I may so put it:

‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’.

(1 Corinthians 13:12).

When Carl Sagan describes science as ‘a bulwark against mysticism’, he is forgetting that the sciences are not absolute, they are open-ended, and incomplete. And one of the themes of ‘Solaris’, (our obsession with knowing and our difficulty in accepting phenomena that we cannot explain or understand, our resentment towards reminders to the limits to our knowledge), is borne out by some of the critical responses to the novel. Manfred Geier (1943 — ) sought to explain the Phi-creatures through a Freudian interpretation. Rheya is a manifestation of Kelvin’s schizophrenia, i.e., he is deluded, an unreliable narrator; a reading of the novel that goes against its entire spirit, trying to explain that which Lem deliberately rendered as inexplicable.

There are implications here for theology as well as science. Mysticism can provide an answer to an existential puzzle, our spirituality. Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905–1980), atheist, argued that God is defined as the perfection of being toward which man strives, and we have been defined (in the West at least) in terms of our relation to a perfect God, i.e., in our imperfection we pursue an impossible goal (perfection, outside of the ideal realm of logic and mathematics, is self-contradictory and impossible), and from which we cannot derive any meaning. He wrote: ‘Man makes himself man in order to be God, and selfness from this point of view can appear to be an egoism; but precisely because there is no common measure between human reality and the self cause which it wants to be, one could just as well say that man loses himself in order that the self-cause may exist. We will consider then that all human existence is a passion, the famous self-interest being only one way freely chosen among others to realize this passion’.

Hence, ‘man is a futile passion’, and ‘life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal’.

But mysticism, our experience of the unfathomable, refutes this. If mystical experience is an experience of God, it is a God that develops and exists on its own terms, independently of us, like the ocean of Solaris. As Kelvin experiences his mystical vision, we may be tempted to see this as a metaphor for religious faith, i.e., water, (baptism), rebirth, hope’s renewal, etc.; except that the ocean is not an ocean, it is merely like an ocean, it is not water; it is an alien (in the full sense of that word) presence. And this is mysticism, the experience of the alien, as alien; challenging, frustrating, testing the limitations of existing epistemological boundaries; elevating us, so that we may pursue ever-higher goals, towards an entirely new mode of being.

It is such an understanding of mysticism that gives to Russian literature, and to Russian culture in general, its uniqueness, and is one of the reasons that I love it so much; the material world in all its gritty complexity, inseparably fused with the mystical, (as part of that world, not beyond it); which we can discern in Olga Sedakova’s, (1949 — ), poem ‘Old Women’, with its imagery suggestive of Rembrandt’s portraits of elderly women, (hence the reference to ‘Old Master’), beauty to be found where it is not so obviously present, the spiteful piety, (which in another context would be oxymoronic), the angel counting money:

Patient as an Old Master,

I love to study the faces

of pious, spiteful old women,

the mortality of their lips,

and the immortality of the power

that pressed their lips together,

(like an angel squatting

and stacking coppers in piles,

five copecks, and light copeck pieces…

‘Shoo! He says to the children,

the birds and the beggars,

‘Shoo, go away’, he tells them:

can’t you see what I’m doing?) -

I stare, and in my mind I sketch them,

like my own face, in a glass darkly.