Now, having placed man as an object of study in the Cosmos in however an insignificant place, how do you, the scientist, the self which hit upon this theory, how do you propose to reenter this very Cosmos where you have so firmly placed the species to which you belong? Who are you who has explained the Cosmos and how do you fit into the Cosmos you have explained?
Having proved your hypothesis, what do you do next? (1) Publish a paper in Science? (2) Begin to lobby for the Nobel? (3) Worry about three other scientists who are working on the same project? (4) Get drunk? (5) Go home and quarrel with your wife? (6) Take a girlfriend to a motel and watch Deep Throat on closed-circuit TV?
If the last is your choice, explain the connection between the triumph of science as a form of transcendence of the world and pornography as one of the few remaining avenues of reentry.
(17) The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is so Anxious to Establish Communication with an ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
CARL SAGAN IS RIGHT in ridiculing the absurd pseudosciences now so popular. He is admirable in his defense of science as a reliable and self-correcting method of attaining truth.
Yet the fact is that nowadays there is no piece of nonsense that will not be believed by some and no guru or radio preacher, however corrupt, who will not attract a following.
Question: Why are people these days generally indifferent to science and yet willing to believe any absurd claim and any rascal who puts it forward?
(a) Because there is a need in humans for myth, for symbols, to construe and order a confusing and hostile environment — just as there is a need for food, water, shelter, and sex — and the abstract truths in science do not provide this myth.
(b) Because, as Chesterton said, when man stops believing in God, he will believe in anything at all.
(CHECK ONE)
Sagan is right in saying that despite all the claims of UFO sightings and encounters of a third kind, extraterrestrial creatures, and such, not a single artifact, e.g., a piece of metal, a bit of clothing of a visitor, a piece of tissue, a fingernail, has been recovered.
Yet Sagan has written whole volumes promoting the probability of the existence of intelligent life on the billions of planets orbiting the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy, let alone the billions of other galaxies — this in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that life exists anywhere else in the Cosmos, let alone intelligent life. Of all the billions of electromagnetic waves from the Cosmos received here on earth, not a single one can be attributed to an ETI.
Therefore, one might ask Sagan the same question he put to UFOers: Of all the countless bits of data received from outer space, the observations of astronomers, the millions of units recorded by radio telescopes, why has not a single bit of information been received which could not be attributed to the random noise of the Cosmos?
Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely?
(a) Sagan is lonely because, as a true devotee of science, a noble and reliable method of attaining knowledge, he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which, as Bronowski has said, there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at alclass="underline" in Velikovsky, von Daniken, even in Mr. and Mrs. Barney Hill, who reported being captured and taken aboard a spacecraft in Vermont.
(b) Sagan is lonely because, after great expectations, he has not discovered ETIs in the Cosmos, because chimpanzees don’t talk, dolphins don’t talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing but random noise from the Cosmos, and because Vikings 1 and 2 failed to discover evidence of even the most rudimentary organic life in the soil of Mars.
(c) Sagan is lonely because, once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere of immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.
Thought Experiment: You are Sagan and you are monitoring the Cornell University radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, when, after years of reception of random noise, you receive a signal which can only be interpreted as representing the prime numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 … Communication is established! The source of the transmission must be Alpha Centauri because of the direction and the transmission time: four years. Years pass. A code is agreed upon. But time is running out. You are growing old. What with the difficulties of encoding and decoding and the period of transmission, there is only time for five simple questions. Which questions would you ask, and how would you answer these five questions from Alpha Centauri?
(1) Are you in continuity with other organisms on P-3, S-G2V (third planet = earth, star G2V = our sun)?
(2) If not, what is nature of discontinuity?
(3) Are you in trouble?
(4) If so, specify.
(5) What information do you need? (E.g., what can we do for you?)
(18) The Demoniac Self: Why it is the Autonomous Self becomes Possessed by the Spirit of the Erotic and the Secret Love of Violence, and how Unlucky it is that this should have Happened in the Nuclear Age
SÖREN KIERKEGAARD MADE a very strange statement. He said that Christianity first brought the erotic spirit into the world. In his arcane style, which often seems designed as much to obfuscate as to enlighten the reader, he wrote: “Sensualism, viewed from the standpoint of Spirit, was first posited by Christianity.” Which is to say, not that sensuality had not existed in the world before in paganism, perhaps in its most perfect expression in Greece, “but not as a spiritual category.” It existed rather as an expression of harmony and unison. “In the Greek consciousness, the sensuous was under the control of the beautiful personality or, more rightly stated, it was not controlled, for it was not an enemy to be subjugated, not a dangerous rebel who should be held in check.” But in the Christian era the sensuous-erotic becomes “a qualified spirituality, that is to say, so qualified that the Spirit excludes it; if I imagine this principle concentrated in a single individual, then I have a concept of the sensuous-erotic genius. This is an idea which the Greeks did not have, which Christianity first brought into the world, even if only in an indirect sense.”
The highest expression of the sensuous-erotic genius, in Kierkegaard’s view, was Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Mozart is the greatest of classic composers and Don Giovanni deserves the highest place among all classic works of art.”
What is arresting here is Kierkegaard’s view that the Don is to be understood not merely as a roué, a dirty old man reverted to his animal appetites, a sinner, or even as a good pagan, a Greek hedonist, but rather as “the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh.”
Nor is the “sensuous-erotic” to be understood in modern biological terms as the sex drive and need-satisfaction, but rather as the sensual “spirit” and therefore, in Kierkegaard’s word, as the “demoniac.”
It is this “demoniac” spirit of the erotic which is “posited” by Christianity.
Presumably, Kierkegaard would have no difficulty explaining that national characteristic which has astounded so many foreign visitors to this country: that the United States is at once the most Christian of nations (at least in numbers of churchgoers) and at the same time the most eroticized society in all of history.
For our purposes, which is a much more modest and dialectically less sophisticated approach to such matters, there are two things of value in Kierkegaard’s notion of the “spirit of the sensuous-erotic,” and I acknowledge the debut fully aware that this particular passage from Kierkegaard was written under one of his pseudonyms and in “the esthetic stage of existence” and hence not necessarily approved by Kierkegaard writing in his “religious stage.”